The Pilot

By Denis Chericone

It was raining lightly, waving in sheets across the FOB. A barrage had been raging for over an hour and so far we’d been lucky, no wounded or worse. I stood in the main trench trying to keep dry while watching the F-fours bomb the shit out of the far side of the ridge where the farmers were forming up to assault us. A couple of marines stood nearby cheering every time there was an explosion. I agreed, heartily. We were staying low. Gunshots stuttered through their own echoes and we had grown cautious of too much exposure. Enemy snipers were now active and Clipper had pulled me out of the way after a thinly smoking hole appeared in a sandbag near my head. Yeah, another quickly followed. As we crouched, Clip stuck his fist above the rim of our trench, middle finger extended, and began moving it back and forth like a carny target. As I shook my head he looked at me with that impish smirk and said, “If that asshole was any good I’d be picking your brains up right now.” He was right. He’d saved my nut and I started laughing.

The Phantoms were coming in only a few hundred feet over target dropping high explosives and napalm, trying to scatter the farmers before they could attack. It was turning into quite a show. As the napalm boiled the air and the barrages grew thicker you could barely hear yourself think. There’s a point in any battle where it cannot get any louder. We’d passed that soon after it all began. Everybody was pissed off and everything was a “Fuck you!” The jet jockeys were rolling the dice daring the farmers to bring them down while trying to help us any way they could. I heard guys mutter Steel Balls more than once.

The flyers were taking heavy ground fire from the farmer formations who were learning fast. At one time they would shoot at the aircraft rarely leading it, but lately they’d begun grouping a dozen or so men to shoot ahead of the plane. Now our guys had to fly into the waiting bullet swarms. It worked well this time. As a Phantom lowed down into his strafing channel and I mean low, brother, just a couple of hundred feet above the deck, if that, a large bulb of flame ballooned out of his exhaust. We watched the canopy pop off as the pilot ejected. His craft slammed into a low hill and disappeared in a cratering fireball. He was maybe three or four hundred feet in the air when his chute opened. Down he came. The marines began yelling bitterly, “He’s dead, man! He’s a goner! Right into the middle of the Dinks!” The pilot and chute disappeared beyond the ridge and we rippled knowing the farmers were going to nail him. Suddenly, I heard Bob’s voice yelling my name. “Kid! Kid! C’mon, we gotta go!”

“Go? Go where?” I asked, looking up from the trench as my dread instantly intensified. Ah, the old They’re trying to kill me again routine.

“We’re gonna go get that guy.” he said smiling before he hurried away. “The pilot?” I yelled astounded.

He turned, “Yeah, c’mon. We don’t have much time.”

I grabbed my weapon and as I climbed out of the trench I was muttering “No, no, he’s gone. They got him.” I heard a chopper coming in as the barrage intensified and we ran towards the FOB’s LZ.

We laid low in a hole as the barrage casually shifted directions. When the helo whirled to a hover near us the barrage began creeping back towards us. At the right moment we made the dash, and then we were in, up and on our way. Bob was smiling and laughing big time as if he’d just won a bet. He loved impromptu flirtations with getting your ass shot off. It kind of fit our situation. He was contagious. I looked at him, “Mommy, are we gonna die?” He gave me the peace sign and laughed some more and as I armed up the crew chief swung his machine gun towards our destination. As we came over the rise I began thinking, “Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be dead before you know it.”

