MARK DOESN'T DIE ON THE CHOPPER

"Mark doesn't die on the chopper."

"What?"

"You have Mark dying on the chopper. Mark doesn't die on the chopper. Mark gets shot on the way back down the hill."

I tilted my head to the side, trying to keep the angle of my sunglasses perpendicular to the rays of the sun. I felt and heard my flesh slide against the plastic webbing of the chaise lounge as I managed to fix Tommy with an unsteady gaze and inquire "Are you sure?"

Tommy gave me an indulgent half-grin, then shook his head and unindulgently called my attention to the computer-generated page number on my manuscript. "Right here, on page 78, where you have the chopper crash-landing short of the LZ. Shadie, Vandez, and Arthur get off on the right, Crappie and Shaw get off on the left, dragging 3-club by the arms and make it to the treeline before the chopper blows up. That leaves Mark on the chopper when it goes up. So Mark dies on the chopper. But then," he flopped pages back and forth until he found a convenient landmark, then selectively poked through pages until he found the one he wanted, "on page 123, you have Mark getting shot by a sniper on the way back down the hill after the mission, so 3-club can redeem himself by getting the sniper with a single shot, and then Arthur confesses that he lied about the grenade while Mark dies in his arms."

I said "Oh," while the information tried to sink in, and after a moment I began to resist the error as significant. "Typo," I declared, and laid back and drank another swallow of beer. We were sitting poolside at a Marriot of some description outside LA, in one of those neighborhoods where no one goes outside for fear papparatzi. The day was brutally hot, the sun beating down with its best desert intensity, churning the air into a pool of heat inside the windless courtyard around us. Still, there we were, drinking imported beer in the middle of the afternoon. I was trying not to think about the manuscript, and Tommy didn't want to think about anything else.

"Typo? Whaddaya mean, typo?" Tommy demanded. He was decked out in floral print bathing trunks and a Cuban shirt, white with a black stripe down each breast, as was currently the fashion.

"Yeah, it's a typo, nothing more to it." I was wearing, embarassingly, a Speedo. My wife must have tossed it into my suitcase as a form of punishment for making the trip to begin with. "Just gotta have Mark jump off the chopper with the rest of the guys."

"Left side or right?"

"Left side."

"Why on the left?"

"That way we can slip in a couple extra lines of dialogue. 'Hey, guys, head for the clearing,' that sort of shit." I inadvertently spilled a little beer on my belly. It felt good, so I did it again. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I was sitting by a pool. As I rose and made my way to the diving board, Tommy was shouting, "Typo? We can't just call it a typo!" The end of that sentence and the beginning of the next were drowned out by the rush of water around my head. Normally I hesitate before diving in. There is something uncomfortable about the first shock of the water, the contrast between heat and cold, the strange combination of rushing sound and muffled silence that comes with immersion. My analyst connected it to separation anxiety at birth, so I never mentioned it again. As I came back out of the pool, having swum underwater to the shallow end, Tommy was repeating the sentance I had missed: "We can't just call it a typo. They already have the script in approved form."

I wanted to say "Blah, blah, blah," but after a moment of indecision I settled on "Bullshit." I resumed my pose on the chaise and picked up my rapidly warming Heineken. "I thought they made changes to scripts all the time, right up to lines of dialogue during shooting?" I took a sip of beer that I didn't want and choked it down. I shoved the bottle aside, resolving to order an iced tea or a soda as soon as our roving drinks dispenser came back around. Our roving drinks dispenser Tommy had dubbed "El Mariachi." I had thought to object at first, but his casual racism was the least objectionable of his personality traits.

His most objectionable personality trait, from my point of view, was his bludgeoning insistence on finding flaws. It wouldn't have been as objectionable had he not been so goddamned good at it. "Yeah," he conceded, "I guess it's not that big a deal." It was good to hear it, and a damned sight more refreshing than the warm beer had been. Small change. Yes. Small changes. It wouldn't be the first small change made to the script.

My wife stormed out of the room when I told her, laughing giddily, that I was being asked to attend a pre-production script meeting. It took me a while to piece together why. I had thought that maybe she seriously thought I was selling out, that she honestly believed that it was some sort of disgrace for professor of history to sell a screenplay to Hollywood, a deception that I managed to maintain until I was on the plane. But in the final analysis, it made no sense. Our relationship had always been based on a kind of mix-and-match imagism; somehow it made sense that she would be the glitzy rainmaker and I would be the stalwart academic. My presence gave her a touchstone of authenticity, and she handed me around at parties like her prize specimen. Not that I minded; she almost always steered me towards the best conversations with people who often had a genuine interest in my line of work. More than a few times I actually found myself talking to people who had some knowledge of American Military History. The flip side of it, the academic conferences and department parties, were even more fun in a perverse kind of way: I found out, before we were married, while we were still dating, that everybody, but everybody, has legal problems.

