“I was hoping you were back in the World,” Peewee said. “I was hoping you was back in Harlem getting loved up by three big-hipped mamas and wearing you some wing-tipped kicks by now.”
“I was kind of hoping myself,” I said.
“We ain’t done a thing since you been gone but sit out here in this fucking rain and mud,” Peewee said. “I been sitting in this shit so long my piles got wrinkles.”
“Everybody okay?”
“Yeah, I said we ain’t done nothing,” Peewee said. “But you see who we with down the way?”
“The ARVNs?”
“Yeah, but that ain’t the bad news,” Peewee said. “Come on, we got some bar-b-qued pork chops on the fire.”
“Where did you get pork chops?” “Walowick shot a pig and cut the sucker up,” Peewee said. “We been eating good since we been out here.”
“What’s the bad news?” I said, walking alongside of him.
We went over to where Monaco was squatting with a bottle of soda. Monaco looked up, then he stood and threw both arms around me and hugged me. It really touched me. I thought I was going to cry.
“I’m sorry you’re back,” he said. “But I’m real glad to see you, man. Real glad.”
I started to say something about being glad to see him, too, but I felt something wrong in the air. I looked from Monaco to Peewee.
“So what’s up?”
“Simpson went back to the World.”
Peewee looked up at the sky. I followed his gaze. The skies were a dirty grey. There was a thick cloud cover, heavy and threatening above us. A large bird started into the air as if it had been thrown, then stopped, spread its wings, and glided in a great arc to the west.
“He okay when he left?”
“Yeah,” Peewee said. “But I ain’t too sure about the new sergeant. He’s a first-sergeant and he old.”
“How old?”
“Guy’s at least thirty-something,” Monaco said. “He could even be forty.”
“He took Monaco off point and put me on,” Peewee said. “I didn’t think nothing about it at first until he put me on all the damn time. Then he told Brunner he didn’t want him pulling the rear. He put Johnson on the rear with the damn pig!”
“Johnson’s carrying the sixty in the rear?”
“Yeah.”
“What did Johnson say?”
“Johnson asked him to his damn face,” Peewee said. “He asked him how come he put a brother on point and another brother in the damn rear with the sixty?”
I looked at Monaco, he looked back at me.
“What did he say?”
“Dongan — that’s his name — ” Peewee said, “he said he do what he think he should do and it ain’t for Johnson to tell him what to do.”
“What did Johnson say?”
“Johnson said he gonna mess around and get himself shot in the back of the head.”
It rained for seven days straight. We sat in the rain for seven days straight. The mud oozed up into our boots, into our clothes, into our skins. There wasn’t any way to get dry.
There was talk about us standing down in Okinawa, but nobody took it seriously. There was a lot of talk about how well the other units in the outfit were doing. But the guys in the squad seemed a little different. Tired. They seemed really tired.
For the first five days after I got back I didn’t get to talk to Dongan. He nodded toward me once or twice and that was it. I got an M-16 and a grenade launcher from the armorer and found out that we had to carry more ammunition than I thought we would. Gearhart came around and talked to us a couple of times, but Dongan stayed away. Johnson was getting a thing about him. I went over and talked to Johnson. I wanted to find out more about Dongan, but Johnson wouldn’t deal with it. He asked me what I thought about Brew.
“I liked him,” I said.
“He probably back home, now,” he said.
“Brew?”
“Yeah.”
There was something about the way Johnson looked at me. I looked at Lobel, and he shook his head.
“Probably back home,” I said.
When Johnson went to chow, I asked Lobel what the hell was going on with him about Brew.
“He’s just not accepting the idea that he’s dead,” Lobel said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you ask too many questions,” Lobel said.
That’s what was going on. The questions kept coming and nobody wanted to deal with them. Johnson didn’t want to deal with Brew being dead, and Lobel didn’t want to deal with Johnson. Maybe I did ask too many questions.
The first day the weather lifted a little, a chopper came in with a priest. Peewee had made a checkerboard out of some leaves he wove together. He was good at that kind of thing. We played checkers day and night. We were playing checkers when the Huey came in with the chaplain.
The chaplain was Catholic, and the Catholic guys had a mass or something. Then he came around to the rest of us. He didn’t look like a chaplain. What he looked like was a middleweight who fought preliminaries in Atlantic City. His name was Father Santora.
“Sometimes,” he said, “prayer can be very comforting. I wonder if any of you men would like to pray with me?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” I said. “Try me,” he said.
“I just don’t want to pray,” I said.
“Figure you don’t want to make your peace if you’re not ready to die?”
I smiled. I had to smile. He was right and he knew it. “Something like that.”
“I know how you feel,” he said. “I’m not quite ready to die just yet, either.”
“You ever go into combat?”
“Into combat? Yes. I ve never fired a weapon at anyone, though.”
“You figure if you don’t shoot at anybody, God’s going to take care of you?” Peewee asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I sure as hell hope so.” The big guns in the distance kept rumbling. The sound seemed to rumble through the hills and flatten out over the valley.
“If I pray with you, will it keep me alive?” I asked. “No.”
“What will it do for me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it can be comforting at times.”
