Fallen Angels

by Walter Dean Myers

  I thought I remembered where An Linh lived and I went to look for her. I found her and an old woman who looked like she could have been her greatgrandmother. They looked okay. When An Linh saw me, she started crying and tried to get behind the old woman. Okay, I could dig where she was coming from.

  I looked around for An Linh’s mother. I didn’t see her. I tried once or twice to ask the old woman, but I couldn’t get through to her. She was squatting against the wall, one thin brown arm raised, the hand over her forehead. She looked as if she might have been still in shock.

  I was glad to see that An Linh was all right. It was what it was getting to be: hoping that what you liked, what you had seen before, remained whole.

  I didn’t have anything to give to An Linh, so I gave her a dollar. I knew there wasn’t much she could do with it in the boonies, but I gave it to her anyway. As I left she followed me with her eyes, and I wondered what she saw.

  The next hut looked empty. There were two bowls on the table. One still had some kind of food — it looked like a thick soup — in it. The VC must have caught them by surprise, in the middle of a meal, maybe saying grace.

  There were pictures on a small wicker chest. I went to see them. A thin Vietnamese man in shirtsleeves stood squinting at the camera. On one side of him was a woman and on the other side a bicycle. He had both of his hands on the bicycle.

  A click! Another!

  I turned to look at the muzzle of a gun.

  Click! Click!

  I couldn’t move. It was like a dream. I was watching it, but I couldn’t move. It was a dream of my death. A gun was pointed at my chest. A small brown man was pumping the bolt frantically to get it to work.

  Click! Click! Click!

  He came at me and swung the butt of the rifle toward my head. I blocked it with my arm and backed away. He swung again and hit my shoulder, the rifle glancing up from my shoulder into the side of my face. I pulled the trigger of my rifle without lifting it. He went down on one knee. Then it was as if I were suddenly awake. I lifted the M-16 and started firing it in his face. I emptied the clip. I snatched another one from my belt, slammed it in, and fired that point-blank.

  “Don’t move!” I screamed at him. “Don’t move!”

  “Perry! Back away!”

  Sergeant Simpson’s voice snapped at me from the doorway.

  “Back away, man!”

  I backed away, keeping my rifle pointed at the VC. Sergeant Simpson went over to him. Then he lowered his rifle.

  “He ain’t in this war no more,” he said.

  By that time a couple of other guys had shown up. I thought my hands were bleeding, but I went to check out the VC before I put my piece down.

  There was no face. Just an angry mass of red flesh where the face had been. Part of an eyeball dangled from one side of the head. At the top there were masses of different-colored flesh. The white parts were the worst. There was a tooth, a bit of skull. I turned away. I vomited.

  My hands weren’t bleeding. It was that much sweat, pouring down my arms and forearms and from my palms. I heard Sergeant Simpson tell Peewee to stay with me. Peewee put his arm around my waist and told me to come on. We left the hut and went to the next one. “They got some tea on the stove in there,” Peewee said.

  I went in with Peewee, then pulled myself together. I didn’t want the tea. Maybe I was afraid of it. Peewee said that we should go outside and sit down. I said okay.

  We had just left the hut when Peewee stopped and turned around.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. His voice was lower than usual, almost a rumble from his throat. He started back toward the hut.

  I went after him. We walked into the hut, and he went over toward the corner. There was a rattan throw mat on the floor. One comer of it was around a bamboo pole that was about six feet high. Peewee aimed at the mat and fired twice.

  “I just thought that could have been a breathing tube or somethin’,” Peewee said.

  I tried to move the mat with my foot. It didn’t move. I looked around until I saw a piece of string. I tied it to the mat and went across the room.

  “I’ll jerk the string,” I said. “You cover it.”

  I jerked it and the mat came up. Even from where we stood, we could see the body. He wasn’t dead. Captain Stewart came in and asked w’hat was going on. Peewee pointed toward the wounded Cong. Captain Stewart finished him off.

  The company surrounded the hamlet. Captain Stewart called in evacuation helicopters. We loaded up the villagers who were still there. He didn’t know how many more Congs were hiding in the huts, half buried under furniture or mats, but he wasn’t going to risk any of us to find out. We moved the rest of the people out to the landing zone and burned the whole place down.

  Two VC came out from one hut that we were burning. They had their hands up. A woman from the village went over and stabbed one in the side. He tried to get her knife away from her, and two guys lit him up. His body jerked around like a rag puppet being dragged by a dog.

  I had killed a man. I thought about how he looked, how I had felt. I remembered looking down at him, the M-16 in my hands, my forearms aching from the tension of holding it. I remembered looking downi at him and feeling my own face tom apart.

  I thought of the other one, too. It was a nightmare. A nightmare of me crouching somewhere listening to the enemy above. Maybe they wouldn’t see me, just take a shot to see if I was there.

