Fallen Angels (8 page)

Lieutenant Carroll looked over at Simpson and Simpson looked away.

We got into the Hueys — big, mean-looking choppers — at 1200 hours and headed north. Part of the squad was in the first chopper and the rest in the second. The news guys were filming everything. We landed in a sandy area about two kilometers from the sea.

Simpson put Monaco on point again, but this time he told Johnson to be the trailer. Johnson looked at me, and I could see he wasn’t happy to be the last man on the line.

The news team was in the middle. We walked along a trail for about twenty minutes with the television guys photographing us, and then headed back toward the Hueys.

We were in sight of the landing zone when Monaco opened up.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’’ Sergeant Simpson had ducked behind a tree.

Carroll moved toward Monaco, who was still firing, and yelled something to him. Monaco stopped firing and yelled back.

Carroll put his back to a tree, pointed to his eyes, and held up one finger.

“What’s that mean?” Peewee asked.

“He means he saw one VC,” Brunner said.

We stayed low for a while, then the cameramen started getting up and easing forward.

There was another burst from Monaco, and then I heard Lobel yelling.

“There he is! There he is!”

I didn’t see anything. I looked, but I didn’t see anything. Monaco was firing on a stand of trees and soon the whole squad had opened up. Simpson was crawling back, and I saw him grab Johnson and turn him around. He wanted Johnson to watch our rear.

I looked to see what they were shooting at, but I still didn’t see anything. I decided to shoot anyway.

I looked closely at where the others were shooting, then thought I saw something move. I lifted the sixteen and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” This from Simpson.

Simpson, Monaco, and Walowick moved out. Lieutenant Carroll was telling everybody to hold their fire.

They found the guy. Walowick dragged him out of the trees. The newsmen went to take his picture while Simpson was posting us around the LZ. My hands were sweating. I looked at my rifle, wondering why it hadn’t fired.

“You okay, Perry?” Lieutenant Carroll came over to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Soon as you fire off a clip put a new one in,” he said. “We got better supplies than the VC, we have to use them. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I looked at the rifle after he had left. Then I shoved in a clip. I had forgotten to load the damn thing.

The newsmen were on the chopper first, then the rest of the squad. Brunner threw on the VC before he got on.

I didn’t want to look at the VC. I knew, by the way that Brunner had thrown him on, that he was dead. The news guys were getting still photos of the dead VC. Brunner took out a cigar and lit up.

We got back to the base, and they took off the VC first. They must have called ahead because there was a jeep waiting to take the VC back. Carroll went with the news team in another jeep. The rest of us walked from the chopper pad to the huts.

We got back, and they had laid the body out on the ground. The arms were out, and the legs were crossed at the ankles. I walked by him. He wasn’t any bigger than Kenny.

We went directly to the mess hall. They had saved lunch for us. The news guys were buzzing around, checking their gear and everything. They must have taken a hundred pictures each of the dead VC. They even put a weapon down by his body and took a picture of him with that. Simpson came over to the new guys and made sure that we all had our weapons on safe.

We had baked chicken, carrots, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, and rolls for lunch. And strawberry ice cream.

I sat with Peewee and asked him what he thought.

“I done seen two VC over here so far,” he said. “One captured sucker and one dead sucker.”

“I didn’t even see where he was hit,” I said.

“Fool had bout twenty holes in his ass,” Peewee said. “I don’t know where you was looking at.”

Neither did I. I couldn’t tell if there was too much to see, or if my eyes were getting bad. Maybe I just didn’t want to see some of the things I was seeing.

Lieutenant Carroll came over and said that we had done a good job.

It wasn’t real. We were eating baked chicken, and all I could think of was that it was pretty good. We had gone out to the jungle and seen one VC and killed him. Then we came back in time for lunch. Maybe Lobel was right. Maybe it was just some kind of movie.

Sergeant Simpson came to our hut and brought some magazines. I asked him if they had found a rifle or anything near the body.

