The Phantom Blooper

In Vietnam, nice guys do not finish at all

Somewhere out behind a black wall of monsoon rain and beyond our wire, the Phantom Blooper laughs.

I laugh, too.

Naked except for a pearl-gray Stetson bearing a black-and-white peace button, I rise up from my bed of wet clay in the bottom of a slit trench. I climb, scuttling like a crab, to the top of a sandbagged bunker. Mud-soaked and shivering, I hunker down. I listen. Holding my breath, I listen and I wait, afraid to breathe.

I grunt. I stand up, ramrod straight. I tuck my chin into my Adam's apple and I strut to the edge of the bunker top, fists on hips like a Parris Island drill instructor.

I say, "Listen up, maggot!" I do an about-face. March back. About-face. Looking sharp, standing tall, lean and mean. "Do you want to live forever?"

I'm a stone-cold comedian yelling punch lines into No Man's Land. It's the Joker's midnight comedy show in the last days of Khe Sanh. I am show business for the shadow things that crawl and slither out in the darkness beyond our wire. At any moment, 40,000 heavily armed, opium-crazed Communist individuals can come in screaming from out of the swirling fog.

I say, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! I have not yet begun to fight! Give me liberty or give me death! Don't tread on me! Send more Cong! Send more Cong!"

I wait for a reply. I listen. But nothing happens.

I pick up a broken broom handle. On one end is nailed a ragged pair of red-silk panties—Maggie's drawers—the target-range signal for a miss. I lift the broom handle and I wave the red-silk panties back and forth like a battle flag.

The only sounds from beyond the wire are creaking frogs and the drumming of the monsoon rain.

I throw down Maggie's (continued on page 148) Phantom Blooper (continued from page 143) drawers. Then, with both hands, I give the Phantom Blooper the finger.

Midnight. The hawk is out. Ghosts are out.

The winter monsoon is blowing so hard that it is raining sideways. Meanwhile, the silence beyond the rumble of the rain is growing larger.

I sit down in an old aluminum lawn chair on top of an abandoned perimeter bunker at Khe Sanh. Cold bullets of monsoon rain wash mud from my body. With my battered Stetson shielding my face, I lean back and get comfortable. My right hand is touching the wet metal of a field radio under my chair.

Between my bare feet is an M60 machine gun set up on its bipod legs. I pick up my long black killing tool. It makes me feel less naked when I hold it.

A smooth feed might save my life, so I adjust the heavy belt of clean golden bullets. Every fifth round is a red-tipped tracer. When I am 100 percent satisfied that there are no kinks in the belt, I slam the feed cover down hard and jack a round into the chamber. Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.

The Phantom Blooper laughs, a cold black laugh.

Maybe if I ignore the Phantom Blooper, he'll go away. If you try to debate philosophical issues with the Phantom Blooper, and lose the debate, well, he comes right up and kills your ass. The Phantom Blooper has never talked to me and I am very disappointed. I could use the distraction of stimulating conversation. Life at Khe Sanh has always been tired but wired. Now that the siege has been lifted, we need something to keep our minds occupied, because boredom makes us think too much.

Meanwhile, the Phantom Blooper comes every night and the suspense is killing me.

At Khe Sanh combat base in Quang Tri Province in the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Marine Corps has sometimes lacked grace under pressure, but we have stuck it out, just the same. We have burrowed into this dead hill like maggots. We have clung to the burnt edge of reality and we have not let go.

This is it, the big game. The championship. The Super Bowl. This is the biggest game of your life, and you're playing it for keeps. You're playing with the black ball. A sudden move at the wrong time could be your last. And not moving at all could be fatal.

The grunts of Khe Sanh hate the Phantom Blooper, but we need him very much. In Vietnam, you've got to hate something or you will lose your mind.

•

There are a lot of sea stories about the Phantom Blooper.

Below Phu Bai, the Phantom Blooper is a black Marine lieutenant who inspects defensive positions at bridge security compounds. The next night, they get hit.

North of Hué, the Phantom Blooper is a salt-and-pepper team of snuffy grunts who guide Marine patrols into L-shaped ambushes set by the Viet Cong.

