Surf's Up

Mike Sullivan was surfing away his non-existent college deferment up and down the Southern California coast in late 1968.  The Vietnam War was in full power, and being nineteen, he knew his number would be called.   He also knew he had very few options. Canada was out of the picture, not so much because he was against the war. He wasn't; he was ambivalent about the whole Communist Domino theory broadcast on the nightly news, but the body counts and KIA's began to get his attention.  The main thing about Canada, he told a surfing buddy while bobbing in the lineup on the south side of the Huntington Beach pier is, "There's no surf."  It was a simple choice, no Canada.  He could wait the war out, maybe down in Mexico, and see if the Feds forget about him or wait until he's drafted and take his chances.  He could also enlist for three years, which seemed like a lifetime in surfer years. Nah, he would be twenty-two or three when he got out, for god's sake.

With his thoughts as scattered as the white caps skipping across the ocean toward Catalina Island this dilemma weighed heavy on the young waterman. Earlier in the morning, he had surfed four-foot waves that were now blown out by the wind and gone. Alone in his VW van, he felt the sea salt draw tight on his skin as the ocean dried on his face and chest.  Pensive without a solution, he watched with indifference two seagulls fighting over a candy wrapper on the hood of an old Ford station wagon stuck in the sand a short distance away.  The occupants had long given up trying to push the vehicle free, and by the looks of the footprints in the sand, had decided to drag their surfboards down to the water's edge.   He squinted his eyes and scanned the beach and ocean and saw two teenage girls sitting on a blanket at the water's edge. Wrapped in towels to avoid the light sandblasting they endured from the late morning breeze they admired two skinny guys, probably still in high school, bobbing on what appeared to be those new mass-produced ten-foot fiberglass logs sold as surfboards at Sears.   There was no swell, the ocean was completely blown out, yet they paddled with a frenzy to catch figments of their imagination.

There were no waves, none.

Mike sighed, started the van, and backed out of the sand using the tire tracks he imprinted earlier when he pulled off the Pacific Coast Highway.  Once on the highway, he paused for a moment, then made a U-turn and headed up the coast to the Army recruiter in Long Beach. Army Sergeant McKinley looked up from his desk and saw a tan and fit young man tentatively enter the Recruiting Office. He wore Huarache sandals, a Mexican blanket wrapped around his waist, and a madras print shirt bleached by the sun with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder.  Sgt. McKinley stood up, and as he offered his hand, thought, "Great shape, but this guy needs a Drill Sergeant bad."

"How can I help you, sir?" Sergeant McKinley asked.

Mike walked slowly toward Sergeant McKinley while viewing posters on the walls that illustrated big green trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, helicopters, airplanes, and artillery pieces of some sort. All posed with fit young men with happy, confident faces, starched fatigues, and polished black boots.

"Sir, can I help you?" Sergeant McKinley pressed.

"Um, ya, I think so." Mike didn't see any rifles or grenades depicted in the posters.  The soldiers looked different from the six o'clock news, more like actors posing on a playbill.

"You need a job, right? You've come to the right place." Still offering his hand, Sergeant McKinley stepped from around a grey metal desk with a practiced and welcoming smile.

"No.  I just want to avoid the draft," Mike said.

Sergeant McKinley's smile briefly melted as his hand dropped slowly to his side.  He wondered if this potential recruit with dried sea salt on his face was worth lying to.

"I mean, I don't want to go to Viet Nam as a soldier… to fight in the war. I'm not sure I would make a good fighter.  Mike hesitated, "As a draftee, I'm not sure the Army is all that interested in training me to be a good fighter, soldier, or warfighter, whatever you call it."

"Bright young man," Sergeant McKinley thought. "Well, the Army has a lot of jobs, and I'm sure there is one that fits you to a 'T.'  Here, have a seat.  You like mechanics?"

"No."

"Carpentry?"

"A little," Mike said.

Sergeant McKinley stepped back around his desk, sat down, and opened a green binder with 'M. O. S. Military Occupational Specialties' printed on the front. "Food Service?"

"What?"

"You know, cook."

"No."

"Truck driver?
"
"Hmm," Mike considered, "I don't know.  Would I end up driving a truck in Viet Nam?"

