The Vets [antikvár]

As he levelled the helicopter off at 3,000 feet above the choppy South China Sea, the pilot marvelled as he always did at the way it managed to stay in the air. The cyclic control stick twitched in his right hand, the collective pitch control lever vibrated in his left, and his feet made small adjustments to the directional control pedals as he headed out to the waiting ship some six miles away in the Gulf of Tonkin. All four of his limbs were needed to keep the helicopter in the air, though he had been flying for so long that he was no longer aware of them as individual movements. He was part of the machine: his nerves and tendons ran from the rotor blades throbbing above his head to the skids below him. He could feel the blades cutting through the night air and the tail rotor fighting against the torque the blades produced, and when he swung the helicopter to the left to make a course correction it was flesh and blood that turned and not metal; he saw only the sea and the sky, not the Plexiglas windows. He scanned his instrument panel, taking in the information from the myriad dials and gauges without reading them in the same way that his skin recorded the chill in the air and his nose picked up the smell of the fuel that had slopped over the fuel tank filler while they were preparing the helicopter at a Special Forces airfield outside Da Nang.The pilot was alone in the cockpit and the second set of controls in front of the co-pilot's seat moved as if guided by ghosdy hands and feet, mirroring his own actions. During his year-long tour of duty with 1st Cav he'd never flown solo on a mission, but Air America did things differently and he hadn't been surprised when he'd been told that he'd be flying alone.He clicked the microphone trigger switch on his cyclic control stick and identified himself to the target ship which