Fallen Angels

by Walter Dean Myers

  “My arm’s hurt.” The other new guy.

  The medic put a flashlight on the arm. It was swollen, probably broken. He looked at the guy’s eyes, then put the flashlight out.

  “You’ll be okay,” he said. Then he slumped backward.

  “You okay, Smitty?” the door gunner asked him.

  “Light shit, man,” he said.

  By the time we got to the camp, Turner was dead. We got some guys to first aid the medic and the other new guy and then the chopper took them away.

  “We got to kick your lieutenant’s ass,” Peewee said when Simpson came into the hooch later.

  “We’ll see about him,” Simpson said. “But we got something else to deal with, too. When that flare went up, Perry, you know what I seen?”

  “What?”

  “I seen with my own two eyes the charlie run up to that claymore you set, turn it around, and run before Monaco got him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, if he turned it around and it went off and it didn’t get none of us, how did you have the damn thing facing to begin with?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Chapter 14

  What had happened? The squad had been in a firefight, and we had been almost overrun. For the first time since I reached Nam we had been in the middle of it. Turner had been killed. And not by some faceless enemy, some random shot from far away, but by an enemy I could see and hear. And what about me? I had stood trembling in fear and waiting, and had run in near panic for the choppers and hoped and prayed for a few minutes more of life. The war was not a long way from where we were; we were in the middle of it, and it was deeply within us.

  We didn’t talk about the wounded man or about Turner, who had died. I think we were glad that we hadn’t known him better. Maybe, even, that if somebody had to die from the squad, it was better that it was a new guy. It was always better that it was someone else.

  “Hey, everybody listen to this!” Monaco was in his shorts, sitting on his bed with the letter in his lap. “‘Dear Sonny, I have been thinking more and more about you every day-I know that you are a long way away, and have a lot on your mind and everything. But, Sonny, I wanted to ask you this. Will you marry me when you get home? Please think about it a lot, as I think you and I would make a nice couple. I got the idea while I was down at the mall on Route 440 yesterday. If you don’t think you want to marry me, please don’t put it in a letter. Just don’t say anything and I will know. Yours, Julie.’”

  “She pregnant?” Peewee asked.

  “No, she just loves me, man,” Monaco said. “This chick has been in love with me since before I even knew what love was.”

  “You going to marry her?” Walowick asked.

  “I don’t know, what do you guys think?”

  “What she look like?” Peewee asked.

  “She’s five-two, maybe five-three,” Monaco said. “Kind of fine, but she ain’t really the foxy type, you know what I mean? She’s an athlete, too. She played softball for St. Dominick’s in Jersey City.”

  “We got to vote on it,” Johnson said. “I vote against it.”

  “Why?” Monaco looked over at where Johnson was cleaning his machine gun.

  “She a nice girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why she want to marry you?” Johnson ran the swab through the barrel of his piece. “You ain’t even got no job.”

  “I’ll get a job when I get home,” Monaco said. “You see these hands? These hands can do anything in the damn world. I can make stuff, I can fix stuff,

  I can do anything. Maybe I’ll even be a cop or a fireman, something like that.”

  “What she do?” Johnson asked.

  “She got a good job,” Monaco said. “She works for Western Electric.”

  “I vote for the marriage,” Peewee said.

  “Marry her,” Brunner said.

  “Monaco, do you love this girl?” Brew said.

  “Yeah,” Monaco said. “I love the shit out of her.”

  “You go to the same church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then Reverend Brew pronounces y’all man and wife,” Peewee said.

  “I think you should marry her.” Brew spoke for himself, but he looked like he didn’t mind Peewee calling him Reverend Brew.

  The final vote was five to two in favor of Monaco marrying the girl. Walowick didn’t think we should vote at all, that it was a sacred decision. Johnson thought that Monaco should get a job first before he made plans to marry her, and Lobel said that he should wait until he got back to the World before he made a decision.

  “You got to see her again,” Lobel said. “I can’t even think of seeing my father again and being the same guy I was when I left home. And if I’m not the same guy, he’s not the same, either.”

  “He got to marry her,” Peewee said. “We done voted on it now.”

  “Okay, you guys are all invited to the wedding. I’ll plan it so that the wedding will be after the last guy in the squad leaves Nam.” “How about me?” Johnson asked. “You inviting me, too?”

  “Yeah, all of us.”

  We started talking about weddings. Walowick said he hated weddings and funerals because all of his relatives got together and fought.

  “First they dance and hug for about a half an hour,” Walowick said. “Then they drink for two hours, then they fight.”

  “That’s cause they white,” Peewee said. “If they was black they could slip in some signifying along with the laughing and dancing and then skip right to the fighting before the drinking even started.”

  Jamal came over from HQ and said that Captain Stewart wanted to see me.

  “About my profile?”

  “What profile?”

  “I’m not supposed to wear boots,” I said.

  “I don’t know nothing about no profile,” Jamal said. “I think it’s about Gearhart.”

  I went over to HQ hut, and Captain Stewart was watching Phil Silvers on television.

