Scotty was about six-five, with a face that was mostly ashy white. But the eyes were what set him apart. They were dark, and darting. I had seen the look on ballplayers before. They were the kind of eyes that wanted to win.
I was nervous being with these new guys. Scotty must have sensed it, because he came over and told me everything was going to be cool.
“Where you from?”
“New York,” I said. “Harlem.”
“You a long way from home, man.”
“Where you from?”
“Tacoma, Washington,” he said. “Doyle tell you about the stand down?”
“No.”
“Charlie Company is going to be the first company that stands down,” Scotty said. “We’ll be standing down for two weeks, maybe even get down to Saigon.”
“The whole battalion standing down?”
“From what I hear,” Scotty said. “And this boy needs a little vacation. Far as I’m concerned we can stand down till this thing is over.”
“I heard it could be over before Christmas.” “Can’t be too soon for this boy,” Scotty said.
Some guys were getting ready to move out, and Scotty got up and shouldered the .6o-caliber machine gun. I crisscrossed two bandoliers of ammunition over my chest and grabbed a boxful. It was heavy as hell.
We went to the pads and then sat down waiting for the choppers.
I liked the idea of standing down. A few weeks away from the combat zone would do me good. If we got to Saigon, maybe we could see what the cities were like before the war was over.
Two black guys came over and asked me if I was new. I said no, that I was on loan from Alpha Company. Then they asked me if I knew a guy named Gifford in Alpha. I didn’t.
Scotty introduced me to a couple of other guys, but I forgot their names as soon as I heard them. Lieutenant Doyle was yelling into the radio that the choppers were late. He was asking if the guy on the other end of the phone wanted us to go to the backup position. The best I could figure out, the answer was no.
“You play ball?” Scotty asked.
“Basketball,” I said. “Played some baseball but nothing to brag about.”
“I played football in high school but couldn’t get into a college. You know the only thing I’m good at?”
“What?”
“M-60 machine gun. You know anybody out in the World need a good machine gunner?”
I smiled. My mind shot ahead. What would I do when I got out? I had read some stuff in Stars and Stripes about Congress expanding the GI Bill. The paper said it didn’t look too hopeful.
The chopper finally came, almost an hour after they were supposed to. We got in and took off.
The LZ was supposed to be secure, but I could see a few muzzle blasts coming from the thick green carpet below me as we came down. I flinched every time I saw one. Scotty and another guy — his name tag read Palumbis — kidded me about the flinching.
“If you see the muzzle blast, it means that the bullet missed.”
He had a lot to learn about physics, but we were already landing.
The struts were supposed to take the jolt out of the landing, but I wanted to be out before they hit. Scotty went just as I was thinking of going, and in a moment I was out and running behind him. The ammo box banged against my legs. I felt as if I were carrying a ton of equipment.
We moved out quickly from the LZ and went into some tall grass. The grass cut-my hands up so fast I thought I had walked into a booby trap. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a thousand paper cuts all over me.
We had to cross a road, and Doyle was telling everybody to look out for mines.
“I don’t know why he tells us that,” Scotty said. “They don’t put the damn mines so you can see them, and we ain’t got no detectors.”
A picture of Jenkins flashed through my mind. I didn’t even look down. I just watched Scotty’s back as we crossed the road. We found the area we were supposed to be in and dug in. Scotty had empty sandbags in his rucksack, and we filled them with dirt and made ourselves a little nest.
Doyle was twenty meters away. The radio guy was with him, and by the time Scotty and I had finished our nest, Doyle and the radio guy were playing cards.
“We just going to stay here?” I asked.
“Doyle don’t go too far,’’ Scotty said. “He don’t think this is his war anyway. He’s got him a Sunoco service station back in New Jersey.”
“He got drafted?”
“He got drafted four years ago, but he changed his name and stayed low,” Scotty said. “Then the FBI caught up with him and brought him in. He got big connections and got into Officers Candidate School.”
Two jets streaked across the sky. Beautiful. Dark birds in a sweeping arc across a silver sky.
“You join up?” Scotty asked.
“Yeah. Nothing to do in the World.”
“Me, either.”
“That’s why they give these dances,” Scotty said.
We sat for a half hour, then Doyle told us we would be moving out in fifteen minutes. Scotty and I had just started to unload the sandbags when the shooting started.
“Four-fifty! Four-fifty!” The shout went down the line. Someone had spotted where the firing was coming from and estimated it to be four hundred and fifty meters in front of us. Scotty was leveling the legs of the tripod, and I jerked open the metal ammo case.
“Get that’ thing going!” Doyle was yelling at us. I looked up and saw that he was on the radio. The radio man was firing at a line of small trees.
I wasn’t scared. For the first time I wasn’t scared. I didn’t see anybody, no muzzle flashes. I was going to be okay.
Scotty started firing the 60. There were tracers in the belt, and I could see the rounds spit across the distance. Leaves and small branches in front of us seemed to jump into the air. I kept feeding, but I didn’t see anything. Doyle let the firing continue for a long time before calling out for us to cease fire.