So, as the plane picked up speed and rolled down the runway, it bgan to dawn on me that she would never have a problem with her screenwriter-professor-husband, that the screaming bout she had treated me to two hours before had been more a matter of convenience than actual anger. And as the plane lifted off and I began to feel my own weight in the weird moment of limbo I normally enjoy so much, I realized that my selling out was easier to say than that she had tired of her pudgy, fifty-year-old academic. Easier to say than that she was bored.

I didn't tell Tommy any of that. I never told Tommy anything personal. I was afraid of how it might come out on the other side.

Not that Tommy lied. Just that he had a cringe-inducing tendency to think in terms of self-preservation. At 28 he had the reflectionless eyes of the seasoned veteran, the thousand yard stare with which he saw everything from every agle until he had done the calculus to determine exactly how to make things work out just right for Tommy.

Or maybe I'm being melodramatic. Maybe I'm just jealous because he is young and richer than I'll ever be. Maybe I'm jealous because he is not going to be getting divorced.

Oh, Jesus. Oh, dear God Almighty, that's what it was. That's what was happening. I was going to be getting a divorced. Or I was going to be divorced. All that screaming about selling out was pretense, and then here comes the big drop kick.

Crap.

Tommy was signaling El Mariachi, who with a deferrent nod indicated that he would be with us as soon as he could. He was a handsome Mexican kid, probably in his 20's, with a brilliant smile. I liked him on sight, because he didn't look anything like any of my students. Privledged, most of them nice enough, a few of them fundamentally cracked for the flimsiest of reasons, they mostly studied and did their work and aced their finals and bored the hell out of me. When I managed to get a tenure track position at a prestige university I thought I was catching the break of all time. When I talked to my old pal from Grad school who landed a job at the community college back in his old home town in Wisconsin, he'd complain about the hardscrabble kids who could barely put a sentence together at the beginning of the semester, and brag about how he had watched the lights come on at the end of the semester, and inevitably after we hung up I'd get drunk on good Scotch and feel sorry for myself.

But the boredom was what led me to writing, and writing was what lead me to Hollywood. Boredom was what led me to try and put together a comprehensive history of the Vietnam war. When that proved impossible, I tried to put together a comprehensive history of the American involvement. When it turned out that that had been done to death, in a sheer panic, I proposed a study of an operation that never was, and the publisher liked it so much that they agreed to it wihout even a good outline. Before I had written half the book, Hollywood was on the line.

In the summer of 1968, 14 helicopters carrying some 100 American soldiers took off for what had been a routine search-and-destroy mission, one they had done countless times with little or no results to show for it. Whether their had been espionage involved or whether the NVA just got lucky could never be proved, but whatever the case, only two of the copters made it to the designated LZ, one of them badly damaged. For the next hour and a half, the crew of the wounded craft played a harrowing game of cat-and-mouse with a well concealed enemy whose force remained undetermined. Of the six who got off the copter alive, five made it back. The sixth, a Corporal Mark Campbell, too a round through the chest as he helped a wounded man, a Private Alvin Washington, into the loading area. They were engulfed in a hail of gunfire from what seemed like every possible direction; the pilot had to take off immediately. The men held Corporal Campbell on the rail of the loading door as the plane took off, managing to hoist him far enough in the door that they didn't drop his body on the fast, hard ride back to base. It was that scene you've seen from every Vietnam War movie ever made.

Taking Mark off the copter before it exploded wouldn't be the first change we ever made.

When Hollywood came calling, it was all sort of a blur. The first couple of call, from a guy I never heard of or from again, just suggested there was some interest; how would I feel about having a movie made of my book? Nooooo, it doesn't matter that it wasn't finished-- in fact, I wasn't even halfway through-- some people had seen enough material to determine that this was just exactly the sort of thing they ought to be pursuing at the time. There was supposed to be a resurgence of interest in movies about Vietnam, and this was the kind of raw, basic war experience that could turn out some star-making performances for some young unknown actors.

And that's what I had liked about the story to begin with: the kids on the chopper were all basic, average, unremarkable guys who became instant heroes when the situation demanded it of them. None of them did anything remarkable after the war, no drugs, no delayed stress syndrome. I had interviewed four of the surviving five-- one died of cancer in the late 80's-- and they all told the same tale: the ship took fire a few miles from the LZ, and they hung in there for a flight that seemed to take days. The pilot got them in, got them down, and died on impact; he had taken shell frgaments to his chest and the right neck, but he didn't let on, no one knew he was hurt until they were on the ground and there was no more noise, and when they shook his shoulder he flopped back and forth like a rag doll.

