Fallen Angels (12 page)

It was 2230 hours. Back home in Harlem it would have been ten-thirty. The eight o’clock parties would be just hotting up. Kenny would be fighting with

Mama about going to bed. Maybe he would wonder about what I was doing. If he was in bed already, he would be reading comics under the blanket with a flashlight. I wondered if he would feel anything if I got nailed? Would he wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what was wrong? Would he feel uneasy, knowing that halfway around the world his brother was hurting?

Kenny, I love you.

We waited. I told myself that I was bored.

I wondered if Mama was getting the allotment checks. I wondered how she felt about them. Did she think I was doing something for her, or just that it was part of my being in the army? I didn’t know myself.

At 2300 hours I had to pee. Actually, I had to do more than that but no way I was taking my pants down out in the boonies. I felt around me to see if I was on an incline, decided I wasn’t, and lay on one side and peed as quietly as I could.

It was grave dark and quiet except for the things that crawled in the night. Suppose everyone else was gone? Suppose I was out here by myself? Forget that. Think about something else. Think about Diana Ross waking me up in the morning, begging me not to get out of bed. No, wait, her and Juliet Prowse were secretly sisters trying to get me to make love to them.

The thing was I was a virgin. I didn’t tell anybody because I wasn’t supposed to be a virgin. I was supposed to be hip. Everybody knew how blacks were, how soldiers were. Everybody knew, and I was still lying in behind a few inches of sand halfway around the world from anything I knew without having loved anything deeply, or spent time with anyone in a bed alone. Maybe it wasn’t important.

Insects chirped, moved through the night. There were shadows all around me, laughing, jerking, mocking.

A sound. I raised my head slightly to hear better. Voices. Vietnamese voices. I brought my hand to the weapon, my finger played with the safety. Shadows ahead of me. They were coming out of the cemetery.

They moved about, talking quietly, calm, singsong rhythms. What were they talking about? The lousy chow they got in the army? Their families?

Someone opened up. A scream. We were all firing. It was too dark to aim, I just fired in what I thought was the right direction.

They began to answer fire. I could see faces over the light from the muzzle blasts. I fired faster, trying to space my rounds in a sector. I heard a bullet whine past me and flinched even though I knew it was already gone. A grenade went off, and then another. I kept firing. I didn’t know where my rounds were going.

“Cease fire!” Simpson’s voice.

“Take cover!” Lieutenant Carroll.

A small pop, and a flare went high into the air. A moment later the entire area was lit up. There was nothing in front of us. I looked from side to side. Then I saw a body, and another. Thin arms not much different in color than mine. A hand waving slowly in the night air, trying to push away the death already there. One body lay facedown. There was a tremendous wound on the back. It’s what a blast from an M-16 can do.

We kept shooting at the bodies even though they were already dead.

“Get another flare up!” Sergeant Simpson’s voice cracked as he spoke.

Brunner sent another flair into the sky as the rest of us searched the area with our eyes, not moving from the spot we were in.

“What the fuck happened?” Monaco came through the trees.

“They pass by you?”

“No.”

“Here!”

Peewee called us over and we went. He had found one of them lying a few feet from the entrance to a tunnel. The tunnel was near the comer of the cemetery, covered by a low, sprawling bush.

Sergeant Simpson took a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it into the opening as hard as he could. We stepped back, and a moment later the grenade went off.

“Okay, let’s hit it!” he said.

We were starting off. Backing out of the village toward the pickup zone. I felt sick. My stomach churned. I looked for Peewee and found him. There was nothing to read in his face.

A pop. Nothing more. A small pop, almost lost in the sounds of the jungle around us. We hit the dirt, the mud. We returned fire. Someone sent up a flare that was defective. It burned for a second and then went out quickly. To my left I heard someone crying out. Not loudly — there was no panic — but a gentle cry of surprise.I turned just as the last of the light from the flare was dying. It was Lieutenant Carroll.

The squad lit up the woods with fire as Sergeant Simpson barked into the radio. We started making our way toward the village. Johnson and Walowick carried Lieutenant Carroll.

