Fallen Angels (18 page)

I got a letter from Mama. She told me that Peewee wrote her and he seemed like the nicest boy. She wrote that she was glad that he and I were friends. I hoped she would get to meet him one day. I thought they would have got along just fine.

The thing was, I needed the people in the World to be okay, and to be the same as when I left them. I was holding on, now, and I needed something to hold on to. I had come into the army at seventeen, and I remembered who I was, and who I was had been a kid. The war hadn’t meant anything to me then, maybe because I had never gone through anything like it before. All I had thought about combat was that I would never die, that our side would win, and that we would all go home somehow satisfied. And now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find something more than the kid I was. Maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and find the man I would be. I hoped I did it before I got killed.

The rain came down in buckets. We watched a newscast that said that a guy had got a heart transplant. They had actually taken the heart out of one guy who had been in an accident and put it in another guy, a dentist. Brunner and Walowick thought it was cool, but Peewee didn’t believe it, and Monaco wondered how the guy lived between the time they took his heart out and the time they put the other guv’s in.

“The whole thing is going to be in Life next week,” Brew7 said. “You wait and see.”

I dreamt about being in the hut, and hearing the VC trying to get his rifle to work. In the dream he smiled as he worked it and I stood there crying, knowing that eventually it would work and that he would kill me. He would blow my face away the way I had blown his away in real life. I kept waking up in a kind of terror and then falling to sleep again and having the same dream.

In the morning we were roused early for the trip. Peewee was messed up, really messed up.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked. He looked like he had been in a fight and been beaten up bad. His whole face was puffed up badly. His upper lip was so swollen he could hardly get his mouth shut.

“Nothing,” he said.

Gearhart had heard about how Peewee looked, and he came over and asked what had happened. Peewee said nothing had happened, and turned away.

“Gates, can you make it to the new base?” Gearhart asked.

“Yuh,” Peewee said. He could hardly talk. He kept packing his gear.

“Look man, we got to know what happened.” Sergeant Simpson said. “We a squad, we ain’t no strangers.”

“You know that stuff I got from that woman?” Peewee said.

“What?”

“That hair stuff?”

“Yeah?”

“I put some on my lip to grow me a mustache,” he said. He put his head down. “Guess it don’t work too cool.”

I started writing a letter to Kenny. At first I thought I wanted to tell him about the war, about how I felt about the fighting. Then I knew I wanted to tell him about my killing the Cong. I started the letter off really cool, hoping that he was okay and taking care of Mama, stuff like that. Then I told him I wanted to tell him about a typical day that I had here in the Nam. Then I changed it to special day instead of typical.

Then I tried to tell him about the killing.

I started off saying that war was about destroying the enemy. Then I remembered about the news guys asking us why we were fighting in Vietnam. It wasn’t the same. Saying that you were trying to stop Communism or stuff like that was different than shooting somebody. It was different than being scared and looking at somebody who was maybe as scared as you were.

In a way I wanted him to know about me killing the Cong. In another way I didn’t. I wanted him to think I was a good soldier. Being a good soldier meant doing your job. For the guys in the squad, it meant killing the enemy. Before I went into the army I had thought about being a writer. Teachers said I used words well. But writing that I had done a good job killing just didn’t work.

“Yo, Peewee?”

“What’s shakin ?”

“You know that Cong I killed?”

“Yeah?”

“How come I killed him?”

“Cause he was gonna kill you ass if you didn’t kill his,” Peewee said.

“That’s the only reason?”

“Ain’t that good enough?”

“I don’t know, is it?”

“It better be till you get your ass home,” Peewee said.

“Man, this ain’t even Boonieville,” Sergeant Simpson said, “This is the suburbs of Boonieville.” He threw his gear on the small folding cot in the hooch that was our new home outside of Tam Ky.

“You should have known this place was going to be garbage,” Brunner said. “We were right outside of Chu Lai and that wasn’t that hot.”

