Levitation

By J.D. Reed

CHICKENHAWK by Robert Mason

Viking; 339 pages; $17.75

In World War II, American soldiers darted across Europe in Jeeps and swarmed ashore on to Pacific islands from LSTs. By the 1960s, G.I.s were commuting to and from action in Viet Nam by helicopter. The chopper, in fact, is symbolic of that war, and memories of 'Nam still echo with the beat of rotor blades.

This memoir by former Army Pilot Robert Mason recalls the violent, deafening, treetop world of 1,000 Viet Nam helicopter missions. Chickenhawk begins with a Florida farm boy's daydream of levitating above the fields and ends with the veteran suspended in horror and disillusionment.

Helicopter tactics were still in the experimental stage when Warrant Officer Mason arrived at An Khe in 1965. Nobody knew much of anything except that Viet Nam was, as Mason writes, "a good place to buy stereo equipment." For months the Army suffered high chopper losses because pilots flew at low levels over Viet Cong-held villages and paddy-fields without varying their approaches and takeoffs. Men died because promised chest-armor plates for their cockpits failed to arrive. To exist, Mason learned to adapt to "the details of the job at hand, no matter how bizarre."

Although they were officially prohibited from flying more than four hours a day, pilots often were at the controls for eight. Mason says that he once flew 20 out of 24 hours. Fatigue fogged the senses, and the view of combat through the Plexiglas became hallucinatory. He thought about bullets coming "through my bones and guts and through the ship and never stopping. A voice echoed in the silence . . . 'Go! Go! Go!' "

Like most of his buddies, Mason had believed that all Asians were unworthy of U.S. salvation. But in a smoldering village, he began to understand the hubris of Western technology. Of an ancient water wheel, he writes: it was "as efficient as any device our engineers could produce. The knowledge that built it was being systematically destroyed."

So were Mason's countrymen. As the fighting intensified, his Huey was frequently an ambulance, and too often a hearse stacked with corpses. "The smell of death seeped out of the zippered pouches and made the living retch," he writes. "No matter how fast I flew, the smell would not blow away." Mason suffered from insomnia, blackouts and nightmares about dying children. He let mosquitoes bite him because malaria was a fail-safe ticket home. When he witnessed two Marines being blown up by a claymore mine they were setting, he reflected, "What's next in this carnival?"

Agonizingly suspended between his fear of death and his passion for duty, the "chickenhawk" took the conflicts home. When a clerk in Hawaii called him a murderer, he felt that she was talking about someone else. Daily quarts of whisky could not erase the awful memories and their replays. Mason lived in a private, disconnected world that finally crashed in 1981 when he was arrested for and convicted of dope smuggling. "No one [was] more shocked than I," he recalls. Chickenhawk, with its vertical plunge into the thickets of madness, will stun readers as well.

-- By J.D. Reed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.