"Did you see the monthly tonnage report?" "Yea" Over a thousand tons of bombs dropped over the North not including the part of the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Those B-52s can carry a load. Why is the Air Force telling us this? Are they trying to look stupid? Every flight all I see are the same trees knocked down and the holes we made in the dirt roads filled with rain water.
"Take a load off and we'll figure this out." I looked around the steel walled state room and all I saw was gun metal gray and lots of it. It made my head swim. Nothing cheery about home sweet home these last eight months but the picture of my wife on the desk. "You lock the door and I'll buy tonight." I opened the the safe on my desk meant for storing secret documents and out came the bottle of Chevas Regal. I had picked up a large bucket of ice for this debriefing. Chevas over ice had a nice golden hue to it and as I brought it up to my nose it had the effect of an ammonia stick and I shook my head. It's four in the morning and still a humid 81 degrees outside. The air conditioning was working overtime in my room and I shivered as the scotch slide down my throat. The midnight flying was going to kill me not a missile. We'd been out to sea for thirty four days straight and I was getting tired.
"What the fuck are we doing here?" "The Air Force gives us shitty targets every night. By the time we get the mission planned they move the ammo depot down the road and we knock down trees again. I feel like I'm in the lumber and swimming pool business."
My flight suit was still wet from the sweat in places so I moved around and pulled the nomex material away from my skin. It had been another stormy night and my landing hadn't been stellar. The LSO had told me I was high in the beginning, low in the middle and needed power over the ramp. All true but I had made a save, grabbed a wire and was back aboard. It's not so bad they're shooting SAMs at you as having to listen to the Landing Signals Officer rant about your landing.
"You want another?" Valdez was clinking his ice around an empty glass. "Yea" "I have an answer to that stupid tonnage report." "Then drink up and let's hear it." I lit my third cigarette in as many minutes. I wasn't chain smoking but it was close. The scotch was taking effect and the nicotine kicking in so I egged Valdez on. "What's you're answer?"
"Oh yeh, if we had dropped the same tonnage of bowling balls with no finger holes into the rice paddies of North Vietnam from the beginning of this damn war they'd have surrendered years ago and still be trucking those balls to the coast."
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2 comments:
I can really feel your description of the weather, the exhaustion of the war, the liquor and nicotine all having a part in how you're feeling at that moment.
Kevin
The voice in this essay is so different from your other pieces. I really like it! I get a sense of your anger, disenchantment, resentment--the angry voice of a young man stuck in war. It's powerful. I'm glad to see that you can write with such varied tones and voices depending on your topic.
I'd like to see the bowling ball image in this piece--the idea of the bombs as bowling balls--that you allude to in your notes. I know you quote this at the end of the piece--you might use this quote further up in the piece, towards the beginning and end somewhere else.
Once you revise this, there might be a way to tailor this essay into a Readers Write (the upcoming topics are blood, saying yes). I think you should try to publish it in the Sun--either in Readers Write or as a regular submission. Your experience seem important and can shed light onto our current war times.
I love the dialogue--the "I'll buy tonight" and what that REALLY means--opening up a secret document desk drawer. I love that.
I'm interested in how the fear of being hit and blown up by a missile has been eclipsed by the dread of flying at midnight (operating on little sleep at this point? say more).
I also appreciate how we compare extreme things (bombing) to mundane things (lumber and pool). It's fascinating. Why do you think we do this? How DO you cope with something so upsetting as dropping bombs?
When you're talking about the LSO, I'm not sure what "grabbed a wire" means, although I'd like to.
Write about the 35 days being all the same. It was wake up, eat, bomb, sleep--or something that gives us a sense of the monotony of it. How something really tremendous can become very mundane. How we (you) might need to make the experience mundane in order to survive.
I love that you offer the reader a glimpse into this secret world. Please write more about this! You have such a way of looking at things that offers much more to the reader than the other narratives of war I've seen.
Great work!
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