Force Recon claims a probable kill for shooting the Phantom Blooper in the A Shau Valley. He was a round-eye, tall and white, with blond hair, wearing black pajamas and a red-silk sash and armed with a folding-stock AK-47 assault rifle. Recon swears that—and this is no shit—the round-eyed Victor Charlie was the honcho, the leader, of the gook patrol.

The Phantom Blooper started visiting Khe Sanh the night after the siege was lifted by Operation Pegasus. But only one Marine at Khe Sanh has ever seen the Phantom Blooper's face.

There was no moon that night, but one of our scout snipers had the Blooper targeted in a starlight scope. As he sighted in, the sniper described the Phantom Blooper's face to his spotter. In midsentence, the scout sniper went plain fucking crazy.

When they medevaced the scout sniper at dawn the next morning, he still had not said another word.

The Phantom Blooper has many names. The White Cong. Super Charlie. The American V.C. Moon Cusser. The Round-Eyed Victor Charlie. White Charlie. Americong. Yankee Avenger.

But whatever name we use, we all know in our hearts the true identity of the Phantom Blooper. He is the dark spirit of our collective bad consciences made real and dangerous. He once was one of us, a Marine. He knows how we think. He knows how we operate. He knows how Marines fight and what Marines fear.

The Phantom Blooper is a Marine defector who deals in payback. Slack is one word he does not understand.

Like his Viet Cong comrades, the Phantom Blooper is a hard-core night fighter. When the day turns black and the sun goes down, everything beyond our wire is overrun by the Viet Cong, one more time. Every time the sun goes down, we lose the war.

Every night, the Phantom Blooper is on deck, armed with a "blooper"—an M79 grenade launcher. The Phantom Blooper attacks without warning from out of the darkness, the one incorruptible bearer of the one unendurable truth.

"Go home," the Phantom Blooper says every night. And we want to go home, we really do, but we don't know how.

"Go home," the Phantom Blooper says, without mercy, over and over, again and again, punctuating his sentences with explosions.

•

A hit from an M79 is just the Phantom Blooper's way of telling us that we are running out of slack.

During the past week, the Phantom Blooper has wasted Lieutenant Kent Anderson, "Funny Gunny" Bob Bayer and that skinny "New Guy," Larry Willis. And he killed Ed Miller, Bill Eastlake and that corpsman everybody loved, Jim Richardson. Then he killed Bernie Berntson, my friend. He probably even killed Animal Mother, the meanest, hardest Marine I ever knew.

Every night, the Phantom Blooper comes into our wire and talks to one grunt.

While I wait for the Phantom Blooper to attack, I keep my eyes turned outboard to avoid looking at the damage we have inflicted upon ourselves. For months, we've been shelled, shelled every day, shelled by the numbers, sometimes as many as 1500 incoming rounds per day. Rusting shrapnel lies scattered across this wire-strapped plateau like pebbles on the beach. What bullets coming out of the dark and 100,000 rounds of heavy ordnance Chi-Com incoming have failed to do, we have done to ourselves. We are blowing up our bunkers. We are tearing up our wire.

Last week, a secret rough-rider truck convoy rolled out of Khe Sanh carrying the garrison of 5000 men 11 miles east to Landing Zone Stud, leaving behind only a few hundred Marine riflemen from Delta, Charlie and India companies as security for the 11th Engineer Battalion and its heavy earth-moving equipment.

In two days, the flying cranes will carry off the last piece of expensive American machinery and the last of the Marine grunts at Khe Sanh will sky out on gun-ships. Then, when night falls, the jungle will emerge from out of the darkness and will move like a black glacier across the red clay of No Man's Land and will silently consume our trash-strewn fortress.

And back in the World, no one will ever know about our self-inflicted Dien Bien Phu.

•

Cold and wet, holding my M60 machine gun in my lap, I wait.

At zero-three-hundred, prime time for (continued on page 178) Phantom Blooper (continued from page 148) a ground attack and our peak killing hour, the Kid from Brooklyn, our radioman, hops over the sandbagged trench-line along the perimeter and slides down into the wire while heavy monsoon rain slants down, battering him in translucent sheets.

Down in the kill zone, the Kid from Brooklyn ditty-bops through budding gardens of metal planted thick with deadly antipersonnel mines. Stepping cautiously through Claymores, trip flares and tanglefoot, he quietly and efficiently robs dead men of their postage stamps.