Carried him. He was limp. His legs dragged behind him. God have mercy. God have mercy.

I looked toward his face, but he was a silhouette, lost in the darkness of the moment.

Pain. I thought my heart was stopping. I couldn’t breathe. We went to the edge of the village and somebody shot off another flare.

“Keep their heads down!” Sergeant Simpson pointed toward the village.

Peewee sent a burst of fire into the village. Johnson had put Lieutenant Carroll down and was setting up the M-60. The sixty — the pig — was hungry, angry that they had hit our man, our leader.

“Cover the trail!” Sergeant Simpson called to Johnson.

Peewee and Monaco kept pumping rounds high into the village while Johnson sprayed the trail behind us.

We didn’t see anything. The fire could have come from the village. Lieutenant Carroll, lying behind a wide tree, was a dark silhouette. No one in the squad spoke. We were afraid for Lieutenant Carroll, we were afraid for ourselves, and our only answer to the fear that called each of our names was to fire blindly into the fearful darkness.

It took the chopper another five minutes to get to us. What we hadn’t done to the village, it did. It leveled the huts. There were Vietnamese, mostly women and old men, running for their lives. Few of them made it more than a few feet as the chopper guns swept everything in their path. These were the people we had come to save, to pacify. Now it was ourselves that we were saving. God have mercy. God give us peace.

The chopper came down and we handed up Lieutenant Carroll. A burnt offering. We didn’t hand him up gently through the chopper doors, we pushed him as hard as we could. It was his life, but it was our lives as well. God have mercy.

We all climbed on and the chopper tilted, jerked, and was off. The door gunner kept spraying the village as we moved off into the night.

A medic on the chopper looked for Lieutenant Carroll’s wound, but couldn’t find it. Bars of lights passed through us. There were eyes, the outlines of helmets. There was Lieutenant Carroll, unconscious.

“Anybody see where he was hit?” The medic was already putting in the IV

We hadn’t seen. There weren’t any signs of blood.

“Maybe he just passed out,” Monaco said.

The medic didn’t answer, he just shook his head. We didn’t land at the base. We went on to Chu Lai. The whole squad made the trip. We got there in what seemed a short time. An ambulance was waiting for us. They took Lieutenant Carroll, and the rest of us went off to one side and sat outside a building.

I was trembling, and I couldn’t stop. Peewee put his hand on mine and tried to calm it. I took deep breaths.

A major came by, saw us sitting on the ground, and came over to us.

“What are you men doing here?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” I heard Monaco say.

“What unit you with?”

Nobody answered. He looked at us, and then said something about either him being in charge or maybe he asked who was in charge, I didn’t know.

Sergeant Simpson got to his feet and talked to him, and then we were all headed over to a low building. It was a mess hall, and two cooks sitting listening to the radio got coffee for us.

One of the medics who had been on the chopper came over, and we asked him how Lieutenant Carroll was doing. He said he didn’t know, only that he was over in building A-3. We finished the coffee and went over to see him.

“He got hit under the arm,” a hawk-faced doctor was saying. “That’s why the medics couldn’t find the wound. Almost in the armpit. It wouldn’t have done any good if they had found it, though.”

Monaco knew the prayer.

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

Amen.

Shock. Pain. Nobody wanted to look at anybody else. Nobody wanted to talk. There was nothing to say. Lieutenant Carroll’s death was close. It hung around our shoulders and filled the spaces between us. Lieutenant Carroll had sat with us, had been afraid with us, had worried about us. Now he was dead.

“It happened so quick,” Brunner said.

“That’s the way it goes,” Monaco said. He shrugged and continued relacing his boots. I looked over at him. His eyes glistened with tears. I started checking my rifle.

At the camp Sergeant Simpson asked me to write a letter to Lieutenant Carroll’s family. I said I couldn’t do it, and he asked me why.

“I just can’t,” I said.

“If he was laying out in the boonies, and he was calling to you needing your help, what would you do?”

“He’s not laying out in the boonies,” I said.

“Yeah, man, he is,” Simpson said. “He just in too deep to get out.”

I took Lieutenant Carroll’s personal stuff from Sergeant Simpson and started looking through it.

