At the end of highway #4, me and Snowball were about as deep into the Nam Bo as you get. Less than forty more miles down and we'd be in Rach Tau, the southmost point in Vietnam that had a name. Of course, we weren't headed that way.
At Hong My village, we turned our jeep over to some ARVN rangers, just like we had been ordered. We could've sold it back there at Can Tho and nobody would've know the difference, but we didn't. So instead, the ARVNs will sell it, and nobody still won't know the difference.
Since we had some slack in the schedule we decided to sack out and rest for a day or so, because in the Army it isn't smart to finish anything early. But a helicopter was beating around the area, and with that thump-thump-thump bouncing off the bamboo we didn't have much luck getting to sleep. Anyway, we heard other noise-cheering, maybe-on the other side of the village.
"Sounds like a party," said Snowball. "We gotta check that out." So he was fast to get his green bandana on his head, the one that made him look like Aunt Jemima in camouflage. That was a joke he told, not me.
Just half a klick from where we had tried to camp out, we found the celebration. Half the people in the village were standing around a drained rice paddy, watching four American GIs slipping and sliding in the mud while strapping a harness on a water buffalo. The buffalo just stood there, its head twisted back, its eye rolled sideways to see what was going on. They have eyes, these buffalo, about the size of your fist.
On its back sat a little kid wearing one of those flat cone-shaped hats, his grin bigger than his face.
"Aw, shit, man, look at that!" said Snowball.
If you've seen one kid on a water buffalo you've seen them all, but you didn't say that to Snowball.
We eased through the crowd, Snowball speaking a lot of Vietnamese with the kids and the mamasans, who couldn't help but smile with him. Vietnamese just seem to naturally like spades. But I kept Snowball moving, because he didn't need much excuse to stop and haul out that bag of candy. The kids followed us anyway, and by the time we got up front, there were enough to make up a little gang. They kept at arm's length, but hung around close enough to be first in line for whatever we had to give.
We walked over to where a couple of NCOs stood off by themselves, overlooking the job, their arms folded and resting on their big stomachs. One was a first-sergeant, the other a staff sergeant, and neither much more than glanced our way, which kind of surprised me. For one thing, we had these noise suppressors on our '16s that made them look more like small bazookas than rifles. For another, we wore face paint that gave us the look of people who hadn't made it home for a couple of nights-and wouldn't make it tonight, either. Up around Long Binh, they looked at us like we were from the zoo. But not here.
"How y'all doin' " I asked in a cracker voice that usually went down alright with most white boys.
The first-sergeant wouldn't turn, but the other one spared us some time. "Where you headed?' he asked.
"Just passing through." I said. It seemed like he didn't much care where we were headed, so I went on. "We thought we heard a chopper. Is that what the party's about?"
"We're doing some public relations work. Soon as we get this buff trussed up, a chopper's going to lift it over to Song Doc. It's been rented out."
Snowball didn't look happy about these plans. "I seen artillery moved around this way. Not no buffalo though," he said.
Somehow his words pulled the first-sergeant's chain, and his voice filled the space around us.
"At Can Tho, we lifted body bags this way after Tet. We couldn't truck them out fast enough to beat the maggots. So we just airlifted them. Choppers didn't even have to land. They'd just drop a line and we'd hook them on."
He still hadn't so much as looked our way.
But before anybody had time to get down to hard feelings, one of the GIs who'd been working on the buffalo popped smoke, and we all stood and waited. When you think a helicopter is coming you don't think about much else.
In a couple of minutes a Huey seemed to jump up from behind a stand of palm trees. It probably had been out hot-rodding, because it was loaded down with guys just sitting up there, like they were only along for the ride.
This Huey wasn't one of those beefed up models, and it was carrying a pretty heavy load already, so I thought it was a little small to do an air-lift job. Of course, I don't know how much a water buffalo weighs.
