Huey Talk

Huey Talk

A few days ago while running errands around town, a Huey, or perhaps several, buzzed the east side of Milwaukee. We have a reserve Army base located here, so I imagine they were just running operations in the sky, or perhaps some other innocent training mission.

But I was below, looking up, having pulled my Focus over, stuck my head out into the cold spring air, and looked straight up, and not quite surprised, but a little disturbed, I began to feel tears streaming down my face. This isn’t the first time the whack-whack-whack of the rotor blades of a Huey has done this to me. In fact it comes close to classical conditioning…put me in the air space of a moving Huey, and I usually start to leak all over the place. I keep trying to get over it, and I say I am over it, and I can go long periods of staying over it, but somehow, like those one or two-step snakes in Vietnam, I get bitten with immediate reactions.

Hueys resupplied our firebase in Vietnam every day, and always, a few guys were stepping onto the Huey to ship out, and a few were stepping off, as new timers for a 365 day tour of duty in Vietnam. Of course the Huey also supplied us with hot food (roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, roast beef, peas, and roast beef and peas.) When the Hueys landed on our little patch of US Territory in the foothills of Vietnam, it was always a good feeling. The wind would kick up fearsome, but for all of us (I’ve lost track of everybody) I wondered if it was some kind of hope that flew in every day with supplies, food, new troops and old-timers. I’ve even flown in on a Huey to this firebase and flew out, so I have a sense, even though it is a distant one, of what it’s like to sit in on, with an M-14 sitting between our legs. I’ve flown in larger helicopters (Chinooks) for special operations, and smaller ones, little mosquitoes, for super fast travel, but it’s Hueys I came to expect every day, and even if the sun didn’t shine (6 months due to the monsoons) I still knew a Huey knew where we were, and wouldn’t forget us.

I came home in bad shape, not physically, but my head was a bit screwed up, and couldn’t quite get over the accusation that I was a monster of the Nixon Administration. I wore a combat jacket for a few months, but with time, I began to find civilian clothes must more comfortable, and created much less buzz with the civilians who I spoke to whether it was ordering fried eggs, or asking a professor about John Milton’s “Areopagitica.” I put away the few medals and “salad bar” items worn on my Army dress coat, and today, I couldn’t even begin to think of where they might be. The few pictures I took are fading away downstairs somewhere in a slide box, and the few paper photos, well, I have no idea where there are now. One photo captured an image of me shirtless with a flak jacket and helmet, M14, outside a bunker. I believe that was taken on Hill 477, probably before the Hill was overrun by North Vietnamese Regulars in June of 1970. I still wonder sometimes why a NVA bullet didn’t spray my brains out that long night so many years ago. I don’t obsess about it, didn’t dream about it, but when those darn Hueys pass over, it all comes back.

Years ago, I thought I wanted to go back to Vietnam, find the hillsides where I lived for 13 months, but I sense it would have been a lonely trip, and no one to really visit with. I read about Tim O’Brien of The Things They Carried doing that in a New York Times Magazine article, but I wasn’t sure about the whole trip. My wonderful wife urged me not to go. Good advice at the time, and I haven’t felt the urge to go, but oddly, and maybe this is the reason for the tears, I did share a wonderful meal with friends last night in Milwaukee’s only Vietnamese restaurant. Maybe the atmosphere, the Hueys, our war in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of it came buzzing by this morning. And the evening, a delightful little theater production of “Ears on a Beatle,” a light look at two FBI agents following the likes of John Lennon. I was doing just fine on the front row until the sound director included a Huey helicopter hovering over the The Dakota. I couldn’t help but close my eyes, tune out the sounds, and take a few yoga breaths. Why have so many Hueys buzzed my brain in such a short time? I’m checking the local air traffic the next time I go outside.