There were letters to his wife, Lois, back in Kansas. He wanted to open a bookstore if she could find a place. I read part of one of his letters to her.

No, I don’t think having the bookstore so close to the library is a bad idea. The place on Minnesota Avenue is close enough to the bridge so that we can get customers from Missouri as well. The idea of the bookstore is so comforting to me, Lois. I have this vision of me working behind the counter and you taking care of the baby in the back. Better yet, you work the counter, and I’ll take care of the baby. Have you considered Karen as a name if it’s a girlP It’s your mother’s name, and I like it.

There were local newspapers that she had sent him and a Alumnus Bulletin from Emporia State College. There were pictures of his wife — a pretty girl, blonde, dark-rimmed glasses, in a winter coat. There was snow on the street behind her. Another picture of the two of them together in bathing suits. She looked less pretty, but the two of them looked so happy together.

It took me three tries to get the letter even close to something worth saying, and then it was nothing special. In a way I felt real bad just being alive to write it. I could think of her wondering why I didn’t do something, why I didn’t save him.

Dear Mrs. Carroll,

My name is Richard Perry, and I had the good fortune to serve under your husband. Last night, we ran into heavy fighting in an area we’ve been trying to protect for some time. Lieutenant Carroll was in the process of getting us out of there safely despite the fact that we had run into more of the enemy than we had expected to, when he was wounded. The medevac choppers got him down to Chu Lai, to the medical unit there, and they tried their best to save him, but could not.

Mrs. Carroll, I know that it is not much comfort to you that your husband died bravely, or honorably, but he did. All of the guys in the squad who served under him are grateful for his leadership and for having known him.

I am sorry to have to write to you under these circumstances.

Yours,

Richard Perry

I read the letter to Peewee and Walowick and they said it was okay. Then I gave it to Sergeant Simpson to take to HQ.

I thought about Mama getting a letter about me. What would she do with it? Would she put it in the drawer she kept Daddy’s papers in? Would she sit on her bed in the middle of the night and take it from the drawer to read like she did his stuff? I wondered how Kenny would feel?

I had to get my mind off of Lieutenant Carroll. The guys in the squad hung out together after we got back to the camp. The conversation was quiet, almost reverent. We got six copies of a book called Valley of the Dolls, and Brew hit a rat with one of them. The rat was as big as any I’ve ever seen.

Lieutenant Carroll stayed on my mind. I knew he would. I thought of his calling Jenkins a warrior angel. It was a gentle thing to say, and he had been a gentle man.

We spent another day lying around. It seemed to be what the war was about. Hours of boredom, seconds of terror.

Morning. The coffee was pretty good. Somebody had found a cache of coffee beans about two months earlier, and they had sent to Saigon for a coffee grinder. I wasn’t hungry so I just had coffee in the hooch.

Lobel came over to my bunk. He was really shaken by Carroll’s death. He sat on the edge of my bunk, and I could see he was trying to say something. He finally got it out.

“Hey, Perry, you know … I kind of feel that maybe it was my fault.”

“What?”

“You know, about Carroll?”

“Wasn’t your fault, man.”

“Throughout the whole thing I was just lying there, scared out of my mind.” There was distress on Lo-bel’s face. “I think I’m a coward.”

“Wasn’t anybody’s fault,” I said. “The Congs got him.”

“I keep thinking if I had shot more, maybe a lucky shot would have got the guy that …’’he stopped and shook his head. I thought he was going to cry. “I was so scared I didn’t even see them until it was over.”

“The Congs?” Peewee had heard Lobel and sat up-

“Yeah.” Lobel was wringing his hands.

“You know, I didn’t see one till it was over,” Peewee said. “I remember what you said about Charlie Company fucking each other up, and I thought we done did the same shit until I seen that Cong laying near that tunnel. I was glad as hell to see him, too.”

“You didn’t see them during the fight?” Lobel looked up at Peewee.

“The only time I seen a live, straight-money Cong was that guy they was questioning. As far as I’m concerned, the Congs could sneak they asses clear out the damn country, and we’d be here fighting for two more years.”