"It's possible, but we need truck drivers in Germany too.  You like beer?  Germanys got the best.  When I was over there, man, was it beautiful."  Sergeant McKinley eyed Mike, "and peaceful too.  Not a shot fired since 1945.  Weekend passes to Paris, and women?  Talk about beautiful women, they're all over Europe, and they love GIs.

"Is there surf?"

"Surf, you mean what you guys do on those board things?  I don't think so.  I know they have canals and rivers.  Can you surf there?"

"No, you need waves to surf… ocean waves." Mike skootched his chair back a bit. "Maybe I need to rethink this…"

"Wait, here, take a look for yourself." Sergeant McKinley turned the M.O.S. binder around and slid it toward Mike. "Go ahead; take your time. I'm sure you'll find something. Don't forget good pay and benefits come with these jobs too; VA for college and a home purchase after your tour." 
 
"Tour?" Mike asked without looking up while he turned page after page of Army jobs listed alphabetically followed by a military code.

"Enlistment," Sergeant McKinley sputtered. "I meant enlistment.  You know the basic enlistment is three years, right?"

"Right, I'll take the extra year.  I just don't want to go to Viet Nam."

Sergeant McKinley quietly cleared his throat and began to gather some papers together.

"What’s this?” Mike pointed at a job description.

“What?”

“This Seaman.”

Startled, Sergeant McKinley quickly leaned forward to get a better look to where Mike was pointing, “Semen, where?”

“Right here, Seaman – 61A10.”

“Oh, SEAMAN.” Relieved, Sergeant McKinley said, “61A10 SEAMAN, that’s the basic course before you promote to Watercraft Operator.”

“Watercraft Operator, you mean someone who operates a boat?”

“Something like that.”

Mike looked around the office and didn’t see any posters of Army boats. Still, he remembered as a small boy sitting with his father on Saturday mornings watching black and white TV war movies with landing craft hitting the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima.  He had assumed those were Navy boats and considered they might as well have been bullet magnets the way they got shot up leaving soldier's bodies hanging over the sides and floating face down in the surf.  “What kind of boats does the Army have?” he asked to make sure.

Sergeant McKinley couldn’t remember all of the types of boats and vessels the Army had.  He knew they had a shit load of them, including huge grey cargo ships mostly on the East Coast. “But dammit,” he lamented inwardly, “guys didn’t join the Army to join the Navy. They joined the Navy to join the Navy for chrise-sakes.”  The idea of soldiers on ships annoyed him. It just wasn’t right; it was like taking a cat for a walk.  “Tugboats,” he said, barely hiding his disgust. “They have tugboats in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor.” 

Mike looked up with a soft smile, "Hawaii...?"

“Yep, that’s where they keep Honolulu and Pearl Harbor,” Sergeant McKinley said with his hands folded together on top of a small stack of enlistment documents. 

A black U.S. Government pen lie neatly on the desk between the documents and Mike Sullivan.

“Where do I…?”

"Right here." Sergeant McKinley pushed the paperwork toward Mike Sullivan, "Sign right here." Mike Sullivan possessed an uncanny knowledge of tides and waves long before he enlisted in the Army and was simply known as Mikey by his surfing buddies.

Throughout his high school years and beyond, his understanding of moon phases, ocean currents, speed, swell direction, and weather fronts allowed him to be at the right break at the right time most of the time.  Except for his fear of going to Viet Nam, he had grown and developed into what some would call a very pleased and laid-back surf bum.  This same understanding of oceanography propelled him through the Basic Seamanship course after enlisting in the Army with the hope of operating a tugboat in Honolulu.  However, the images of swaying palm trees, balmy weather, and perfect surf at Makaha, Pipeline, Sunset, and Waimea soon fell flat as the surf in a coastal estuary at low tide. Not long after the ink had dried on his enlistment contract, he discovered that tugboat operators were required to be Warrant Officers. And that required a college degree or prior Navy service as an Ensign or Chief Petty Officer.  Mike Sullivan was neither of those things, but he did possess uncanny seamanship ability. He was soon promoted to Specialist Five as a coxswain aboard a seventy-four-foot landing craft known as the LCM-8.  LCMs were referred to as Mike boats, so it was a no-brainer that coxswain Mike Sullivan would thereafter be known as Mike Boat Mike.