I watched him. He peered above the dirt mound he was behind.
“You want a squad out?” Scotty called to Doyle.
“I’m calling for Willy Peter!” Doyle called back.
“That’s Doyle for you, man,” Scotty said. “Whoever started the shooting probably didn’t even see anything, but he’s still going to call for a couple of rounds of Willy Peter, just in case.”
We waited for another minute before a lone round of white phosphorus landed in the distant trees.
“We re too close to be calling in artillery,” Scotty said.
One of our machine guns started chattering on our right, and Scotty opened up again. A moment later some more white phosphorus started coming in. The Willy Peter sent streamers of fire into the air. The smell of it was terrible. Terrible and scary. Just the idea of being hit by a white phosphorus barrage sent a chill through me. The barrage lasted for fifteen seconds, then stopped abruptly.
Scotty nudged me and pointed toward Doyle. Doyle had his helmet off and was screaming into the radio. He was gesturing wildly and then he stood up and looked toward the target area. The radio man stood and looked, too.
The machine gun on the right opened up again, and Doyle started screaming.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Doyle was jumping around and waving both of his arms over his head.
“Oh, shit!” Scotty turned around and leaned against the sandbags.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I hope not what I think it is,” Scotty said.
We waited as Doyle walked a little ahead of his position, hands on his hips, and looked out to the field ahead of us. Behind us I heard choppers. I turned and saw them headed for us. They went by us out to the target zone.
“Hey, Scotty, did we … ?”
“Yep, we just shot the shit out of the first platoon.”
We walked slowly across the field. There were some kind of crops being grown in between the trees, half of it now burned out or uprooted by the shelling. As we got near the first plato
on the smell from the phosphorus grew stronger.
They were loading the guys onto the medevac choppers. Medics were running from guy to guy.
“Look in the bushes!” a captain was shouting.
We looked for wounded. They were all over the place. The medics were so busy they were just tagging guys. The ones they thought they could save they worked on, the others they marked their wounds down. One kid, the angry stain of blood on his T-shirt growing with every breath, watched calmly as the medic wrote up the tag. The medic tied it to his lapel and patted the kid’s shoulder. When the medic left, the kid tried to read the tag without taking it off.
If there were time — if the medic had finished with the ones he was fairly sure he could save — he would come back to the kid to see what he could do. I kept looking for other wounded. These were our people.
The first chopper was moving out already. They were so quick. One guy had a plasma bottle strapped to his helmet. He was going through his pockets looking for matches to light his cigarette. He found them but they were soaked through with his own blood. Scotty lit his cigarette.
A sergeant was crying. He was sitting by himself, his rifle cradled in his arms, crying softly.
Nobody was talking. There was nothing to say. More medevacs came in and took away the rest of first platoon. The last one took the body bags. There had to be at least fifteen.
We went back to the LZ an hour later. They had brought in the stand-by platoon to replace us.
A spec four from the first platoon had wandered away from the company and was riding with us. He was a young kid, really good-looking. He had bums on his arms and face. Both eyebrows were gone, but he was still good-looking. He looked so young.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Charlie Company, sir,” he said.
I started to tell him that I wasn’t an officer. But it didn’t matter.
As soon as we landed I was told to go back to my company. Scotty said that it was nice meeting me.
“You okay?” Lieutenant Carroll was the first to meet me.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You know, the way they run this shit over the radio,” Lieutenant Carroll shook his head. “You would think all hell was breaking loose.”
When I got to the hut, Peewee asked me what had happened.
“We heard that you guys ran into a VC battalion or something,” he said. “’Cause I told them that Perry could handle the shit if it was only one damn battalion.”
“I was with their fourth platoon,” I said. “We ran into their first platoon and we hit them. They must have lost over a dozen guys.”
“You hit our own guys?” Monaco came over to where I was sitting on the bed.
“I didn’t hit them! The platoon leader called in artillery on their position.”
“Who spotted them?” Monaco asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody knows nothing. That’s why a bunch of guys get nailed for no reason!”
“Yo, man, I didn’t mess them up.”
Monaco looked at me and walked away. I watched him lie down on his bunk with his face to the wall.
“They messed up bad?” Peewee asked.
“Yeah, real bad.”
Thanksgiving. This year, Kenny’s birthday was on Thanksgiving, and I damn near forgot it. I figured it would take three weeks for anything to reach home from Nam. I didn’t want to send him money. He could have used the money, but I wanted to send him something more. I asked Lieutenant Carroll if he thought I could get a knife in the mail. I told him it was for Kenny.
Lieutenant Carroll said he had something else, and he gave me a jacket he had bought in Saigon. It was black silk and there was a map in green of Nam on the back. I wanted to pay him for it, but he said no.
I got the jacket in the last mail. Lieutenant Carroll was in the officer’s hooch, and I stopped in to see him. He was sitting in his shorts. He was drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“You know where I got this?”
“Where?”
“We went into a village about six months ago; I guess we surprised some VC. They left their meal, their cards, and this bottle behind. You want a drink?”
