"They are trying very hard not to," she said. "Would you like me to tell you how that works?"

"Yes," he said. "If you're talking, I can't get my foot in my mouth."

There are two kinds of officers in the army," she said. "Did you know that?" "Only two?" "There are regular officers and reserve officers," she said. "Oh."

"But that's not as simple as it sounds," she said. "There aren't enough regular officers to go around."

"Why not?"

"They have sort of a club," she said. "They don't let a lot of people in the club. Like women."

"I thought there were women in the regular army."

"WACs," she said. "Not medical corps officers. Or for that matter armor officers or infantry officers. Just WACs."

"So what happens, to cut a long story short... this must be boring you out of your mind."

"On the contrary, I'm fascinated," he said. She smells of soap, he thought. It was a delightful smell.

"Because they don't have enough spaces for regular officers to go around, what they do is have reserve officers. When on active duty, reserve officers are equal to regular officers. Did you ever read any Orwell?"

"Some animals are more equal than others,"?" he asked.

"Right," she said. "It's delightful to meet someone who reads books. I have been around people who don't read, period."

"Soldiers, you mean?" he asked. "And officers," she said. "Oh.

"As I was saying, about reserve officers and regular officers," she went on, "since the medical corps doesn't have women as regular army officers, and since the medical corps needs doctors, what they do is commission women as reserve officers and call them to active duty temporarily promising them the moon, plus two dollars."

"I see," he said. "I'm getting the feeling that you're not too wild about being in the army."

"Are you really?" she asked. "Well, what happens is that when a woman who is on active duty as a reserve officer completes her three years of service and wants to get out of the army, they suddenly realize they don't have enough people in her specialty, so they declare her to be essential." "Is that what happened to you?"

"Uh-huh," she said. "I was supposed to get out of the army this month. Now I have to stay another year."

"I see."

"What really burns me up is that if I wanted to stay in the army," she said, "and applied for a regular commission, they would pat me on the head and say, Sorry, little lady, the army is a man's game, and you can't play."

"What is your specialty?"

"I'm a psychiatrist," she said. Then she saw the look on his face. "Why does that surprise you?"

"I don't know," he said. "You don't look like a psychiatrist."

"Very funny," she said. "But enough of this gay, idle chatter about girlish things. What were you doing in Germany? What do you do for a living?"

"I'm an armor officer," Lowell said. "Lieutenant colonel. Regular army."

She looked at him to make sure he wasn't kidding.

Then what are you doing in first class, wearing a five hundred-dollar suit and a thousand. dollar wristwatch?"

"I've also read a book or two," he said. "Observant little lady, aren't you?"

"Touche, Colonel," she said. "But that doesn't answer my question." "I was sitting here minding my own business," Lowell said. "When Pan American dumped a charity case in my lap."

"Oh, you do play nasty, don't you?" she said. She seemed pleased.

"You said it, little lady," Lowell said. The army s a man's game."

"If you call me little lady' one more time, I will pour my drink in your lap," she said.

That would be assault upon a superior officer, and they would send you to Fort Leavenworth to make small rocks from big ones. That would be a good deal less pleasant than sitting in a comfortable chair, listening to people tell you all about their toilet training."

"You are such an all-around regular-army male supremacist sonofabitch," she said, "that I think I like you."

"You're just saying that to get me on your couch," he said.

"Your wife wouldn't like that," she said.

"How do you know there is a wife?" he asked.

"Are you saying there isn't?"

"How did a nice girl like you get to be a shrink?"

"If you ever say shrink to me again, you will get the drink in your lap," she said. "We were talking about your wife."

"No wife," he said. 1 get a lot of people your age who never married on my couch," she said.

"I didn't say I had never been married," he said. The stewardess walked past. Lowell snapped his fingers, caught her attention, and signaled for two drinks.

"If you had done that to me, you would have gotten the drinks in your lap," the captain said.

"Did you ever wonder if you might perhaps have a drink sing-the-crotch' fixation?" Lowell asked.

"God!" she said, and then she laughed. "I suppose I asked for that."

She looked at him, and for a moment their eyes met. Then she flushed and looked away.

"What happened to the wife?" she asked. "She fled screaming home to mother?"

"She died," Lowell said.

She looked at him again, remorse on her face. She colored again, too, but this time she didn't look away.

"Let's try it one more time," she said. "Hello, there, my name is Barbara Gillis. Is this seat occupied?"

"Please sit down, Doctor," Lowell said. "I'm grateful for the company. My name is Craig Lowell."

"I've very pleased to meet you, Colonel Lowell," she said, offering her hand.

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Dr. Gillis," he said. "Traveling far?"

Her hand was soft and warm, and he let go of it reluctantly. "Fort Bragg, actually," she said. "Do you know it?" "I get there from time to time," he said. "Perhaps we could have dinner or something."