He was initially assigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia, to ferry trainees and cargo down the James River across the Chesapeake Bay to Fort Story. Mike Boat Mike was disappointed he wasn't going to make it to Hawaii but did find a type of solace with surfing the two and three-foot slop waves of Virginia Beach as he embraced the tenuous belief of knowing he was nine thousand miles away from Viet Nam. Mike Boat Mike had cut a picture out of a surfing magazine of surfing legend Greg Noll charging down the face of a twenty-foot Waimea backbreaker and taped it to the front of the radar screen.  The radar screen, useless in the close tributaries of the Rung Sat, provided a perfect picture mount for surfing inspiration that pulled Mike Boat Mike forward to that elusive wave in his soul.   Standing next to him, Spec. 4 Drake eagerly waited for Mike Boat Mike to take a break from the helm.  Spec. 4 Drake wasn't a surfer, he was from Iowa, but Mike Boat Mike thought Drake might know a little about the lure of surfing when Drake talked about tractors, spring seeding, and harvesting rolling hills of overhead green corn all while keeping a straight line and a weather eye on the horizon.  If Drake ever made it out to California after ‘Nam, Mike Boat Mike mused, he would get him on a surfboard, one of his old Dewy Webbers.  He smiled to himself as he thought that the first surf lesson might be the end of the Drake family farm.  Pleased, he motioned for Drake to take the helm as he stepped from the wheelhouse to the starboard railing near the stern and lit a cigarette.

"Hey man," Drake, happy to be at the helm, called out over the rumble of the diesel engines. "Met a snipe the other day from a SWIFT boat coming down from Saigon. Said the Harbor Master broadcast an undersea earthquake happened in the Pacific somewhere between Nam and Hawaii and that the west coast of Hawaii, Mexico, and the US got some kind of tsunami warning."

Mike Boat Mike leaned on the railing and watched the prop wash boil out from beneath the LCM. He smiled at the thought of overhead surf at Southern California's west-facing beaches. "Don't worry about it. I don't think it is going to affect us here."

“What?” Drake called out louder while keeping an eye on an approaching bend in the river.

Mike Boat Mike didn’t bother to turn around to answer Drake but continued to stare into the prop wash and considered how much it looked like the white water of a wave rushing toward shore. He cocked his head to speak over his shoulder and raised his voice above the sound of the diesels while still staring into the prop wash, “I said don’t worry about it, keep your eyes on the horizon.”

Although #2 diesel fuel isn't as flammable as JP-4 aviation fuel, the fully loaded fuel bladder that lie within the well-deck from gunwale to gunwale demanded smokers stand at the stern just in case.  Mike boat Mike took a deep drag from his cigarette and studied the heavily armed thirty-one-foot fiberglass Army gunboat called a PBR providing escort fifty yards aft.  He knew the Coxswain; Slade from Motor City, Button the front fifty-gunner from East LA, and some FNG on the rear fifty just in from Utah; his last name was Moroni, but they called him Angel. He didn't smoke, drink or swear but, according to Slade, was deadly on the fifty.

Mike Boat Mike exhaled a steady plume of smoke as he turned to face the bow. He watched the wake of the lead PBR escort fifty yards ahead dissipate into mini waves that lapped against the mangroves as the three-boat flotilla inched its way up the Phu Luc River to Outpost Roberts.  He also knew Morason, the Coxswain of the lead PBR, Dingson the front gunner from the Louisiana Bayou, and that wound too tight rear gunner with a bird's name; Robin or Sparrow or something like that.  "Weak," Mike Boat Mike thought to himself. "That dude is scary weak and afraid of his own shadow, a real gremmie. How he ended up on a PBR is one of God's great mysteries. Maybe it's one of the ways Colonel Blackthorn is trying to thin the herd."

The tall Palm trees and thick Mangroves stretching upward to the relentless sun slipped by Mike Boat Mike's peripheral view leaving the impression of a fluid green curtain rising from the river's edge blocking all but the most astute from peering beyond the high-water mark into the Rung Sat and rice paddies beyond.  Hot, humid, and silent except for the sounds of the flotilla's diesel engines loping steadily against the outgoing current, the day offered a mesmerizing invitation to chill-out, lay back, take a quick hit off a joint, and relax; a regular Disney Jungle Cruise paid for by Uncle Sam.