“You can’t say anything better than that?”
He shrugged.
“You scared being over here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he nodded his head. “I’m scared.”
We got the squad together. We told him some of the things that had happened to us. Then he prayed, asking God to take care of us and our loved ones, things like that. I really appreciated it. Then he started asking God to look out for Brew’s soul. That’s when Johnson walked away. Right in the middle of a prayer, he walked away.
Father Santora looked up at him, and he was puzzled. Or at least I think he was puzzled. When the prayer was over, Father Santora had to split.
“Where you going?” Monaco asked.
“Some place named Khe Sanh,” Father Santora said. “How come all these places over here have such foreign-sounding names?”
Johnson and Dongan got into a pretty heavy argument about how Johnson was keeping the sixty. Dongan didn’t think the extra barrel that Johnson had to keep was clean enough. Johnson was telling him that he needed a grenade up his ass. They got real close to each other, and Johnson pushed Dongan away from him.
Lieutenant Gearhart got Johnson away from Sergeant Dongan and started pushing him toward the HQ hooch. Peewee told Johnson that if anything funky went down that he could count on him.
“You can count on me, too,” I said. I meant it, too.
The squad didn’t need any crap to get us separated. I knew that, and I was sure that Peewee did, too. But we didn’t have to take any crap, either.
Guard duty. Me, Lobel, Peewee, and Sergeant Dongan. He said that he wanted to pull guard to check us out. When he said tha
t, Peewee opened his pants and told him to check out his crotch.
Sergeant Dongan was from Richmond, Indiana. He sounded southern, he looked southern, and he seemed to think southern. Brunner was sucking up to him, as per usual.
Johnson outlined the problem. “Me, Peewee, Perry, and Monaco is the niggers of this outfit,” he said. “We got to keep a serious watch on our asses.”
I believed him. Monaco was Italian, but he was the same as the black guys in Dongan’s eyes. Maybe because he got along with us so well, I don’t know.
We went out on guard duty at 2000 hours. It was my first real duty since I had got back to the squad. I hit the guard position and inspected it. It looked okay. It was a foxhole with sandbags around the top, and boards at the bottom to stand on. The boards were rickety, but they were better than oozing down into the mud. I lifted the boards and dug it down another foot.
Noises.
The crickets and creepy crawlies were out in force. Crickets made a terrible racket. Things slithering through the grass could wake up the dead. The moon, floating above us, scraped against the clouds.
Noises.
My watch’s ticking was louder than my heartbeat.
There was something out there. No, it was just the darkness. What was out there was me, fearful, crying in the night. I was afraid. I thought of Father Santora.
A noise.
Was it a click? What was it?
Another noise.
I saw Sergeant Dongan move his right arm. He seemed to be groping about in the darkness. He found something. He swung his arm in a tight arc. A grenade.
Thump. It hit. Nothing. It didn’t go off. I glanced up. There was movement, what might be a voice.
Sergeant Dongan fired a short burst. There was a muffled scream.
He fired off a flare. It went high into the air, ignited, then parachuted slowly toward the ground, lighting the entire area. There was one dead VC, a sapper with his wire cutters still in his hand, his lifeless body draped across the wire. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything else. Slowly the light from the flare died. It was dark. The bogeymen could come out again.
Minutes passed. An hour passed. We were relieved by a crew of grim-faced ARVN marines.
“What a time for a dud grenade,’’ Lobel said.
“Ain’t threw no dud,” Dongan said. “Threw a damn rock. That gook ducked his head down when he heard it land. Then he wondered why it didn’t go off. Stuck his head up and I popped him. Learned that from the Third Marines!”
The man knew what he was doing. He knew how to stay alive.
Back at the hooch Lobel came over and sat on Peewee’s bunk. Peewee said that anybody who sat on his bunk had to give him a kiss. Lobel said he wasn’t a faggot, and Peewee said he was sorry about that because he could have really used a kiss.
“You guys think we re going to have a race problem over here?” Lobel asked.
“Not as long as everybody over here got them a gun,” Peewee said.
Lobel stood up. “Well, just in case we do,” he said. “I want you to know you got the Jew on your side.”
“Who’s the Jew?” Peewee asked.
“Me, I’m a Jew.”
“You ain’t no Jew,” Peewee said. “You too tall.”
“Fuck you, Peewee.”
“There you go with them promises again,” Peewee said.
The rain stopped. We sat. We did nothing. The war was a million miles away. Walowick told me and Peewee that they were talking about progress in the Paris peace talks.
“Perry?” Peewee was hanging over the edge of his bunk directing traffic for an ant traffic jam.
“What?”
“You ever have your black ass in Paris?”
“No.”
“Where you been?”
“New York.”
“You know where I been?”
“Where?”
“Chicago and Petersburg, Virginia. I got me a cousin in Petersburg. He work in a library down there.”
“What he do?”
“He run the whole thing.’’
“How he get to do that?”
“He just smart as hell,” Peewee said.
A joint operation. Captain Stewart came around to tell us how we had to look good because we were going to be working with the marines. He made it sound like a job.