Brunner was right. The base at Chu Lai was almost like the old section of Fort Devens. The barracks were neat and clean, and there was even a post exchange. Where we had been bivouacked, west of Chu Lai, had been cool, too. Our new area was something else again.

It looked like the other firebases, with barbed wire and mine fields around it. But I didn’t see anything that looked like a major generator, which meant that it was going to be dark as hell at night. The hooches were half underground and didn’t look as if they could take much in the way of direct hits. If we got incoming mortar, we would have to roll out of the hooches into the sandbag-lined trenches around them. I didn’t like it at all.

“The streams around here are a little murky,” Lieutenant Gearhart said. “Make sure you take your malaria pills.”

“I’m taking every kind of pill I can get my hands on,” Peewee said. “I’d take some birth control pills if I could find me some.”

There were a few guys there from a boat outfit, the 159th Transportation Battalion. We asked them what they were doing so far away from the water if they were supposed to be boat people. They said that they were teaching the ABVN troops, the Vietnamese friendlies, how to maintain the engines on their landing craft.

“They any good?” I asked.

“They don’t seem to get the hang of how we do things,” a sergeant said. “They don’t expect stuff to work, so when it doesn’t, it’s no big deal. They don’t believe in maintenance at all.”

What it looked like to me was that we were going to beat down the Congs and then turn over the last part of the effort to the ARVN troops. That sounded just okay with me.

We went on night patrol. Night patrol from our last base was scary. Night patrol from the new base was something else.

We were picked up at 2000 hours. The LZ was in tall grass, which made us all feel uneasy. Somebody said that an ARVN captain had selected it. The only thing I really knew about ARVNs was what Sergeant Simpson said, and that wasn’t good. He said that some units were good, as good as anything we had to offer. Other units were crap, and would bug out on you in a moment.

What we were supposed to be doing was what they called an interdiction number. Which meant that we were supposed to be cutting off the routes the Congs could use to cut off First Corps from the rest of the war. The area just north of Chu Lai was what they seemed to want.

The Congs we were after had been probing along our defenses, looking for soft spots. They would set up a mortar attack from somewhere within the jungle, raise a little hell, and then split before anyone could get to them. HQ figured the Cong operation to be a squad-sized unit. We had two squads from Alpha Company and two ARVN squads to clear them out.

What we were supposed to do was to set up an ambush on what we figured to be their route.

We hit the LZ at 2035 hours. We went in first and cleared the LZ, and then the ARVNs came in. We had four squads, but only twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, guys. All of the squads were short except ours. Simpson said that they kept our squad up to par because the battalion commander liked him.

Near Chu Lai the patrols had been serious, but away from Chu Lai, in the deep boonies, they were dead serious. There was no talking from the time we hit the LZ.

Once we hit the wood line the ARVNs broke off from us and went ahead. We were supposed to set up a company-sized “L” trap. Sergeant Simpson didn’t like it because it was too big, and we didn’t know how the ARVNs would react. I just hoped and prayed we weren’t walking into one.

Walowick was on point. Brunner was in the rear and Johnson was left flank. I was in the middle again, right behind Brew. In the darkness you couldn’t keep the proper distance. You were always afraid that you would lose the dude in front of you, that you would suddenly find yourself walking through the woods alone. We had signals, but they didn’t help when it was really dark.

“Don’t think about anything,” Sergeant Simpson had said. “Don’t think about your mama, don’t think about your girlfriends, nothing. Just look around and be alert.”

Sergeant Simpson had six days left in Nam. Brunner said that Captain Stewart had been on his case to extend for three months. The squad said that we would try to watch out for him, but we knew it didn’t mean much.

I looked around. I couldn’t see anything. I listened for Brew’s footsteps. He sounded like a cat, moving through the night. I heard the cat.

We reached the ambush site. The two ARVN squads formed the short end of the “L.” The two Alpha Company squads were the long side. Lieutenant Gearhart set out the claymores. He had the detonating wires, too. We waited.

I was lying on my stomach. I tried not to think of anything that would get my mind off of what I was doing. I tried to control my imagination, to keep the shadows from becoming things they weren’t.