Mike Boat Mike took a quick peek at Drake to see if he was preparing to position the LCM on the outside corner of the approaching bend in the river.

Done deal.

No problem, Mike Boat thought, Drake had it under control.

Once a month, Mike Boat Mike and a crew of two; Spec. 4 Drake and PFC. White piloted their LCM-8 down from the Navy base at Nha Be, located twenty clicks south of Saigon. They inched their way through the Long Tau Channel to the Phu Luc River and into the interior of the Rung Sat Special zone crawling with Viet Cong.  Usually, two PBR's from Outpost Roberts were dispatched to meet up with the LCM where the Phu Luc River and Long Tau channel converged to begin the seemingly peaceful journey to Outpost Roberts.  The time of Mike Boat Mike's monthly mission of resupply was a closely guarded secret for obvious tactical reasons. This planning made for safe delivery of mail, ammo, fuel, and food. Other items of recreational consumption were also transported for those who were in the know.  However, understandable anxiety developed among some of the troops who had an itch they couldn't scratch when the delivery occurred during a long month.

Outpost Roberts was initially dug out and built by Army Rangers who rappelled out of Hueys during the night into the Mangroves.  The well-camouflaged and fortified outpost was initially used as a clandestine jumping-off point to engage the Viet Cong using unconventional guerrilla warfare tactics. This meant Victor Charles got his throat slit while he slept, shit, or squatted in front of a small dung fire to cook rice and rat.  Small by any standards, the Outpost lacked a helo-pad and could barely house a platoon of soldiers.  It soon became evident that mission success was sporadic and dismal; enemy body counts were too small. These results bordered on the appearance of failure, something Colonel Blackthorn, the Brigade Commander, would not accept. This combat conundrum came not from a lack of courage or commitment from the Rangers. It came from the sleeping giant of Vietnam’s channels, tributaries, and streams of the Rung Sat. The U.S. Navy and Army bureaucratic spider web had met its match.  The challenge was obvious; the Army had Rangers but no boats, the Navy had boats but no Rangers.  Navy pride fueled reluctance to provide transportation and logistical support for the Rangers. Army stubbornness blinded MACV planners from seeing the benefit of providing Rangers to assist the Navy Riverine Task Force.  Both Army and Navy Commands knew the importance of ridding the Rung Sat of Viet Cong and their headquarters on VC Island. Each wanted to be the first to claim the prize.  The Navy began scaling up its presence with SEALs as jungle fighters. The Army expanded its Seamanship program to allow Coxswains to volunteer for Riverine Warfare Training provided by the Navy at Mare Island located in California's San Pablo Bay near Vallejo.  This odd marriage finally gave Colonel Blackthorn and his Rangers the support and transportation they needed to eliminate Viet Cong command.

Mike Boat Mike, who had been quite satisfied with Virginia Beach slop surf, did not volunteer for Viet Nam, much less for some crazy Spec-Op training with fiberglass gunboats.  Annoyed, his Karma had placed him in Vietnam anyway; he was, at the same time, grateful he was on a steel vessel protected by PBR escorts.  He didn't like shooting at people, and he didn't like being shot at; he was a surfer, not a warfighter. He looked deeply one more time into the prop wash as they approached the bend in the river, hoping for some type of Karmic clarity but not fully expecting it.  He took one last drag of his cigarette and flicked the butt into the wake peeling away from the stern and watched it fade into the distance directly in the path of Slade's PBR.  Slade smiled and gave Mike Boat Mike a thumbs-up.  Mike Boat Mike nodded back and turned to enter the wheelhouse when he heard a loud SWOOSH cut through the thick humid air a second before he saw the trailing smoke from an RPG fired from behind the tree line.

The picture of Greg Noll charging down the face of a giant wave was the last thing Mike Boat Mike saw when the RPG penetrated the starboard side and exploded in the wing tank.

The concussive force of the RPG and subsequent explosion of the fuel bladder propelled a fireball of burning diesel fuel one hundred feet into the air that came raining back down as burning drops of fire from an overhead hell.

This Asian Thor's explosive power also blew Mike Boat Mike off the stern with lightning bolt speed, embedding him ingloriously into the mud on the opposite riverbank.