  “You want to tell me what happened last night?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “Your patrol lost two men.” He was drinking from a cup. I was about four feet away, but I could still smell it was booze. “One killed, one wounded.” “We were waiting for the chopper and — ” “Medevac? You waiting for a medevac?”

  “No, sir, we hadn’t been hit yet,” I said. “We were hoping to get away without being hit.”

  “Lieutenant Gearhart mess up?”

  “He shot off a flare, we got exposed,” I said. “But I think they knew we were there.”

  “You’re a good man, Perry,” he said. “Why don’t you see what you can do with this letter. Give it back to me before it’s sent.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me ask you something else, too. How many of the enemy do you think were there?”

  “Seemed like the place was crawling with them, sir.”

  “And you guys laid down a pretty good line of fire?”

  “Best we could.”

  “How many you think we got?” he asked. “I know you can’t be sure, just give me a number.”

  I didn’t know what to say. A picture of the paddies came into my mind.

  “Twenty? Thirty?”

  “Maybe not that many, sir?”

  “Maybe, but it could have been.”

  “It could have been, sir.”

  “Good enough,” Captain Stewart nodded. “See what you can do with that letter.”

  I read the letter. It was Lieutenant Gearhart to Turner’s folks. It said that it was his fault that their son was dead, and he was sorry. There was a lot of pain in the letter. It said that Turner was hit in the back after our position had been exposed to the enemy.

  I rewrote the letter. I said that Turner was fighting off the enemy, trying to let the rest of us escape, when he was killed. Gearhart was in the mess hall, slumped over a cup of coffee when I found him and showed him the letter. He read it slowly, and shook his head.


  “Captain Stewart told me to write it,” I said.

  “If I hadn’t set off that damned flare…” His voice trailed off.

  “He still might have got it,” I said. “You can’t tell.”

  “You know, I never thought much about black people before I got into the army. I don’t think I was prejudiced or anything — I just didn’t think much about black people.”

  “Well, we’re here,” I said.

  “I think I should let his parents know what happened,” Gearhart said. “I don’t want to be let off the hook.”

  “The letter I wrote,” I said, “is going to sit better with his family. You might feel bad, like you need to get something off your chest, but don’t drop it on his folks. It’s going to be hard enough just having him dead.”

  He looked at me, then pushed the letter across the table. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  I wanted to be pissed at him. I wanted to think that he was crap because of what he said about black people. But the only thing I could think about was that I was glad it was Turner, and not me. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel, or what I thought I was supposed to feel.

  Jamal came by and showed me the body-count figures. Stewart had listed twenty-eight of the enemy as killed.

  We got the word that the first hamlet we had worked on the pacification patrol was being harassed by the VC. A Major Leff was giving us the rundown about what was going on. He seemed to know what he was talking about.

  “We’ve seen the infiltration over the last two months or so,” he said. “We thought it was in response to the peace talks. They’ve been stalling in the talks, and the thinking was that they wanted to get into a favorable position before the talks get under way so they can claim more territory than they actually had. But now we re not sure. Intelligence reports a lot of movement just north of the DMZ and in Cambodia and Laos.

  “The harassment of the hamlets and villages is part of the whole movement. If they can terrorize the villages, then they can create a hostile atmosphere in them for us. You have to remember that there’s as much of a psychological war going on over here as there is a physical war. I have the feeling that we could win the real war and still lose the psychological war.

  “What I want from you men is as much vigilance as possible until the situation is clearer. Your officers have all been briefed, but it’s up to you guys to do the job. God be with each and every one of you.”

  An intelligence report said that our village was going to be hit by the VC at 1800 hours the next day. Eighteen hundred hours was a hell of a time. It would still be daylight, and if they showed up in the daylight, they would be demonstrating that they weren’t afraid of us, that we couldn’t protect the village.

  Captain Stewart sent all of Alpha Company to the village. We were supposed to link up with a company from the 173rd Airborne. They had the 173rd hopping all over the place, and they were really doing a job, from what we heard. They were supposed to go in first and secure the village and then we were to protect it overnight or until it was decided that the VC in the area weren’t a threat.

  “This mess sounds good,” Sergeant Simpson said. “We sit in the village until the truce and maybe we be sitting out the rest of the damn war.”

  Gearhart was quiet. Sergeant Simpson, who had been bumped up to top sergeant, was more or less leading the whole platoon.

  As soon as I heard the sound of the chopper engines I had to pee. I found a tree and peed and then went toward our chopper. Walowick was already in the door of the Huey and gave me a hand up. My stomach was tight as I found a spot to squat..

  “Get them weapons on safe!” Simpson called out.

  Gearhart was checking gear. He had Peewee carrying a shotgun for the first time.

  Peewee, Walowick, Sergeant Simpson, and Brunner were opposite me. Brew, Monaco, Johnson, Lobel, and Gearhart were on my side. We started off with the other choppers. I was scared again. Wasn’t there ever going to be a time when I wasn’t scared?

  Monaco was reading the letter from his girl.

  “You know,” he said. “It takes balls for a chick to propose to a guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  I wondered if anybody else had the feeling of being scared. I looked over at Peewee. He was looking at a manual that had been on the floor of the Huey.

