“Never happen!” Peewee dug in.
“Soldier!” Captain Stewart swung a forty-five on Peewee.
I didn’t see the sixty move. I heard the impact of the bullets in the ground in front of Captain Stewart’s feet, I saw him leap backward. I saw him dive for cover. The forty-five went back into its case. I looked over my shoulder. Johnson was on his knees, a menacing silhouette.
The sixty swung toward the clearing and raked the far side. Suddenly a figure popped out of the underbrush carrying a tube.
“Get him! Get him!”
The sixty barked. The figure started at first to collapse, and then to expand. It was as if it drew in on itself, gathered the momentum it needed, and then began to grow. The arms flung apart. But it had already fired the RPG.
Down. Sweet Jesus. Please.
Dirt all over me. There was more firing. I looked up. There was something near me. It was flesh. I pushed it away, I wanted to get away from it. I stood and started to run from it.
The ARVNs were on the left. I saw them. I fired in their direction. I don’t know why. I stopped and tried to pull myself together.
The charlies were still ahead of us. They had backed themselves into a tight knot in the middle of the field. There must have been sixty, maybe seventy of them. We fired at them, and fired at them, and fired at them. Bodies once alive, then lifeless, seemed to live again as the bullets tore into the dead flesh and made it dance in the afternoon sun. I breathed in some bugs without bothering to spit them out.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Gearhart.
The other side of the clearing was burning. The sudden darkness of a jet surprised me. Surprised all of us. One guy opened up. The jet roared and dropped a bomb just over the clearing. Napalm.
It burst into the trees, rolling, rushing, a gale of fire through the trees.
Couldn’t breathe. I went down. Guys were dropping around me as the heat from the napalm sucked up the air. The trees above us caught fire. My skin was full of tiny pin pricks. The napalm was too close. We started moving into the clearing.
A Cong, maybe the one who had fired the RPG, was lying on top of a pile of bodies. His chest and stomach were open. There were tubes and organs and the redness of working parts that no longer worked.
“Perry!” It was Peewee.
“Wha?”
He pointed. I looked. It was a soldier. He had been white, round-faced. Now the bottom of one leg was off. Most of the flesh from the thigh was off, too. The white, twisted bone angled out oddly from the hip. His eyes were open, his mouth was open as wide as it would go, the teeth bared.
“Look at his hands, man.”
The hands were around the neck of a NVA soldier. There were no other wounds on the NVA. The GI had killed him from the other side of death.
I walked away. People were not supposed to be made like that. People were not supposed to be twisted bone and tubes that popped out at crazy kid’s-toys angles. People were supposed to be sitting and talking and doing. Yes, doing.
Chapter 20
When the ARVN troops first reached us we didn’t notice anything unusual. Then we heard one of their officers yelling and motioning for us to move back toward the hamlet.
“What the hell is this?” Peewee reached for his rifle.
Gearhart saw that the ARVN troops were surrounding us. I almost freaked out. I thought the ARVN troops must have been Congs in disguise.
“What the fuck is this all about?” Gearhart was asking.
Then we saw. The choppers started down. The ARVN officer simply wanted to get out first.
“Put your hands up! Put your hands up!” Gearhart shouted.
He threw down his weapon and put his hands high over his head. Peewee lifted the muzzle of his rifle.
“No, put your hands up high,” Gearhart shouted. “Like this!”
He put his hands up even higher.
We finally figured out what Gearhart had in mind and put our hands up. He was letting the guys in the choppers know what was up. The door gunners on the choppers opened up on the knot of ARVNs behind us. We got our pieces and started firing into them. They broke it off quickly and moved away.
We started scrambling to the choppers, fighting off any ARVNs that tried to get on before us. The chopper I was trying to get on dipped down and almost knocked me off. Then it seemed to leap into the air with me hanging onto one side. Somebody pulled me in. I felt something slip by me, clutch at my ass, my leg, hold onto my ankle for a long second, and then let it go. I thought my ankle was broken. I twisted to see who was behind me. There was nobody, nothing but the empty space of the door. Somebody had fallen out.
It was forever getting back to the base. We were jumbled over each other, our bodies aching and too tired to move.
We got to the base, and somebody came up with some coffee. I had never been a coffee drinker in the World, but now I wanted it. Now I needed it, anything that promised to get me to the next minute. Gearhart told us to get some rest.
“Sleep,” he said.
Sleep. Rest. The words had lost their meaning. Trying to reach sleep, any kind of real sleep, was hard. It was as if I just faded out sometimes, and then faded back in when we got called. Most of it wasn’t rest, either. You had to be away from the boonies for three, maybe four days before you felt rested. It wasn’t so much the running around, or the fighting, it was the tension.
Monaco’s screaming woke me with a start. I jumped up reaching for my rifle.
“There they are! There they are!” he was screaming. He fell to the floor and shot a burst toward the door of the hooch.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Walowick was yelling.
Lobel and Johnson jumped on Monaco and wrestled his weapon away from him. I was behind my bunk looking toward the door.
“Be cool! Be cool!” Johnson called out.
“Oh, God!” Monaco had his hands to his head. They were helping him up.