I took a drink. It burned like hell going down. It came up easier.
I couldn’t sleep. They all started crowding in on me. The guy with the plasma taped to his helmet, the sergeant crying. None of them were together in my mind. They just kept coming, one by one. Short movies. A few seconds of a medic putting a tag on a wounded soldier. A few seconds of a chopper taking off over the trees. A guy cradling his rifle. A body bag.
The guys that our artillery blew away didn’t have a reason to die. They hadn’t died facing the enemy. They just died because somebody else was scared, maybe careless. They died because they were in Nam, where being scared made you do things you would regret later. We were killing our brothers, ourselves.
Brew was getting ready to go to bed and I went over to his bunk and asked him if he knew where the Lord’s Prayer was in the Bible.
“The Bible I got has an index,’’ he said. “You can look up anything you want in the back.”
“Hey, that’s cool.’’
“You can borrow mine any time you want,” he said, tossing it to me.
“You pray a lot when you in the World?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I prayed a lot,” Brew said. “But, man, I didn’t pray nowhere near as hard.”
Chapter 9
Brunner came into the hooch and told us to saddle up, that we were going on a pacification mission. Monaco asked him who had given the order.
“Just get your ass in gear,” Brunner snarled.
“Who the hell elected you God?” Monaco hadn’t moved and neither had the rest of us.
“How many stripes you got on your arm, Private Monaco?” Brunner walked to the end of Monaco’s bunk.
“Enough to know that I don’t have to take any bull from you,” Monaco said.
Brunner kicked the end of Monaco’s bunk hard enough to knock some magazines onto the wooden pallets that served as a floor. Monaco reached under his bunk, grabbed a grenade, and pulled the pin.
“Now what do you think you’re going to do with that, pretty boy?” Brunner said, looking down at Monaco.
Monaco smiled, lifted the armed grenade high over his head, and flipped it toward Brunner.
Everybody dove to the floor, screaming. I tried to pull my bunk down over me. I heard myself screaming, as if the noise I made would somehow cut off the impact of the grenade. Peewee was on the floor near me. He had one hand over his head and his helmet over his rear end.
I didn’t stop screaming until I saw Walowick, who had rolled himself into a tight little knot, get up.
Slowly we all got up. Walowick started the cursing, and we joined in. Monaco was on his bunk, laughing.
“The next time I’m going to toss you one with the powder in it,” he said to Brunner.
“You’re a fucking kid! You’re a fucking kid!” Brunner was screaming at the top of his lungs. “You call yourself a fucking soldier, but you’re a fucking kid!”
We continued cursing out Monaco. He was called every low-life and every animal we could think of, and then some. Peewee called him a faggot baboon dog, which was different.
When we finished the cursing we all laughed, all except Brunner and Brew. Brunner was still pissed, and Brew was praying. Brew’s praying bothered me. It wasn’t that I minded him being religious, it was just that I didn’t want him being closer to God than I was.
Everybody was interested in the pacification thing we were going on. It was like the closest thing to a real answer about why we were in Nam. Sergeant Simpson said that the marines had done the bulk of it in the past but that they were digging in up north to establish positions for the Tet truce.
“Keep your eyes open and don’t mess with the women folks,” Sergeant Simpson said. “Keep your weapons on safe. I don’t want none of y’all shooting me.”
I thought about my going out with Charlie Company and how we had shot at our own men. Then it left my mind. I noticed that lately there were things I would let myself think about, and things I wouldn’t. But every once in a while things would come into my mind, not like a thought but like a picture, and I felt a little strange about that. I wondered if that happened to any of the other guys.
We mounted the choppers and started out. My stomach tensed when I saw the choppers. They were like a trigger. Even when I heard them putt-putting into the area I would tense up. It meant that we were leaving the camp, leaving home. At the camp I felt safe. Outside of the camp anything was possible.
It didn’t take us long to get to the hamlet. Lieutenant Carroll was showing Sergeant Simpson the map, and I looked at it. It showed all the hills and the streams mostly. That was how we got around, following the hills and streams and paddies. Sometimes there would be a plantation that we would use as a reference, or a field of rice paddies.
The hamlet consisted of a cluster of little huts. They were put together well. Some kids came out to greet us. Most of them were young, four or five, seven at the most. The M-16 I carried felt bigger than it usually did. We came into the village to pacify the people who lived there. Lobel found me and came alongside.
“You know who we are?” he asked.
“Who?”
“You remember those cowboy movies when the bad guys ride into town? You know, the killers?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s us,” Lobel said.
“I’m not a killer,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. I hated him saying that. I hated his smiling as if he had some dark secret. Sergeant Simpson was up ahead. He didn’t walk, he loped. He was cool, simple. I trotted the few steps to catch up with him.
“I wonder what they think of this war?” I said, half to myself and half to Sergeant Simpson. I was looking at a group of Vietnamese kids playing in the mud.
“It ain’t so bad for them,” he answered.
“How can you say that? They’re just kids.”
Fallen Angels Page 8