Communist grunts hang in our wire all the time, little yellow mummies who have paid the price, enemy military personnel who got caught in the wire and gunned down, their moldy mustard-colored khaki shorts and shirts splotched with brown, their nostrils clogged with dried blood, bugs crawling on their teeth.

Enemy sappers crawl into our wire every night. Your basic operational model gook will take six hours to crawl six yards. Sappers cut attack lanes in the wire, tape the wire back, then smear the tape with mud. They turn our Claymores around. Sometimes a gung-ho sapper will get close enough to heave a 14-pound satchel charge into a perimeter bunker. Those who don't blow themselves up on an antipersonnel mine get hung up in the wire or trip a flare. Then we demonstrate leatherneck hospitality by grenading them and shooting them to death.

Incoming patrols sometimes bring in confirmed kills and throw them into the wire as war trophies.

The North Vietnamese army likes to probe us with ground attacks. It drags its wounded off to tunnel hospitals. It buries its dead in shallow graves in mangrove swamps. Wasted gooks unlucky enough to get left behind hang in the triple-strand concertina wire until maggots hollow them out from the inside and they fall apart.

Rotting corpses can get to smelling pretty bad sometimes. We really should bury them, but we don't. Nobody likes to police up dead gooks. You grab confirmed kills by the ankles or by the wrists, and their arms and legs come off in your hands like sticks. If you try to pick up what's left of the torso, sometimes your fingers slip into an exit wound, and then you're standing there with a handful of maggots.

Besides, we enjoy throwing dead gooks into the wire. A dead gook hanging in our wire in less than mint condition is a handy audio-visual aid to keep our enemies honest. We want everybody we do business with to know who we are and what we stand for and take seriously.

•

Now, down in the rain in the dark, the Kid from Brooklyn is digging into mildewed pockets for colorful bits of gummed paper.

It all started when the Kid from Brooklyn pulled an R&R in Japan. He took the bullet train to Kyoto, scarfed up beaucoup sake and Japanese bennies, took long, hot baths with slant-eyed naked jailbait.

"I'm a salty lance corporal who is short, short, short," the Kid from Brooklyn said when he came back from Japan. "I'm so short I could fall off a dime. I'm so short the gooks probably can't even see me."

In Tokyo, the Kid souvenired himself a small black stamp album. Now he's back in-country to pull his tour of duty in a world of shit. Only he's different now. He has changed. Now the Kid from Brooklyn is a dedicated stamp collector.

Enemy postage stamps depict exciting scenes of war and politics. North Vietnamese troops shake hands with smiling Viet Cong under a Communist red star and wreath. Columns of ragged and forlorn American prisoners of war are marched off to Hanoi prison camps. A helicopter gunship with an oversized U.S. on its side plunges to earth in flames to the cheers of an all-girl peasant militia crew behind the village anti-aircraft gun. An old papa-san walks along a paddy dike, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other.

I watch the Kid from Brooklyn, hunched over a suspended carcass, indulging himself in his grubby hobby. I know that my job is to climb down there and drag his section-eight ass back behind the wire where it belongs.

I know that I should do that, most ricky-tick, but I don't. I need him as bait.

"Damn," the Kid from Brooklyn says, gently shaking his leg loose from a wild strand of tanglefoot that has caught him in the ankle. He bends down to another shredded lump of shadow and frisks it for diaries, wallets, piasters, love letters and crumbling black-and-white photographs of gook girlfriends. Everything that looks like it might have postage stamps on it gets stuffed into one of the cargo pockets on the front of his baggy green trouser legs.

In the monsoon rain, the Kid is a black silhouette. His poncho is outlined by silver blips. He is a perfect target. Gook snipers in the dark can hear the rain bouncing off his poncho. The Phantom Blooper can see the black butt plate of the Kid's M16, slung barrel-down to keep the rain out of the bore.

I should try to save the Kid from Brooklyn's bacon, but I won't. I can't. Marines are not elite amphibious shock troops anymore. We've been demoted to expendable seafood. In Vietnam, we're only cheap live bait impaled on an Asian hook, wiggling until we draw fire and die. Dying, that's what we're here for. Our Parris Island drill instructors would say, "Blood makes the grass grow."

