Fallen Angels (3 page)

“The recruiting sergeant said he can’t get in no army ’cause they don’t be taking no rowdy dudes like him. I figure if they don’t take no rowdy dudes, the army had to be pretty cool. If they really meant to be doing a whole lot of killing and carrying on, they should go get them suckers from the projects, ’cause that’s all they like to do, anyway.”

“So you joined up?”

“Yeah,” Peewee said. “But I think I got tricked.”

Peewee looked out over the trucks, which were mostly packed with crates of rations and supplies. The land beyond them was flat as far as we could see in one direction. In the other direction, where we thought the action would be, there were mountains shrouded in haze.

“Hey, at least I ain’t rowdy,” I said.

Peewee looked at me and smiled. “Yo, you remember that brother wanted to mingle our blood and stuff?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe we could do that stuff with some spit or something,” Peewee said.

He spit on his hand and held it up. I spit on mine and we exchanged fives. It felt good.

Peewee didn’t say much after that and neither did I. I was scared. My mouth was going dry, and I could see that Peewee was scared, too. Jenkins was crying. It made me feel a little better to see him crying like that.

“Load ’em up!”

Me and Peewee got on the trucks between boxes of peanut butter, and started to the airport and to wherever the hell Chu Lai was.

Most of the flight to Chu Lai was over water. A sergeant with us said that the plane swung out over the water to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Chu Lai was cooler than the area we had come from, but not much. It was still muggy. They had expected us earlier, and the lieutenant who directed us to the truck that would take us to our units seemed pissed.

“We can’t hold these trucks up any longer, so you guys are going to have to chow down at your units,” he said. “When I call your name, get right in the back of the first truck. Keep your hands and arms in the truck, and leave that netting up. You don’t want to be sitting in there when some slant throws a grenade in the back.”

The lieutenant was sharp, his brass belt buckle and insignia were shined, and his uniform was creased in all the right places. Chu Lai seemed less frantic than Tan Son Nhut.

I was looking around, trying to figure out what Chu Lai was like, when I heard my name.

“Any of you guys know this Perry?” the lieutenant was asking.

“I’m Perry,” I said.

“Well, wake the hell up, soldier!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, get on the damn truck!”

“Yes, sir.”

When I got in the back of the truck, Peewee was cracking up. I laughed with him. Jenkins started imitating the sergeant, and he had his voice down perfectly.

“Hey, are you an actor?” Peewee asked.

“No, I can just…” Jenkins’ voice trailed off.

“Do it again!” Peewee nudged Jenkins’ foot.

Jenkins did it again, and Peewee cracked up again. I thought Jenkins was going to be fun after all.

Peewee pulled the net over the back end of the truck and tied it down. Then we started off. The back of the truck was like an oven. We started off reasonably slowly, and I got my first glimpse of the base. It looked okay. The movement cooled the truck off a little, and I thought the ride wouldn’t be bad. Then we went through the gate and an outer checkpoint, and the driver picked up speed. We were bounced around the back of the truck like crazy. I had to hold onto the sides and keep standing. Sitting in the bouncing truck was impossible.

We arrived at headquarters company a half hour or so after we left the main base at Chu Lai. The captain who greeted us was wearing a flak jacket, the heavy vest that was supposed to stop bullets and shrapnel. There were big rings of sweat under his arms and a pool of sweat in the hollow of his neck.

He glanced at each of us and checked our names off on his copy of our orders.

The GIs I saw at Chu Lai looked sharp enough to be in a parade; these guys looked as if they had just come in from a hard day’s work, a damn hard day’s work. Most of the guys who had come with us from Chu Lai were assigned to one of the row of hooches behind us. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins were told we would be going out to Alpha Company.

A chopper was supposed to take us and one other guy out to the company. In the meantime we had to load a pump onto the truck we came on. The pump wasn’t crated, and it was hard to get a grip on it. Peewee and Jenkins were on one side of it, and I was on the other, but we couldn’t get it up on the truck. Then an officer sent another guy over. His name tag read Johnson. He was black and as tall as I was, but bigger.