“We’ll be going into the Phuoc Ha Valley. The marine unit will move in first and clear the area,” he said. “Then we’ll secure it and establish an LZ in the valley. Is that clear?”
We didn’t do anything. Like half the plans that came down from regiment, this one was canceled. The marines had started a counteroffensive up near Khe Sanh, and moved up there instead of into the Phuoc Ha Valley. We were glad of that, damn glad.
Lobel tried to get up a volleyball game but nobody wanted to play. We got Gearhart to requisition some gloves and baseballs from battalion supply.
We got word that General Westmoreland wanted us to “maximize” destruction of the enemy.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Peewee asked. “We get a Cong, we supposed to kill his ass twice?” “No, monkey face, it means that we re supposed to kill as many of these gooks as we can,” Brunner said.
“You going to ‘monkey face’ your way right to Arlington Cemetery,” Peewee said.
Later, lying in the bunk sweltering in the heat,
I wondered what it did mean about “maximizing” destruction. Would it mean that we would simply kill more?
But who would we kill? Maybe we would be quicker to shoot in the hamlets. Maybe we would stop pretending that we knew who the enemy was and let ourselves believe that all the Vietnamese were the enemy. That would be the easy way. The women, the babies, the old men with their rounded backs and thin brown legs. They would be the enemy, all of them, and we would be those who killed the enemy.
Okay. I got a letter from Peewee’s girlfriend. The first thing she told me is that Peewee said I’m nice-looking and educated. Then she went on to say how she was sorry she couldn’t wait for Peewee anymore. Peewee wasn’t around when I got the letter so I just burned it.
I got a letter from Kenny, too. He said he had a part-time job working at Kelly’s Drugs on the comer of Lenox and 118th Street. For some reason I felt so proud of him, that he would do that. I just hoped Mama was letting him keep all the money he made.
He also said that he heard that Johnny Robinson got killed in the Nam.
Johnny Robinson? The last time I remember seeing him was when we were playing three on three in Morningside Park. Johnny couldn’t play that well, but he always tried hard. I had always thought he was younger than me. I didn’t know how he could even be in the Nam.
Tuesday. Raining. It promised to be the worst day of the war. We were sitting on the side of the hill. Johnson, Monaco, and Lobel had got some money together, and we were playing poker with some guys from Charlie Company. They called it Charlie Company, but it wasn’t really anything more than three squads at best. Three thin squads at that. The ARVNs caught a woman with two children coming along the edge of the paddies. They stopped her and started slapping her around. Some guys from Charlie Company stopped them and brought the woman and the two kids to the HQ hooch.
HQ didn’t have an interpreter, and the ARVN interpreter didn’t get anything from the woman. They finally let her go. Peewee wanted to give the kids the checkerboard he had made.
“They probably don’t even play checkers over here,” Sergeant Dongan said.
“No lie?” Peewee said, “Maybe I’ll make them a doll or something.”
He went over and started grabbing a handful of grass and started making a doll. It was important to him. I could see that, but I didn’t know why. He wanted to make those children something, to give them something.
I watched as some guys from Charlie Company started talking to the Vietnamese woman. They were just kidding around with her, talking stupid stuff about how they were looking for some cheerleaders. They followed her to the edge
of the camp. Meanwhile Peewee was working hard trying to get his little doll together to give to her kids.
I watched as Peewee stood, putting the last touches on the doll. I thought it was cool when the woman stopped just before she reached the dikes and handed one of the kids to a guy from Charlie Company.
The GI’s arms and legs flung apart from the impact of the blast. The damn kid had been mined, had exploded in his arms.
Guys not even near him, guys who had just been watching him take the kid into his arms, fell to the ground as if the very idea of a kid exploding in your arms had its own power, its own killing force.
I saw the woman running across the paddy. I saw her fold backward as the automatic fire ripped her nearly apart. I saw part of her body move in one direction, and her legs in another.
The woman’s other child stood for a long moment, knee deep in water and mud, before it, too, was gunned down.
I turned and saw Peewee walking away. The doll he made lay facedown in the endless mud.
It was raining again.
Chapter 18
Peewee skipped his meals the rest of the day. Monaco tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer. It was Johnson who finally got him to talk.
“Hey, Peewee?”
“What?”
“You care anything about these damn kids over here, man?”
“They got kids over here?” Peewee asked.
“Naw, man, all they got is Congs,” Johnson said. “Congs and mosquitoes.”
“And rats,” Walowick added.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Peewee,” I said. “It’s okay to feel bad about what’s going on over here, man. It’s really okay.” “Me? Feel bad?” Peewee turned over in his bunk and pulled his sheet up around his shoulders. “Never happen.”
The first thing in the morning, a guy got hit. Lobel saw it and told me about it. A medic was handing out malaria pills. The guy had just put the pill into his mouth and was getting water from one of the water cans when he got hit in the rear end.
“First the guy turned around because he thought somebody was screwing around with him,” Lobel said. “Then he felt his ass and looked at his hand. He saw the blood and knew he had been hit. Then he thought that one of us had shot him and he started looking at us. Then another shot hit the water can and we all dove for cover.”
Fallen Angels Page 17