I wanted to talk to him more about why Lieutenant Carroll had died. I wanted to talk to everybody about it, but nobody could deal with it. Lobel had thought it was his fault. He said if he had shot more maybe he would have got the guy that got Carroll. Maybe. Maybe, even, that was why Carroll got nailed, because somebody didn’t shoot enough, or maybe somebody didn’t order enough bombs dropped, or enough shells fired into some sector three months ago. But why was Carroll even here? What was he doing so far from Kansas City? So far from his bookstore on Minnesota Avenue?
I hadn’t put a reason for his dying in the letter to his wife. I wondered if that had been the reason Captain Stewart had asked me to write it. I started writing a letter to Kenny. What I wanted to put in it was the reason for my dying, if I should die. I knew that I wanted to live because I was afraid of dying, and I knew that I could come up with reasons for wanting to live.
A memory came from so long ago. It was the glow of the light through the spread that I had pulled over my head when Mama got to the part about “If I should die before I wake.”
It was another letter that never got finished.
The next afternoon we had to run escort service for a civilian pacification team. These guys wanted to know exactly how to go about winning over the people. That’s what they said, anyway. There were four young guys, college types, and one of them had his wife and kid with him. The guy acted sincere as hell, and Brunner was sucking up to him like crazy. I thought the guy was an asshole for bringing his wife and kid to Nam.
“His wife is probably a spook, too,” Gearhart said.
“A what?” Peewee looked at me.
“The guy’s got to be a spook,” Gearhart said. “You know, CIA.”
“What they do over here?” Monaco asked.
“Below the DMZ they do pacification stuff, look around to see who is infiltrating, that kind of thing. Then they do a lot of stuff above the Z. The navy guys slip them in on the west and the Green Berets slip them around the Z through Laos. Down here she’s probably his cover.”
“Is the kid a spook, too?” Monaco asked.
“Who knows?” Gearhart answered. “This is a funny war.”
I didn’t like the idea of having people who were civilians around. It just didn’t seem right somehow.
We took trucks to the hamlet we were going to. If I didn’t like choppers that much, I hated trucks. You were in a truck, and you expected bullets coming through the sides any minute. Me, Brew, and Peewee were the only ones wearing flak jackets. The damn things were too hot and too heavy.
We got to the hamlet and just hung around while the civilians set up a screen and started showing Walt Disney movies.
“What the fuck am I doing running around over here protecting Donald Duck?” Peewee complained. “That little dude is three times older’n me and ain’t got a scratch on him.”
“That’s cause he don’t wear no pants,” Sergeant Simpson said. “You go around with no pants on you got to be cool.”
“What kind of freaky mess you talking about?” Peewee asked. “Donald Duck wears pants.
“No he don’t.”
Peewee and Sergeant Simpson watched the movies with the kids and made notes about who had pants on and who didn’t. Sergeant Simpson was right about Donald Duck not having on pants. Peewee got pissed. I think he was really pissed because he thought Simpson was putting down Donald Duck.
Halfway through the movies we heard the sounds of big guns being fired in the distance. Sergeant
Simpson said that a lot of it was Cong artillery. It kept up for nearly three hours without letting up. There was a lot of air activity, and we actually saw a jet go down.
The jet was streaking across the sky, and then we saw a rocket go up. I didn’t know it was a rocket but Lieutenant Gearhart did. I didn’t actually see the rocket hit the jet but I saw the jet twist in the air, hesitate for a long moment, and then start down.
“There’s a chute!’’ Monaco spotted it first.
We watched the parachute come down slowly, and the plane streak away. We couldn’t figure out what had happened with the plane. Then a heavy stream of smoke came from it, and it disappeared. Sergeant Simpson got on the radio to spot the parachute, but he said it was already on the waves.
All the time we were showing the movies the civilians were talking to the villagers. The woman let some people play with the kid. I got near enough to her to hear her talking Vietnamese.
When it was time to leave, a chopper took the civilians someplace. They thanked us and told us we were doing a good job. They weren’t the kind of people that had to be in Vietnam. I wondered just what kind of people they were.
Peewee got a letter. I hoped it was from his woman, but it wasn’t.
“Say, Perry, what’s your mama’s name?”
“I don’t play that ‘mama’ stuff, Peewee,” I said.
“No, I ain’t running no dozens, man,” Peewee said. “I just want to know her name.”
“Mabel.”
“What’s my name?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not telling you,” I said. “My name is Peewee Gates,” Peewee said. “And what is the name on this letter?”
I looked at the letter. It had his name on it, but it was from Mama.
“How come my mother is sending you a letter?” I asked.
“You must have told her about me.”
“Yeah, I did. Open it up.”
“Don’t be telling me when to open my mail,” Peewee said.
Peewee didn’t open the letter all day. I tried to figure out what Mama would have to say to Peewee. I had written to her and told her that Lieutenant Carroll had died. Maybe that worried her. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her that. People back home didn’t want to know about the war, I knew that. But Mama was used to hard times, I thought it would be okay to tell her.
