Bloods

by Wallace Terry

  We were getting hit terribly.

  Davis knew it. And Davis was a private. A private.

  Davis saved us.

  When I got out of the service, I went back to Food and Drug, the lab technician thing. But I was carrying this pistol all the time, so people come up and say, “Why don’t you go in the police department?”

  I joined in December ’69. And because I was a LURP and had these medals, they figured I wasn’t scared of anything. So they asked me to work undercover in narcotics. I did it for 19 months. Around 7th and T, 9th and U, all in the area. The worst in D.C. I would try to buy drugs on a small scale, like $25. Heroin and cocaine. Then I gradually go up to where I could buy a spoon, $100. Then I could buy a ounce for a $1,000. I got robbed three times, hit in the head with a gun once. But my investigation was so successful that they didn’t lock anybody up until it was all over.

  I threw a great big party at the Diplomat Motel. I had 34 arrest warrants. I invited all the guys that I bought dope from. About 20 of them showed up. All dressed up, and everybody had Cadillacs and Mercedes. We had agents everywhere outside. Then I told them, “I am not a dope pusher like y’all scums.” They laughed. I said, “Y’all scums of the earth selling dope to your own. Take the dope up in Georgetown if you want to do something with it. Heroin. Cocaine. Get rid of it.” All of them laughed and laughed. And I said, “When I call your name, just raise your hand, ’cause you’ll be under arrest for selling these heroins.” And they laughed. And I call their names, and they raise their hand. Then these uniforms came in, and it wasn’t funny anymore.

  But they put out a $25,000 contract on me.

  I was in Judge Sirica’s court when they brought in the big dealer, Yellow Thompson. He had got a lot of confidence in me. Called me son all the time. He took me to New York and Vegas and showed me his connections in the Mafia and introduced me to some stars. He waved at me, and I waved back. Then they introduced everybody to the jury to make sure nobody in the jury knew any of the government witnesses. When they call on Special Agent Richard Ford, I stood up. And Thompson looked at me and started crying. He had a heart attack right there. I went to see him in the hospital though. I told him, “You cheap son-of-a-bitch. What’s this twenty-five-thousand-dollar contract? But first of all, I don’t have nothin’ personal against you. I can’t stand heroin dealers. I got children, and a family. I was on my job, and you wasn’t on yours. If you was, you wouldn’t have sold a newcomer that heroin.” We got along terrific after that. But I had to go see this numbers man, White Top. And he and the man behind him took me down to 9th Street in this Lincoln to this club. Everybody sayin’, “There go Rick, that no-good police.” But White Top and this dude bought me a drink. They didn’t drink nothing. Just said, “This is my son. Whatever he did, it’s over with. This is my son.” They let me go, because I was not touching the numbers, just the drugs.

  I got the gold medal from the police department, and they sent me and my wife to Greece. I got the American Legion Award, too, ’cause I was a Vietnam veteran doing all this good police work. But I left the department, because they wanted me to testify against policemen taking bribes. I said if you want me in internal affairs, make me a sergeant. They said if you want to stay in narcotics, we’ll get you in the federal bureau.

  I was a federal agent until this thing went down in Jersey. We was working police corruption. This lieutenant was stealing dope out the property office and selling it back on the street. But somethin’ told me the investigation just wasn’t right. We had a snitch telling us about the lieutenant. But he had all the answers. He knew everything. He knows too much. I think he’s playing both ends against the middle. So one night, my partner and me are walking down this street going to meet the lieutenant to buy these heroins. This scout car comes driving down on us, hits us both, and the lieutenant jumps out and shoots me in the head. He knows that even if he didn’t sell no dope, we gon’ nab him. I didn’t have no gun, but I reach like I do from instinct. And the lieutenant took off. He went to jail, and the prisoners tried to rape him, kill him.

  I retired on disability, because the wound gives me headaches. I do a little private security work now for lawyers, and I try to keep in touch with Davis and the other guys.

