Fallen Angels (4 page)

“Hey, Johnson, bet you didn’t have nothing this good down in Georgia, huh?” Peewee said.

“You really need to die young, don’t you?” Johnson grunted the words out.

“What you do in Georgia, anyway?” Peewee said. Johnson got up on one elbow and looked over at him. I thought he was mad, but he just grinned at Peewee. “If the man give me a job back home I wouldn’t be doing this job over here,” he said. “Guess you didn’t know that, huh?”

They kept at it for a while, Peewee agitating until I felt that for him it was just some kind of sport. Find somebody big and mean-looking to mess with and then push your luck.

I started writing a letter to Mama. I hadn’t written much during basic training, but now I wanted to, and I really wasn’t sure why. I started writing’about the trip over, remembered that I had already written about that, and started again. The second start was about how I was glad that the war was in Vietnam and not home, but that didn’t sound right, either. I was looking for things to say but everything sounded lame.

The track over the gym in Stuyvesant High School was so small you had to run around it nearly fifteen times to go a mile. As I ran around that day I could hear Mrs. Liebow’s words echo in my ears.

“You have to get out of yourself, Perry,” she had said. “You’re too young to be just an observer in life.”

I was fifteen, and painfully aware that I was “just an observer in life.” I didn’t want to get into what was going on at home, about how Mom seemed to be falling apart, and how I couldn’t think about much else than keeping us together.

Being an observer hadn’t been so bad in Stuyvesant. There was always a way to frame things, to put them into a romantic setting, that made you feel good. Even the loneliness I felt sometimes was okay. I could break the loneliness, the feeling of not belonging to the life that teemed around me, by going to the basketball courts. I was somebody else there: Mr. In-Your-Face, jiving and driving, looping and hooping, staying clean and being mean, the inside rover till the game was over.

But sometimes even that didn’t work. Sometimes, when I was tired and the competition was really rough, things would change for me. There would be a flow of action around me and it would seem as if I were outside of myself, watching myself play ball, watching myself trying to establish a place for myself on the hard park courts. It was then that I would feel a pressure to give in, to let a rebound go over my head, to take the outside shot when I knew I had to take the ball inside. I told Kenny about the feeling, and he hadn’t understood it. I told Mrs. Liebow, my English teacher, and she said that it was what separated heroes from humans, the not giving in, and I hadn’t understood that. It was a weakness in my game, not about being a hero.

Peewee said something that pissed Johnson off, and Johnson started to get off his bunk. Peewee pulled his M-16 across his body.

“Come on,” he said. “I got something for you, Georgia Boy.”

I wanted to say something to Peewee but thought better of it. It came to me that Peewee could be crazy. I caught Jenkins looking at me and shrugged.

The squad we were assigned to came in. They were arguing over who won a volleyball game. They saw us, and one guy beckoned for me to get up. He looked around, and then pointed to another bunk. I got up and moved my gear to it, and he laid on the bunk that I had been on.

“You the cherries?” A tall, thin-faced sergeant.

“We’re the new men,” Peewee said.

“What’s your name?” the sergeant asked.

“My friends call me Peewee. You can call me Mr. Gates.”

“Uh-huh. Well, my name is Simpson and I’m the sergeant of this here squad. I’m gonna tell you guys something,” the sergeant was black with a high voice that seemed to get higher with every word. “I ain’t got but one hundred and twenty days left over here. If we go to Hawaii, then I ain’t got that. Now I ain’t about to let neither one of you fools kill me, you hear?”

“We look like Congs to you?” Peewee said.

“You look like cherries!” the sergeant said. “I’d rather go out and mess with a whole bunch of charlies instead of y’all cherries. That the truth, too!”

I made believe I was scratching my forehead so my hand would cover my face. The guy was strange. Thinking we were going to kill him when we were fighting a war with the Communists was weird.