Usually Peewee and I went to chow together, but I told him I wasn’t hungry. When he went I looked under his bunk and took Mama’s letter out.
Dear Peewee,
Richard has told me all about you and you sound like a very fine boy. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope you get the chance to go home to your family. I do not know why Richard went into the army, because he did not seem to be the type. Only I think he was not happy at home. If something happens to him please tell him that I love him very much. You seem to be his friend and he will believe you.
You can write to me if you want to.
Mabel Perry
It made me sad that Mama had written to Peewee to say that she loved me. She hadn’t even told me that when I was leaving.
I put the letter back and wrote to Mama. I told her that I loved her very much and missed her very much. I had always had a small war with Mama. I was always the bright one and she always the one that didn’t understand what I needed. Now all I could think of was how much I needed her.
Walowick got a rash on the inside of his thigh, his back, and on the inside of his arms. It looked terrible. Everybody took a look at it and offered their opinion on what it might be. Lieutenant Gearhart came in to our hooch and saw it and asked Walowick if he had been having intimate relations with anything with a reptilian background.
“Like a snake or a lizard,” Gearhart said with a big smile on his face.
“Go fuck yourself!” Walowick said.
Gearhart didn’t like Walowick saying that. You could see it all over his face, but he didn’t say anything.
Late that night we watched some television. Security was getting tighter, and we had to cover the windows of the hooch the television was in, which made it just about too hot to watch the thing. We watched Gunsmoke and then a Christmas show. I forgot it was almost Christmas. It got me a little sad, and I was just about to go back to our hooch when all of a sudden, there we were, on television. It was the time we had gone out with the television crew.
“There I go,” Peewee said. “You know, I sure don’t look like no damn soldier.”
“What you look
like is a VC,” Monaco said.
I watched the film with the others. They made little comments about how they had felt walking that day, and how they were surprised at how the cameras made us look.
“Where am I?” I didn’t see myself.
“There you go, behind me.”
I looked older than I thought I did in real life. Older and sloppier.
The pictures also made it look as if the photographers were leading the patrol. But what the squad wasn’t talking about was the guy walking behind Walowick. Lieutenant Carroll turned back to make sure we had kept our distances. He seemed for a moment to look directly into the camera. His eyes were quiet, serious, as they always were. And then, as he had to, he turned away from us.
Chapter 12
“I think you should major in math,” Peewee said. Walowick had a catalogue from the college he wanted to go to when he got back to the World and Peewee was telling him what to take.
“I’m no good in math,” Walowick said. “I think I’ll take music or something like that. Something easy.”
“Why don’t you go to the University of Chicago?” Brunner said. “That’s got a good reputation. Who ever heard of Knox College?”
“That sounds like that School of Hard Knocks I been hearing about,” Peewee said.
“Knox is good and it’s in my hometown,” Walowick said. “My cousin went there.”
“They got any brothers going to that school?” I asked.
“The first colored senator went to Knox,” Walowick said. “The whole town has a good history with helping coloreds and stuff like that. The underground railroad used to go through Galesburg.” “You study math like I told you,” Peewee said in a gruff voice. “Then I’ll let you come to Chicago and be a big-time numbers man.”
“Walowick would rather stay over here than go to Chicago,” Sergeant Simpson chimed in. “He figure he stay over here he’ll be safer.”
“What else you got in the mail?” Monaco asked. “A newspaper,” Walowick said. “Only thing in it is the stuff about guys burning their draft cards.”
“Faggots and Commies,” Brunner said. “Anybody who wouldn’t stand up for their country is either a faggot or a Commie.”
“They’re doing what they think is right,” Monaco said. “Maybe they are right, who knows?”
“That’s why we got four and five-man squads,” Brunner said, “’Cause those jerks are home smoking dope and burning their draft cards. You get blown away because you don’t have a full squad, you can thank those creeps.”
“I almost went to Canada when I got notice to go down to register,” Brew said.
“Yeah, but then you got it together,” Brunner said.
“No, man, I didn’t have the nerve.” Brew had a sheepish grin on his face.
A rat scurried up the side of the hooch, jumped onto Walowick’s bunk, and stopped right in the middle of it. We had put some poison around, and we figured he must have been dying. It was about seven to eight inches long and bloated up.
“Brunner, get your piece,” Sergeant Simpson said.
Brunner had a twenty-two air rifle. He got it, kneeled down, and shot the rat. It died right on Walowick’s bunk, and Walowick got pissed off. He left the hooch and told Brunner he had better have his bunk cleaned up before he got back. The rest of us got up and split and left Brunner and the rat in the hooch.
What Brew had said about not having the nerve to go to Canada shook me. Here he was in Nam, getting shot at every day, afraid of every noise, every step, and yet he had been afraid of going to Canada. It shook me because I knew what he meant. Sometimes standing alone seemed to be the hardest thing in the world to do, even when being in the crowd meant you could be killed.
We got hit by a rocket attack that night. It came on us all of a sudden. I woke up screaming. The sounds of the explosions rattled through the hooches, and we couldn’t tell where the rockets were hitting. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and ran for the bunker.