Both Slade and Morason immediately dropped the gates on the Jacuzzi propulsion system, causing their PBRs to stop dead in their wakes. The front and rear fifty-gunners opened up full auto on the riverbank with vengeance.  Even without a visible target, the gunners’ unleashed fifty caliber hell into the jungle line littering the decks with hot brass. The six fifty caliber machineguns of both PBRs firing a combined rate of 4,500 rounds per minute mowed jungle foliage down like Tasmanian chainsaws obliterating the primitive but effective bamboo rocket launcher turning it into a thousand splinters by the onslaught.

There was no return fire.

Slade backed his PBR away from the growing and burning oil slick that produced a black wall of smoke that obscured the tilting, twisted LCM half-submerged near the riverbank. Morason turned his boat around stern first into the current, which provided clear shots for Dingson behind the twin fifties.  Morason could barely see Slade's PBR through the smoke and fire flowing past the destroyed LCM toward Slade.  Morason could maintain his covering fire, but Slade could not and instead, retreated to avoid the burning oil slick.

Stuck in the mud with his face half burned off was not the Karmic clarity Mike Boat Mike had hoped. His vision was blurred, and his mind spun with stereophonic sounds of whizzing bullets and fifty caliber chain saws cutting and chewing through bamboo stalks and mangroves.  Instead, the clarity he recieved was of white-hot pain charging through his body imprinting the chaos before him deep into his mind’s eye and cauterizing that imagery with fierce resolution. He tried to counter the harsh reality of his circumstance with fading and feeble hope that what had just occurred, had not.
Mike Boat Mike loved surfing.
 
He didn't know exactly why he did, but he did.  Some days he'd paddle out just as the sun rose.  Other days he surfed until the sun slowly disappeared into the Pacific Ocean.  Once, in the late afternoon, when the Santa Ana's were blowing offshore, he dropped in on a nice glassy six-foot Huntington Beach left.  He carved a smooth bottom turn back up the face to briefly see the sun setting through the translucent lip of the feathering wave just long enough for the vision to join with his soul, seemingly forever.

It was a place he wanted to be.

But even though he didn’t want to be where he was now, he accepted the relief the small muddy waves that lapped the right side of his face provided.

Surfable?

No.

Comforting?

Somewhat. On the verge of unconsciousness and choking on air thick with diesel smoke, he gagged at the smell of his burnt flesh as he slid his wounded body deep into the muddy water to cool his burns and to be closer to the little waves.

His left eye, swollen shut, caused him to peer at the wreckage of his boat like a one-eyed alligator.  The smoke had begun to dissipate, and the diesel fuel slowly burned itself out as it flowed away from him.  He saw the wheelhouse had been ripped from its mount and lay half on and half off the quarter deck tangled in the stern railing.  The machine-gun fire from the PBRs was sporadic and winding down.  The ammo cans on the LCM cooked off an occasional round and then were silent.  With his blurred vision and growing pain, Mike Boat Mike scanned the length of the wreckage with one-eyed determination looking for White and Drake.  He could not locate them as he faded in and out of twilight consciousness nor, did he see Drake's severed arm lying on the quarterdeck next to the wheelhouse.
Three days after Mike Boat Mike had been medi-vac'd to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon, Dingson spotted a body hung up on exposed Mangrove roots.  Bobbing face down, it had begun to bloat, causing the Army OD t-shirt to ride up to mid-torso and expose inflated yellow, blue-green, and buttery looking flesh.

The body was missing an arm.
  
Dingson climbed out of the front gun tub and walked along the gunwale to the stern as Morason kept the bow facing the slow current and carefully maneuvered the PBR sideways closer to the body.  The diesel engines set at low idle provided a solemn anthem as Robin leaned over the gunwale and grasped the fallen soldier's wrist. As Dingson stepped to his side, Robin suddenly screamed a long and terrible scream as if he just discovered his head caught in a slow, closing vise.  He stumbled backward from the gunwale with the dead soldier's hand in his own.  Stripped from the bones, the rotting flesh gathered in the palm of his hand like a deflated medic's glove turned into rotting yogurt.  Gasping for air, Robin recoiled in terror as the sight of the dead soldier's fingernails lying in the palm of his hand wriggled like voracious maggots worming their grotesque image into Robin’s mind and soul. Terrified, he threw the goo onto the deck and swore as he leaned over the opposite gunwale and began to rinse his hand vigorously in the river as if it was on fire.