The GIs on the ground got the kid off the buffalo, and they all cleared away. The chopper moved over the buffalo and hovered about thirty to thirty-five feet above. A guy up there who looked like he was laughing threw out a line. A GI on the ground ran back to the buffalo, all stooped over like the prop was beating away no more than six inches above his head. He attached the line to the harness, and ran back out of the way, now acting like something was going to blow up.
The chopper rose gradually to take up the slack in the line, then the big blades started slapping the air hard, trying to get that buffalo off the ground. That chopper pulled and pulled, but it couldn't bring that water buffalo straight up.
To get enough lift, the chopper had to start forward. That maneuver brought the buffalo off the ground, barely, but it had him swinging back and forth in about a twenty foot arc. The chopper itself started swinging in the opposite direction of the buffalo, and this double pendulum didn't look like something that the pilot was going to be able to handle.
He powered up in a spiral for maybe a couple of hundred feet, trying to get the load under control. Now the buffalo was bellowing like hell and was swinging all over the place, worse than before. The pilot knew not to go any higher, but the problem was he couldn't land the buff either with it swinging like that-not without snapping its legs off.
There was no going up and there was no going down. The joy ride was over.
The problem had to solve itself, and it did pretty soon. Something broke or came loose in all that harnessing, and the buffalo fell-turning over and over and not bellowing anymore. At least I didn't hear anything. After the ground caught the buffalo, the most noise you could hear was from that chopper. It had gone shooting up in the air real fast after losing its load, and the pilot still wasn't in control.
In a few seconds, though, all them Vietnamese broke loose. They were crying and laughing and making just about any other kind of noise. I don't think they knew what to do, but they stayed away from us.
The bunch of kids who'd been waiting for Snowball had disappeared. In fact, all the Vietnamese were disappearing from this place, slipping away into the hedges, and it was getting quiet.
"Well I'll be dipped in shit," said the first-sergeant.
"Oh, Lordy, Lordy," said the staff sergeant in the country twang of some back home grandad, like normal cussing couldn't handle the occasion.
"These folks gotta have a buffalo." said Snowball. "What they gonna do?"
"Guess there'll be one hell of a barbecue tonight," the first-sergeant said.
"These people don' need no dead buffalo. It's gotta be alive."
"Shit, son," said the first-sergeant, turning our way for the first time. "The U.S. Army bought them this one. Now we'll buy them another one-probably a better one. Why do you care?"
From our back angle, I had thought I had pretty much put together what the
first-sergeant looked like. But when I finally saw him face on, I was mainly surprised at
what I didn't see. He was just a middle-aged man who was overweight and who had a
pasty-face with nothing in it to remember. He was as plain and ordinary a looking human as
you'd ever see. That's all there was to it.
We got on our way before the big cookout. Too much attention to this spot didn't help us, so we were off. I didn't want to think too much more about that buffalo. We had to do recon through at least two places where unfriendly gooks would try to blow our asses off if they saw us, and I like to have my mind clear for that sort of thing.
Snowball, though, just couldn't let it go.
"That was a awful thing to do. We always fuckin' over them people."
"But if they'd got the buff over to whatever village that was, everybody would've come out ahead. Maybe there ain't much more than a little luck separating something that's real good and something that's real bad."
"Seems to me bad and good ain't much alike. So what you talking about?"
"Okay, I don't know what I'm talking about. But it was still just an accident."
"Shit. It was a accident and it wasn't a accident. That's all I got to say about it."
But it wasn't all he had to say, because he hounded my ass for the next fifty miles that we walked and crawled through swamps and mangrove forests. It was the injustice of it that bothered Snowball, but since he was used to injustice, I figured that maybe he'd soon get over the buffalo.
On the other hand, though, I don't know how either one of us is ever going to forget watching something that big-something that didn't know what to do with its legs-fall so far for no good reason.
Steve Anderson has published one other short story, "American Expedition." It too has a Vietnam setting.
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