“We’re all dead over here, Monaco,” I said. “We re all dead and just hoping that we come back to life when we get into the World again.”
“Yeah…” He patted me on the arm. Somebody called my name and I looked up. It was the doctor. He came and started wheeling me into the operating room. Monaco held my hand until the doctor, rolling the gumey I was on, pulled it from his hand. I had never been in love before. Maybe this was what it was like, the way I felt for Monaco and Peewee and Johnson and the rest of my squad. I hoped this was what it was like.
I dreamt about the Apollo Theater. I dreamt that I was in the Apollo and the Shirelles were there. There were a hundred girls in the audience, and they were all going crazy over the Shirelles. Peewee was there, too. He was saying something about the Shirelles not being so hot. I told him he was crazy. He said they had better singers in the projects in Chicago. I told him he was a Chicago fool. We were having a good time, me and Peewee.
Then I heard my name. I looked at Peewee to see if he was calling me, but he had his back toward me. I stood next to him and looked at his face but he was watching the stage. And still I heard my name being called.
“Perry!”
I opened my eyes. There was a nurse. She wasn’t pretty. Her eyes were brown, tired.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hi, yourself, soldier,” she answered. There was more life to the eyes. “How you feeling?”
“Okay, how’s my leg?”
“You won’t be dancing on it for a while, but it’ll come around.”
She gave me something to drink that tasted like orange juice and castor oil. She fixed my pillow and asked me where I was from.
“New York,” I said. “Where you from?”
“Puerto Rico,” she said, smiling. When she smiled she was very pretty. “Santurce. You know where it is?”
I didn’t. She started to leave and I called her back. “Look, you see a guy named Gates? Harold Gates?” “Could be around here,” she said. “You get any pain in the leg, you call the nurse. Try not to ask for painkillers unless you really need them, though, okay?”
“Sure.”
My mouth was dry and tasted like gasoline residue. The nurse wheeled me out into a small room. There was another guy there, he was bandaged around his chest. He was staring at the wall.
“How you doing?” he said.
“Okay. How do my legs look?”
He looked down at them. “They’re there,” he said.
Peewee found me two days later. He was in a wheelchair and came up alongside the bed like gang-busters.
“I got full charge of the numbers racket in this hospital,” he said. “What you want to play?”
“How the hell you doing, Peewee?”
“What number you want to play?” he insisted. “How about 3-1-2?” I said.
“That’s too long for me to write down,” he said. “I’m out of here in two weeks.”
“Back to the States?”
“Where else I’m going to go?”
“How’s your wound?”
“Nothing to it,” Peewee said. “He cut enough to make me have to have another damn operation when I get back to the States, that’s all.”
“Is it serious?”
“Serious enough to get my ass home,” Peewee said. “I’m gonna say a prayer to Buddha for the boy who done it soon’s I get a chance.”
“They didn’t tell me anything yet,” I said.
“If they say you ain’t hurt bad enough to go home you got to play crazy. Tell them you keep seeing pink-ass zebras running around the room and vou want to catch one of them and eat him.”
“I’ll tell them something,” I said.
“They ain’t getting me back in this war. We been in this shit too long, man” — Peewee shook his head — “and it’s too damn heavy.”
The nurse from Santurce was named Celia Vilas. She got us some beer, and me and Monaco drank it on the night before Monaco had to go back to the boonies. Peewee couldn’t drink anything except plain water and a little warm milk. We did a lot of drinking and a lot of crying. Me and Peewee didn’t want Monaco to have to go back. Monaco didn’t want to go, either. But he didn’t feel it was right to leave the squad unless he had to.
Peewee got sick, threw up, and busted all his stitches. The doctors had to sew him up again, and I realized that Peewee was hurt worse than I thought he was. Monaco said he would come by in the morning before his plane left and say good-bye. He didn’t. He left a note at the desk, and Celia gave it to me. It said that I had to wear a tux to his wedding.
I got to sit up in a wheelchair, and the leg felt all right in spite of the cast. It felt good. I hoped it wasn’t. I could make it with a limp. I just didn’t want to go back to the boonies anymore.
We got a call from Lieutenant Gearhart on the ham radio network. He told us the other guys in the squad were all right. It was nice of him to call us, but it wasn’t true. Monaco wasn’t all right. Monaco was like me and Peewee. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren’t all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.
He also told us that Captain Stewart had been promoted.
It was two weeks before they took the cast off. The doctor looked at the X rays and then at the wound.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay,” I heard myself saying.
He examined the chart again, then went to the foot of the bed. “You’re Richard Perry, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was your stateside station?”
“Fort Devens.”
“Why were you in combat?” he said. “You’ve got a medical profile. Did you volunteer?”
A butterfly, maybe a moth, had gotten into the room. It flittered about the ceiling, then landed on the foot of the bed opposite me.
“No, sir. They said the profile from Devens hadn’t arrived.”
He looked at the record again. “It was here since, oh yes, the eighth of March. I guess it was late. You’re going to be sent home. This is your second Purple Heart, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hope it’s your last, Corporal.”
Peewee had another operation on his stomach for something called adhesions, but he was still scheduled to leave with me.
