Chickenhawk: A Shattering Personal Account of the Helicopter War in Vietnam

Chickenhawk: A Shattering Personal Account of the Helicopter War in Vietnam

Robert Mason

Language: English

Pages: 174

ISBN: B002J81C3K

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A stunning book about the right stuff in the wrong war. As a child, Robert Mason dreamed of levitating. As a young man, he dreamed of flying helicopters - and the U.S. Army gave him his chance. They sent him to Vietnam where, between August 1965 and July 1966, he flew more than 1,000 assault missions. In Chickenhawk, Robert Mason gives us a devastating bird's eye-view of that war in all its horror, as he experiences the accelerating terror, the increasingly desperate courage of a man 'acting out the role of a hero long after he realises that the conduct of the war is insane,' says the New York Times, 'And we can't stop ourselves from identifying with it.'

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Dinner was C’s eaten down by the ships. Riker and Resler sat on the deck eating from cans while I twisted the opener around a tin of chicken: I was pulling the ragged lid away from the chicken meat when the silence was shattered. Whomp! and then ringing. The ringing came from my ears. Nobody announced the obvious: mortars. Cans clanked on the deck and shadows scattered. I dropped my can and ran toward a shallow hole I had seen when we landed. It was only twenty feet away. Whoomm! I saw the bright

They aim at puffs of smoke in the jungle, drop their shit, and gam, they’re back home. Their total time in the air from takeoff to landing is one hour and twenty minutes. It’s a quickie. Then they hop in an air-conditioned van and cruise back to the club. And that’s it for the day. A hundred missions and they go home.” He paused for a minute while a Phantom came in for a landing. “Can you imagine? A hundred missions? Shit, I’d be back home twice already.” “You guys log missions?” “No, not

narrow sidewalk, gawking at the strangeness of it all. We smiled at everyone, and they smiled back. Even with their smiles, the people looked afraid. I imagined that our French and Japanese and God knows what other predecessors found Pleiku to be very much the same as we did. So the smiles were probably those of self-defense. I think ours were, too. There was no detectable difference between the people who milled around us now and the ones who tried to kill us every day. It wasn’t paranoid to

about that night became legend. The next day was business as usual. I was scheduled to fly with Leese. He was going to teach me one of his valuable lessons. We had been assigned to fly a single-ship mission to haul a load of high-explosive rockets from Pleiku to a Special Forces camp about thirty miles south. The rockets, 2500 pounds of them, were the type used on our helicopter gunships. We often placed caches of them near the action to cut the wasted time of return flights. They loaded

bodies were piled near a bunker. Some were missing limbs and heads. Others were burnt, facial skin drawn back into fierce, grotesque screams. A VC gunner was lying below his antiaircraft gun with one arm raised, chained to his weapon. American soldiers were policing the dead for weapons and piling what they found in a growing heap. Most were smiling with victory. Wood smoke from the hooches mixed with the stench of burnt hair and flesh. The sun was hot and the air was muggy. At the river’s edge,

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