Fallen Angels (17 page)

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 searching.

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.

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.