I pick up the handset to the Kid from Brooklyn's field radio. It has been taped up inside a clear plastic bag. I whistle softly. I grunt. I say, "This is Green Millionaire, Green Millionaire, First Platoon actual. I want illumination, ladies, and I want it immediately fucking now."

First Platoon as sleeping, totally exhausted after an 18-hour day of loading six-bys.

An endless convoy of trucks has been hauling off live howitzer shells, wooden pallets stacked high with cases of C rations, mountains of plywood and building beams and tons of sheets of perforated steel planking torn up from the airfield.

First Platoon is cutting a few well-earned zulus. Time to wake them up. Time to wake the whole base up.

The handset sizzles with static and someone says, "Rog. Pop one. Shot out."

•

I heft my M60 to port arms the way they do it in the movies and I squint harder and harder into an expanding darkness. But my night vision is not what it used to be. There's no movement. No muzzle flashes. No sound but the rain.

One word from me and the Phantom Blooper will be in the bottom of a red-mud swimming pool shitting Pittsburgh steel. If a frog farts, I will bury that frog under a black iron mountain of American bombs. And even if this dirty zero-zero weather keeps the big birds grounded, I can always get arty in. One magic set of two-word, six-number map coordinates spoken into my radio handset and the cannon cockers get wired and in 40 seconds I can crank up more firepower than a Panzer division.

Somewhere in the rear, a mortar tube fumps.

My finger squeezes up all of the slack on the trigger. I take a deep breath. I've got the jungle covered. I'm looking forward to working the 60 and cutting up the black night with red lines of bullets.

Five hundred yards down range and moon high, a muted pock. Light vast, harsh and white spills out across the black sky, melts, then floats down with the rain. An illumination flare sways under a little while parachute, squeaking and dripping sparks that hiss and pop.

I hold my breath and freeze. Now is not the time to make a wrong move. The Phantom Blooper is just waiting for me to do something stupid like a New Guy.

Down in the wire, the Kid from Brooklyn stops and looks up at the light. Near Sorry Charlie, a human skull mounted on a stake in the wire, the Kid hunkers down, pounded by cold gusts of wind and monsoon rain.

Black laughter drifts in from No Man's Land. The Kid turns outboard and slowly unslings his rifle. Behind his rain-fogged glasses, his eyes are big in his face.

There is the sound of a metallic wine bottle popping open and there is the moment of perfect silence, and then one M79 blooper fragmentation grenade hits the Kid from Brooklyn and he does a very bad impression of John Kennedy campaigning in Dallas and in silent slow motion the Kid from Brooklyn's head dissolves into a cloud of pink mist and then bam and he falls into pieces all over the area, blown away, killed in action and wasted, shot dead and slaughtered.

The Kid from Brooklyn's headless body is a contorted blob of wax in the ghost light of the illumination flare. One arm gone. One arm converted to pulp. Legs bent too far and in the wrong directions. Ribs curving up incredibly white from inside a glistening black cavity, which, as though on fire, is steaming.

Abruptly, illumination fades. Night falls on my position. A shadow walks across my field of fire.

I cling to the cold metal of my machine gun, mouth dry, teeth gritted, fingers aching, knuckles bleeding where I've bitten them, sweat stinging my eyes, stomach pumping in and out and I'm shaking.

The Phantom Blooper knows where I am now. He knows where I live. Out there beyond the wire, in that deep black jungle, the Phantom Blooper can hear the sound of the gong that is the beating of my heart.

I try to let go of the machine gun, but I can't.

Hunkered down, I hold my breath, afraid to fire.

•

Life in the V-ring:

Inside the only guard bunker still standing in our area, our New Guy is busy choking his lizard. His teenaged horny brain has left Khe Sanh and has gone back to the World and has wrapped itself up inside Susie Rottencrotch's pretty pink panties. He groans, abusing Government property, polishing his bayonet, just a little early-morning organ practice to cut the edge off the cold; the Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.

I hop down into the bunker.

A field radio buzzes. I pick up the handset while the New Guy fumbles frantically with the buttons on his fly.

Some fucking pogue lifer standing radio watch in the Sandbag City command post demands a sit-rep, then yawns.

