Fallen Angels (11 page)

I started telling him how he was wrong, but he cut me off. He told me not to fall asleep just because I was on a mission of peace.

We had to go into each hut with little gifts. That was to make sure that there weren’t any VC hiding out among the civilians. The people were the same. Small, withered women, skin creased over onto itself; dark, life-weary eyes that had seen everything.

I felt huge walking among them. I towered over them. I was huge, and I was armed to the teeth, and these were not my people. Maybe, they did look at me as if I were the killer in Lobel’s movie. Then, on the other hand, the hell with Lobel. I wasn’t a killer.

The Vietnamese didn’t look up at me. They looked down, or at my chest. Sometimes, when they did look directly at us, they would shade their eyes with their hands as if they were looking at something very far away. I smiled at an old man and he nodded his head. I wondered what that meant. I had been trying to be friendly, and he just nodded. Did he know that I wanted him to like me?

Walowick found a place that had jars filled with some kind of paste. He thought they might have been Molotov cocktails and called Lieutenant Carroll over. Carroll smelled the jars and shrugged it off.

“It’s some kind of salve,” he said. “Maybe it’s good for jock itch or something.”

We were supposed to smile a lot and treat the people with dignity. They were supposed to think we were the good guys. That bothered me a little. I didn’t like having to convince anybody that I was the good guy. That was where we were supposed to start from. We, the Americans, were the good guys. Otherwise it didn’t make the kind of sense I wanted it to make.

I saw Brunner pocket a small statue from one of the huts. I told him about it and he gave me the finger.

“Maybe you’ll be a better dude when you come back in your next life,” I said. “Who knows, cockroaches might be in by then.”

He took a step toward me, and Johnson — I hadn’t seen him nearby — stepped next to me. Brunner looked at Johnson, then turned on his heel and walked away.

“He ain’t spit,” Johnson said.

Johnson went off and started looking at a pig that was tied in back of one of the huts. Johnson was different than I thought he was at first. He didn’t seem that sharp, but he knew things. He knew when somebody was doing something that he didn’t like. He knew when one of the black guys was being messed with. And when he knew something he put his butt on the line. That was Johnson. Maybe back in Savannah he was different. But the war made him a certain somebody. The same way that it made Monaco a certain somebody. Monaco was the point man. Johnson had the pig, the big sixty, the heavy ’chine. Who the hell was I?

I found Peewee trying to play a game with some Vietnamese kids.

“These little fuckers trying to cheat me,” Peewee said.

The kids were laughing, having a good time. I told Peewee about the salve that Walowick had found and he wanted to go get some.

“Why, you got jock itch?”

“They got medicine for the stuff they be catching over here,” Peewee said, “Right?”

“Right.”

“And we over here, right?”

“Right.”

We slept in hooches that were surrounded by sandbags. There were vents on both ends, and sometimes they worked. Usually, though, the hooches were hot as anything. We had put straw and leaves on the roof of our hooch back at the base to keep the sun from baking us, but it didn’t help that much. The huts that the Vietnamese lived in were made on bamboo frames and covered with woven bamboo slats and dried flat leaves. The joints weren’t nailed. They were notched and tied with either rope or wire. Some of the huts had slats that could be adjusted to let the light in. They were cool enough inside, especially the ones with the high ceilings.

Peewee and I found the hut with the salves and went inside. There were two women and a kid sitting on the floor. One of the women was old, the other not much more than a girl. The kid was two at most and didn’t have any pants on. The whole place stunk of urine and God knows what!

“What medicine good fo’?” Peewee asked in his best “Let’s go talk to the Indians” dialogue.

The two women just looked at us.

“What medicine good fo ?” Peewee asked again. “My-America number one!” the girl said. “Vietcong number ten!”

“Yeah, I know we number one,” Peewee said. “But what the damn medicine good fo’?”

I took a bottle of salve, put some on my finger — the smell of it was awful — and put it near my mouth. I raised my eyebrows.

“No-no,” the old woman took the salve from me, took some of it on two bony fingers, and started rubbing it in my hair.