As soon as they were off the chopper, they were under fire again. For the next hour and a half, they fought and they ran, fought and ran, until the relief chopper with it's red and white cross, the one nobody was ever supposed to shoot at, managed to sneak into the LZ next to the wreckage of the first ship. They threw smoke; they tried not to scream their lungs out in relief and joy and the terror that still wasn't going away and the adrenaline they all blamed for the fact that they almost shot each other to pieces before they got on the ship. As they scrambled for the helicopter, which was taking fire and lifting off before it ever completely set down, and Campbell went limp. No explosion of blood, no ringing shot, just a bare indication that some small piece of the chaos around them had found one of their comrades. They grabbed him by his uniform, his web belt, anything they could grab, and held him through take-off until the flight levelled and hauled him in as best they could, all five simultanously thinking the same thing:

Goddamnit.

Because he was dead. And they knew it. They knew there was nothing they could do about it. They grabbed him, and they held him, and they hauled him back into the ship, and not because of some leave-no-man-behind ethos. They just didn't know what else to do.

Make a movie out of it? Sure, why not. So I rushed the finishing the book, since I had this notion that I had to have something finished before I sold the rights to it, and I ended up using a more narrative voice, just on this expectation that it was going to be a movie, without even being conscious of it. Meanwhile, there were negotiations, there were bidding wars, suddenly I had an agent, and by the time the book, my third, was ready for publication, the film rights had been bought, and the buzz was tremendous.

The sales went through the roof.

And I, of course, was famous. And not just professor famous, which I had taken to with a kind of mild narcisism. Now I had people calling to interview me, and alot of them called more than once, because I knew things. The next thing I know, the studio is talking about pre-production, my wife is yelling at me, and the script is getting written.

I didn't expect to write the script myself, of course. And I expected changes to be made. But before I knew it, the characters are getting colorful nick names and drug habits, helicopters that landed are blowing up, an invisible enemy turns into a scheming, evil tormentor that our heroes conspire to defeat, only to have their leader slain before they can leave the field, leading to a last-second barrage that takes out the enemy Colonel just as he emerges from the treeline to try to shoot down the copter before it can get them safely out. By the time I started trying to keep changes from being made, it was too late. The screenwriters, affable guys named, I kid you not, Chuck and Dave, had developed a mindset wherein once they had heard a suggestion, they had done all they needed to do. The best I managed was to keep Campbell from taking on the nickname "Fastball" by saying to Dave that perhaps Campbell wasn't the kind of character who got nicknamed. He looked me in the eye, nodded, and said "That's very true." It was at this point, I noticed, that people had stopped asking to interview me, and had started interviewing Chuck and Dave instead. They were hot young writers with proven track records, and they were talking as if they were responsible for writing the whole thing. As little mention was made of my book as was possible. So I did what any reasonable, responsible middle-aged man would do:

I drank.

At first it didn't seem like a big deal. There were parties at home, parties abroad. I was flying back and forth, and anyone who's ever done the bi-coastal thing can tell you, sleep begins to come at something of a premium, so it wasn't unusual to end the day with seven or eight drinks. As my wife's outright hostility increased, especially as it began to emerge in public, I began to think her hostility was actually a response to my drinking. So I slowed down, backed off, began limiting the number and strength of the stuff, and as the haze began to clear it became obvious that the opposite was true.

As I was thinking about this, staring at the sun glare from the pool reflected against the side of the building, it suddenly dawned on me that if anyone had left Mark on the chopper it wasn't me. "Hey," I said, with all the abruptness I could manage under my third-beer-buzz. He looked up at me from the script, his thousand-yard-stare and predatory cast temporarily broken by his readin-in-the-sun squint. "I didn't leave Mark on the chopper. I didn't write the script. Chip and Dale did.

Chip and Dale was Tommy's sobrioquet for the writing team. Tommy was also the first to point out that both Chuck and Dave had written a schlock piece followed by a serious piece, and that this was their adaptation, standard industry progress for a writer. After a moment, during which his predatory gaze came back in full while he tried to think how this information might be used to benefit him, then finally admitted "Oh. I guess not." When I had come out the last time, Tommy had been asigned to me as an aide, a handler, his main function being to make sure I had cabs and hotel rooms and juggle inteviews if needed. If I understood things properly, he had been a member of the production team, and his assignment to me was little more than a happenstance. I probably didn't understand things right. But it seemed pretty clear that Tommy would have been happier had he been assigned someone who might give him a greater advantage, perhaps even some leverage, to increase his stature and status. Instead he got me: the guy who wrote the book.

But I can't complain. I'm making money and I'm famous. My wife is a lawyer, so she'll divorce me in whatever old way she pleases. And I can't make them change everything back before shooting begins in Guatamala next week. The best I can do is sit back and pray, very quietly, that someone in the legal department forces them to change the source attribution to "Very strongly suggested by a discussion about a book by . . . "

In the mean time, El Mariachi was approaching, and Tommy, knowing he had no obligations for the rest of the day aside from picking on the script if he fel like it, signaled enthusiastically for him to approach. He walked over and gave us that warm, pleasant smile that made me think he was just happy to be where he was, and said "What can I get you?"

I cleared my throat and said, my Carolina drawl inexplicably slipping back into my voice from who knows how many years of absence, "Could I have an iced tea, please?"