Instead of saying "All secure" in a mechanical monotone. I say with an exaggerated gook accent, "This is General Vo Nguyen Giap speaking. Situation normal, all fucked up."

The fucking pogue lifer laughs and says, "Wait one." Then he says to someone in the background. "It's Joker. He says he's a Jap." Both pogues laugh and talk about how crazy I am, and then the radio voice says, "Affirm, Joker. Roger that," and I put down the handset.

The New Guy is waiting for me, standing almost at attention.

Since the Phantom Blooper started wasting the grunts with the most T.I.—time in—all I've got left are New Guys. The replacement pipeline pulls cherries out of high school and ships them to Khe Sanh.

New Guys have to be watched. Along about midnight, when the Phantom Blooper walks and talks, New Guys wet their pants. Nobody wants to die alone and in the dark.

•

"What's your name there, dipshit?"

"Private Owens, sir." He steps forward. I shove him back.

"Been in-country long, hog?"

"All week, sir."

I turn away. I don't laugh. After a few cadence counts, when I trust myself, I do an about-face.

"The correct answer to that question is 'All fucking day.' And stow the Parris Island 'sir' shit, lard ass. Shut your scuzzy mouth, fat body, and listen up. I am going to give you the straight skinny, because you are the biggest shitbird on the planet. Don't even play pocket pool when you're supposed to be pulling bunker guard in my area. You will police up your act and get squared away, most ricky-tick, or you are going to have your health record turned into a fuck story. In Vietnam, nice guys do not finish at all and monsters live forever. You got to bring ass to get ass. A few weeks ago, you were the hot-rod king of some hillbilly high school, stumbling around in front of all the girls and stepping on your dick, but be advised that Vietnam will be the education you never got in school. You ain't even been born yet, sweet pea. Your job is to stand around and stop the bullet that might hit someone of importance. Before the sun comes up, Prive, you could be just one more tagged-and-bagged pile of nonviewable remains. If you're lucky, you'll only get killed."

The New Guy looks at me as though I've slapped him but does not reply.

I say, "We are teenaged Quasimodos for the bells of hell and we are as happy as pigs in shit, because killing is our business and business is good. The commandant of the Marine Corps has ordered you to Khe Sanh to get yourself some trigger time and pick up a few sea stories. But you are not even here to win the D.F.M., the Dumb Fucker's Medal. The only virtue of the stupid is that they don't live long. The Lord giveth and the M79 taketh away. There it is. Welcome to the world of zero slack."

The New Guy swats away a whining mosquito, looks at his boots, says sweetly, hating my guts, "Aye-aye, sir."

I don't say anything. I wait. I wait until the New Guy looks up, looks at me. He snaps to attention, a ramrod up his ass, chin tucked in. "Yes, sir!"

I stroll down the muddy catwalk of rope-handled ammo crates. I pick up a short black cardboard cylinder from the firing parapet. I tear off black adhesive tape from around the cylinder until it breaks open. An olive-drab egg drops into my hand, heavy, hard and cold. There is tape around the spoon; I tear it off.

I say, "I know that you've seen all of John Wayne's war movies. You probably think that you are it Hollywood now and that this is your audition. In the last reel of this movie, I'm supposed to turn out to be a sentimental slob with a heart of gold. But you're just another fucking New Guy and you're too dumb to do anything but draw fire. You don't mean shit to me. You're one more nameless regulation-issue goggle-eyed human fuck-up. I've seen a lot of ol' boys come and go. But it's my job to keep your candy ass serviceable. I'm the most squared-away buck private in this green machine lash-up, and I will do my job."

I hold down the spoon on the grenade with a thumb and I hook my other thumb into the pull ring. I jerk out the cotter pin. I put the pull ring into my pocket.

The New Guy is staring at the grenade. He thinks now that maybe I'm a little diên cai dau—crazy. He tries to move away, but I punch him in the chest with the frag and I say, "Take it, New Guy, or I will get crazy on you. Do it now."

Awkward, stiff and scared shitless, the New Guy touches the grenade with his finger tips to see if it's hot. His trembling fingers get a slow grip on the spoon. I let him breathe his bad breath into my face until I'm sure that he's got control of the spoon, then I let go.

The New Guy holds the grenade out at arm's length, as though that will help if it goes off. He can't take his eyes off it.