She said something to the younger woman, and she reached up and felt my hair. I remembered in the orientation lecture that you weren’t supposed to touch the head of a Vietnamese person.

“If they rubbing our heads for luck I’m gonna bum this mother down,” Peewee laughed. He was comfortable with the Vietnamese.

We tried to work out what all the salves were for. The first salve was something that was supposed to make hair grow. We couldn’t figure out most of the others, but we did figure that one was to rub on a girl’s stomach to either get her pregnant or after she got pregnant, we couldn’t figure out which, and the last was to put on your feet.

Peewee paid them three hundred piasters, about three dollars, for four bottles of the hair stuff and the feet stuff. He said that he was going to take the stuff home and make a fortune growing hair. I told him not to mix them up; we didn’t want people growing hair between their toes.

A chopper brought in some hot food for us and some grain and a box of chicks for the people in the hamlet.

Brunner told Carroll that he thought that one of the older girls in the hamlet was a VC. Carroll told him not to worry about it.

“We re not playing I Declare War today,” Lieutenant Carroll said. “That comes next week. This week you have a choice of stickball, ring-a-levio, and pacification.”

There was another outfit doing a pacification project a few kilometers from us, and the chopper that had picked them up was waiting with our chopper. We loaded up and both choppers cut their engines. Then — bingo — they both started up, and we raced back to the base. Our chopper lost by a few seconds.

When we got back there was a lot of yelling in the camp. We were having roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, and carrot cake again for supper, and everybody was pissed. An officer wanted to start an investigation and somebody else wanted to frag the cooks.

It wasn’t the greatest supper in the world, and the cooks served it in flak jackets.

Lieutenant Carroll said that we were going on another pacification mission the next day, then an hour later he came and told us that we weren’t.

“How come?” Brew was trying to increase his vocabulary and was working on a quiz in Reader’s Digest.

“That’s just the way it is,” Carroll said.

Later Monaco heard from Sergeant Simpson that Captain Stewart got us out .of it.

“You can’t get a body count on a pacification run,” Monaco said.

Peewee got a letter from Earlene that said she still loved him even though she married somebody else. She said she was pregnant, and if the baby was a boy she was going to name it Harry after him. Also, Lobel got a letter from his father. The letter was really full of crap. He read it out loud. The whole thing was about how could he go into the war and kill innocent people.

“Young men all over the country are burning their draft cards and resisting the war machine,” Lobel read. “He probably got ‘war machine’ from one of his fifteen-year-old girlfriends.”

Lobel didn’t make a big thing over it, but I didn’t think it was really that cool with him. I sat with him at chow and listened for a while as he talked about movies. Then I asked him about the letter.

“You know why this letter sucks?” he asked. “How come?”

“Because I joined the friggin’ army in the first place so he would stop thinking I was a faggot,” Lobel said. “Now he thinks I’m a creep because I’m in the army.”

“What the hell does he know?”

“You know what I hope?” Lobel asked. “I hope I get killed over here so he has to fit that shit between his vodka martinis.”

“The next time we call for artillery, we’ll aim right at your pad at home,” I said.

“You know what that jackass doesn’t know?” Lobel said, looking away from me. “He don’t know that now I can go back home and blow him away. That’s what I’m fucking trained for, man. That’s what I’m fucking trained for.”

Mail call. Got a letter from Kenny. He said a guy is starting a basketball league for kids from nine to eleven. He said he didn’t think he was that good in basketball, but he wanted to enter. Everybody on the winning team would get a trophy. He needed ten dollars though, and Mama didn’t have the money.

I answered him right away. I told him that he would do just fine in basketball. I put twenty dollars in the letter for him.

It was good having Kenny need me. I almost cried as I thought about him. It had been tough on me not being able to go to college, but things had been tough on him, too. In a neighborhood where you had to be tough just to get to the store with money for a loaf of bread, Kenny wasn’t tough at all. I had been sort of a father to him since our folks split, and I know he missed me.

I thought about what Lobel had said. Here he was with a gun ready to kill people to prove that he wasn’t queer, and I was ready to kill people because I wanted to get away from home.

I told myself I would write to Kenny more, and to Mama, too.

