Fallen Angels (14 page)

Gearhart didn’t like Walowick saying that. You could see it all over his face, but he didn’t say anything.

Late that night we watched some television. Security was getting tighter, and we had to cover the windows of the hooch the television was in, which made it just about too hot to watch the thing. We watched Gunsmoke and then a Christmas show. I forgot it was almost Christmas. It got me a little sad, and I was just about to go back to our hooch when all of a sudden, there we were, on television. It was the time we had gone out with the television crew.

“There I go,” Peewee said. “You know, I sure don’t look like no damn soldier.”

“What you look like is a VC,” Monaco said.

I watched the film with the others. They made little comments about how they had felt walking that day, and how they were surprised at how the cameras made us look.

“Where am I?” I didn’t see myself.

“There you go, behind me.”

I looked older than I thought I did in real life. Older and sloppier.

The pictures also made it look as if the photographers were leading the patrol. But what the squad wasn’t talking about was the guy walking behind Walowick. Lieutenant Carroll turned back to make sure we had kept our distances. He seemed for a moment to look directly into the camera. His eyes were quiet, serious, as they always were. And then, as he had to, he turned away from us.

“I think you should major in math,” Peewee said. Walowick had a catalogue from the college he wanted to go to when he got back to the World and Peewee was telling him what to take.

“I’m no good in math,” Walowick said. “I think I’ll take music or something like that. Something easy.”

“Why don’t you go to the University of Chicago?” Brunner said. “That’s got a good reputation. Who ever heard of Knox College?”

“That sounds like that School of Hard Knocks I been hearing about,” Peewee said.

“Knox is good and it’s in my hometown,” Walowick said. “My cousin went there.”

“They got any brothers going to that school?” I asked.

“The first colored senator went to Knox,” Walowick said. “The whole town has a good history with helping coloreds and stuff like that. The underground railroad used to go through Galesburg.” “You study math like I told you,” Peewee said in a gruff voice. “Then I’ll let you come to Chicago and be a big-time numbers man.”

“Walowick would rather stay over here than go to Chicago,” Sergeant Simpson chimed in. “He figure he stay over here he’ll be safer.”

“What else you got in the mail?” Monaco asked. “A newspaper,” Walowick said. “Only thing in it is the stuff about guys burning their draft cards.”

“Faggots and Commies,” Brunner said. “Anybody who wouldn’t stand up for their country is either a faggot or a Commie.”

“They’re doing what they think is right,” Monaco said. “Maybe they are right, who knows?”

“That’s why we got four and five-man squads,” Brunner said, “’Cause those jerks are home smoking dope and burning their draft cards. You get blown away because you don’t have a full squad, you can thank those creeps.”

“I almost went to Canada when I got notice to go down to register,” Brew said.

“Yeah, but then you got it together,” Brunner said.

“No, man, I didn’t have the nerve.” Brew had a sheepish grin on his face.

A rat scurried up the side of the hooch, jumped onto Walowick’s bunk, and stopped right in the middle of it. We had put some poison around, and we figured he must have been dying. It was about seven to eight inches long and bloated up.

“Brunner, get your piece,” Sergeant Simpson said.

Brunner had a twenty-two air rifle. He got it, kneeled down, and shot the rat. It died right on Walowick’s bunk, and Walowick got pissed off. He left the hooch and told Brunner he had better have his bunk cleaned up before he got back. The rest of us got up and split and left Brunner and the rat in the hooch.

What Brew had said about not having the nerve to go to Canada shook me. Here he was in Nam, getting shot at every day, afraid of every noise, every step, and yet he had been afraid of going to Canada. It shook me because I knew what he meant. Sometimes standing alone seemed to be the hardest thing in the world to do, even when being in the crowd meant you could be killed.

We got hit by a rocket attack that night. It came on us all of a sudden. I woke up screaming. The sounds of the explosions rattled through the hooches, and we couldn’t tell where the rockets were hitting. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and ran for the bunker.

The noise messed me up. I jumped with every explosion, I trembled as the ground shook around me.