I say, "Now, if you need gear, do not go to supply. They sell all of the good stuff on the black market. Supply will not issue you any gear, but they might sell you some. No, what you do is you wait until you hear an inbound medevac chopper or until somebody says that some dumb grunt has been hit by incoming. Then you double-time over to Charlie Med. Outside Charlie Med there will be a pile of gear the corpsmen will have stripped off the dying grunt. While the doctors cut the guy up, you steal his gear.

"After that, the first thing you need to know is to always tap a fresh magazine of bullets on your helmet in case it's been in your bandoleer long enough to freeze up due to spring fatigue. The second thing you need to know is this: Don't you even piss in my bunker. You need to pee, you just tie it in a knot. And the last piece of skinny I've got for you, New Guy, is this: Don't ever put a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound."

The New Guy nods, tries to talk, tries to pull some air down and cough some words up at the same time. "The pin...." He swallows. "Do you want me to be killed?"

I turn to go. I shrug. "Somebody's got to get killed, it might as well be you. I'm not training you to keep from getting killed. I'm training you so you don't get me killed."

•

I look down at the wrist watch hanging from the buttonhole of the breast pocket of my utility jacket. I say to the New Guy, "I will inspect this position again in two hours, you gutless little pissant. You will not even fall asleep. When I give you the word, you will return my personal hand grenade in a serviceable condition. You will not even allow my personal hand grenade to blow itself up and hurt itself. You will not even mess up my favorite bunker with the horrible remains of your disgusting fat body."

The New Guy swallows, nods. "Aye-aye, sir." He's really scared shitless now. He's scared of me, scared of the frag, scared of everything and everybody on the planet.

I say, "When the Phantom Blooper comes, do not work the sixty. Pop a frag. Or call in for artillery support. Pop frags all over the area if you want to, many, many of them. When you're standing lines, frag first and forget about asking the questions. Keep your shit wired tight at all times, but do not work the sixty. The tracers in the sixty will give away your position."

But the New Guy is not listening. He's distracted.

Down in the wire, a squad of Marines is coming in off a night ambush. Somebody pops a star-cluster flare and five glowing green balls of beautiful fireworks swoosh up and sparkle down. A bone-weary squad leader issues a military order: "Hippity hop, mob stop."

I say, "What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? How long will it take me to forget your name?" Without warning, I get a firm grip on the New Guy's Adam's apple and I slam him hard into the bunker wall. Most of the air is knocked out of him. I choke out what's left.

I get right up in the New Guy's face. "I can't hear you, you spineless piece of low life. Are you going to cry? Go ahead—squirt me a few. You better sound off like you got a pair, sweetheart, or I will personally unscrew your head and shit in your shoulders!"

His face red, Private Owens tries to speak. His eyes are bulging out and he's crying. He can't breathe. His eyes lock on me, the eyes of a rat in a trap. I stand by to make my hat most ricky-tick. The New Guy looks like he's just about ready to faint and drop the grenade.

"Aye-aye, sir!" he screams, crazy, desperate. He shoves me back. He makes his free hand into a fist and hits me in the face. His eyes are turning to the dark side now; he sees himself in my face as though in a mirror. He hits me again, harder. We're relating now, we're communicating. Violence: the international language. The New Guy glares at me with pure, uncut hatred in his puffy red eyes.

The New Guy shoves me back again, sneering at me now, daring me to stop him, inviting me to get in his way, meaning it, not afraid now, not caring what I might do, a little crazy now, nothing to lose now, nothing standing between him and that one short step into the Beyond. Nothing but me.

"I'll kill you," he says and cocks his arm, threatening me with the frag. "I'll kill you," he says, and I believe him, because, finally, the New Guy has become a very dangerous person.

I can't keep the smile off my face, but I do try to make it look like contempt. "Carry on, Private Owens," I say, and I let him go.

I do an abrupt about-face and ditty-bop down the catwalk. I pause. I dig the pull ring from the hand grenade out of my pocket. I flip it across the bunker to Private Owens, who actually catches it.

"Don't play with it anymore tonight, Private Owens."

Private Owens nods, looking glum and totally confused. He brings the hand grenade up to the tip of his nose and picks at the firing mechanism with a fingernail, then pokes around with the cotter pin, trying to reinsert it into the grenade.