  The wounded were taken out first. Our squad was on perimeter patrol while others lifted the litters onto the choppers. The throaty sound of the mortars could still be heard, and the incoming fire was getting closer. They were calling in artillery to shut down the incoming mortars even though it was estimated that the mortars were almost on top of us.

  The first choppers lifted off and the others started coming in. I couldn’t believe they would come in with all the heat in the area, but they came. Great insects, angry and buzzing over the steaming jungle, ignoring the fact that every hostile in the area was trying to bring them down. Any direct hit would bring death to the entire crew, and they all had to know it, and still they came.

  I looked over my shoulder at the choppers as they landed, blowing away the loose grass and debris on the ground. A glassine bandage wrapping danced across the area between the huts, flattened itself momentarily against the small, still body of a dead NVA soldier, and then flew off into the jungle.

  The chopper crews. They were the stuff of heroes. Swooping from the skies like great heavenly birds gathering the angels who had fallen below.

  When we got back to the compound, Peewee couldn’t walk. He jumped from the chopper and his legs gave way under him. Johnson had to carry him to the hooch. They got him back to our hut, and Gearhart got a medic over.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” Peewee told the medic.

  “Let him look at your legs, soldier.” Captain Stewart was in our hooch.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with my damn legs,” Peewee said. “All I need is a cigarette.”

  Captain Stewart gave him a cigarette and he lit up.

  The medic told Peewee again to relax while he took his pants off. Peewee took his own pants off. He was right, there wasn’t anything wrong with his legs.

  I laughed and Peewee laughed and we were all laughing. Then Peewee started coughing from the cigarette, and the medic gave him some water.

  Stewart left after saying something about how good we had done.

  Gearhart came over and talked with us for a while. Just small talk. He was shaken from what we had been through. Nobody got used to it. Good.

  Brew’s hand began to jerk and that scared him. We were all jumpy. It wasn’t that we were hurt. It was just that we couldn’t get down. We had been shooting and screaming and scared that somebody, that something, was going to kill us. We just couldn’t get down that easily. It didn’t stop when they blew the whistle. I didn’t know if it would ever stop.

  After a while Johnson noticed that we were all whispering. He
laughed a quiet little laugh, and we all laughed about that.

  “How the hell do you smoke a cigarette with half of it in your mouth?” Gearhart asked Peewee.

  “You know what this is?” Peewee asked. “This is the first cigarette I’ve ever smoked.”

  Later we went to the recreation hooch and watched the news. It was all about President Johnson trying to get a bill passed to help the urban poor, and then something about the Pueblo, which had been taken over by the North Koreans. Then there was a big thing on the Super Bowl, and whether or not the Packers had a dynasty going. It wasn’t real that people were thinking about things like that when all this shit was going on. It just wasn’t real.

  Sleeping didn’t come hard; it didn’t come at all. I was asleep, in a way, and yet I wasn’t.

  “Peewee?”

  “What?”

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay, how you doing?”

  “Okay,” I said. “You know what happened today in the hut?”

  “What?”

  “That VC popped up from no damn where,” I said. “First thing I heard was him trying to blow me away. His weapon didn’t work. If it had, he would have got me, Peewee. He would have got me!”

  I started crying, and Peewee got up and came to my bunk. He put his arms around me and held me until we both fell asleep.

  We got word that we were moving again, some place near Tam Ky. The whole outfit was going, but Alpha was going first. Captain Stewart told us we were supposed to act as advisers to the ARVN troops. Nobody trusted him.

  Lobel got a map and we figured out exactly where Tam Ky was and figured we didn’t want to be there. The marines were at Chu Lai, which was pretty safe. They were also up north fighting their rear ends off. Tam Ky was being hit a lot, and Lobel figured that if the VC wanted to hit someplace near there, the ARVN base would be easier than the marines.

  “You got too big a base for them to hit at Chu Lai,” he said. “They’re already fighting like crazy up north, so they hit the ARVNs at Tam Ky. It figures.”

  “Hey, Lobel?” Sergeant Simpson was packing up his gear and his personal supply of ammunition. He had all of these clips that he had checked round by round, and he was taking it all with him.

  “You don’t agree?” Lobel asked.

  “Why don’t you go back to your damn movies, because I only got eight days left and that’s too damn short to be listening to your war theories.”

  Jamal came over to tell us that he was going to be with our squad from now on. He looked scared.

  “You think you’re man enough to go out with us?” Brunner said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jamal said. “But they’re sending me, anyway.”

  Mail call.

  Brunner got a letter from his wife in Seattle. She was a waitress in a coffee shop down near the waterfront, and the coffee urn blew up. It burned her arm and her right leg, but it wasn’t serious, she said. Brunner went out of his mind over it. He couldn’t understand how a damn coffee urn could blow up.

  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.”

  Chapter 15

  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 ev
en 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.