  Davis tried to get a job with the New Orleans police, but they said he was too short. When it comes to weapons, Sir Davis is terrific. But he’s been in trouble. A drug thing, two assaults. He writes me sometimes. Tells me his light bulb is out. They trained us for one thing. To kill. Where is he gonna get a job? The Mafia don’t like blacks.

  Hill went home first. Said send him all our grenades. He was on his way to Oakland to join the Panthers. Never heard nothin’ about him again.

  Fowler got shot through the chest with a BAR. But he got home. He stays in trouble. He’s serving 15–45 in Lewisburg for armed robbery.

  Holmes got to computer school. He’s doing okay in San Diego. I don’t know what happened to Ferguson and Taylor.

  Sir Drawers came over to see me for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He is still out of work. We marched together. When we got to the memorial, I grabbed his hand. Like brothers do. It was all swollen up.

  We looked for one name on the memorial. Louis. We found it, and I called his mother. I told her it was nice, and she said she might be able to see it one day.

  But I think the memorial is a hole in the ground. It makes me think they ashamed of what we did. You can’t see it from the street. A plane flying over it can’t see nothing but a hole in the ground.

  And it really hurt me to see Westmoreland at the memorial, ’cause he said that we had no intentions of winning the war. What the hell was we over there for then? And the tactical thing was we fought it different from any way we was ever trained to fight in the States. They tell you about flanks, platoons, advance this. It wasn’t none of that. It was just jungle warfare. You jumped up and ran where you could run.

  We went to church on the Sunday after the memorial thing. I was doing pretty good about Vietnam the last five years, ’cause I was active a whole lot. If I ever sit down and really think about it, it’s a different story.

  My sister’s husband was with me. He got shrapnel in his eye. His vision is messed up. There were 2,000 people in the church. And the pastor gave us space to talk, ’cause we were the only two that went to Vietnam. My brother-in-law is a correction officer at the jail. So we’ve always been kind of aggressive. Ain’t scared that much. But we got up there to talk, and we couldn’t do nothing but cry. My wife cried. My children cried. The whole church just cried.

  I thought about Louis and all the people that didn’t come back. Then people that wasn’t even there tell us the war was worthless. That a man lost his life following orders. It was worthless, they be saying.

  I really feel used. I feel manipulated. I feel violated.

  Specialist 4

  Charles Strong

  Pompano Beach, Florida

  Machine gunner

  Americal Division

  U.S. Army

  Chu Lai

  July 1969–July 1970

  This dude, Lieutenant Calley, really didn’t do nothing, man. I know, because I use to be in the field. He didn’t do that on his own to My Lai. He was told to do that. We killed a whole lot of innocent gooks by mistake, because they were not suppose to be there. The GIs would take them out of their home. But dig this, the people’s religion is very strong. They can’t leave where they live. So I see why they would come back. I didn’t kill any civilians personally. But what I know now, maybe I shot a few. When the stuff happened, it happened so fast, most people got killed in the first 15 or 20 seconds. That’s how fast a fire fight happened.

  The war in Vietnam didn’t do nothing but get a whole lot of guys fucked up for some money. There may have been a chance of having a base close to Red China. But actually it was fought for money. And the people in the world didn’t want it to stop. That marching to stop the war was a whole lot of bullshit. Because, dig this, I seen
this with my own eyes, because my MOS was humping the boonies. We found caches that the North Vietnamese got, full of sardines from Maine and even medical supplies from the U.S.

  I wish the people in Washington could have walked through a hospital and seen the guys all fucked up. Seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds got casts from head to toes. This old, damn general might walk in and give them a damn Purple Heart. What in the hell do you do with a damn Purple Heart? Dudes got legs shot off and shit, got half their face gone and shit. Anything that you can mention that would make you throw up, that you can possibly dream of, happened.

  Can you imagine walking around policing up someone’s body? Picking them up and putting them in a plastic bag? Maybe you find his arm here, his leg over there. Maybe you have to dig up somebody’s grave. Maybe he been there for a couple of days, and it will start stinking and shit. You dig graves. You open graves. You are an animal. You be out there so long until you begin to like to kill. You know, I even started doing that. I walked over a body of a North Vietnamese, and said, “That’s one motherfucker I don’t have to worry about.” It made me feel good to see him laying there dead. It made me feel good to see a human life laying down there dead.

