Chickenhawk Book

Add this one to my long list of books about the American War in Vietnam. I am the right age to have been drafted for that war, but was not due to a variety of deferments and a high lottery number. The short story is that I was considering fleeing to Canada if I was drafted but never had to make that momentous decision that would have significantly changed my life. I never came to that fork in the road so will always wonder what I would have done if I was actually faced with that choice.

The book was published in 1983, the year Robert Mason was forty-one years old, eighteen years after he was a twenty-three year old in Vietnam.
This is a personal narrative of what I saw in Vietnam and how it affected me. The events all happened; the chronology and geography are correct to the best of my knowledge. The names of the characters . . . have been changed . . .
Movies and books about Vietnam always have the Huey choppers coming and going from LZs delivering and picking up supplies and men. They are often taking ground fire and sometimes coming down as a result. But this is my first book that I have read that puts the reader in the head of the helicopter pilot, on the ground and in the air. Bob Mason wanted to fly from a young age and had his pilot's license before he graduated from high school. Vietnam made an impression on those who fought there; Mason is writing about events and feelings years later and it seems like you are right there.

Mason has been criticized for being too technical. There is a diagram at the beginning of the book of a helicopter with all the major parts named. There is also quite a bit of detail about how to actually maneuver a helicopter using hands and feet simultaneously. It is way harder than patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. But this is far from a "how to" book. But it does let you know that being a helicopter pilot in a war zone is a complex job. Apparently you volunteer to be trained as a helicopter pilot so you are in this incredibly dangerous occupation by choice.

How many ways can you say, "War is hell"?
The old man said nothing about Morris except that we ought to get some money together for flowers for his wife, but Sherman took it upon himself to give a little speech that night.
"Well, we've been pretty lucky up to now. It was only a matter of time. The other companies have taken a lot more kills than we have, so it's our turn now. It looks like the overall ratio is one in five. One pilot out of five will get killed. We've only lost two guys, which puts us five away from the average. We've just been lucky."
I hated Sherman. Now we were delinquent in our deaths. Running behind in our proper death ratio were we? Well we'll just see about that. C'mon you guys, let's go out there and die!"
I will have PTSD just from reading this book. Short scenes and events strung together. Moments in the lives and deaths of a group of men in a war. The big story is the war. The real stories are the individual actions and interactions between the men. And then there is some occasional sane thinking:
I had never heard of a gook or a slope-head or a slant-eye or a dink who did anything but eat rice and shit and fight unending wars. These tools and that waterwheel convinced me that there was a successful way of life going on around us, but all we saw were savages, backward savages fighting against the Communist hoards from the North. Why were all the men of this beautiful village gone just when the Americans were right outside? Wouldn't people under attack by the Communists welcome the men who were there to save them? Or was I seeing the wrong way? Maybe the only people who wanted us around were the Saigon politicians who were getting rich from having the Americans here. The village was a long way from Saigon. And the people weren't rich; they were just people.
Robert Mason had over 1000 helicopter missions during his year in Vietnam. Some moments were peaceful, many were not.

At the first sound of the returning ships, I went outside and watched. The Hueys snaked out of the mist and with increasing noise gathered on the field west of the camp. Huey after Huey hovered to a landing. The field became a complicated dance of whirling rotor blades, swinging fuselages, and swirling mist. The roaring rush of the turbines, and the rotors swing lazily as the ships shut down. The crew wandered up to the camp. They all had come back.
. . .
The ships were shadows in the early morning mist. We took off singly to join up out of the fog. Climbing over vague trees, we saw the earth disappear. Riker, who knew where he was going, told me to turn left. Just as I did we saw the phantom of a Huey cross immediately in front of us. I lurched back on the controls, but that was not what saved us from the midair collision. Luck had been with us.
As he began to suffer from the accumulated stress at the end of his tour, he found he was most comfortable when he was flying.
When I was flying, my life was in my own hands. When I was back at the camp, the army was in control of my destiny.
He suffers from textbook PTSD that eventually drives him out of the air, then out of the army. The nightmares go on and on, sleep comes with the help of alcohol. And his life spirals down.

Death is almost always gruesome as it is described by Robert Mason in this most gruesome book. There is the intensity of heroism too. Eventually there is the heroism of going on with life having experienced so much death.

This book is so distressing, more than most war books I have read. Lots of blood and guts and shattered bodies that were sometimes left to rot for several days so they could be more easily located in the tall elephant grass - by the smell.

Vietnam was a nightmare in so many ways. Now we have unmanned drones that kill from the air and humans that blow themselves up in a crowd.
Robert Mason writes about his experience of the brutality of a war he fought when he was young. He wrote about his time in Vietnam in 1965-66. For a while those fighting thought they were winning a war that would go on for years longer and claim many more victims.

Chickenhawk is, I think, a regrettable title for an unforgettable book. It captures the horrors of one man's war, horror that is undoubtedly still with him these many years later. He flew men on his chopper to their death and lived to be haunted by it.

This book may be too raw to give five stars. Too many mangled bodies and destroyed minds. Too surreal a world for too many men. War is not the answer.