Fallen Angels

by Walter Dean Myers

  “Sometimes it goes like that,” Monaco said. He started to say something else, then shrugged it off, and left.

  I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen before had been my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready, walking into the darkened church with the family and sitting in the first pews. But Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before. Seeing him lying there like that, his mouth and eyes open, had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.

  The neat pile of body bags was waiting for the rest of us. There were enough there — the supply clerk had reached for the top one without even looking — to know that they expected that many of us would be going home in them.

  I didn’t know what to think about what had happened. I didn’t know what to feel. I touched my fingers to the palm of my hand. I could feel my fingers. It was only inside that I was numb.

  Lieutenant Carroll, our platoon leader, came in. He was a quiet guy, with dark hair and dark, calm eyes and an uneasy smile. I never felt that he was comfortable with himself. I hadn’t had a chance to talk with him yet, but sometimes I would see him drift off into his own daydreams and be embarrassed when we caught him at it.

  When the old guys — the guys that had been through it before — saw him, they put their cards down, and their magazines, and gathered around him. I got up and nudged Peewee, who was lying facedown on his bunk.

  Lieutenant Carroll took off his helmet and bowed his head.

  “Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, OLord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.”

  In the morning, in the mess tent, I asked Lieutenant Carroll why he had called Jenkins an angel warrior.

  “My father used to call all soldiers angel warriors,” he said. “Because usually they get boys to fight wars. Most of you aren’t old enough to vote yet.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three,” he said.

  “How come you’re not retired?”

  Lieutenant Carroll stayed in our hooch for a while and helped check our supplies. He asked if we were short or anything, and Monaco said we could use some more three-day passes.

  “I got a letter from Virginia Union.” A brother we called Brew sat on a footlocker next to Lieutenant Carroll. His real name was Brewster, so I could see where Brew came from. “They said I can probably get into the theology school there but they can’t accept me formally until six months before my admission date.”

  “Did you write to that school in New York I told you about?” Lieutenant Carroll asked.

  “No,” Brew grinned. “From what I’ve heard about New York, the temptations might be too great for me.”

  “If the Temptations don’t get you then you got to look out for Smokey Bobinson and the Miracles,” Peewee called out.

  “You know” — Lieutenant Carroll had spread all the extra first aid packs on the floor in front of him — “my brother went to theology school and I almost followed him.”

  “You can still go,” a guy called Walowick said from his bunk. “It’s good for a priest to be older.”

  “I might have too many doubts, now,” Lieutenant Carroll said.

  “If you turn to God, He’ll take away your doubts,” Brew said.

  “I don’t have doubts about God,” Lieutenant Carroll said. “I’m just not that sure who I am anymore.”

  He gathered the first aid kits together and asked Brew if he would give them out. Then he got his weapon and said he would see us later.

  “He don’t look like a priest,” Peewee said after Lieutenant Carroll had left.

  “He used to act more like a holy guy or something when he first got over here. He never cursed or anything like that.” Walowick was putting powder on a rash he had. “Then one day we were trying to clear a road and some guys got trapped in a ditch off to one side. We were on the other side of the road, and we could see them but we couldn’t get to them. It was getting dark, and we knew they couldn’t last. Charlie was throwing everything at them. Then Lieutenant Carroll just went wild and stormed across the fucking road. We went after him. We were shooting at guys maybe three or four feet from us. We finally wasted all of them and cleared the road. He hasn’t been the same since, but we all found out what kind of a guy he was that day. When the chips were down, he put his ass on the line for the guys.”

  “You get the guys out of the ditch okay?” Peewee asked.

  “Unh-uh.” Walowick shook his head. “That’s why you guys are in the squad.”

  I wrote Mama a letter all about how Jenkins had got killed. Then I tore it up and decided not to tell her about it. It would only get her upset. Instead, I told her more about Peewee. I didn’t want to tell her about Jenkins for another reason, too. I didn’t know how I felt about it. In a way I was really sorry for Jenkins, but there was a small voice inside me that kept saying that I was glad that it wasn’t me that was killed. I didn’t want anybody to see me putting that in a letter.

  They brought a VC into camp to question. They questioned him, and then they took him into a hooch they used for storage while they decided what they were going to do with him. Peewee had been in there to get extra clips earlier and thought he might have lost his comb there. He went into the hooch to look for his pick, and the VC was sitting in there and started a conversation with him.

  “Sucker spoke better English than I did,” Peewee said.

  “What was he talking about?” Brunner asked. Brunner had a thick neck and short blond hair. He also seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.

  “Ask me where I was from and stuff like that,” Peewee said. “I thought he was a friendly, you know.”

  “You tell him where you were from?”

  “Yeah, and he told me he used to go to the flicks down on State Street and even asked me if I knew some chick named Thelma.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then he asked me for a cigarette, and we was sitting there smoking when the captain come in. That’s when all hell broke loose. The fool jumped on me and tried to get my pistol, and the captain run up to him and punched him in the face.”