  I was twenty when I went to ’Nam. My people was from South Carolina. We was migrants. We picked string beans in New York. Strawberries in Florida. When my older brothers started to work in the canneries in Florida, we moved to Pompano Beach. My father, he only went to the fourth grade, but I finished high school. I wanted to go into the field of automation and computers at the time. I had saved some money, and my mother had saved some money. I only needed $27 to take this course in a junior college. I asked my brothers and sisters to loan me $27, and they wouldn’t do it. So I got a construction job helping carpenters. Then I had a feeling they were going to draft me, because only one of my brothers had been in the Army. They drafted me 29 days before my twentieth birthday. My boy was born when I was in basic training. I don’t think she wanted to get pregnant. I just think that we just got carried away. I married her when I got out in ’72.

  I really didn’t have an opinion of the war at first. I was praying that the war would bypass me. I chose not to evade the draft but to conform to it. I figured it was better to spend two years in the service than five years in prison. And I figured that for nineteen years I had enjoyed a whole lot of fruits of this society. I knew that you don’t get anything free in this world.

  I first arrived in Chu Lai in July 1969. After a week of orientation, I was assigned to the Americal Division, Alpha Company, 1st of the 96th. My company commander was a very good company commander, because he knew his profession and kept us out of a whole lot of crucial incidents. But the second lieutenant—the platoon leader—he was dumb, because he would volunteer us for all kinds of shit details to get brownie points. We would walk point two or three times a week for the whole company. He was literally the word “stupid,” because he couldn’t read a map. And he would say, “You don’t tell me what to do, because they sent me to officers’ training school.” When we got one or two sniper fire, he would stop right there and call in artillery to saturate the whole area before you could take another step.

  One time we had to check out an area. It was during the monsoon season. It rained 15 days and 15 nights continuously. We stayed wet 15 days. We started catching cramps and charley horses. And guys’ feet got messed up. Well, they were trying to get supplies into us. But it was raining so hard, the chopper couldn’t get in. After five days, we ran out of supplies. We were so hungry and tired we avoided all contact. We knew where the North Vietnamese were, but we knew that if we got into it, they would probably have wiped a big portion of the company out. We were really dropped there to find the North Vietnamese, and here we was hiding from them. Running because we were hungry. We were so far up in the hills that the place was so thick you didn’t have to pull guard at night. You’d have to take a machete to cut even 100 meters. It could take two hours, that’s how thick the shit was. We starved for four days. That was the first time I was ever introduced to hunger.

  Then we found some kind of path road down into a little village. And we came to a house that had chickens and stuff there. I think the people abandoned it when they saw us coming. I was the machine gunner, so I had to stay where I was and watch the open area while the guys searched the house. They were city guys who didn’t know about utilizing the forest or what they were running into. So they started throwing the rice on the ground. They didn’t have the experience that I had. When I was younger, I used to go out for miles of distance into the woods and run the snakes. I told my friend Joe to pick up the rice and get the chickens. So Joe got the stuff. I told them not to worry, so I skinned a chicken. I got a whole mess of heat tabs, and put the chicken in my canteen cup and boiled it for a long time. When I thought the chicken was half done, I put in the rice. And a little salt. It was about the only food we had until the bird came in two days after that. Those guys were totally ignorant. They kept calling rice gook food. That’s why they threw it on the ground. I told Joe food is food.

  It was a good thing that I didn’t run in the house. Because I saw something about an eighth of a mile away. It looked like a little scarecrow out there in the rice paddy. It was sort of like a little sign. I looked at it real hard. I stretched my eye to make sure it wasn’t nobody. Then I seen another little dark object, and it was moving. So I opened my fire immediately. I think the Viet Cong was trying to get around behind us so he could ambush us. I just happened to recognize him. I cut off maybe 50 rounds, and the CO hollered, “Hold up there, Charles. Don’t just burn the gun up.” The rest of the company told me I really got him, so that was the only person that I really was told I actually killed.