“What the fuck is going on?” I looked toward Peewee, who was standing flat against the wall.
“I swore I thought I saw some Congs dragging a guy through the bushes,” Monaco said. “I saw it just as plain as anything.”
“You were probably dreaming,” I said, getting up from the floor.
“No, man, I was awake,” Monaco said. “I saw these two Congs dragging a guy into the bushes.”
Monaco shook his head and sat down on his bunk. Everybody else cooled out. Some guys from another squad came over to find out what the shooting was about, and Walowick told them a guy was working on his rifle and it went off.
When they saw that Monaco was okay, Lobel and Brunner walked him over to the mess tent to get some coffee.
“Hey, Perry,” Walowick sat on the edge of the bunk.
“What?”
“You know what happened to Monaco?”
“No, what?”
“I mean, you know what he just did? Thought he was seeing something he had seen before?” “Yeah?”
“That happened to me once,” he said. “I was on guard and some VC tried to get through the barbed wire. We were firing on them, and out of the comer of my eye I saw one that had already got through. He came at me and I turned and got him, and then I went back to firing on the other guys trying to get through. We stopped them, and I didn’t think much of it. But the next day I was playing volleyball and just as I turned…
Walowick paused as if he were trying to remember exactly what had happened.
“You thought you saw guys coming through the wire again?”
“No, not coming through the wire,” he said. “I thought I saw the guy that had broken through. I screamed and dove for the ground. It was pretty embarrassing.”
“It’s understandable, though.”
“You understand it?”
“No.”
Monaco was cool by the next day. He made a lot of jokes about what had happened, but I thought he was worried about it.
It was a dreary Friday, the rain beat down on the tin roof of the
hooch all morning, and we were all down. Jamal was typing up a report on
Brew and noticed it was his birthday. If Brew had made it he would have been nineteen on the twenty-sixth.
“We could have had a birthday party for the guy,” Peewee said. He was cleaning his gear.
I had been trying to get the mud from my boots, gave it up, and went to the mess tent. I asked the cook if he had any cake or anything and he came up with some pound cake and some fruit cocktail. I took it back to the hooch and we celebrated Brew’s birthday.
Gearhart wrote three letters to his wife. He gave one to me, one to Walowick, and he kept one.
Gearhart said that if we got back to someplace we could mail the letter to go on and mail it. The letters were all the same he said, more or less.
“Just in case I don’t get a chance to mail it myself.” He said. “You know…”
Nobody answered him. He nodded and left. “Who the hell is he to lay this shit on us?” Lobel asked. He seemed really mad.
Peewee told Walowick to open the letter.
“That’s not right,” Walowick said.
“I didn’t say the shit was right,” Peewee said. “I just said open the damn letter!”
Walowick opened it and Lobel read it.
Dear Sandra,
I have finally made a decision on the storm doors. I think we should go on and have the glass-paneled doors the way you want. We’ll put my den in that room, and I’ll put a good
strong door that we can lock between that and the hallway leading to the bedrooms. That way it’ll be safe even if someone does try to break in, and you can still have the doors the way you want them.
I don’t know what you should do about the paper boy. If he insists upon being a wise guy tell him not to deliver the damn paper anymore. The only reason to get the paper from him is to have something to read while you’re having breakfast.
Tell the kids I said hello. You were always better with words than me. Could you please tell them how much I love them? Try to explain that I love them as much as I love you and you know how much that is.
Things are going okay over here. I’m with some okay guys.
Love,
Ricky
I wished I had a wife and kids. I mean I really wished I had a wife and kids, somebody somewhere that loved me in a way I could look forward to going back to the World to. I knew Mama loved me, but I also knew when I got back, she would expect me to be the same person, but it could never happen. She hadn’t been to Nam. She hadn’t given her poncho to anybody to wrap a body in, or stepped over a dying kid.
Maybe she was worried about me the same way a wife would. I didn’t even know how a wife would worry. Gearhart wasn’t talking about her worrying, he was just talking about the paper boy. It was like she was away, and going through the crap. Maybe she was, in a way.
“Peewee!” I called over to where he was reading a paper. “You think I should tell my little brother about how things are over here?”
“You ain’t told him yet?”
“I keep trying to, but I can’t get it out right. You know, I don’t want him to think about it like you do when you go to the movies.”
“You gotta tell him it’s just the way things are in the movies,” Lobel called out from across the aisle. “You tell people what this is really like, and who’s going to come to the next war? They’ll have all the announcements out and everything, and nobody’ll show up.”
“Yeah, but you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that whatever I tell him he’s going to start thinking about heroes and stuff like that.” “Heroes?”
“You know, to a kid if you kill somebody and the somebody is supposed to be a bad guy, you’re a hero.”
“You ain’t killed nobody yet,” Peewee said. “They gots to be people before you can kill them. You think these Congs is people?”
“Yeah, sure they are.”
“What they names?”
“How the hell would I know their names?” “What they like to eat?”
“I don’t know.”
“See, they ain’t people to you yet. You figure out all that shit, what they names is, what they like to eat, who do the dishes and shit like that, then they people. Then you shoot them you killing somebody.”
