The Phantom Blooper (11 page)

Now the villagers called the Woodcutter
Bac Kien
--"Uncle Fire Ant." The Woodcutter was the fire ant that bit the French so painfully that the French were forced to take their foot off of the village.

The big iron war machine that was killed by a barefoot peasant still sits under the giant banana tree, rusty brown now and with a full crew of lizards.

The Woodcutter gets tired of humiliating me at Ping-Pong and has retold all of his favorite parables and proverbs and tiger jokes--The tiger is more honest than man, because a tiger wears his stripes on the outside, the United States is a paper tiger powered by gasoline. Americans are ferocious tigers but they are helpless against determination, America is on the back of a tiger and is afraid to dismount, in the United States they have killed all of the tigers and the rabbits are in charge.

I go outside to find Johnny Be Cool.

Johnny Be Cool is in the water buffalo's bunker, feeding his prive possession. He's constatnly washing the bo, feeding it, pampering it.

By village standards Johnny Be Cool is a man of means. He bought the water bo with his own money, earned as a shoeshine boy while on his spying missions, and he rents out the lumbering monster to farmers who are too poor to own a buffalo. Johnny Be Cool saves every piaster. Someday he will take a trip to America to find his father, John Henry, that steel drivin' man.

Johnny Be Cool watches the water buffalo eat. As the bo crunches his food lazily, Johnny Be Cool offers me a strip of sugar cane.

Johnny Be Cool and I sit together in the moonlight, sucking noisily on our sugar cane. Johnny Be Cool encourages the water buffalo to continue eating by taking out a small bamboo flute and playing a tune, close to the water bo's ear.

The only other sound is the soft, rhythmic tapping of Song's typewriter.

At dawn the next morning, Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I join everyone in the village for the harvest in the rice fields.

When I was a kid in Alabama I could drag a nine-foot gunnysack from dawn to dusk, picking cotton to earn a little extra money to throw away on suckers' games at the county fair.

The first thing you learn about harvesting rice, if you have ever picked cotton, is that the pain hits you in exactly the same spot in the small of your back. After ten hours in the sun my revolutionary enthusiasm is not what it should be. I've gone soft since I gave up farming and started fighting in a war.

It does feel good to get my hands into some dirt, even if it is mud.

I kick some water at a duck as it paddles by and I think about the truth in Uncle Ho's slogan, "Rice fields are battlefields." Nobody ever said that back in Alabama, but somebody should have said it, because we had the same war, grow to eat, eat to live.

In this world without supermarkets farmers are Asian Minuteman, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other, and rice is life itself, god's gemstone, and hunger in the rice fields is a military defeat. Each planting season is a new campaign in the war that never ends, the war of water, weather, and soil, the life-and-death struggle some men wage against stump roots.

The Woodcutter grunts his disapproval of my harvesting technique, steps in close behind me, grabs my wrist roughly. He demonstrates the proper way to hold the
Luoi hai,
a rice sickle with a curving blade, and how to grasp a rice-heavy bunch of stalks, how to slice the bunch at the base under the water, quickly, but smooth and sure so that none of the dull gold rice kernels shake loose. A grain of rice is a drop of blood.

Trying to look like I'm squared away, I cut a few more bunches, wading knee-deep in muddy water, rice-stalk stubble pricking my naked feet.

The Woodcutter watches me closely, then says, "Someday, Bao Chi, you will hear the rice growing. Someday. Maybe." With a critical grunt, he climbs up onto the paddy dike and walks away.

Rice sickles flash up and down, glinting in the sun. It's like being inside a vast machine that hums and crunches. Each harvester piles cut stalks into a crooked arm. When the bunch is big enough it is tied with twine and stacked on the foot-worn paddy dike, where they are picked up by the village children and carried to thrashers who beat the rice stalks by hand to remove the grains. The grains are rolled to remove the husks and then tossed into the air on flat rattan baskets until the thin husks are blown away by the wind.

The people of Hoa Binh, peasants up to their knees in paddy muck, work in the yellow furnace of the sun all day, dawn to dusk, and they talk, and laugh. Sometimes they sing. Men, women, and children work in harmony with
Xa
, the land, because the pull of the land is strong. Back in the World, farmers are becoming almost as rare as cowboys and Americans no longer respect the land or people who work the land. In Hoa Binh the ancient bond of centuries, soil, and farmers is still strong.