  My feet was all scriggled up. My skin was raw and coming off. I still carry an infection on my feet right now that I have to visit the VA hospital on a regular basis to take treatment for.

  Then I started to take drugs to stop the pain in my feet.

  When one of our men was killed the next day, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference, because I just felt good that it wasn’t me. But it gave me a thrill like you take a drink of alcohol or smoke a cigarette to see a Viet Cong laying dead. It was giving me a good feeling. It stimulated my senses. I thought about it, and I really started to love seeing someone dead. And I started doing more drugs. Now I’m afraid that if someone catches me the wrong way, I would do them really bodily harm. It won’t be no fight to prove who the best man is, or to prove manhood. Because of ’Nam, I cannot fight, because if I fight now, I’ll fight for life. Someone is gonna die immediately.

  But it hurt me bad when they got Joe. Joe was an all right guy from Georgia. I don’t know his last name. He talked with that “ol’ dude” accent. If you were to see him the first time, you would just say that’s a redneck, ridge-runnin’ cracker. But he was the nicest guy in the world. We used to pitch our tents together. I would give him food. He would share his water. And food and water was more valuable then than paper money. And when we had an opportunity to stand down, he would get sort of drunk and go around the brothers and say, “Hi there, brother man.” The brothers would automatically take offense, but I always told them Joe was all right. His accent was just personal.

  I remember one night I put my little transistor radio on my pack. We listened to music with the earphones, and he talked about his wife and kids back home on the farm in Georgia. He said he would be glad to see his wife.

  The next day he was walking point. I was walking the third man behind him when he hit a booby trap. I think it was a 104 round. It blew him up in the air about 8 feet. He came down, and about an inch of flesh was holding his leg to his body. He rested on his buttocks, and his arms were behind him. He was moaning and crying in agony and pain and stuff. What really got to his mind is when he rose himself up and saw his leg blown completely off except that inch. He said, “Oh, no, not my legs.” I really distinctly remember the look on his face. Then he sort of went into semiconsciou
sness. He died on the way to the hospital. I had to walk up the trail to guard for the medevac to pick him up. And I remember praying to the Lord to let me see some VC—anybody—jump out on that trail.

  After six months, it was approaching Christmas, and we went back through the jungles to the rear area for a stand-down. That was when I made up in my mind that I wasn’t going back to the field. The officers were dumb, but besides that, before I went to Vietnam, I had three dreams that showed me places in Vietnam. When we were in this one area, it was just like in the first dream. I felt like I had been there before, but I didn’t place much value on it. But when I seen the second place, it dawned on me this was the place in the second dream. I said that in my dream, there’s suppose to be a foxhole approximately 15 feet to the left and a little tin can sittin’ on it. At the LZ I was in at the time, I walked straight to the place where the foxhole was suppose to be. And there it was. And the can, too. The third dream said that I was going to be crossing a rice paddy, and I was going to get shot in my chest with a sucking wound that I would never recover from. And one of my buddies was holding me in his arms, saying I would be all right until the medevac came in. But it seemed like I never made it out of there. So I wrote my mother and told her that it was time to leave the field, or I would never make it out alive. The first and second dreams came true. It was a sign from the Heavenly Father for me to do something, or the third dream would come true. A Christian never walks into any danger, dumb and blind. Never.

  I had three alternatives. One was I could go back to the field. The second was I could go to jail. The third was I could take more time in military service. I chose the third. I enlisted for three years to get out of the field and get trained for welding.

  I left the ’Nam the end of July 1970. I had learned my job welding at Lai Khe. Then they transferred me from Fort Dixon to Frankfurt. Germany was good for my readjustment, because I really didn’t care nothing about law and all those things. I really didn’t have no respect for life. Like I had the power in ’Nam to issue out life or death sentences. If I just wanted to be a real nasty person, then I probably could have just ripped off South Vietnamese civilians for practice. In Germany I learned black people can live together in harmony and that we had to band together in order to make it back to the United States without going to jail.