Fallen Angels (13 page)

“How about you, Perry?” Lobel looked at me. “Did you see them?”

“During the fight?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I saw their faces over the muzzle fire. I just fired where I thought they were. I’ve never aimed at anything. I’ve never seen anything to shoot at.”

Lobel looked down at his hands again.

Sergeant Simpson came in and said that Captain Stewart wanted me over at headquarters.

I went over and there were two colonels there. One was a marine corps guy. I started to salute but the marine corps guy just walked away from me.

Stewart motioned for me to sit down.

They had a guy tied up in the middle of the room. I guessed he was VC. A Vietnamese interpreter was talking to him.

I couldn’t understand any Vietnamese, but I listened all the same. An orderly had made coffee and passed it around. He brought me a cup and I thanked him with a nod. It was black, and it didn’t have any sugar but I didn’t want to get up and get the milk and sugar next to the marine colonel.

“What’s he talking about, Vinh?” the colonel asked.

“He says he’s a fisherman. He says he works on Song Bong River, but he doesn’t have an accent like that, he has an accent from the north. Then he say that the VC make him fight with them, but he doesn’t want to. He says that if he is killed his people don’t get his body from the VC. He doesn’t want to be buried under a tree in the forest. That’s what the VC do.”

“Tell him I don’t believe a word he’s saying,” the marine colonel said. “Tell him that if he doesn’t tell me the truth pretty soon I’m going to have to shoot him.”

The Vietnamese spoke to the prisoner again. This time his words were harsher. He slapped him a few times, then took his gun out.

The VC was rocking and talking as fast as he could. His voice rose as he spoke. The Vietnamese officer hit the prisoner with his pistol butt.

“Is he saying the same thing?” The army colonel asked. His name tag read Mulig.

“Now he say they make him fight with the Second Division,” the interpreter said. “He says he hates army life.”

“The Second?” The marine colonel looked at the VC as if he were seeing him for the first time. “He actually said the Second?”

“That’s what he said,” the interpreter reported.

“That’s the fifth one we got from the Second in the last two days. Something’s up. Get him over to Chu Lai to intelligence there. Let them work him over for a bit.”

The marine colonel and the army colonel both left. Captain Stewart talked to the major who stayed behind for a few minutes and then the major left. The orderly went to Captain Stewart and spoke to him. I heard him mention my name. Stewart, who had been leaning on the edge of a desk, came over to me.

“Your name Perry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You wrote the letter to Lieutenant Carroll’s wife?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Damn good letter, boy.” Captain Stewart wiped away some tobacco juice from his chin with his thumb. “You know how to type? I can use somebody in here who can type and speak English.”

“I can’t type, sir.”

“Well, it’s still a damn good letter,” he said. He turned and walked away.

I finished the coffee as two guys blindfolded the VC to take him back to Chu Lai. He was trembling.

“They found some tortured marines up near the demilitarized zone,” the orderly said. “He probably thinks they’re going to do the same thing to him.”

“Tortured?”

“They tie them to trees and pull their guts out,” the orderly said. “Then they just leave them there. That marine colonel said when they found them they were still alive and begging for somebody to kill them.”

“For the marines to kill them? They begged for the marines to kill them?”

“Yeah,” the orderly said. “And now they think that a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regulars are coming through Laos and Cambodia now.”

“Damn!”

“To say the least,” the orderly said.

Back at the hooch I told Peewee what the orderly had said. Peewee asked what had happened to the truce, and I told him I didn’t know.

We had a halfhearted volleyball game against some guys from HQ company. They beat us easily and made a lot of noise about how good they were. Peewee wanted to take a shot at one of them. When I got back to the hooch after the game, I saw the Vietnamese house girl putting something on the end of my bunk. I went to see what it was and saw that it was Lieutenant Carroll’s pictures. For some reason I put them with my stuff.

The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into his coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.

We got a new platoon leader, a Lieutenant Gearhart, and he chewed tobacco. He could have been twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, no older. Captain Stewart brought him around and introduced him.

“The first thing Lieutenant Gearhart is going to do is to make sure that we get some gooks for Lieutenant Carroll,” Stewart said. “Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Gearhart answered.

“Where you from?” Monaco asked.

“Wilmington, Delaware,” he said.

“What the hell do they have in Delaware?”

“The DuPont company, mostly,” he said. “And Delaware State. I played football for Delaware.”

“You any good?” Brunner asked.

“Damn straight.”

“What position you play?”

“Linebacker.”

“You’re too small to play linebacker,” Monaco said.

“I played it,” Gearhart said.

“When you get in country?”

“Two months ago.”

“Where you been?” Peewee asked. “Mr. Cong been asking for you.”

“Taking reconnaisance training,” Lieutenant Gearhart said. “I was supposed to be with the Seventy-fifth’s program, but they needed officers here, so here I am.”

“How are things going down in the south?” “Okay. They think we’ve seen the worst of it.” That afternoon, orders came through for Brunner and Lobel to be promoted to sergeant, and everybody else in the squad moved up to corporal. I didn’t even know that Lobel had been a corporal. The word was that everybody was getting short on people. “Say, Peewee?”

“What?”

“Why you think Lieutenant Carroll got it?”

“The Man dialed his number,” Peewee said. “You really believe that?” I asked.

“Can’t handle nothing deeper,” Peewee said.

He got up and started fixing his mosquito netting. He had got some new netting from a guy in supply and was tacking it around his bunk.

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.