Fallen Angels

“Somebody must have told them suckers I was coming.”

“Told who?” I asked.

“The Congs, man. Who you think I’m talking ’bout?”

“Why you think somebody told them you were coming?”

“’Cause I don’t see none of ’em around here. They don’t want their butts kicked.”

“Yeah, okay.” I looked at the guy’s name tag. It read “Gates.” “Hey, Gates, I’ll tell you as soon as I see some Congs.”

“I’m going on in the bathroom,” he said. “Make sure they ain’t none in there.”

“Right.”

I watched him wade through a sea of GIs, stopping now and again to talk to one of them.

“Does he really think we’re in Vietnam already?” Specialist, Fifth Class Judy Duncan looked sharp in her dress uniform as she leaned against the Coke machine. Most of us were in fatigues, the army’s work clothes. I had been sitting next to Judy on the flight from Massachusetts. She had brought along an assortment of snacks to eat on the plane and was now digging into a bag of potato chips as we waited for the plane to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska, on our way to Vietnam.

“He’s just a clown,” I said. “On the plane he asked a captain to wake him up when we reached Cong City.”

“Where you say you were from?”

“New York,” I answered. “You?”

“I tell most people I’m from Dallas,” she said. “But I’m really from Irving. That’s right outside of Dallas. I don’t think anybody is really from Dallas anymore.”

“You took advanced training at Fort Devens?” “Unh-uh. Sam Houston, in Texas. I did basic there and then went right into medical school. I got assigned to the hospital in Devens, but it got boring.”

“Now you going to see the world?”

“Something like that,” she said. She had a nice smile. “I think somebody figures if I see Nam first, everything else is going to look good to me.”

The plane had been half empty coming from Massachusetts to Anchorage. We picked up about fifty more guys in Anchorage, most of them infantry from Fort Lewis. There were a few nurses with the group, too, and Judy went and sat with them.

We were served dinner shortly after we were airborne, but I wasn’t hungry. I usually can’t eat when I’m nervous, and going to Nam made me nervous. The only reason I was going anyway was because of a paperwork mess up. At first my unit was scheduled to go to Nam, but a doctor at Fort Devens had said that my knee was too bad for combat duty. I was assigned to a supply company while I waited for new orders. But then my old company didn’t go to Nam, they went to Germany instead — which was cool because there wasn’t any fighting going on over there — and I got orders for Nam.

“Look at it this way, Perry,” the captain had said. “The only reason you’re going to Nam is that it takes forever to process a medical profile. Once it catches up with you, you’ll be headed home. In the meantime you’ll get to Nam, they’ll put you behind a desk in some headquarters company, and the worst thing that’ll happen to you is that you catch a social disease in downtown Saigon that’ll rot your twinkie off.”

I hadn’t been too worried about going to Nam. From what I had heard, the fighting was almost over, anyway.

Our next stop was Osaka, Japan, and I slept most of the way. We landed at a commercial airport because of some kind of disturbance at the military facilities. There was supposed to be a change of planes, but they didn’t have another plane available until the next morning. A tall, square-shouldered first lieutenant gave out meal tickets, and we were told we could use them at the airport cafeteria. The people at the cafeteria were civilians, and they didn’t want any part of our meal tickets, even though a sergeant tried to explain to the head of the cafeteria that the U.S. Army would redeem them. Two corporals made some noise about taking the cafeteria over. What finally went down was that we all bought our own dinners. Typical army.

We spent the rest of the night sleeping on benches in the airport. A lot of Japanese civilians gave us the once-over. I bought a few souvenirs to send home, a little parasol for Mom and some Japanese comics for my brother Ken. By morning the cafeteria mess was straightened out, and we ate anything we wanted. I talked with Judy at breakfast, and she told me how she had wanted to be a garbageman when she was a kid.