"Carry on," I say, aiming a forefinger between his eyes, "after I'm gone."

Private Owens nods, stands still and waits, a human Marine monument to an ignorance as hard as iron.

•

Dawn at Khe Sanh. As the day suddenly turns real, dew glistens on a shantytown of tents built with shelter halves and muddy ponchos. From the last of the decaying bunkers still standing and from the mouths of man-made caves, hard reptile men poke steel-helmeted heads out into the cold morning air, squinting, their faces stubble-bearded, bulky in their flak jackets and baggy jungle utilities, with weapons growing out of their hands like black-metal deformities. They walk hunched over and fast in the Khe Sanh quick step, humping ankle-deep in red mud, grunts, scuzzy field Marines, slouching half-awake toward burlap-wrapped piss tubes that no longer exist, scratching their balls.

A Skycrane helicopter lifts a howitzer off the deck and whack-whacks into a sky the color of lead. The howitzer dangles like a big toy on the end of a steel cable.

I crawl up into my gray metal hole inside a Conex box and I try to sleep.

Outside, an engineer yells, loud and bored, "Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"

Whomp.

Thuds and thumps are doing what enemy gunners have been having wet dreams about for months. They are tearing up some of the perforated steel planking from the airfield and loading it onto trucks. There are so many fires that most of the guys are wearing gas masks. The engineers are blowing up the last bunker wish blocks of C-4, while working parties of tired grunts chop into sandbags with E-tools and machetes. Growling bulldozers bury any remaining trash that's left beneath tons of red mud.

I curl up into a ball to hide and to wait for darkness. I close my eyes and I try to dream. If I'm going to go one on one with the Phantom Blooper, I need my beauty sleep.

If I don't kill the Phantom Blooper before we leave Khe Sanh, he will live forever.

Sometimes my dreams are too noisy, and sometimes my dreams are too quiet, and sometimes I can hear the sound of shrapnel going off in my mind.

•

The monsoon rain is coming down hard and cold and the New Guy I put through grenade school is falling asleep on guard duty, hunkered down in a hole where the guard bunker used to be, a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders like an Indian blanket.

Cutting zulus, the New Guy nods forward, pulls himself a little rack time, then jerks his head up, opens his eyes and looks around.

Within two minutes, the New Guy's eyes narrow to slits and his head starts to nod forward again. When you're on guard duty, sleep is the most valuable thing in the world.

Staring into a night as black as hell's steel door, I slide past the dozing New Guy and down into our wire.

I salute Sorry Charlie. The napalmblackened skull is wearing a pair of felt Mickey Mouse ears.

Naked except for the beat-up old Stetson on my head, armed with an M79 grenade launcher, and with the Kid from Brooklyn's prick-25 field radio on my back, I double-time into No Man's Land across a postatomic dark and bloody ground.

From sterile red soil that has been blasted with more firepower than a six-pack of Hiroshima bombs, dragons of ground mist rise up to swallow me. Gigantic bomb craters pockmark the deck. If I fall into a shell hole, I'll either break my neck or drown.

Mud sucks at my naked feet and slows me down as it always does in nightmares when the monster is chasing you. The sucking of the mud is embarrassingly noisy.

A star-cluster flare shoots up to the north. I squat and freeze. Somebody on a night ambush is coming in early. They must have wounded.

I wait until No Man's Land is silent, so silent that even the frogs have shut up. Then I hump, and every piece of darkness has something mean and ugly hiding in it, and every shadow is full of ghosts with iron teeth, but I don't care.

The Phantom Blooper laughs.

I stop and listen. The Phantom Blooper laughs again.

The grunts standing lines on the perimeter hear the Blooper and get wired. There's shouting and movement. In ten seconds, illumination flares are going to be popping all over this A-O.

I get a feeling that tells me that I am rapidly becoming someone's favorite sight picture.

The Phantom Blooper starts talking, but I can't quite hear what he's saying and I hope that the grunts on the perimeter can't hear him either, because the Phantom Blooper's grasp of the situation is too damned precise and if we listen to him, we'll all go plain fucking crazy.

Using my ears like an animal, I stalk the Blooper. My ears pick up each dot of sound.

