Machine Dreams

zone is hot, they might lay down on the floor of the chopper and have to be shoved out the fucking door. On the ground it can be hell and crazy and you still never see any Cong but dead ones. It’s like they’ve just been there and turned everything to fuck or they’re invisible, raining ammo in. Like cowboys and Indians, except the Indians are ghosts and they can’t lose because nothing really kills them. Listen, I write Dad part of this and I don’t write it to Mom at all. I’m glad you’re staying at home this summer, but I can’t do anything about Mom’s being depressed. I guess she’ll get used to it. Right now her nerves are the least of my problems. I guess I sound pissed. I am pissed but not at you. I don’t know. Keep writing to me but don’t tell me shit about Mom.
    Billy
    June 17
    Dear Danner. Am at Firebase X-Ray, about midnight here. Funny to get mail from you in the drop we’d brought out to X-Ray since our mail stays at Lai Khe. Your letter was in the bag by mistake. Weird because today was the hottest LZ I’d come into. Air Force prep had blasted out a zone with daisy-cutters, 5000 lbs of bomb that goes off at the treeline and knocks everything down so the choppers can land. Jungle green and waving and charred at the edges, and there were twenty choppers or more, red flares up for the dustoffs, everyone scrambling in or out of machines in this orange air. There were so many wounded we took on WIAs comingback from every run. The Medivacs were filled. Luke had a medic kit & bandaged the ones so fucked up the medics hadn’t found all their wounds, while I stayed on the gun. We did four runs into that zone, coming thru fire meant to score choppers before they could land reinforcements, but the last one was the worst. One of the choppers just below us as we lifted off took a rocket and we were close enough to bounce as it blew. Explosion hit in the center and took the whole bird. We were taking pops ourselves and had to pull away. After we got back, Luke told me that was my first day—air hot enough to char the asshole was always the first day. Not much time to sit on my ass here wondering is the war right or wrong—right is getting thru and pulling everyone else thru, getting bodies back if we can’t get anything else. I’m with Luke and the crew and we live in the chopper. These guys are the only country I know of and they’re what I’m defending—I’m not stupid enough to think my country is over here. Luke and me joke about how clicked in we are to Barbarella. He’s been shot down twice but says she’s not like those other cunts, etc. Wants to take her back to Oklahoma and fly her over Bluestem Lake until they both die of old age. His grandmother is an Osage & says charms. Luke says B. is an Osage chopper living in the Nam just to save our asses. Can you believe it? Sometimes it seems like I dreamed everything but this, because what I remember was in the World. Well, my ass is beat. Like we said, keep my letters to yourself. See you in 344 days. I’m getting shorter all the time.
    love,
Billy
    June 24
    Dear Dad. Things here status quo. Thank Bess & Katie for writing, okay? Have had a lot of 18 hr days this last week, no chance to write, but today we came back to Lai Khe late afternoon after resupply runs near here, so decided to drop a line. When I get time I try to figure how to describe this place. Monsoons begin inAugust but now it never rains, days are just blue and hot. The sunlight is so hot it’s heavy. I don’t know why I never asked you about the war you went to, I guess I thought I saw it in the movies. They’ll never show this one there, pictures don’t say how it is. If a whole operation moves across a field out in the bush, the sky can be full of twenty or thirty choppers in formation, and below them just the humped cattle and the villagers looking small in the grass. Even the old women carry long poles over their shoulders, baskets on rope at each end. The people all have the same coloring, and out in the country they dress the same—to me they all look similar, especially the girls and the children. Their faces look perfect in a way. We sweep across windrushing the grass, and they stay where they are. Our guys, the ones I’m up there with, are the best I’ve met, the best I’ve been with anytime. Maybe you know what I mean. I think about bringing a couple to lunch at Bess’s, then sitting on the porch swing (summer, of course) and watching a few cars go