“We re supposed to — ” Peewee was pointing to the pump when Johnson reached down and grabbed it. He grunted, rocked backward, and brought the pump to his knees. He grunted again, lifted the pump onto the back of the truck, turned slowly, and walked away.

“Amen!” Peewee called out behind him. “Amen!”

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“Did you notice that I had a medical profile?”

The captain looked at his clipboard, looked up at me, and then back down to the clipboard.

“I don’t see anything about a profile here,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Perry, sir.”

“You got a lot of pain?”

“No, but every once in a while the knee sort of gives way,” I said. “That’s why they gave me the profile.”

“You get to your company commander, mention your profile to him.”

“The officer at the replacement company said…”

He was already walking away, and I had the feeling that he wasn’t particularly interested in my profile.

We were told by a corporal that Alpha Company was “In the Deep. ’’

“In the Deep what?” Peewee asked.

“In the Deep Boonies,” was the answer.

We were supposed to get to the “Deep Boonies” by chopper. We waited for three hours for one to come and get us, but none came. We found a mess hall and ate. Jenkins didn’t feel like eating. I could tell he was still scared out of his mind.

“What were you trained for?” I asked him.

“My MOS is infantry.”

“You went to advanced training for infantry?” Peewee looked up at Jenkins.

“Yeah.”

“You look like a clerk-typist or something like that,” Peewee said.

“My father’s a colonel,” Jenkins said. “He wanted me to be infantry. He’s got this thing, he calls it his game plan. First I volunteer for the army, then I volunteer for infantry and take advanced individual training in infantry. I serve my time over here, then I go to Officers Candidate School.”

There were Vietnamese people working behind the counter. They looked peaceful enough, and so small. I was six-three, and many of them seemed a good foot shorter than I was.

Johnson, the guy who had lifted the pump onto the truck, turned out to be going to Alpha Company with us. He brought his gear over and sat with us. “Where you from?” Peewee asked Johnson. “Savannah.”

“Savannah, Georgia?”

“You ever been there?”

“No, and I don’t want to go to there, either.” “How you know what it like if you ain’t never been there?” Johnson was eating his second dish of ice cream. He was about as black as a human being could get and as thick as he was wide. Even the whites of his eyes were dark. When he wasn’t talking or chewing, his mouth sort of hung open. It hung open as he stared across the table at Peewee.

“I ain’t never been to hell,” Peewee said. “But I heard enough about it not to want to go there for no damn vacation.”

“Where you from?” Johnson was pissed at Peewee for dumping on Georgia.

“Chicago.”

“Chicago ain’t nothing.”

“Neither is your daddy,” Peewee said.

Peewee didn’t raise his voice when he said it, and he didn’t smile. What he was saying was that he didn’t care how big Johnson was. I glanced over at

Jenkins, who was looking down into his food.

“You kinda little to be talking about somebody’s daddy.” Johnson pushed the words out through thick lips.

“No shit?”

“You guys think we should stay in here or get back outside in case they come looking for us?” I asked, hoping to cut off a confrontation.

They both looked at me like I had said something wrong. I was in the wrong war.

We finished eating and went back out to the pickup zone where the chopper was supposed to be. We asked around to see if anybody had been looking for us.

“You guys waiting for a lift to Alpha Company?” A short guy wearing what I thought was a flight suit came over to us.

“Yeah,” Johnson said.

“I’m looking around for some smokes,” the short guy said. “You guys wait here.”

He started off toward some low Quonset huts off to the left. It was getting cooler, but the humidity was so high I was dripping wet. We found some shade, dropped our gear, and Johnson and Peewee went off looking for a latrine. Jenkins sat on the ground with his head in his hands, and I asked him how he was doing.

“I think I’m going to die over here,” he said.

“You’re not going to die,” I said. “Most guys over here won’t ever fire their rifles. I mean, they won’t ever really shoot at anybody.”

“Who told you that?”

“A major I had at Devens,” I said.

“He probably wasn’t ever over here,” Jenkins said.

“Hey, it won’t be that bad, man.”

“Thanks.” He looked up at me and forced a smile. Jenkins acted as if he didn’t want to talk anymore and so I didn’t talk, either. Peewee came back from the latrine.