“Perry wants to make sure the dude was a VC,” Brunner said. He still had his cigar in his mouth.

“He wasn’t no VC,” Simpson said. “He was a North Vietnamese regular, from one of their big units, the 324th. They found his papers on him.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“How I know?” Simpson said. “All I know is my time is getting short. I’m going to go take me a short nap because I ain’t got time for a long one.”

Monaco wanted the squad to practice volleyball. He had bet twenty-five dollars on our squad versus the Blazers, a team from Charlie Company.

“We can’t beat them,” Brew said. “They beat us six times already.”

“You know that tall guy with the big hands?” Monaco was flossing his teeth.

“Yeah,” Brew was putting salve on his feet. “He’s the one that spikes all the time.”

“Well, he got hit the day before yesterday,” Monaco said. “He ain’t playing.”

Jamal, the medic, came by with malaria pills. I took one, and he sat on the edge of the bunk.

“I see you people got three VC today,” he said.

“Three?”

“That’s what the report says,” Jamal said.

“We got one VC,” I said.

“All I know is what I see on the reports,” Jamal said. “They put three down on their reports, I send three in to Regiment.”

“I don’t believe they put down three when everybody saw that we only got one.”

“You’ll get used to what goes on over here,” he said. He had a singsong way of talking, like a child in a man’s body.

“Did Captain Stewart see the report?”

“Who do you think gave me the report?” He left some malaria pills on Peewee’s bunk and split.

“Thanks,” I called after him as he left the hooch.

One of the correspondents had left a New York Times behind and I went through it. Mostly it was the same old garbage. The Knicks had drafted some guy from Southern Illinois I never heard of, and they were still losing a lot of games.

There wasn’t much about the war. A lot of VC were killed north of Saigon, and President Johnson was saying that the United States was ready to come to the peace table if the Communists were.

It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet, and the weather was already cold in New York. I imagined the brothers hustling down Lenox Avenue trying to get away from the wind. Howard, a guy I used to play ball with, crossed my mind. He was somebody I could write to. He’d probably write back. Three years before, he had pulled a robbery in midtown and been sent up to a prison in Stormville, New York. I had written to him the whole time he was up there. He used to tell me how much he appreciated the letters. Maybe he would answer my letters from Nam.

Mail call was hard when you didn’t get any mail. I thought that what I needed was to have something more in the World than I had. I remembered what Lobel had said about the starlet, but it was silly. I needed something real. It didn’t even have to be something that was going on at the time, a plan for when I got back would have been fine. I couldn’t think of anything and felt depressed.

An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?

What was worse than thinking about him dead was the way we looked at him. At least we had cared for Jenkins, had trembled when he died. He was one of us, an American, a human. But the dead Vietnamese soldier, his body sprawled out in the mud, was no longer a human being. He was a thing, a trophy. I wondered if I could become a trophy.

“We won.” Walowick came in after the volleyball game and sat on the edge of the bunk. “They’re paying us off in beer.”

“Way to go,” I said.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Seeing that dead gook mess you up some?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe even more than Jenkins.”

“Who’s Jenkins?”

“He was the guy — ” I couldn’t believe that Walowick didn’t know who I was talking about. He had been on the patrol when Jenkins was killed. I looked into his face, and I saw that he was for real. “Jenkins was the guy I came in with. He stepped on a mine.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about him,” Walowick said. “You play chess?”

“A little, you got a set?”

Walowick went to get his chess set, and Jamal came back in. He had a clipboard and he put it in front of me. He pointed to a figure. It read “3.” I looked at the column it was in and it was listed “Confirmed Kills.” I looked up at Jamal, but he was already on his way out.

“You know, that guy is a little…” Walowick held his hand out, palm down, and turned it from side to side.

“It takes all kinds,” I said. Walowick had put the chessboard on a box, and we started setting up the pieces.

“How many VC were killed today?” I asked.

“One, I guess,” Walowick said.

“The report said three,” I said.