Something crawled across my wrist. I jumped, and just managed not to cry out. It was too dark to see what it was, but it was still there. I tried to brush it off, but it didn’t move. I felt it. I thought it was a finger. For a crazy-ass minute I thought there was a Cong behind me and he had just dropped a finger on me. I grabbed it and squeezed. It was soft and mushy. My heart was pounding. Every Cong in the world had to hear it. I wanted to turn over and look behind me. I wanted to cry.

I remembered something. It was a picture of a guy with his hands on a bicycle. It was the picture that I had seen in the hut. I tried to picture the guy’s face that I had shot. Was it the same guy? Could it have been his hut? I wondered what he would have said if he had killed me. Would he have said that he was trying to stop the spread of whatever the hell he thought I stood for? What did he think I stood for? What did the bullets feel like going into his face?

Don’t think. Stop thinking. Stop. Look ahead of me. Don’t think, don’t daydream. Look.

Quiet. Suppose everybody had left except me? I didn’t hear anybody. Why was I so afraid of being left alone? It was possible. I knew it was possible.

Look.

I couldn’t see anything. Once in a while the moon would be bright enough to cast a shadow. Somebody had the Starlight Scope. Probably Sergeant Simpson. In the moonlight I looked at my wrist. A fucking leech. I got my bayonet out and cut it in half, then scraped it off my wrist. It stung like crazy.

Ignore it. Sure.

We waited for an hour that seemed like four hours. We waited for another hour that seemed like four more hours.

Voices. Charlie. They were supposed to be so quiet, so cool. I moved my hand up to the trigger.

The first charlies were in the killing zone. I waited. I wanted to pull the trigger. I knew they were passing the claymores. I heard them talking. My hands were sweating. We had the upper hand. We had them in the killing zone. I was waiting for Lieutenant Gearhart to open up with the claymores. The claymores would waste them. They were terrible.

Nothing happened. The charlies were going through the killing zone and out the other side. What the hell had happened? Where the hell was the squad? I heard the charlies go off into the night. They must have passed the ARVNs, too.

“What the fuck happened?” Peewee’s voice in the darkness.

“Shut up!” Gearhart.

Peewee mumbled something to himself, and was quiet.

Okay, it was cool. We weren’t going to do the ambush. We would wait until morning and then split. Maybe Gearhart was scared. He had made a mistake before, and we had lost a man and had one wounded. Now he was playing it safe.

I relaxed. My wrist stung. It felt like the leech was still on it.

Voices. More charlies. They were talking again, taking a stroll through the woods. They entered the killing zone. I kept telling myself not to think about the wrist, and I kept thinking about it.

The voices continued. How many of them were there? The nearly full moon drifted from behind some clouds, and I got my head down. I looked up. There were the charlies. Only instead of the four or five I had imagined there seemed to be an endless line.

I opened my mouth so I could breathe quietly. I had to pee.

Voices behind us. The woods were crawling with charlies.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name… .

Don’t think. Don’t even think of God. I thought. I thought of all the good things I had done in my life. I didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t want to die.

The voices went on for another ten minutes. If we had sprung the ambush, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“Let’s get out of here!” Brunner.

“Shut up!” Gearhart.

Quiet. More voices. They kept coming.

It lasted nearly fifteen minutes. It was only fifteen minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. Still, we didn’t move. A half hour passed after we heard the last one move, before I heard Gearhart calling us together. Simpson went out and got the claymores and we started going back, careful not to take the route the charlies had taken in case they mined it.

Jamal was shaking so badly I wondered how he could have stayed still all that time.

“How you doing, man?”

He didn’t answer. I looked at him and he was crying. I made a note to tell Simpson. If Jamal was that shaky, he was going to get us all killed.

There had been too many charlies to pull an ambush; they would have wiped us out. I wasn’t sure how many there had been, and I thought that Gearhart was only estimating.

“There had to be at least a battalion.” Gearhart was on the radio as soon as we got back to the base.