The noise messed me up. I jumped with every explosion, I trembled as the ground shook around me.
“Look for sappers! Look for sappers!”
Sergeant Simpson was calling out for us to look out for sappers, the Vietnamese suicide squads. He had sixty-two days to go and he was trying to stay alive.
“Somebody send up a flare!” Monaco.
“I’m going to get some!” Peewee. The squad had settled down. I was still shaking. I heard somebody screaming for a medic.
The flare went up and there was some firing, but we didn’t see any sappers. The rockets stopped, the flares died down, they put out the fires. The night had us again.
Captain Stewart came around to check for casualties. He started talking about how we had to be more aggressive, how we had to go out to get the VC.
“We got to keep them up a few nights,” he said. He patted Sergeant Simpson on the shoulder.
When he left I could see that Sergeant Simpson didn’t look good.
“You okay, Sarge?” I asked.
“That man bucking for major real bad,” he said. “He gonna get somebody killed before he makes it.”
I couldn’t sleep, and sat outside in the bunker, trying to catch a little breeze. Johnson was there, too.
“This reminds me of a Harlem night,” I said. “Sometimes the little apartment we lived in would be so hot you couldn’t sleep for days.”
“Wish I was anyplace I could call home,” Johnson said.
“Wherever it is, I’ll think more of it the next time I get there,” I said.
“Yeah.” He looked away. “What you think about them protesters?”
I was surprised at the question. I looked up and saw that he was leaning back against the sandbags. I could just see his silhouette, helmet pushed back, rifle across his lap.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You think much about why you were going to fight before you came in?” “Unh-uh. You?”
“No, but I’m thinking a lot about it now.”
“’Cause they shooting at your ass?”
“Sounds like a good enough reason to be thinking about it,” I said.
“You trying to figure out who the good guys, huh?” Johnson spoke slowly. “So what you come up with?” “I guess somebody back home knows what they’re doing,” I said. “What it means and everything. You talk about Communists — stuff like that — and it doesn’t mean much when you’re in school. Then when you get over here the only thing they’re talking about is keeping your ass in one piece.”
“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.”
“That might be a good reason to be over here,” I said.
“That’s for people like you to mess with,” Johnson said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“Then why you messin’ with it?”
When I turned in, Peewee was still up. He told me he had an idea. He was going to spray the netting with this new repellent we got. I got into my bunk and pulled the mosquito netting around it and then Peewee sprayed the netting, which was supposed to be his good idea.
“Yo, Peewee, I can’t breathe in here,” I said.
“I wondered if that was going to be a problem,” Peewee said.
I fell asleep thinking about what Johnson had said. Maybe the time had passed when anybody could be a good guy.
Chapter 13
December 22, 1967. Three days before Christmas and only ten days left in the whole year. Me and Peewee spent all day talking about whether we should try to have sex with a Vietnamese girl before we got back to the States. He figured it might be our only chance to have sex with a foreign woman. “Suppose we catch something?” I said.
“That’s what combat is all about,” he said, looking in the mirror he had nailed on a pole at the end of his bunk. “Taking chances.”
“How about Walowick?” I asked.
“He didn
’t mess with no women,” Peewee said. “He just got the Nam Rot.”
That was true. Walowick had been sent to the 312th to get his rash treated. Sergeant Simpson said that it usually took a week to clear up a real mean rash. By that time, according to the word going around, the war was going to be over.
Captain Stewart said that the war wasn’t over yet, and for us not to get too relaxed.
“We can spend the last weeks of the war kicking a little ass and letting them know who the hell we were,” he said.
The way the story was going around was that the Vietnamese had agreed to a truce for their New Year’s celebration, which they called Tet. Then the truce would be just extended while the talks went on, and we would all go home. Captain Stewart seemed disappointed.
I wrote Mama telling her that I expected to be home around January or February. I didn’t believe all the stories, but I did believe Jamal. Jamal said that all of the South Vietnamese officers were going home for the holidays.
“And they should know,” he said, looking like a serious bullfrog.
Then some other stuff started coming down the line. There was a lot of Cong activity and the special forces guys in Cambodia were spotting convoys.
“Them Greenies just don’t want to have a truce,” Sergeant Simpson said, “if they ain’t got them a good war, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”
Back home the World seemed to be splitting up between people who wanted to make love and people who wanted to tear the cities down. A lot of it was blacks against whites, and we didn’t talk about that too much, but we felt it.
Over the summer a kid in Harlem had been killed by a white police sergeant and there had been some riots. I told Mama in a letter to tell Kenny to be careful. Sometimes he had a fresh mouth, and I didn’t want him hurt.
Kenny was all Mama had left. She had me, in a way, but not in any real way. Kenny loved her straight up and down. He didn’t see any faults in her. I loved her, too, but not like Kenny. When you’re young, the way Kenny was, you didn’t ask much of people.
Christmas. Depression. We had roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, carrot cake, and candy canes.
Fallen Angels Page 11