I expected to see a bazillion farmers aiming at us, but there was only a mushed-up chute a few hundred yards distant billowing in a narrow ravine and a lone figure slogging through the mucky earth. It was our guy. When he saw us he started waving wildly and as we flew at him I heard the hollow sound of a few hits bopping our ship’s frame. We skirted the ground and as we neared our boy Bob and I jumped off in a dead run. The pilot could barely walk, but he was game and gave it everything he had left. When we got him on the ship he collapsed into a sweat-stained shivering ball and Bob immediately gave him a deep once-over. I’d forgotten about getting wasted beneath the effort of getting him aboard. The crew chief brought it all home when he opened up with his fifty. Then I suddenly remembered something about dying as we lifted off. I was surprised. There weren’t many zzzt’s of bullets aside from a few hollow metallic thunks into the side of the ship. The crew chief yelled something to me and pointed his weapon to the crest of the ridge a few hundred yards distant. I looked and saw some dark smudges oozing over the brow. He let loose and we lifted off just as I fired a burst at the smears. Then we were over the rise. In the distance I saw more smudges moving over the blasted landscape towards where we’d been.

Definitely not our guys. Bob held the pilot’s hand and was saying something to him as he stared blankly into nowhere. I remember thinking then that maybe our guy was realizing he’d come back from the dead. I still think it’s strange. I’ve forgotten most of the little details of being shot at and bombed on, but I remembered this small thought from that moment in the helo. We took a few more hits and then were touching down on our LZ before any of us knew it.

The helo left and we dodged the barrage well enough to get him down into the med bunker. He was weak and disoriented and I wondered if he was able to believe he was safe. He was what I could only describe as consciously unconscious, you know, he wore a haze.

Bob sat him on a stretcher for a closer exam and was trying to be as reassuring as he could. I got him some water which he greedily drank and immediately choked on. He was a large man and an Air Force colonel, a sign he was a “hands on” kind of guy. He’d broken all the rules by skimming the targets; but he and his boys had succeeded in breaking up the assault. We were humbled, grateful and definitely in awe of his band of madmen. We knew what that kind of flying took. Suddenly, he was talking excitedly to us about the mission and then promptly fell off the stretcher onto the muddy floor where he began crying uncontrollably. We didn’t expect it at all and when he rose to his knees and hugged my legs tears darkening the caked mud on his face I couldn’t speak.

Stammering, he hoarsely croaked, “I would be a dead man if you guys hadn’t…”

Bob tried lifting him up; but the pilot was elsewhere right now.

“I know they would have gotten me. I saw them! They were already shooting. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t come. You guys saved me! You saved me!”

Bob and I gently helped him back to the stretcher as he retired into quiet sobs and I think it was then, I’m not sure, that I wanted to start crying myself. I never told this to anyone else except Bob later that night after things had settled down. Unexpectedly, he told me the same thing describing the moment as poignant. I agreed with everything I had. What other kind of feeling could you draw out of this? Bob was always sympathetic. It was hard to piss him off. He had that rare quality of active and enduring mercy. The kind that never dies. At Khe Sanh it was an essential if not distinctive virtue, a bit of grace within the chaos, a necessary recourse when darkness ruled. Without it, I simply cannot imagine.

Pitbull and Q showed up and quickly put the moment together. They introduced themselves and softly asked the colonel to come down with them to the command bunker. They attended to their brother officer very respectfully, almost solemnly. This was the man who lead the effort to preserve our lives. There was a bit more than a well deserved reverence to the moment. A special Air Force chopper came and got him and Pitbull told us he’d been in good shape as he departed. Later, when the barrages were somewhere else, Bob and I sat talking on some sandbags vantaging Co Roc. The sky had cleared and the last bits of sunlight were melting into the coming night.

“The flyboys usually don’t survive going down in the middle of the Dinks. I know he believed he was dead at worst, captured at best. No other choices, you know?” Bob stared out across the hills as his voice trailed off, “You don’t ever get that vulnerable, ever.”

“Yeah, when we got to him it wasn’t what I’d expected, not at all.” I added with growing disbelief. Someone or something had guided us through that venture and I began sweating all over again.

“Right, me, too. I really didn’t think we’d be able to bring him in. I was surprised as hell to see him moving,” he said and turned to me flush with smiling satisfaction, “But I’m sure glad we did! Add him to the Hall of Heroes, Kid with three toots on the harmonica!”