  Then they had tied the VC up and threw him in the back of a jeep to take to an intelligence unit, and the captain gave Peewee hell for giving information to the enemy.

  Peewee said he was glad he gave him some information.

  “How come?” Monaco was cleaning his rifle again. “’Cause if the Cong ever get to State Street, I want to be on their side,” Peewee said.

  Walowick, a Polish kid with dimples who looked like he had more teeth than he needed, looked up from his magazine, flashed a smile, and went back to reading.

  “By the time we get out of here there won’t be any Cong left,” Brunner said.

  “We’d get out of here a lot faster if we took them all to Hollywood.” Lobel was tall and a little pudgy. His hair looked as if he had given himself a perm or something. He was almost as tall as me but soft-looking. He didn’t look feminine or anything, just soft.

  “What are you going to do with the Vietcong in Hollywood?” I asked.

  “Look what they did after World War II,” he said, getting up on one elbow. “We made a hundred war movies, and we brought all the Germans over and gave them nice little bit parts, and they were very happy. We brought the Japanese over and gave them little bit parts, and they were happy. Now all we have to do is to stop this silly war and start making the movies right away. We take all these little slant-eyes over to Universal, give them SAG cards, and put them to work.”

  “That is a fag solution, only capable of coming from the mind of a fag,” Brunner said.

  “Hey, Corporal,” Lobel got up on one elbow. “Just because I don’t have my serial number tattoed on my genitals does not mean I’m a fag.”

  “You wouldn’t have enough room for more than
three numbers, anyway,” Brunner said. He looked around to see who was laughing. Nobody was.

  We got mail call and I didn’t get anything. I had to find somebody to write to beside Mama so I would get mail. I couldn’t depend on Kenny to write.

  There was something happening up north the next morning. For about an hour we heard artillery. Simpson was in our hooch, talking about squirrel hunting outside of Petersburg, Virginia, and Monaco was getting on his case.

  “You call that sport?” Monaco asked. “I mean, there you are, you gotta weigh two hundred pounds, and you got a rifle, and you’re against a squirrel that weighs maybe two or three pounds, and he ain’t got nothing.”

  “Man, it’s a damn sport!” Simpson protested. “You know what a sport is?”

  “Do I know what a sport is?” Monaco pointed to himself. “I played football and baseball for Marist High School in Bayonne. I made All-County. That’s sport. I don’t have to shoot no little animals.”

  “You had you a rifle,” Peewee said. “You could have made All-World.”

  “The way I figure it,” Monaco went on, “if you hunt a squirrel with a rifle, what do you hunt a bear with? Artillery?”

  “Call in some white phosphorus on him,” Brew said. “That’ll get his attention until the jets zero in.” White phosphorus, or Willy Peter as they called it, was an artillery round that burned the crap out of anything it touched.

  “You don’t know nothing about no hunting!” Simpson was getting pissed. “You don’t know what hunting is!”

  “What he’s trying to say,” — Lobel was flat on his back; there was a can of Coke on his chest — “is that the white phosphorus is enough. After it burns the bear’s ass off, then the good sergeant will finish him off with a couple of frag grenades.”

  “Lobel, y-y-you are a faggot!” Sergeant Simpson got up and left the hooch.

  We had to go to a village and do what sounded like public relations work. We were supposed to pass it around that anybody who was a Communist and who wanted to change and be on our side was welcome to come. The program was called “Chieu Hoi,” but Peewee called it “chewing the whores.”

  The village was a good ten minutes away, and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.

  I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of- the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.

  On the way to the chopper I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.

  When we landed, another squad was already at the landing zone. They told us that all the women in the village were either under six or over six hundred.

  The village stunk. You could smell it as you got near. There were huts laid out about fifteen meters from each other. Some were fairly large. There were people in the village walking around, some were building a pen of some kind. Like the guys had told us, they were either very young or very old.

  “All their men is either in the VC army or the

  ARVNs. The ARVNs is the South Vietnamese army, and they suppose to be on our side. The VC is the enemy. This is like the Civil War,” Simpson said. “Sometimes one brother go to the VC and the other brother go to the ARVN. After a while the brother who fighting with the VC either gonna get killed or want to leave and join the ARVN.”

  “They don’t care what side they fight on?” I asked. “They would if they got time to think about it,” Simpson said. “But the ARVN kick they butts if they catch them in the village and they ain’t fighting for the ARVN — ”

  “— and the VC kick they butts if they catch them and they ain’t fighting for the VC,” Peewee said.

  “Bout the size of it.”

  There was a jeep with medical supplies on it. There were aspirins, a few malaria pills, and some Band-Aids. A captain was giving them out to the squad.

  “If you give them malaria pills, make sure they take it on the spot,” he said. “We don’t want this stuff falling into the hands of the VC.”

  “So why we giving it to them?” Peewee asked. “To make them love us,” the captain said. He had a smirk on his face.