“Hey, Perry, what you thinking about?”

“My brother,” I said to Peewee.

“Why don’t you think about girls so we can get some more sex in the atmosphere?”

“Right on.”

Two American Red Cross workers came around and passed out candy and stuff. They were the first American women we had seen in a long while, and the guys just kept looking at them. A funny thing happened. One of them — her name was Sam — asked me what I was going to do when I got home. The question embarrassed me. I was so embarrassed I think she felt bad.

She made a few jokes, and I laughed harder than I should have, and she went off to the next guy.

I remembered sitting in the counselor’s office my second week in high school. The counselor, a short, red-haired woman, with blue eyes that bulged slightly

from a thin face, had asked me what I had wanted to do in life.

“I’d like to be a philosopher,” I had said.

She had started laughing and apologizing at the same time. It was simply not the kind of thing, she explained, that she had expected.

I was hurt. I didn’t even know what a philosopher did for sure, but her laughing messed me up. After that I never told anyone I wanted to be a philosopher again, or even a writer. I started telling people in school that I wanted to work on a newspaper. Around the block I told people that I either wanted to play ball or teach. But I was always uncomfortable with the question. Even when Kenny had asked me, I couldn’t come up with anything easily.

“Something important?” he had offered.

“Yeah.” It was a good answer, and we both had a feel for what it meant.

Bad news. A patrol from Echo Company went out on a pacification thing to the same hamlet we went to, and two guys got hit. They were on their way into the place when it happened. They searched the whole place but didn’t find any VC. Everybody felt bad about that. Then we were told we had to go to the hamlet again.

“What the VC do is to go in when we leave and mess up anybody that got help from us. If they see they got some grain from us or some pills that they didn’t turn over to them, then they kill the head of the village,” Sergeant Simpson said.

“What we got to do,” Sergeant Simpson went on, “is to lay an ambush outside the hamlet. If they come in, they got to fight their way out.”

“How about the people in the hamlet?” Brew asked.

“We got to show them that we can be peaceful if they peaceful with us, or we can mess them up,” Sergeant Simpson said.

“Pacify them to death!” Peewee said.

“Something like that,” Sergeant Simpson said.

It was a platoon thing, but not really a full platoon thing. Our squad was cool, but the other squads were all cut down to four or five men. It was a platoon on paper, but it was just paper, not men. We mounted the choppers an hour before nightfall. We were at the LZ in a little over ten minutes. Sergeant Simpson laid out a new route to the hamlet.

We cut through some dense underbrush for a half hour before we got near the hamlet. Sergeant Simpson laid out the ambush. It was simple enough. We were on one side of a small cemetery. The reports had it that the VC came past the cemetery into the hamlet at night. They terrorized the people in the hamlet, taking what they called a “tax” and killing anybody they thought might have been informing on them. We were supposed to surprise them, to make them pay for coming to the hamlet.

Monaco, as usual, was point. He was about forty meters beyond the cemetery. The way we figured they had to pass him to get to the cemetery. We had claymore mines at the end of the cemetery, and then the rest of the platoon stretched out in a straight line along what we had been told was the path the VC took. Johnson and Brew would be at the end of the line we formed.

We moved in quietly, with Sergeant Simpson placing each of us, and making sure that we knew where the others were.

“Try not to kill each other if you can help it,” he said.

We dug in. I had five sandbags, which I filled and put in front of me. Suddenly they weren’t big enough, or solid enough. I wanted something else, a wall, maybe. I could rest my piece on the sandbags, but it didn’t look very convincing.

Silence. There wasn’t to be any communication between us in case the VC had lookouts.

Suppose, I thought, they had spotted us already?

The only radio we had, a PRC-io, or Prick 10 as they called it, was near Lieutenant Carroll. Brew had it. I didn’t want the radio. The antenna made you stick out like a sore thumb, and drew a lot of fire.

It got dark. There were bugs. Somewhere in the distance I heard frogs. The night was filled with noises. After a while it dawned on me that I couldn’t see anything. There was a moon above us, but it didn’t give us enough light. I wanted each VC to have his own light shining right on him.