Free The Phantom Blooper by Gustav Hasford Page B

The roof is red tile. There's a small courtyard off to one side where French colonial officials used to sit and drink fancy drinks and tell jokes beneath canvas canopies.
    Today the courtyard is full of laughing children taking their places on reed sleeping mats, which they unroll in perfectly aligned rows along the clean-swept classroom area. The classroom area faces a wall covered by purple bougainvillea and is shaded by a coconut palm.
    Kieu Chi Song and I are laying bricks. Song is the Viet Cong schoolteacher for the village of Hoa Binh, a Viet Cong village somewhere west of Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border. Song and I got up at dawn to repair a big bite that an artillery shell took out of the low whitewashed wall that encloses the courtyard.
    Enemy cannons at the Rockpile and Camp Carroll crank out fire missions twenty-four hours a day. Three or four times each week big shells pass over our village on their way to hit Viet Cong positions pinpointed by forward observers, Bird Dog spotter planes or Force Recon inserts. One shell in a hundred is a dud. One shell in fifty is a short round. Sometimes short rounds kill Vietnamese civilians in the occupied zones. Sometimes short rounds fall on enemy positions and kill American Marines. This short round took a bit out of our wall.
    Song stands on the other side of the wall and mixes cement as I life another broken brick. The brick is heavy and red inside and still cold from the night. It has been broken before and has been repainted many times.
    After spreading a layer of cement, Song puts down her wooden trowel and helps me position the brick. Song is careful not to get any cement on her dress. She is wearing a black silk Ao Dai which she has hand-swen with big yellow chrysanthemums. Song has coal-black eyes, high cheekbones, dark eyelashes, perfect white teeth, and shiny black hair. Her hair hangs down her back all the way to her waist.
    Song looks at me and smiles. "Bao Chi, my brother, you mend this wall without revolutionary enthusiasm."
    I shrug. "Bad night."
    "Bao Chi, I think that you miss your home village of Alabama very much."
    I pick up another brick. "Yes," I say. You cannot tell a beautiful woman that the reason you can't sleep is because you sometimes still get the Hershey squirts, even though you've been a prisoner of war for over a year and have consumed more than your share of Viet Cong chow. "Sometimes I can't sleep. I sit up all night down by the river and I think about my family."
    "Will you fight again with the Black Rifles?"
    I pat the brick down until it settles. "I can't fight against the people. Not again." I lie. "This village is my home now."
    Song smiles. "Will you be the giant student today?"
    I say, "Yes, my sister."
    I hop over the wall and Song and I join the students in the courtyard. The children are all in their proper places on their mats, talking and playing. As Song and I come out of the schoolhouse with armloads of books, the kids stop horsing around and giggling and sit up straight and silent like little soldiers.
    Song and Le Thi, her teacher's pet, pass out the books while I go back into the schoolhouse to get the notebooks and pencils hidden in the wall. High on the wall hangs a framed photograph of Ho Chi Minh and a flag. The flag is half red and half blue, with a big yellow star in the center.
    As I distribute notebooks and pencils to the students one little girl stares at me with terror in her eyes and starts crying. The little girl runs to Song for protection. Song hugs the little girl, dries her tears, kisses her.
    This little girl is new to the school, another refugee from the occupied zones. The mothers of Viet Nam tell their children, "Be good or the Black Rifles will get you." The Black Rifles--the Marines, long-nosed white foreigners--like me.
    After Song has comforted the girl and talked softly to her the little girl squats down, but watches me, sad-eyed and silent. I'd make a funny face at her and try to make her laugh, but