“You’re talking technical stuff,” Lobel said. “You shoot some guy and he falls down, you’ve killed him. Pure and simple.”
“Hey, Lobel, if they was people to your ugly, overweight ass, you couldn’t kill them because you wouldn’t have the heart.”
“You couldn’t, either,” I said.
“Yeah, I could,” Peewee said. “I’m a damn animal, man.”
“Old Peewee is going to fight the next war all by himself.” Monaco was putting powder on his crotch.
“No, I’m going to go out get me some more seventeen-year-olds like us that don’t know nothing and turn them all into animals,” Peewee said. “And if I catch some dude putting face powder on his crotch like you doing, I’m gonna put him on point cause I know he ain’t got no sense.”
“This is supposed to keep the jock itch down,” Monaco said.
They argued about whether or not Monaco was enough of a jock to have jock itch with Peewee saying that Monaco was just about enough man to have jock tickle but not near enough man to have jock itch. I started writing to Kenny.
I just told him that the war was about us killing people and about people killing us, and I couldn’t see much more to it. Maybe there were times when it was right. I had thought that this war was right, but it was only right from a distance. Maybe when we all got back to the World and everybody thought we were heroes for winning it, then it would seem right from there. Or maybe if I made it back and I got old I would think back on it and it would seem right from there. But when the killing started, there was no right or wrong except in the way you did your job, except in the way that you were part of the killing.
What you thought about, what filled you up more than anything, was the being scared and hearing your heart thumping in your temples and all the noises, the terrible noises, the screeches and the booms and the guys crying for their mothers or for their wives.
And exciting. It was exciting, too. Sometimes, when we were waiting to make a move, to go into some area where we hadn’t been before, it was as if the time would never come soon enough. That’s what kept it going somehow, that and the idea that we were better than the Congs. It was that, the knowing that we would win, and the excitement that overcame the being scared. If we just did our job, we would be all right. But I didn’t think it was going to last forever. I was growing too tired. It was good that we were only in Nam for a year.
“Y’all children can relax now,” Peewee said as he stood in the doorway to the hooch. “This war only gonna last about three more days. We got us a body count of four hundred and thirty-three Congs in the last fight.”
“Four hundred and thirty-three?” Johnson looked up to see if Peewee was kidding.
“Yeah, every time we shoot one of them his cousin and his uncle die, too,” Peewee said.
Walowick and Monaco made jokes about the body count, but they ended when Captain Stewart told us that afternoon that we were going out again.
“This area is secure,” Captain Stewart was saying, “so they’re moving the First Cav up to the DMZ, and we’re going to be patrolling the region east of the firebase at the edge of the valley. The marines still control the firebase, so we just have to check on any buildups in the area.”
“Yo, do the Congs know that shit?” Peewee asked. “The Congs know everything,” Johnson said. “Yeah, but do they know they moving out the First Cav and putting us in there?”
“Two things, soldier,” Captain Stewart’s voice hardened. “The first was that I’ve already told you that the area is secure and the second is a question. Are you saying that the First Cav are better soldiers than we are?”
“Fucking A right!” Peewee said.
Captain Stewart’s face turned whit
er as he went over to Peewee. “Where the hell is your pride, soldier?”
“In Chicago, sir. Can I go get it?”
Chapter 21
Captain Stewart put Jamal back into medical again. Peewee said that he did it just so that Jamal could serve him coffee anytime he wanted him to. With Sergeant Dongan gone the squad was down to seven guys again. Gearhart was commanding our squad and two others. The other squads were down to five men each.
“You guys want to switch squads so they’re all equal?” he asked. “If you don’t you’ll probably be out more than the others.”
“We don’t want to switch, sir,” Monaco said.
“That goes for all of us,” Peewee said.
“You talking for the squad now, Peewee?” Gearhart was cleaning his piece.
“Yeah,” Peewee nodded. “I guess so.”
Gearhart wanted to combine the other two squads, but they wouldn’t let him do it. They said that we had to have so many squads in the field, even if it was only on paper.
Brunner got a bad case of hemorrhoids. Gearhart wanted to send him to Chu Lai, but his time was short and he wanted to stay. Gearhart told me and Johnson that Brunner wanted to make Sergeant, First Class.
“Captain going to give it to him?” Johnson asked.
“Could be,” Gearhart said.
“Sucker get through a calendar, you ought to give it to him,” Johnson said.
“I didn’t think you liked him,” Gearhart said.
“You got to like a man make it through a whole calendar over here,” Johnson said.
Things were quiet for a few days, even boring. We heard all kinds of stories about how we were beating back the North Vietnamese.
“Somebody better send them a telegram so they know about it,” Peewee said.
From what I heard from guys from other outfits I thought we were winning, too, but that it was going to be a long time before it was over.
We played Pitty Pat and Dirty Hearts every day. Then Monaco came up with a new game. He found some paper and put down the names of all the movie stars and singers he could think of. Then he passed them around and we played for them. That didn’t last long. Walowick won Mary Wells from Peewee and Peewee wouldn’t give her up. Walowick called Peewee a welcher.
Fallen Angels Page 20