I watched the cloud collar winding around Co Roc, “Man, we got away with a big ‘Fuck you’ today, huh?”

Bob smiled wearily and looked towards the mountain, “I guess it’s what you’d call being overcome with salvation, you know? Hell, I’ve been there once or twice myself. Who hasn’t around here? It’s our lives we’re talking about, right?” He put his arm around my shoulder, “We did something good today, bub, worthy. That doesn’t happen very often, especially here.” He laughed happily, “The gods were with us today, my boy, with us all the way. It’s things like that which wind up changing lives, pointing you in another direction, exposing you to other options.”

We were both so really beat. I felt wrung out like someone had tried to squeeze the life out of me. I was marveling about my fatigue. We hadn’t really done much; but something had reached in, something had rearranged our actions. Maybe it was the other guys feelings which had drained me. We’d all been affected by the pilot’s passionate gratitude, an expression of thanksgiving I’d never, never-ever, seen a human being display before. I was getting lost wondering about discoveries, you know, wondering how far certain feats and ordeals can reach in, how they can bind themselves to your soul.

“I never felt the way I did today, you know, feeling someone else’s sincerity, feeling their powerful gratitude so powerfully. It was so, so vast, you know?”, I said with relief.

Bob looked at me kindly, “This is my fourth tour and I’ve never seen anything like that either. That guy was serious. He’d already accepted his death. He was getting ready for it and then, then, we stopped by.” His shoulders drooped and he put his hand on a sandbag as if to steady himself. “There’s so much that makes me tired these days. I don’t know, maybe I’ve been doing this too long. Maybe I’m getting too old for this.”, he whispered drained and dragging. I looked at him and it was as if I was seeing him for the first time. I felt an electric pulse surge through me. He’d lost a lot of weight and there were streaks of white in his hair now. He looked older than before, older than before we’d gone to get the pilot. I followed his gaze to Co Roc and wound up letting myself get lost.

“Hell, I never expected to make it this far.”, he let out as if he was waking up from a dream. “I had to make peace with that on my first tour, you know, knowing I’d be dead before it was all over. That was necessary ‘cause when you look at it, really look at it, it’s the only thing you can accept without question.”

The pilot had hit us deeply. I think we were all feeling like him in a way. I think it reminded us of how extremely vulnerable we all were when the bottom line revealed itself, when you couldn’t ignore it, when you realized it was part of the life, part of you.

Staring towards Co Roc it reached out. I was there for a moment. We were still talking, but it was more like we were talking with the mountain instead. He brought me back, “You’re learning what no one could teach you, Kid. It never stops coming at you. It’s like exploring the unknown, you know? There’s no end to it.” It came out in a wave of fatigue.

“I guess this is where it all begins then, right?”, I answered.

“Or ends, buddy.” And with that, we faded into the approaching darkness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR — From Denis Chericone’s LinkedIn biography: “While in the military I was posted to a remote and very isolated US Army Special Forces A camp, An Loc. While there I was in charge of a twelve bed jungle hospital where I treated everything from amputations to leprosy. I lived amongst the people of the area, the Gerai and Rhade Montagnards. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. They were Vietnam’s equivalent to the First Nations people of the Americas. Sociologically light years more sophisticated than the people of the industrialized west, the Montagnards exposed me to me a deeper understanding of the qualities that comprise the essence of being human.”

Denis is a writer, both of poetry and prose. You can hear Denis reading his poetry at the Oregon Poets Satyricon Poetry Series.

Denis is also a talented pianist. In 2021 he placed first in the music division of the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival (NVCAF), which resulted in an invitation to perform at the 41st NVCAF in 2022. You can hear Denis’ winning performance of the selections he submitted in 2021 on YouTube, which included one original composition. One other original, Fukushima #5, is included in the list of links below:

“Summertime”
“Daybreak” — an original piece
“My Favorite Things”
“Ruby My Dear”
“When Johnny Comes Marching Home”
“Fukushima #5” — an original piece