"Or something," she said.

XII.

(One) U.S.N.S. CARD.

10' 3O' North Latitude, 108P2S' North Longitude (The South China Sea) 1330 Hours, 10 January 1962 The choppers, the Piasecki H-21s, the Bell H-13s, and the Sikorsky H-Ms had taken off first, without problem. There had been one almost-incident with an H-34. A helicopter has the ability of taking off vertically and of remaining motionless with reference to the ground, once it is airborne. When during takeoff a helicopter pilot detects or senses that something is not going exactly as it should be going, he can raise the forward end of the rotor cone, which reduces or eliminates forward speed, and he can thereafter make a powered or unpowered descent an autorotation to the ground immediately under him.

While taking off or landing, an experienced helicopter pilot is always aware of what is directly under him in case something goes wrong. If he has to land, in other words, he wants to land on the runway, or the taxiway, or the grass beside the runway, and not in treetops or on top of parked aircraft.

As one of the H-34s took off, a red Fuel Warning light on the instrument panel lit up. Very quickly and automatically, aware that he was then fifteen feet or so above the forward edge of the Card's landing deck, the pilot raised the leading edge of his rotor cone and lost forward velocity. He then considered the problem. There are three reasons a Fuel Warning light will illuminate: (1) The fuel supply is near exhaustion; (2) there is some sort of problem in transferring the fuel from the fuel tanks to the engine; or (3) the goddamn light is broke.

The pilot has personally supervised the fueling of his aircraft, taking particular pains to ensure that there was no water in the avgas. If there was some sort of problem with fuel transfer, the engine would be running roughly or would have stopped. The engine was running like a Swiss watch. Ergo, the goddamned Fuel Warning light was fucked up.

It had taken the H-34's pilot no more than three seconds from the time the Fuel Warning light had started flashing to reach this conclusion, and he spent another second looking at his co-pilot to see if he had any idea. When the pilot shrugged and made an I-haven't-the-foggiest face, the pilot lowered the nose of the helicopter and resumed his takeoff procedure.

He had completely forgotten that the airfield from which he had taken off was unlike any other airfields with which he had experience. This one was moving in the same direction as he was, at approximately twenty-five miles an hour.

While he was holding the Sikorsky in a hover, in other words, the "airfield" with its armor-plated "island" was catching up with him at twenty-five miles per hour. Some of the seventy-five or so people on the Card's deck held their breaths, some swore, and some averted their eyes in the time it took the pilot to make up his mind and resume horizontal motion.

Once it was clear that the H-34 was not going to be swatted out of the sky by the aircraft carrier's island, spewing flaming avgas over the deck and the people and aircraft on it, Major Philip S. Parker IV found himself chuckling. The two fat, dumb, and happy jackasses in the H-34 had no idea how close they had been to disaster. The proof of that came almost immediately, when the H-34 swung from side to side in a cheerful gesture of "so long."

The Cessna L-19s and De Havilland of Canada L-20s made their takeoffs without trouble. The two-place L-19 had been designed especially for Army Aviation, which meant it could take off and land from short dirt strips and roads at the front. The L-20 "Beaver" had been designed for civilian use in the wilds (the "bush") of Canada and Alaska. They became airborne somewhere between forty and fifty miles an hour. Since the Card was making twenty-five knots into a ten-mile-per hour wind, in effect the L-19s and Beavers were almost at takeoff velocity when they were sitting on the deck with their brakes locked off and their engines not running.

The Beaver and L-19 pilots had been instructed to keep their wheels on the deck until their airspeed indicators indicated seventy miles an hour. They all took off without incident and disappeared to the West Southwest.

When the decks were cleared, the Card made a slow, ten minute 360-degree turn. While it was turning, the Mohawks were brought up from the hangar deck on the elevator and pushed and trundled to the aft end of the landing deck. There were seven of them.

The takeoff of the first Mohawk from the Card would be the first takeoff ever of a Mohawk from an aircraft carrier. There was absolutely no question in the minds of anyone connected with Grumman (there were two Grumman technical representatives "tech reps" aboard, one of whom was a retired naval aviator) that it should pose absolutely no problem. They had a good deal of experience in taking aircraft off from the decks of aircraft carriers, and the flight envelope of the Mohawk (how quickly it could become airborne) was better than the envelope of other Grumman aircraft, which routinely made hundreds of takeoffs every day from aircraft carriers around the world.