A courier kid runs along the paddy dike, a little boy in a faded yellow T-shirt that says ELVIS THE KING. He hands a tiny envelope to the Woodcutter.

The Woodcutter thanks the young courier, opens the envelope, nods approval, scribbles a brief reply on the back of the envelope with a ballpoint pen, then hands the little envelope back to the boy.

The boy salutes, double-times back down the paddy dike.

The courier kids come to the Woodcutter like that all day, every hour or so.

Three or four times each day artillery shells crash though the air over our heads and chug away to hit some target in the mountains. Except for the odd short round, we ingore the shells.

Several times each day we hear the sounds of approaching helicopters. We ingore the helicopters as long as they don't come in groups and don't come in too close or too fast. Nothing freezes the blood faster than the black shadows of these airborned machines. If we run, we're VC, and they shoot us. If we stand still, we are well-disciplined VC, so they shoot us anyway.

But if it's an attack and the helicopters are going to land they come lick locusts. If a single chopper landed here alone, the people of the village would not try to feed it yams.

A hundred angry villagers would hang as dead weight from the slender rotor blades until the rotor blades were twisted, bent, and broken. They would hack through the fragile aluminum fuselage with wooden hoes and rakes. The door gunner would be slashed without mercy by a flailing wall of rice knvies and machetes. With bare hands the people of the village would rip apart the smashes Plexiglas bubble and then the pilot's helmet would be pounded and stabbed and battered with stones and farm implements until the dark green sun visor over the pilot's face turned black with blood.

At noon we eat lunch from wicker baskets brought out from the village by pretty teenaged girls, the Phuong twins, White Rose and Yellow Rose.

Eating the fist and rice, I think about how my dad and I, after a long morning of plowing with a mean mule, used to eat lunches of cornbread, mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches, poke salad in a brown paper sack, and well water in Mason jars.

As the Woodcutter drinks pickle juice from a gourd dipper like the gourd dippers we used on the farm when I was a boy, the Woodcutter's hands are like my father's hands, callused and scarred, but hands that can feel the life in good soil and the solid strength in a block of wood.

One of the Phuong twins gives me a plugged coconut. Her smile revelas dimples that would melt an asbestos brick. Both of the Phuong twins have round, happy faces, with flawless complexions, black hair braided into pigtails, and hair-trigger giggles. Today they're both wearing black pajama trousers and matching pink shirts.

I lift the coconut between raw, blistered hands. I drink the delicious cocnut milk in long swallows, chugging the cool, sweet liquid.

The Phuong twins move down the paddy dike and give coconuts to the Nguyen brothers, Mot, Hai, and Ba. There are a lot of blushes and giggles from the Phuong twins and a lot of good-natured catcalls from the villagers. The village matchmakers have been working overtime to solve this critical problem in mathematics: how to divide three Nguyen brothers into two Phuong twins.

I wipe sweat from my face with somebody's Liberation Front bandana. I climb up into the paddy dike and lie down. My back is throbbing with pain. I concentrate. I ignore the pain. On Parris Island, during Marine Corps recruit training, Gunny Gerheim, our Senior Drill Instructor, taught us that pain is only an illusion and exists only in the mind.

Concentrating, I can hear Sergeant Gerheim's booming voice: "Fall into the squad bay, herd. Gent inside! Get inside! You pinheaded no-brained foreskin-chewing pogey bait maggots, you are lower than worm life! All right, ladies, right shoulder locker box. Do it now! And repeat after me: 'We're a bunch of girls, and we can't march.'"

I miss Parris Island. Parris Island was a picnic.

As I sit up and swallow my last bite of fish and squash, a muffled drone on the horizon turns into a Bird Dog spotter plane. A small olive-drab Cessna sputters in slow motion above the rice fields, unarmed, just one for a little noontime VR--Visual Reconnaissance.

Loudspeakers on the plane play Buddhist funeral music wile a Kit Carson Scout who has
Chieu Hoi'
d reads invitations to surrender and itemizes the many bennies available for Viet Cong troopers who defect over to the American side of the bamboo curtain.