“The trucks were just the best things I had ever seen in my life,” she said. She had an order of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a small mountain of toast that was disappearing quickly. “When I found out I couldn’t be a garbageman, I settled for being a movie star, but it was definitely second-best.”

She asked me what I had wanted to be when I was a kid, and I told her that most of the time I had wanted to work in a drugstore and wear a white coat with the buttons on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” she shook her head approvingly. “That’s what I like about you, Perry, you know all the good stuff. And buttons on the shoulders are definitely the good stuff.”

When the plane took off for the final hop to Vietnam, the conversations got quieter. Everybody who could was looking out of the windows.

“Okay, listen up!” A sergeant stood in the aisles with a clipboard. “We re scheduled to arrive at Tan Son Nhut, the ree-public of Vietnam, at 1400 hours. When you deplane, you will form four ranks in the area designated by Lieutenant Wilson. There will be no grab-ass, no excessive running off at the mouth, and no wandering around. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant!” came the familiar chorus.

“You will have your gear ready to deplane the moment we touch down. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

I had to go to the john. I thought about it for a while and looked back toward the plane’s johns. Too late. The line already stretched hallway down the aisle. It was 1320 hours, twenty minutes past one o’clock civilian time. We’d be in Nam in less than an hour. I thought of writing Mom and took out my paper. All I could think of was the date: September 15, 1967-

“Hey, Perry.” Judy was leaning over my shoulder.

“How’s it going?”

“Okay. Look, I just found out the nurses are going right to Chu Lai. I just wanted to wish you luck.

“Hey, thanks.” I shook her hand. “Where’s Chu Lai?”

“Who knows?” she shrugged.

Hot. Muggy. Bright. Muggy. That was the airport at Tan Son Nhut. We deplaned, followed Lieutenant Wilson across the field into an area in front of some Quonset huts, and started forming ranks. It took a while. The sergeant with the clipboard came along and tried to encourage us as best he could.

“You faggots can’t even line up straight, how you gonna fight?’’ he shouted.

He kept on yelling and Lieutenant Wilson started yelling, and we finally got in order. Then a captain came out, and we were turned over to him. The sergeant’s clipboard was turned over to him, too.

“Medical personnel assigned to the Sixty-seventh Group or the 312th or the Twenty-third Battalion fall out and get in those buses over there. Everybody else stand at ease.”

When the medics fell out, Judy waved to me again, and some of the guys around me told me to go give her a kiss.

“That’s what they do in the war movies,” one guy said.

I didn’t really know Judy, and I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to kiss her in front of everybody, even if I did. We watched the medics go toward the buses while the rest of us stood in the sun. I checked my watch, and it was 1430 hours.

The next time I checked my watch it was 1530 hours, and we were still standing in the sun. Once I had figured that of the seven months I had spent in the army, four of them had been standing around waiting for something to happen. Vietnam might have been a different place, but the army hadn’t changed.

Vietnam. There were mountains in the distance. A helicopter hovered over the far end of the field, tilted at a crazy angle, and then flew off. I watched it until it was almost out of sight.

Most of the guys around the landing field were in fatigues. No different than Fort Devens, except that half of them carried their rifles around with them. There were a lot of pistols, too. You didn’t see many pistols stateside.

There were Vietnamese soldiers around, too. They were smaller than I thought they would be. I tried not to stare at them. A rumbling noise off to my left sounded like distant thunder. We knew it was artillery. My stomach felt queasy. Guys started looking at the ground. This was Nam.

We had a roll call. I listened for the sergeant to call my last name. When he did, I responded with my first name: Richard. Two marines — they had obviously been in Nam awhile — came over and stood near the sergeant and looked at us. They were unshaven. Their uniforms looked worn, darker than ours. One of them was wearing a necklace of some kind. The other one had a peace symbol painted on his helmet. They were old-looking guys, older than any of the guys just coming in.

We went back to waiting in the sun. We waited until 1600 hours. Then the trucks came.