The rest of the squad consisted of one black guy and four white guys. They played cards in the afternoon, and asked us if we had heard anything more about Hawaii. Later we played volleyball against another squad and won. Sergeant Simpson said that our victory was a good sign.

We checked our gear and watched television in the afternoon. The television was hooked up to a small generator, and we got more noise than picture, but that was okay. We watched a game show that had been taped. I knew most of the answers and impressed everybody.

It started to rain. A lieutenant, not our platoon leader, came in and spoke to Sergeant Simpson. He nodded and then, when the lieutenant had left, told us to pack up our gear. We were going on patrol.

A chopper came in quickly from just over a stand of trees. We were airborne less than a half minute after the chopper had touched down. We skimmed over the treetops for a little under ten minutes before touching down in the landing zone, or LZ, as Simpson called it.

It was exciting, a little scary. This is what I had been trained for. I thought about my knee, if it was going to be okay.

“You could get into surveillance with your test scores,” a lieutenant had said. “Maybe even army intelligence.”

An officer at the classification center had told me that if I could play ball I could always find a post to play for. I chose basketball. I was assigned to the infantry with the understanding that I was going to play ball for Fort Devens. Two good games led to a write-up in the post paper. Then I started dreaming again. Enough write-ups sent to the NBA, and who knew what might happen?

Then there was the game against Fort Monmouth. A quick move at the top of the key, drive through the middle, leap, leap, twist, and jam the ball through the hoop. I had come down amid a mass of sweating bodies, had landed on a sneaker instead of the floor. My knee had twisted. The pain burned through the joint into the thigh. My season was over.

“Perry, wake the fuck up!”

I looked at Sergeant Simpson and saw that he looked genuinely pissed.

We were going past a flat area. Off to the right there were short trees with wide trunks. A quarter mile off to our left there was a wooded area that ran halfway up a small hill. Even from where we walked I could see that near the top of the hill the trees were just charred sticks. On the very top they were black silhouettes against the sky. I looked from side to side, telling myself not to daydream again.

The regular guys in the squad walked differently. They seemed to do a kind of slow lope, lifting their feet more than they had to. I thought it must have been because of all the mud.

Monaco, a sweet-faced Italian kid who looked as scared as Jenkins, was on point-out in front of the squad. The regular squad guys took their positions, leaving me, Peewee, Johnson, and Jenkins in the middle. Simpson said that a plane had spotted two guys with what looked like surveying instruments.

“They could be laying out some kind of assault plans,” he said.

For the first ten minutes I had to wipe my right hand on my fatigues at least a dozen times. I kept imagining VC popping up and me not being ready to fire. We were on flat ground going along a row of small rice paddies. I didn’t see anything. Nobody saw anything.

We walked or, it seemed, wandered for nearly an hour before Simpson called in the chopper to take us back.

We went to a pickup zone that was different from where we had landed and squatted in the knee-high grass. Simpson and this corporal named Brunner kept us covered while we mounted the chopper. Then they were in and the chopper was off. Then we were back to our base area.

“Y’all looked okay out there,” Simpson said. “You got to stay alert like that all the time.”

We started back toward the camp. It was less than a hundred yards. We had been told that there were mine fields and trip flares planted around the perimeter. Sergeant Simpson had a map of our way back in. The path we had to walk up was covered by a brace of M-60 machine guns. The guys manning them looked bored.

There could have been a whooshing noise, I wasn’t sure. I just heard Sergeant Simpson yelling for us to stay on the path. The other regular squad guys were already down.

I was in the dirt. My eyes were closed. I could hear somebody screaming.

“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!”

Noises. Somebody saying that it was a booby trap. Sergeant Simpson talking into the radio. I opened my eyes; everybody else was up. I got up as quickly as I could.

Some of the guys were looking around, their weapons moving, shaking almost as if they were alive, looking for an enemy to fire upon.