“You shoot a VC, and they take the bodies and run off with them,” Walowick said. “That’s so you never know how many are killed. You can’t even find shells when they shoot at you. They take those, too.”

“Then how do you know how many were killed?”

“Long as it’s them and not us,” he said. “Take the white pieces.”

As soon as I crossed Manhattan Avenue I knew something was up. The street was quiet except for a radio that blared from behind a window with its shade pulled down. I stopped on the comer and looked down the street. A small girl, too young to be out past eleven, came out of a hallway and peered around a mail collection box.

“The Rovers down there,” she said.

“Who?”

“The Rovers,” she repeated. “They’re from Brooklyn. They looking for somebody.”

I wasn’t about to go down the street. I had heard too many stories about gangs looking for someone who they had to “deal” with. A lot of them were getting out of the gang thing and into a Black Pride thing, but the gangs were still there.

A car, I hadn’t noticed it before, had eased onto the block. Suddenly it picked up speed, wheels squealing, lurching from one side of the narrow street to the other. The Rovers came out and threw rocks and bottles. Then I heard the shots and flattened myself against the wall. The Rovers started running from down the block. A minute later the street was empty again. Then came the police sirens.

“Here’s one!”

It startled me at first. Then I went over to where the woman was pointing. I saw the kid’s frightened face; the eyes wide, as the neon lights from Joe Walker’s restaurant turned it alternately green and red. He had been shot. The police cleared the corner. It was safe to walk up to Momingside, and home.

The next day in the West Indian store I heard two teenagers saying that the kid had died.

Brew came in and put his radio on. He had cupcakes and tossed me one and Walowick one. The radio was playing something about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair. A nice tune.

We played two games of chess, and I won both of them easily. Walowick didn’t seem to mind. His idea was just to capture as many pieces as possible. If it led him to a bad position, he would just lose. I was glad the game wasn’t hard. I didn’t want anything hard to do.

When I tried to sleep, I kept seeing the VC, just the way he was laid out in front of the company. I pushed my mind away, forced myself to think about other things. I started thinking about Kenny. There was a kid in his class who used to bother him a lot. The lad used to call him a punk and push him around. Kenny wasn’t a punk, but he wasn’t a fighter, either.

Sometimes we used to imagine traveling around the world together. We’d have imaginary trips around the world. I would imagine just the two of us, but Kenny would always include Mama. That was the difference between me and Kenny. He could get other people, mostly Mama, into his dreams easier than I could. He was the bridge between me and Mama, and I liked him for that.

I woke up in the morning, about 0400 hours, with the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life. I thought I was having an attack of appendicitis. I was doubled up in bed and had to crawl out of the bed to get to where Peewee was sleeping. I shook him, and when he opened his eyes I told him I needed help. He got up right away and went to get a medic.

Jamal came over and saw me doubled up on the bed.

“You got the shits,” he said.

“No, man, I feel like I’ve been poisoned.”

“Hurts worse than anything else in the world, like it’s burning for a while, and there’s a sharp pain for a while?”

“Yeah.”

“You got the shits.”

“What he got to do?” Peewee said.

“He don’t have to do nothing,” Jamal said. “After a while he’s going to go to the latrine and shit his lungs out, that’s all.”

“He gonna feel better, then?” Peewee asked hopefully.

“No.” Jamal put some pills on the table and some Kleenex. “Every time you go to the bathroom, take two of these. Sometimes it helps, but usually it don’t.”

Then he started to leave.

“Yo, faggot, you got to do more than that,” Peewee said.

“Don’t be calling me no faggot,” Jamal said. “You don’t know me that well.”

I threw the box of Kleenex at Jamal and told him where to shove them. He picked them up, shrugged, and left.

“I see where I’m gonna have to lack his ass before long,” Peewee said. “You want some water or something?”

“No.”

I remembered that after the orientation the old-timers started telling us about the diseases they said the lieutenant overlooked.

“They got one land of thing they call the Damn Nam jungle rot. It rots you from the insides out. By the time it gets to your skin you’re dead meat.”