“Where’s Johnson?”

“That country fool?” Peewee sat on the ground between me and Jenkins. “He in there, sitting on the john, trying to figure out how to shit.”

“You better leave that guy alone.”

“He better leave Peewee alone,” was the answer.

The chopper pilot got back an hour after sunset and said we’d have to wait until morning. You could smell the booze from three feet away. He was so high he couldn’t stand straight. I figured the guy must have been a career guy. A lot of the career guys drank heavily. It took us two more hours to find a place to bunk for the night.

In the middle of the night I woke. I thought I was hearing thunder. Then I realized that it was artillery. I went outside and looked around. In the distance someone was shooting off flares. In a way it was beautiful, like brilliant white and red flowers against the dark sky. They left behind puffs of colored smoke that drifted away like tiny fain-clouds.

Johnson slept naked on one side, snoring. Peewee lay on his back, arms and legs spread, eyes not completely closed. Jenkins had his head under the blanket.

Morning. The chopper pilot came to get us. He was bright-eyed, shorter than I thought he was the night before. We piled our gear on and climbed on. It was my first chopper ride. I had missed that part of training when I got the medical profile. No marching. No prolonged field duty. No combat. I had seen the doctor at Fort Devens sign it. He was supposed to have sent it to the company.

The chopper trembled and rattled. Then it lifted slowly, tilted, and jerked into the air. It was the noise I hated. More than the wind through the open door. More than the slow speed, or the sitting still in the air waiting to fall, I hated the noise.

I looked over at Johnson. The one expression he had in the world was on his face. Peewee was busy looking out the door. Jenkins had his eyes closed and his knuckles were white from holding onto the seat.

“Which one of you is Perry?” We had reached Alpha Company in the boonies and were sitting in the commanding officer’s hooch. A stream of tobacco juice oozed from the side of the captain’s mouth.

“I am.”

“You supposed to have a profile or something, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, they got it listed that you’re concerned with it,” the captain said. “You got any pains or anything?”

“Not right now,” I said. “But I got a bad knee.”

“You been wounded in the knees?”

“From playing basketball,” I said.

“Yeah, okay,” the captain looked me up and down. “I’m sending a radio message through to look up your medical records. In the meantime I’ll just let you stay with the squad. You’ll be okay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fact is, all you guys better go on over and stay with the squad for a few days. I got word this morning that we’ll probably be moving down to Third Corps and then ship over to Hawaii from there.”

“Hawaii?”

“Yeah, looks like this thing is about over,” the captain said. “What I want you boys to do is to listen to your squad leaders and try to keep yourselves alive.”

We got weapons. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins got the usual M-16 rifles. Johnson, who had had machine-gun training, got an M-60. It was a big, wicked-looking weapon that made the M-i6’s look almost fragile in comparison. Johnson signed for it, took it by the handle, and walked away without even looking at it. They fit each other.

We were asked if we wanted anything else. Peewee asked for and got a pistol in addition to his M-16.

“You want a pistol?” the armorer asked me.

“What for?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. I didn’t want to be close enough to anybody to shoot him with a pistol.

“Make sure you keep those M-i6’s clean,” he said. “Don’t go believing that stuff about how it’s going to work no matter what happens to it. You don’t clean that piece, charlie is going to clean your ass.”

We were assigned a hooch and found bunks. I wondered what had happened to the guys who had had the bunks before we got them, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask anybody.

“Okay, listen up!” A soft-voiced lieutenant stuck his head into the tent. His name tag read “Carroll.” “I’m your platoon leader. You guys have any problems, you let me know through your squad leader. Anything really heavy, and you can come right to me with it. This is a book platoon. We do everything by the book. You new guys better listen and learn. That way you get to be old guys.

“Everybody’s talking about Hawaii. There’s plenty of time to think about getting out of here and getting to Hawaii when we re at the airport on the way out. Until then, keep your mind on your work. That’s all and good luck.”

The rest of the squad was outside playing volleyball. We unloaded our gear and picked out bunks to lie on. There was gear on some of the other bunks. An M-79 grenade launcher lay across one. There were copies of Playboy on another.