Bam. An M79 grenade lifts a chunk of the deck in front of me, splattering me with mud and shrapnel.

Dark shadows dance and turn into monsters and larger shadows swallow them.

Someone screams into my ear, "More Illum! More Illum! Goddamn, more light!"

Hunkered down in the dark, butt-naked in a bombed-out wasteland, I'm muddy and stung by shrapnel. And my feet are cut all to shit.

A lone illumination shell from the 81 mike-mike mortars section hisses up in a high arc, pops, burns, pours down a foot-ball field of harsh white light.

The air I'm breathing turns into bullets and angry blips of red neon try to find my eyes. I know that the New Guy was sleeping, woke up when the Blooper laughed, got scared enough to shoot his own shadow, started working the 60 without remembering that a ordered him to use a frag or call in arty so that he wouldn't give away his position.

The New Guy has just fired a shot in anger; he's not a New Guy anymore.

I hear footsteps.

A hot sledge hammer hits me and knocks me down. I try to get up. My mouth goes dry in an instant and my stomach turns sour. I can't breathe. I've been shot. That fucking New Guy has shot me and I try to say to him, "You're in the hurt locker now, sweet pea." But all that comes out is a cough.

I lift myself up onto an elbow and I hold my M79 in one hand and I fire bloop at the expansive target of the New Guy's ignorance. There's a silence, and then the New Guy's area comes all to pieces in slow motion. A cadence count later, the fragmentation round thuds.

The whole perimeter opens fire. Tracer rounds probe the darkness.

I think maybe I'm dying.

Cold hands grip my ankles. I kick. I try to kick the hands away, but they are too strong. The field radio on my back hangs on a root and is pulled off. I'm being dragged away, toward the jungle.

Struggling to stay conscious, I try to talk tough to the Phantom Blooper. I want to see his black bone face.

My head bumps on a rock; I drop my M79.

•

While my mind drowns in a red-and-black river, the Phantom Blooper is dragging my body off into the jungle to bury it alive in a Viet Cong tunnel as a wire-strapped fetus stuffed forever into a damp, silent wall hundreds of feet beneath the impenetrable rain forest.

I can smell the moist black stink of jungle and I think, halfheartedly, So this is dying; it don't mean nothing, not even.

The darkness is cold, solid and total.

I see a floating light. But I am a United States grunt and I know that what I am seeing is a false light, a phosphorescent glow imprinted upon the jungle floor by the decayed remains of some animal that has died there.

In the glow of the false light, I can see where I've been hit. My naked shoulder looks like an old piece of saddle leather after a maniac has worked it over good with an ice pick. The skin is hard, dry, yellow-brown and stretched too tight. In the center of the ice-pick holes is one big hole, angry, red and moist.

As my eyes focus, I can see that deep down in the bottom of some of the little holes are hard brown eggs. My shoulder is hot and itchy. I can't stand it anymore. I scratch hard, digging into brittle flesh with dirty fingernails, exposing the tunnel system constructed under my skin by Viet Cong worms.

Maggots come out of the holes. Maggots as white as egg flesh crawl out of the holes. Blind worms with shiny brown heads burrow beneath the thin yellow surface of my skin. Maggots crawl out of my skin through the tunnels they have made. Maggots pour out of the holes by the hundreds, wiggling wildly and squirming.

The jungle gets lighter and lighter and then brighter and brighter until it is as lit up as a nighttime carnival. Every tree trunk and every plant and every leafy vine begins to radiate a strange green-yellow phosphorescent light.

Elephant grass and creepers and each leaf and gnarled root and even the interlocking triple-canopy roof of the jungle glows with light. All around me are living jungle plants full of a perfect, wondrous green, and I am bathed in a warm green light of blinding intensity and everywhere I look, I see jungle vines and ancient trees with light glowing deep down inside them and I surrender to the hypnotic enchantment of the world of green light and the Phantom Blooper drags me deeper and deeper into a vast and beautiful forest of green neon bamboo.

The Phantom Blooper laughs.

I laugh, too.

"He knows how we think. How we operate. He knows how Marines fight and what Marines fear."

"The Kid pulled an R&R in Japan. He scarfed up beaucoup sake, took hot baths with naked jailbait."