  The artillery fire was more frightening now. Puffs of smoke around us meant that they were shooting at the chopper. If they hit us while we were in the air, we didn’t have a chance.

  Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name … I thought the words. Would God think I was a hypocrite, praying every time I was scared?

  A guy from the chopper crew turned, looked at us, and asked who Gearhart was. Gearhart raised his hand, and the chopper guy handed him the headset.

  We all watched Gearhart, trying to figure out what was being said, trying to read his face, his gestures.

  He nodded once, again. He handed back the headset.

  “We’re securing the village instead of the 173rd,” he said.

  “Where the hell’s the 173rd?” Simpson asked.

  Gearhart shrugged. Sergeant Simpson wiped his palm on his pants leg. I had heard him say to Peewee that Stewart had asked him to extend. He had less than two weeks left in Nam.

  The chopper stopped in midair, then made a violent maneuver. I thought we were hit. I looked up at the chopper crew; they were calm. We picked up speed. There was a whine above the other sounds. Were we hit?

  The chopper stopped again. The crew opened the door. The machine gunner started firing even before he looked out. The killers had arrived.

  We jumped from the chopper. It was faster now. One foot on the ski, then down. Move. Move. The other squads in our company had landed at the same time. We moved toward the village. We could see fires up ahead.

  “Spread left! Spread left! Keep your distances!” Sergeant Simpson barked orders.

  We moved straight ahead until we came within forty meters of the village. Several of the huts were on fire; there were people milling about. Even from where we were we could hear the wailing.

  “Let s move!” Gearhart went first.

  We followed. The VC had already struck. There were bodies all around. Some twisted awkwardly, others looking as if they were just resting, their legs bent for comfort. We started checking out the huts. Empty except for the villagers. Some were hurt bad.

  “Two platoon, on perimeter!” I turned and saw Captain Stewart. He must have been in one of the other choppers.

  The village looked like the one they had constructed for practice at Fort Devens. Only here there were real people. An old woman stumbled into the open space in front of her hut. Her face was covered with blood. She fell. I went over to her, looked at her, and saw the bones in her face where the flesh had been cut away. Turn away.

  There was a sense of panic in the air. We had our weapons ready. Sergeant Simpson was telling us not to kill the civilians. I didn’t consciously want to kill anybody, anything. But I felt strange. The sight of all the bodies lying around, the smell of blood and puke and urine, made my head spin, pushed me to a different place. I wanted to fire my weapon, to destroy the nightmare around me. I didn’t want it to be real, this much death, this much dying, this waste of human life. I didn’t want it. I looked around until I found Monaco. There were tears in his eyes, but his mouth was twisted in hate and anguish and confusion. I turned away from Monaco’s pain. It wasn’t the time for comforting each other.

  The heat from the burning huts was intense; the shimmering air creating phantom figures all around us.

  There was a burst of fire behind me. I turned. Walowick was firing toward a steel drum that lay on its side. I reached for a grenade just as Simpson ran past me. He grabbed Walowick and threw both arms around him.

  “Easy, man! Easy!”

  I stood with the grenade in my hand. My hand on the pin, ready to pull it out and arm it. I watched Simpson holding Walowick. Around us, the other guys went on with their se
arching.

  I looked back at Walowick. He had freaked out. He was breathing hard, and Sergeant Simpson was still holding him. Walowick was a rock, a fucking rock, and he had freaked out. I turned away. I was going to be cool, I had to be.

  We went from hut to hut. They were all empty. Some guys formed a bucket brigade and started trying to put the fire out of the huts that were still burning.

  The company was calming down. We bandaged some of the wounds. Captain Stewart called in some medevacs to take out the wounded Vietnamese.

  We began coming down, but it wasn’t easy: stepping around the bodies, turning away from the stench, from the reality of the death around us. I stopped for a moment to look at the bodies of two old men, their arms around each other in death. I saw them even after I turned away.

  We could have killed as easily as we mourned. We could have burned as easily as we put out the fires. We were scared, on the very edge of control, at once trying to think of what was right to do and hating the scene about us.

  I think, if Simpson hadn’t been there, it would have been worse. Much worse. He calmed us down, brought us back to ourselves. He let us be human again; in all the inhumanity about us, he let us be human again.

  “They messed up at least one person from each hut,” Peewee said.

  “They cut a baby’s head off.” Monaco spoke slowly. His face was dark, his mouth quivered between words. “How the hell do you kill a friggin’ baby?”

  “Like the major say,” Peewee said. “They showin’ the people we can’t protect them so they might as well be on charlie’s side. You know what this is like?”

  “Like a trip to friggin’ hell,” Monaco said.

  “No, man, this is like the projects in Chicago,” Peewee said. “The police can’t protect your ass from the muggers and shit, and the muggers don’t protect your ass from the police.”

  “This ain’t like Chicago,” Monaco said. “They don’t kill babies in no Chicago.”

  Stewart told us to go to each hut and pick out the wounded who looked most like they were going to live and get them ready for evacuation.

  “If you see anybody who looks like a VC make a note of it,” he said.

  Body counts. I looked over at Simpson, but he was looking away.