“Keep those pieces still! Keep ’em down!” Sergeant Simpson’s voice had changed. He barked commands. “Get into the camp! Get into the camp!” Brunner was dragging somebody. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see anything. It was light out, but all I could see was a few feet in front of me. My vision didn’t go any further.

We got back to the camp. Two sergeants opened the barbed wire fence. They pulled the wounded man in. I looked.

There was a shard of metal protruding from Jenkins’ chest. The blood gurgled out of the wound it made and sprayed along the concave metallic surface. He tried to bring his hand to it, to touch it. A medic had reached him and pushed his hand away. Jenkins’ face was white and twisted as he struggled to look down at his wound. There were bubbles on the wound as he struggled for a final breath, and then that, too, stopped.

“You got the tags?” The supply guy had a long face and his mouth twisted oddly when he spoke.

“How many bags you got there?” There was a neat stack of dark bags on the shelf.

“Enough,” he said, handing me the heavy plastic bag. “What he do, step on a mine?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what happens,” he said. “They sneak in and plant a mine on your path, and you don’t know where the hell to walk.”

“Oh.”

I took the bag out to where Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll waited. They lifted Jenkins by the shoulders of his uniform. Sergeant Simpson used a first aid patch to pick up something that had erupted from the hellish wound on Jenkins’ chest and fallen on the ground near him. He placed it in the bag at his side.

I thought I would throw up. I stood along with the other guys in the squad until the bag had been zipped up. We started back to the hooch. On the way I looked back at the body bag again. Sergeant Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll were talking together, the body bag was at their feet. I turned away and went to the hooch.

Monaco came over and sat on the edge of my bunk. For a while he didn’t say anything. Then he put his hand on my shoulder.

“You know him?”

“No,” I said. “I just met him at the replacement company.”

“Sometimes it goes like that,” Monaco said. He started to say something else, then shrugged it off, and left.

I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen before had been my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready, walking into the darkened church with the family and sitting in the first pews. But Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before. Seeing him lying there like that, his mouth and eyes open, had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.

The neat pile of body bags was waiting for the rest of us. There were enough there — the supply clerk had reached for the top one without even looking — to know that they expected that many of us would be going home in them.

I didn’t know what to think about what had happened. I didn’t know what to feel. I touched my fingers to the palm of my hand. I could feel my fingers. It was only inside that I was numb.

Lieutenant Carroll, our platoon leader, came in. He was a quiet guy, with dark hair and dark, calm eyes and an uneasy smile. I never felt that he was comfortable with himself. I hadn’t had a chance to talk with him yet, but sometimes I would see him drift off into his own daydreams and be embarrassed when we caught him at it.

When the old guys — the guys that had been through it before — saw him, they put their cards down, and their magazines, and gathered around him. I got up and nudged Peewee, who was lying facedown on his bunk.

Lieutenant Carroll took off his helmet and bowed his head.

“Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, OLord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.”

In the morning, in the mess tent, I asked Lieutenant Carroll why he had called Jenkins an angel warrior.

“My father used to call all soldiers angel warriors,” he said. “Because usually they get boys to fight wars. Most of you aren’t old enough to vote yet.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” he said.

“How come you’re not retired?”

Lieutenant Carroll stayed in our hooch for a while and helped check our supplies. He asked if we were short or anything, and Monaco said we could use some more three-day passes.

“I got a letter from Virginia Union.” A brother we called Brew sat on a footlocker next to Lieutenant Carroll. His real name was Brewster, so I could see where Brew came from. “They said I can probably get into the theology school there but they can’t accept me formally until six months before my admission date.”

“Did you write to that school in New York I told you about?” Lieutenant Carroll asked.

“No,” Brew grinned. “From what I’ve heard about New York, the temptations might be too great for me.”

“If the Temptations don’t get you then you got to look out for Smokey Bobinson and the Miracles,” Peewee called out.

“You know” — Lieutenant Carroll had spread all the extra first aid packs on the floor in front of him — “my brother went to theology school and I almost followed him.”