“Look for sappers! Look for sappers!”

Sergeant Simpson was calling out for us to look out for sappers, the Vietnamese suicide squads. He had sixty-two days to go and he was trying to stay alive.

“Somebody send up a flare!” Monaco.

“I’m going to get some!” Peewee. The squad had settled down. I was still shaking. I heard somebody screaming for a medic.

The flare went up and there was some firing, but we didn’t see any sappers. The rockets stopped, the flares died down, they put out the fires. The night had us again.

Captain Stewart came around to check for casualties. He started talking about how we had to be more aggressive, how we had to go out to get the VC.

“We got to keep them up a few nights,” he said. He patted Sergeant Simpson on the shoulder.

When he left I could see that Sergeant Simpson didn’t look good.

“You okay, Sarge?” I asked.

“That man bucking for major real bad,” he said. “He gonna get somebody killed before he makes it.”

I couldn’t sleep, and sat outside in the bunker, trying to catch a little breeze. Johnson was there, too.

“This reminds me of a Harlem night,” I said. “Sometimes the little apartment we lived in would be so hot you couldn’t sleep for days.”

“Wish I was anyplace I could call home,” Johnson said.

“Wherever it is, I’ll think more of it the next time I get there,” I said.

“Yeah.” He looked away. “What you think about them protesters?”

I was surprised at the question. I looked up and saw that he was leaning back against the sandbags. I could just see his silhouette, helmet pushed back, rifle across his lap.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You think much about why you were going to fight before you came in?” “Unh-uh. You?”

“No, but I’m thinking a lot about it now.”

“’Cause they shooting at your ass?”

“Sounds like a good enough reason to be thinking about it,” I said.

“You trying to figure out who the good guys, huh?” Johnson spoke slowly. “So what you come up with?” “I guess somebody back home knows what they’re doing,” I said. “What it means and everything. You talk about Communists — stuff like that — and it doesn’t mean much when you’re in school. Then when you get over here the only thing they’re talking about is keeping your ass in one piece.”

“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.”

“That might be a good reason to be over here,” I said.

“That’s for people like you to mess with,” Johnson said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Then why you messin’ with it?”

When I turned in, Peewee was still up. He told me he had an idea. He was going to spray the netting with this new repellent we got. I got into my bunk and pulled the mosquito netting around it and then Peewee sprayed the netting, which was supposed to be his good idea.

“Yo, Peewee, I can’t breathe in here,” I said.

“I wondered if that was going to be a problem,” Peewee said.

I fell asleep thinking about what Johnson had said. Maybe the time had passed when anybody could be a good guy.

December 22, 1967. Three days before Christmas and only ten days left in the whole year. Me and Peewee spent all day talking about whether we should try to have sex with a Vietnamese girl before we got back to the States. He figured it might be our only chance to have sex with a foreign woman. “Suppose we catch something?” I said.

“That’s what combat is all about,” he said, looking in the mirror he had nailed on a pole at the end of his bunk. “Taking chances.”

“How about Walowick?” I asked.

“He didn’t mess with no women,” Peewee said. “He just got the Nam Rot.”

That was true. Walowick had been sent to the 312th to get his rash treated. Sergeant Simpson said that it usually took a week to clear up a real mean rash. By that time, according to the word going around, the war was going to be over.

Captain Stewart said that the war wasn’t over yet, and for us not to get too relaxed.

“We can spend the last weeks of the war kicking a little ass and letting them know who the hell we were,” he said.

The way the story was going around was that the Vietnamese had agreed to a truce for their New Year’s celebration, which they called Tet. Then the truce would be just extended while the talks went on, and we would all go home. Captain Stewart seemed disappointed.

I wrote Mama telling her that I expected to be home around January or February. I didn’t believe all the stories, but I did believe Jamal. Jamal said that all of the South Vietnamese officers were going home for the holidays.

“And they should know,” he said, looking like a serious bullfrog.

Then some other stuff started coming down the line. There was a lot of Cong activity and the special forces guys in Cambodia were spotting convoys.