The theory that the Mohawks were capable of taking off from the Card had been tested at length at Fort Rucker and Bethpage, Long Island. It had been proved possible to get a Mohawk easily into the air from a runway exactly as long as the Card's deck. Parker had made three such takeoffs himself. It therefore logically followed that if the Card was headed at twenty-five knots into the wind, bringing the aircraft to a relative airspeed of thirty-odd knots before the brakes were released, it should be able to take off with no problem at all. Theory was fine. But Phil Parker was worried and about several things. He was the senior Mohawk pilot present, in effect the commanding officer. As such, he had wondered, what was his duty? To make the first takeoff himself, following the infantry school's "Follow me!" creed? Would that be inspiring his men to follow his example? Or would it inspire them to whisper that Phil (or "the coon") fixed it so that he would be the first man ever to take a Mohawk off an aircraft carrier?

Or should he send the best-qualified pilot up first? The best qualified pilot was by definition the pilot with the most Mohawk time. The best-qualified pilot aboard had seven hours more Mohawk time than Parker himself did. That hardly made him that much better qualified.

If he himself went into the drink, the next best-qualified pilot was also the next senior in rank, and would therefore have the responsibility to decide whether to abort further takeoffs and take the Mohawks into Saigon on the Card, or to try it again.

Parker suspected that since taking the planes into Saigon would mean that they would have to take half their wings off (a hell of a job), so they could be trucked from the dock to Tan Son Nhut Airfield through Saigon, his successor would opt to try another takeoff. Which would likely put two Mohawks in the drink.

In the end, he had decided that he would make the first takeoff and then circle the Card until the other Mohawks had taken off. He was not at all surprised that the most experienced Mohawk pilot was miffed at the decision.

"Pilots, man your aircraft! Pilots, man your aircraft!" the loud speaking system boomed.

With Parker's exception, all the pilots were sitting in their aircraft, not from any burning ambition to rush into the air, but because that was more comfortable than standing around on the deck.

"Launch helicopters!" the loudspeaker boomed. "Launch helicopters!"

Two H-34s had been kept behind, so they would be able to do whatever they could if a Mohawk went into the drink. If all the Mohawks made it safely into the air, they would land and pick Up the army personnel who had been needed to get the Mohawks running and into the air.

Parker climbed the little ladder and got in the pilot's seat, strapped himself in, and put on his helmet. He turned on the Master switch and watched as the instruments and the gyros came to life.

Then he looked down at the deck and made a circular motion with his index finger "Wind it up!"

When he had closed the canopy, it was hot and muggy inside the Plexiglas, and he felt a drop of sweat roll down his back. He thought that it was probably going to be this way from now on in Vietnam hot and steamy.

When all the instrument needles were in the green, he gave a thumbs-up signal to the Grumman tech rep. The retired naval aviator was functioning as launch officer. He had equipped himself with an old-fashioned cloth pilot's helmet, which Parker thought made him look like Amelia Earhart, and a pair of handheld flag signaling devices he called "paddles."

Faintly, over the whistle of the tudoprops and the higher pitched whistle of the stubby propeller blade tips themselves, he heard the command "Launch aircraft!"

He checked the position of the flaps, reset the brakes, and then ran the engines up. He gave another thumbs-up signal to the Grumman tech rep, who then, enthusiastically, even violently, waved his paddles.

Parker flipped the brake switch off and felt himself being pushed back against the seat by the forces of acceleration. He was off the deck long before he ran out of it, and as the flaps and wheels came up the Mohawk quickly picked up speed and altitude. He began a slow, climbing turn around the Card.

He saw the second Mohawk take off. When he was sure that it was safe to distract the pilot, he pushed the Radio Trans button on the stick.

"Form up on me," he said.

"Gotcha," the pilot of the second Mohawk said, and then, as the third Mohawk was taking off, came back on the air.

"Hey, there it is," he said.

From this altitude they could make out the land mass of Asia. Specifically Vung Tan, Parker decided, also known as Cap St. Jacques.

One after the other the rest of the Mohawks took off without incident and climbed out and formed a V behind him.

He switched his radio frequency.

The sense of romance, of leading a flight of aircraft onto the Asian land mass, into the mysterious Orient, was shattered almost immediately.

"Tan Son Nhut Approach Control, Air France 404." "Go ahead, Air France 404."

"Estimate Tan Son Nhut in thirty minutes. Have you got me on radar?"

"I have you, Air France 404, at two five thousand, heading 270, indicating 350 knots, distance 150 miles."

"Air France 404 requests landing instructions."

"Air France, maintain your present heading. Descend to five thousand. Radar indicates a Northwest Orient DC-8 inbound twenty miles to your right and several unidentified small aircraft flying in a circle at five thousand ten miles off Cap St. Jacques. Report passing through one zero thousand."

"Ah, Roger, Tan Son Nhut," Air France said.

We are not, Parker thought, the forces of virtue and right flying in like Jimmy Cagney in Devil Dogs of the Air to the sounds of trumpets and drums to defeat the forces of evil and save the world for democracy, but "several unidentified small aircraft flying in a circle."