I was assigned to the Twenty-second Replacement Company. That’s where I met Gates again, the guy who had been looking for “Congs” in Anchorage. We bunked next to each other.

Gates was brown-skinned, but he had reddish hair and freckles. I thought I was going to like him.

“You see any Vietcong?” I asked.

“Yeah, you see that girl come in here a moment ago?”

“The one cleaning the barracks?”

“Yeah, she’s a Cong, man.”

There were three or four Vietnamese civilians around our barracks. Two were painting the decorative rocks around headquarters, the kind of thing that we all did stateside, and the other two were cleaning inside.

“They’re not Vietcong.”

“Who told you that?”

“It figures,” I said. “We re fighting the Vietcong. You don’t fight somebody, then hire them to clean up.”

“I remember back home this boy come into a poolroom — ”

“Where’s back home?”

“Chicago.” Gates was lying on his back on his bunk. “Anyway, this dude come into the poolroom, and he knowed he was a good pool shot, see? So he hustled this other dude into a pool game for twenty dollars and beat him.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Well, he figured he was supposed to get his money,” Gates said. “But the boy he beat didn t want to pay him so he shot him in the stomach.

Gates stopped talking and started taking his boots off.

“So what’s the end of the story?” I asked.

“That the end. The dude that did the figuring done figured wrong. That s why you shouldn’t be figuring that chickie that be doing the cleaning ain’t no Cong.”

Right.

I started writing home. The Vietnamese cleaning lady came in again. She started dusting around the bunks. I looked over at Gates, and he was looking at me. He smiled.

“Hey, Gates,” I said, “I know you’re wrong.”

“Don’t be calling me no Gates,” he said. “You call me Peewee.”

“Okay, Peewee,” I said. “You’re still wrong.”

“I can prove it to you,” Peewee said. “Watch this.”

“Hey, you!” he sat up and called to the Vietnamese woman. “Mama Cong!”

The woman looked at him, shrugged, and then turned away.

“Mama Cong!’’ he repeated, louder.

“She probably doesn’t even understand English,” I said. A couple of other guys had turned to see what Peewee was doing.

“Watch if she don’t split,” Peewee said.

The woman turned again and looked at Peewee. Then she left.

“See!” There was a big smile on his face. “She’s a Cong, that’s why she left. She know Peewee got her number.”

“If you talked crazy at me,” a heavy, red-faced guy called over to Peewee, “I’d leave, too.”

“That’s cause you probably a Cong, ’’ Peewee said. “And you a ugly-ass Cong, too.”

The guy stood up. He seemed twice as big standing as he did sitting. He came over to Peewee’s bunk and put his foot on Peewee’s bed.

“Boy,” he said, “I just finished seven months of ranger training, learning how to kill little people like you. So why don’t you just shut up?”

“Yo, you, what’s your name?” Peewee called over to me.

“Perry.”

“Perry, did this peckerwood just call me boy ?” “I think you’d better leave him alone,” I said. “Yeah, but did he just call me boy ?”

“I can answer for myself,” the ranger said. “Yes, I did call you boy,’ Boy!”

Peewee turned and looked as if he were going to put his feet on the floor. Instead he shot both legs into the ranger’s crotch. The big man doubled over, and Peewee punched him on the side of the head. Then he laid back, put his hand under his pillow, and pulled out a knife, which clicked open with a flick of the wrist.

“Now you can get up and start beating on me if you want,” Peewee said. “But if you do, I’m going to cut your damn throat soon’s you go to sleep.

The ranger got up, looked at Peewee, and started sputtering something about if Peewee didn’t have the knife what he would do. I put Peewee in the letter to Mama.

A sergeant came in and put the lights out. Then he made a bunch of stupid remarks about what we should and shouldn’t do in the dark.

“Hey, Perry!” It was Peewee.

“What?”

“What did you do back in the World?”

“Just got out of school,” I said.

“You didn’t finish, either?”