Blues Frank X. Gaspar (bio) It was the 24th day on the line with no relief because the carrier that was supposed to spell us had that big fire up on their flight deck when the rocket got loose and blew up an A-4 that was on the catapult. We were out too long and the shit was rolling and the sweat was up, it was daylight and we’d been rocking and rolling like we couldn’t remember a time when we weren’t, and we had our own A-4 down, shot by AA fire. He didn’t make it to beach to ditch, but I had him just by his beeper, he had a good chute, and I had a good bearing on him, and we got a helo out, almost there, but somebody, one of our own guys in the bush, dropped a fucking smoke to mark him, right on his position, and then in code on the Alpha Sierra net the sitrep came: the VC got him, they just followed the smoke and got him, and we all were fucking wailing and screaming, we had him, we had him, who dropped the fucking smoke? I had him. I never missed anybody ever who made it to the water, but he didn’t quite, and some stupid fuck smoked his position. And then on the same op—we were sucking Benzedrine tabs like coughdrops and booting them with bad coffee, nobody could eat, nobody could shit—it was black out, nothing but artillery flashes and white phosphorus lighting up over the beach, an F-4 down over water but with no chutes, and one of our search helos with a low fuel state, critical, sent in a code for a bearing, and I was working one side of the plot and two nets at once, giving out steers, talking in couple-code, static coming back, voices, trouble, volleys of noise, everything lighting up, deep shit, and they pulled Green off one of the open scopes, there was just too much going on, and they put him on the NC2 Tracer, which he didn’t have the clearance for, but what the fuck, shit was flying everywhere and the Alpha Whiskey net lit up, like where’s chink five two who’s got chink five two, he’s low fuel, and I had his last datum, but nobody had him on a scope, nobody on the op, none of [End Page 62] our cans, none of the radars, and Boulder Six was recovering the sortie that lost the F-4, and their Combat talker was like, alpha sierra where’s your chink, over, and that was when the sweat filled up CIC like a hot fog, we worked it all through the watch and by noon the next day nothing, no wreckage, nothing, and it was Green, when we walked it all back, Green didn’t read him the correct steer which he was supposed to calculate in his head because the chink was in a black sector and the Tracker arm had to work backward and Green should have been reading reciprocals of the actual bearings coming up, but he didn’t, he just sent that helicopter out into the gulf somewhere in all that blackness, and when they found out what had happened Green cried, he wept. He was a round-faced kid who had worked in a Campbell Soup plant someplace in Wisconsin, and his eyes were pinned and he had the shakes, we all did from the Benzedrine, but I remember his face, round and red and streaked with tears and sweat, dismal and confused, he wasn’t supposed to be there on that gear, and they knew it, this shit wasn’t on him, but of course it was going to be on him anyway, and a few days later they flew him to Danang in the COD, and he never came back, and then three watches later one of our own helos slammed into the fantail in broad daylight and all four guys aboard went down with it before the plane guard could maneuver over to it, and now we...