  When we got to the village, some of the people ignored us while others came up and begged for C rations and whatever else we would give them. Lobel and I gave chocolate bars to a Vietnamese woman. A small girl clung to the woman’s legs, and Lobel asked her name. The woman told us the girl’s name was An Linh. She was about seven, maybe eight. She was small, like all the Vietnamese, compared to us Americans. She looked like a little doll with dark black eyes that dominated a round, brown face. She could have been black, maybe Puerto Rican.

  Lobel gave her some candy and carried her around on his shoulders. I shook her hand, and she seemed to want to hold on to my fingers, so the three of us went around the village. Sergeant Simpson let a young boy wear his canteen.

  We broke out more C rations, the canned stuff the army passes off for food, and shared them with the kids. Me and Lobel ate with An Linh. A woman, her head too big for her small body, brought us some rice, and Lobel took some.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  I didn’t want any rice. It smelled okay, but I was afraid of being poisoned. My mind went back to Jenkins and how he had been afraid of dying. We hadn’t mentioned his name since he got it. I wanted to ask Lobel about that, but I didn’t.

  “If I owned this village,” Lobel was saying, “I’d make it into a real jungle scene.”

  “It is a real jungle scene,” I said.

  “No, to make it real you have to have one side of the huts open so you can shoot inside,” Lobel said. “Then you have to get some artificial grass so it stays the same color throughout the whole picture, and finally you have to get a wind machine so you can make the grass sway.”

  “Why not just shoot it naturally and save the money?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you from New York?” Lobel squinted at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought black guys from New York were supposed to be smart?” he said. “Nobody pays to see anything natural. You pay to see unnatural things look almost natural.”

  “Oh.”

  “Would you want to see Doris Day or some natural-looking girl with pimples on her forehead and heat rash on her chest?”

  The Vietnamese woman who had brought us rice squatted at the edge of the bush to take a leak.

  “See, you couldn’t have any of that,” Lobel said. “People in Hollywood don’t pee.”

  We gave An Linh as much of our C rations as she could carry, and Lobel gave her a new name. “She’ll never do anything in Hollywood with her name,” he said.

  We decided to call her Arielle. Lobel said that as soon as we got her to Santa Monica we had it made.

  Peewee spent most of the time sitting down in a hut until Lieutenant Carroll made him walk around the village. He found a bottle of wine in one of the huts and tried to buy it for four American dollars. The people in the hut said that he could take it for nothing, but Lieutenant Carroll said not to. He finally paid two dollars for it.

  “Suppose it’s poisoned or something?” I asked.

  “Then I’m gonna die,” Peewee said.

  “You taking it back to the base?”

  “Nope.”

  He borrowed a corkscrew from the woman he had bought the wine from and opened the wine and drank some of it. He made an awful face, then drank some more.

  “That bad?”

  “Yep, but that’s one thing I got done.”

  “What is?”

  “That’s the first time I ever drank wine from a bottle with a cork in it,” he said. “Now all I got to do is to make love with a foreign woman and smoke a cigar.”

  We stayed around the village for the rest of the day, and then it was time to leave. The choppers came in and lifted us out, and we were back at the base before we knew it.

  “Those gook
s will probably be having supper with the VC by the time we sit down to chow,” Brunner said.

  “How come when you say ‘gooks’ it sounds like ‘nigger’ to me?” Johnson asked.

  “You hear what you want to hear,” Brunner said.

  “What I’m hearing is what you saying,” Johnson said.

  “Y’all shut that shit up,” Sergeant Simpson looked from Brunner to Johnson and back again.

  We had roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, carrot cake, and milk for supper. I sat under a tree with Peewee, eating. A bug crawled over his leg, and he put some mashed potatoes on his knee in the bug’s path, but the bug turned and went the other way.

  “You think he’s saying something about the chow?” I asked.

  “He probably want some of the roast beef,” Peewee said. “He know it Sunday and everything. But he ain’t getting none.”

  “Sunday? It’s not Sunday, it’s Wednesday.” “Bugs is four days behind people,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Sergeant Simpson saw us and came over. He sat down and asked us how we were enjoying ourselves.

  “I’ve seen places I’d rather be,” I said. “Times Square, Lenox Avenue, Fifth Avenue, you name it.”

  “I loves it here,” Peewee said. “I ain’t never seen no place in the world better than this place right here. You know what I love the most?”

  “What’s that?” Sergeant Simpson was amused by Peewee.

  “The bugs,” Peewee said. “You go to sleep at night they right there. You wake up in the morning, they right there. They better than a damn dog.” “So what you guys think about this outfit?” Sergeant Simpson asked.

  “It looks okay to me,” Peewee said. “I might have to straighten a few things out, though.”

  “Like what?” Sergeant Simpson asked.

  “Like Brunner,” Peewee said. “That boy got a quick lip on him.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sergeant Simpson looked away. “He might got him a quick lip, but Captain Stewart is the one eligible.”

  “Eligible for what?”

  “For major,” Sergeant Simpson said. “And his best chance of making it is while he over here. His tour is up the fifteenth day of March.”