Morason grabbed the poncho covering the entrance to the cuddy and tossed it to Dingson, “Use this.”

Dingson barked at Robin, “Shut the fuck up and get over here!”

“I’m not touching it.”

“You don’t have to.  Just get over here and grab the poncho,” Dingson insisted, then added, “He’s not an ‘IT’ you dipshit.”

Robin stepped closer and saw his service number and name printed on the poncho, "No way," he protested, "You're not using my poncho!"  He grabbed the edge of the poncho and tried to pull it away from Dingson's grasp.  Dingson increased his grip and resisted Robin's efforts when Morason jumped out of the coxswain flat, grabbed Robin by the collar, spun him around, and pushed him toward the coxswain flat. "Take the wheel!" Morason commanded.

Robin bounced off the ¼" steel ballistic plate that surrounded the coxswain flat, then stumbled up to the wheel and fumbled with the throttles.  "Not my poncho," he thought, "why my poncho… why now?"  "Why," he shouted over the sounds of the diesel engines toward the oncoming current of the river, "I kept it clean.   It's my poncho.  I don't want that shit on my poncho!"  He mumbled to himself as he tried to keep the image of yellow fingernails from gouging into his brain.  "I was going to turn it into supply when I DEROS'd in the same condition as I received it.  See Sarge, no rips, tears, bullet holes, or decaying mushy soldier flesh.  Clean as a whistle, see… What yellow fingernails?  Scratches…?  You must be mistaken, Sarge. Those aren't claw marks. It's in perfect brand new out-of-the-box condition.  No harm, no foul, right?  I'm going home now, gonna get on that Freedom Bird at Tan Son Nhut and fly the fuck home."  Robin's mind began to overload as his thoughts morphed and fermented into coagulating clots of confusion.  Images of fingernails floated in his mind's eye. His girlfriend's when she held his hand and placed it on her breast and told him she loved him. His Grandmother's when she handed him a New Testament and told him it would give him strength and keep him safe. His Uncle's balled-up fist when he threatened to knock the piss out of him if he caught him smoking that marijuana again, and his own, when he enlisted and raised his right hand to swear allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.

 “Pay attention!”  Morason shouted at him.

As Robin struggled to keep the bow facing the current and the PBR next to the body, Morason and Dingson slipped the poncho beneath the dead soldier.  Finally, after much sweat and cursing, they were able to lift the dead soldier onto the boat as if he was in a green hammock and placed him onto the rear deck between the rear fifty machine gun and engine covers.  
 
Dingson carefully straightened out the poncho to roll the body over and read the dog tags.

Morason stood on the engine covers watching, then said to Robin over his shoulder, “Put’er in the middle of the river and head back.”

“Asshole,” Robin thought as he swatted at imaginary fingernails grazing lightly on the side of his neck.

Ignoring the stench and the sight of the soldier's face eaten away by fish, Dingson rolled the body over and reverently held the dog tags up and read the solders name.  He sighed then said, "It's Drake."

Robin heard Dingson but did not glance back at the rear deck.  If he had, he would have seen Dingson use an empty C-ration carton to scoop up Drake's hand goo and place it next to his body before wrapping the remains carefully with the poncho.  Robin would have also seen Dingson fold the poncho in such a way that Robin's name and service number would not be seen.

Looking downriver, Morason was relieved that Mike Boat Mike would not have to witness Drake's body being unloaded and placed in a proper body bag.  He considered that both soldiers would be flown back to the world in two different types of aircraft. Hoping Mike Boat Mike would be able to surf again,  Morason stepped alongside Robin at the helm and said, “Stay in the middle. Increase speed a bit.”  Robin, pale and sweating asked, "We won't find White, will we?"  Fearful and anxious he answered his own question, "I don't think we will, it's been too long."   Silent, Morason wanted to tell him to leave it all behind, that it was nothing, that this is the ‘Nam and there is nothing anyone can do about it but, he couldn’t because it wasn’t all behind.  It was all right here on the boat lying on the deck at the stern, blown up, disfigured, maybe even drowned. Eaten by fish, and slowly rotting within the remnants of a United States Army uniform, PFC Anybody-Everybody had just joined the crew, and at that moment, they all shared one thing in common as they rode together in silence toward Outpost Roberts.