The villagers wave at the plane in a friendly way, and they jokes: "
Ban May Bay giac My
"--"We must shoot down all of the American pirate planes." Everybody laughs, waving harder.

I wave too, and I hunch down beneath my white conical rice-paper hat as I squat on the paddy dike.

Johnny Be Cool stands on the back of his water buffalo, waving.

Today, instead of buzzing along harmlessly until it's out of sight, the Bird Dog swings around and makes another pass, coming in unusually low, rocking its wings to wave at the villagers, who wave back and cheer, and laugh, because everybody knows that the Phuong twins, the pretty girls who brought us lunch, are at this moment in a camoflaged postition in the treeline, taking care of business.

The Phuong twins track the Bird Dog through the sights of a 12.7-milimeter antiaircraft gun until it is out of sight.

The day returns to its usual back-breaking routine until late in the afternoon, when someone finds an unexploded shell. There is some minor excitement as Commander Be Dan arrives with four
Chien Si
, Front fighters from the village Self-Defense Milita.

The
Chien Si
are skinny teenaged boys wearing dark green shorts, short-sleeved khaki shirts, and rubber sandals cut from truck tires. The fighters are armed with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their backs.

Commander Be Dan and the Woodcutter have a brief but noisy debate concerning the risk of removing the shell. It could be cut opne and the explosives inside used to make boody traps and hand grenades.

Commander Be Dan is short and stocky, like a Korean Marine. He's missing his left hand at the wrist. His hand was blown off when Commander Be Dan was a sapper in the
Dac Cong
, the Viet Cong Special Forces. He's a former heavy-hitter demoted to the minor leagues. As the Woodcutter chatters on and on and flings his arms, Commander Be Dan is silent. Commander Be Dan never says very much; he's sort of a Viet Cong Gary Cooper.

During planting season three villagers were killed and seven injured when their plows and hoes struck unexploded bombs and shells. Even the soil that gives us life is full of death sown by the enemy.

Commander Be Dan convinces the Woodcutter that this particular shell is too dangerous to remove intact. The shell is blown in place, quickly, so that the harvest can continue.

We work on. More hours of hard, back-breaking labor. The grain is in head and ready to fall, so harvest days do not end until twilight.

Tonight is village meeting night. As we leave our partly harvest crop and walk back to the village we look forward to an entertainment.

Song and I kick aside the stubby white ghosts that are chickens pecking rice kernels off the paddy dike. Somewhere a water bo bellows mournfully, lonely for his girlfriend. Somewhere laughing children run, trying to catch firelfies.

Walking with Song, I inhale the life-giving odors of earth, sun, sweat, and animals. My back is stiff and numb, but my body feels hot and strong with the good tired feeling that comes at the end of a day of hard work, when you feel like you're earned your supper and have earned your right to a good night's sleep, because you're free, and honest, and you don't owe anybody a damned thing.

After the evening meal, still tired from our day in the fields but enjoying the relief from the tropical heat, the entire village assembles on the village common, facing the giant banana tree.

Sitting on top of the rusting wrekc of the French armored car is Bo Doi Bac Si, a North Vietnamese Army medic. This is a relief for everyone. It means that we are not going to have to suffer through another reading from Mao's Little Red Book by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre.

Bo Doi Bac Si is an ernest young man, serious about his duties, yet friendly and good-natured. He is wearing a clean khaki uniform with trousers and spit-shined black leather boots. Red collar tabs bearing a single silver star on a yellow stripe identify him as a Corporal. Attached to the front of his small khaki-colored pith helmet is a red metal star.

A pet monkey sits on Bo Doi Bas Si's shoulder, playing with the Coporal's ear. Bo Doi Bac Si found the monkey on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The monkey was dying and he nursed it back to health. He calls the monkey
Trang
--"Victory."

The Corporal, along with his superior, Master Sergeant Xuan, are stationed in Hoa Binh as liasisons between the Front fighters and North Vietnamese Army units that march like army ants down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and draw supplies of rice from the village of Hoa Binh.

The commanding officer of the NVA liaison detachment, Lieutenant Minh, a very popular man, was killed last month during a B-52 attack a few miles from the village. During the attack, Lieutenant Mihn jumped into a shell-hole fish pond for cover and was bitten by a deadly bamboo viper.