“Them Greenies just don’t want to have a truce,” Sergeant Simpson said, “if they ain’t got them a good war, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”

Back home the World seemed to be splitting up between people who wanted to make love and people who wanted to tear the cities down. A lot of it was blacks against whites, and we didn’t talk about that too much, but we felt it.

Over the summer a kid in Harlem had been killed by a white police sergeant and there had been some riots. I told Mama in a letter to tell Kenny to be careful. Sometimes he had a fresh mouth, and I didn’t want him hurt.

Kenny was all Mama had left. She had me, in a way, but not in any real way. Kenny loved her straight up and down. He didn’t see any faults in her. I loved her, too, but not like Kenny. When you’re young, the way Kenny was, you didn’t ask much of people.

Christmas. Depression. We had roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, carrot cake, and candy canes.

They were supposed to send in a movie called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with Sidney Poi-tier. But when they opened the cans they found the movie with Julie Andrews that we had already seen.

“That other movie don’t sound like much anyway,” Monaco said. “Some black dude coming to dinner.”

“Maybe they were going to have fried chicken, and they were afraid he was going to eat too much,” Brunner said.

“Maybe they thought your mama was going to eat too much, too,” Peewee said.

That ended that conversation.

Word came in that the marines were catching hell all over the place. Some old-timers said that a piss load of marines were trapped up in the hills of Khe Sanh. The fighting was picking up. Captain Stewart was still saying that the VC were trying to get into place in time for the Tet holiday.

“The only trouble is” — Lieutenant Gearhart sat on an ammo box with his feet up on Brunner’s bed — “what they’re seeing most of is the NVA, not the VC.”

“The NVA ain’t nothing but the VC with their pajamas off,” Peewee said.

“Bullshit.” Gearhart turned and looked toward Peewee with his eyes half closed, as if he were asleep. “The NVA get up to a year of training before they even get to the south. The VC are guerrillas. The NVA is their regular army.”

“Don’t mean shit to me,” Peewee said.

“We’re talking about regiment-sized units,” Gearhart went on. “They’ve finally figured out they can’t whip us with this little guerrilla action.”

“Hey, man,” Monaco sat up. “They can’t whip us with nothing they got!”

I looked up to see if Monaco was kidding. He wasn’t. But he talked about it like it was a volleyball game or something.

The sounds of fighting, the far-off booming of the artillery, the hollow, bass-drum sound of explosions echoing off the mountains became a constant thing. Before, it had been an occasional crackle of gunfire, the steady rhythms of. 50-caliber machine guns with the .60 s answering in short riffs. Sometimes, just after the gut-shaking boom of a jet, you could see the bombs arc down and, if the wind was just right, the sound would be somewhere in between thunder and a cymbal clash. Peewee said that it sounded like a South Side jazz club when the brothers were right. A death blues for Mr. Cong.

The noises had always scared me. I had gone through basic training just fine until the end when we had to go under live fire. The noises shook you, made you want to stop and hide.

Now it was different. Now the sound swelled in my consciousness like a dull headache. It kept coming and coming, day and night. Sometimes I felt as if the sounds were inside me somehow. And there were times, I never wanted to mention them to anyone else, that I heard the sounds at night when it was very quiet, and no one else heard them.

I was ready for the truce.

Stars and Stripes talked about peace feelers in Paris. Where I was, it was raining. It rained almost every day. The ruts filled with water. There wasn’t any place to dry out.

We waited and listened to the stories coming in. They weren’t good. When the Tet started, we were put on alert. We kept hearing about truce violations. They kept talking about the body counts we picked up, but the ones they gave at the end of the reports, our own KIAs, Killed in Action, were climbing, too.

All of First Corps went on alert as we found out that all the major cities were being hit. All the way from Saigon north to the DMZ.

Interdiction patrol. That’s what they called it, but it sounded like a plain ambush to us. We were being separated from the rest of the outfit, which was supposed to be operating further north above Phuoc Ha. Meanwhile our squad was supposed to stop nighttime traffic between two hamlets.