We kept up with the war in Stars and Stripes, but it seemed different in the papers. In the papers there didn’t seem to be any cost. A hill was taken, or a hamlet, and the only body counts that were given were for the Congs. Once in a while there would be mention of our own killed, but the numbers didn’t seem to even match the numbers I saw in the hospital unit.
President Johnson was saying that the United States was willing to stop its bombing if the North Vietnamese were ready to begin serious talks.
We looked for word of our own guys, of the squad, but it was as if we weren’t even there. The papers mentioned something about the Third NVA, a crack Cong regiment, being pushed out of the Nui Loc Son basin, but it was only that, a mention.
A sergeant I got to play chess with told me that the personnel sergeant would look up friends for you if you gave him a few dollars. I found him and gave him ten bucks to look up Judy Duncan. The guy, a tall red-faced spec four with freckles and a shock of red hair, told me he would look her up and that I could leave my name and come by later.
“You a relative, or just a friend?”
“Just a friend,” I said. “But I’m shipping out for the States and…”
He had already turned back to his papers, so I left.
Peewee stayed in his bed for a day and a half. He said he didn’t want anything to happen to the wound.
“I’m getting out of here,” he said, “if I got to put some Scotch tape on this sucker.”
Waiting for word. Monaco was far away now, and so was Johnson. They were already names in my past. I would think of them, worry about them, but for the moment I was just
hoping for the Freedom Bird to take me back to the World.
Word came. Me and Peewee had orders to be on the same plane back, but my orders were on a different set of papers than Peewee’s. We read them together. I was on crutches, but the leg was feeling stronger. I felt a sharp pain every now and then. I thought it might have been shrapnel, but I wouldn’t complain. Not now, not until I was back in the World again.
We were lined up, waiting to get on the plane. The line wasn’t that rigid. Half the guys were on crutches or in some kind of bandages. We all talked nervously, not looking at the stack of silver caskets that were being loaded on. They would be going back to the World with us. Me and Peewee kidded a guy from the 159th Transportation Battalion who had lost part of his left hand about how he should have taken one of his boats home when he had the chance.
“Perry?”
The red-haired clerk had a clipboard. It was the guy I had asked about Judy Duncan. The name tag read “Witt.” I tensed as he came near me. The stream flashed in my mind. The sound of the crickets in the darkness.
“Yeah?”
“Your friend didn’t make it,” he said.
“Didn’t make it?” I looked at him. “I’m talking about a woman. Her name is Duncan.”
“Yeah, Judy Duncan,” he said. “She got transferred to a field hospital and it got hit. Sorry.”
In the distance there were helicopters headed toward the mountains. Headed toward the hell of an LZ. I turned away.
A plane landed. GIs came tumbling through the doors and out into the hot Vietnamese sun. They lined up and started marching toward us from the other side of the field. A major near us jumped into a jeep and went across the field to meet them. They stopped while the major talked to the officer leading them.
The major returned and sat in his jeep.
Judy Duncan. I forgot what part of Texas she was from. I hadn’t known her, not really. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry that Texas was so far away and that nobody there would know about her, how this part of her life had been, what she had seen, or how she had felt at the end. They would get a telegram, and a body, but they wouldn’t know.
The caskets were almost completely loaded into the tail end of the C-47. They were there together, but they had died alone. Maybe some of them had been friends. I turned away.
They finished loading the caskets, and the major drove his jeep around the front of the plane and signaled the officer with the new guys.
They marched them by us to the orientation barracks. They were supposed to be looking straight ahead, but they were looking at us. We tried to straighten up the best we could. It wasn’t the wounds that kept us bent, that tugged at our shoulders, so much as it was the fatigue. We were tired of this war.
We got to Osaka and the C-47 picked up some more caskets. The GIs were spread on other planes and me and Peewee talked a lieutenant into putting us both on a flight to Fort Ord, in California. I made him promise he’d take some leave with me in New York. Peewee said he’d go, but he knew Harlem couldn’t touch Chicago.
I was telling him about the wonders of Harlem when I noticed he was shaking. I asked if his stomach was bothering him, and he said no, that he just couldn’t believe he was out of the Nam. The stewardess came over and offered us Cokes. I think she was embarrassed that we were holding hands.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to relax. Peewee fell asleep and turned away from me. The stewardess came by and smiled.
“He looked tired,” she said.
I nodded. She went on.
I took the thin magazine from the pouch in front of me and began to thumb through it. I felt self-conscious, as if I shouldn’t be there. My mind began to wander, as I knew it would, back to the boonies. I was on patrol again. Monaco was on point. Peewee and Walowick followed him. Lobel and Brunner were next, then Johnson, the sixty cradled in his arm as if it were a child. We were walking the boonies, past rice paddies, toward yet another hill. I was in the rear, and for some reason I turned back. Behind me, trailing the platoon, were the others. Brew, Jenkins, Sergeant Dongan, Turner, and Lewis, the new guys, and Lieutenant Carroll.
I knew I was mixing my prayers, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted God to care for them, to keep them whole. I knew they were thinking about me and Peewee.
Peewee stirred in his uneasy sleep. The plane droned on. A fat man complained that they didn’t have the wine he wanted. We were headed back to the World.
Fallen Angels Page 23
