Fallen Angels (2 page)

“I finished high school.”

“No lie?”

“No lie.”

“Then why you come in the army?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

I finished high school, but I hadn’t gone to the graduation exercises. It just hadn’t made sense anymore.

“You can go to City College,” the guidance counselor had said. “Your grades are good enough.”

I told her I’d think about it. What I was thinking about was that I had to get up every morning and dry the clothes I had washed the night before by putting them on the oven door, to have something to wear to high school. How was I going to get the clothes for college? How was I going to get clothes for Kenny so he would stay in school? Mama had said that she’d see to it that Kenny stayed in school if I sent the money for clothes for him. I wasn’t saving any money, the way I figured I would when I first got into the army, but I figured that might come later if I made sergeant.

I thought of writing a letter to Kenny. He would dig getting a letter from Nam. I remembered once he was involved with a pen-pal program and got a letter from some lad in Logan, West Virginia. He had looked at me with his wide, bright eyes and smiled like he couldn’t believe the great thing that had happened to him. The night before I left for the army we had sat and talked about what we were going to do in the future. No matter what I said, I knew he was sorry that I was leaving.

“Richie,” he had said before he went to sleep, “when you get to Vietnam, I hope you guys win.”

The Monarchs, the neighborhood team I played for, had just lost a tournament the week before. It had bothered me a lot. I had done well, and Kenny had said that it wasn’t my fault. I had given him a big speech about basketball being a team sport, and that my doing well didn’t matter.

“Either the team wins or the team loses,” I had said.

I had wanted to win badly. I knew I was going into the army, but for me that was a kind of defeat.

My plans, maybe just my dreams really, had been to go to college, and to write like James Baldwin. All the other guys in the neighborhood thought I was going to college. I wasn’t, and the army was the place I was going to get away from all the questions. I wanted to win the tournament, to walk away from the streets I had been raised in with my head high, a winner.

That night I kissed Kenny good-night. It was the first time I had kissed him since we were both small.

Peewee and I had breakfast together. I asked him if he liked the army, and he said it was okay.

“You got all this chickenshit to go through,” he said. “And I don’t like that. But this is the first place I ever been in my life where I got what everybody else got.”

“What does that mean?”

“Back home when everybody got new sneakers, I didn’t get none,” Peewee said.- “Either Moms didn’t have the money, or she had the money, and we had to get some other stupid thing, like food. When everybody got a bike I didn’t get one ’cause there was no way we could get the money for a bike. But anything anybody got in the army, I got. You got a gun, I got a gun. You got boots, I got boots. You eat this lousy-ass chip beef on toast, guess what I eat?”

“Lousy-ass chip beef on toast,” I said.

Peewee’s grin just about filled the mess tent.

Most of the day was spent sitting around. Some of the guys were talking about how hard they had had it in basic training. They all had the same stories no matter where they had taken basic. I thought the stories were probably part of the training.

There were a lot of black guys. I didn’t think there would be so many. Some of them stayed off to themselves, but one guy was making the rounds of all the other blacks.

“The way I figure it, we got to stick together over here.” He had three rings on the hand he waved in the air. “I can’t trust no whitey to watch my back when the deal go down.”

“So what do you want to do?” I asked.

“We got to make an oath or something,” Rings said. “You know, mingle some blood. That’s symbolic of what we going to be about over here in this strange land.”

The dude was serious. I watched him take out a pocket knife and cut his wrist. Then he handed the knife to Peewee.

“You got to be out your mind!” Peewee said. “You sitting there cutting your own damn self, you don’t need nobody watching your back!”

“You don’t understand,” Rings said. “This is symbolic of our common African blood.”

“Yeah, all that is cool, but I want my common African blood in my common African veins,” Peewee said.

“You ignorant!” Rings pointed at Peewee. “Maybe I am, but I ain’t bleeding.”

Rings shook his head and slid the knife across the table to me.

“I got hemophilia,” I said. “If I cut myself, I won’t stop bleeding.”

“You a Uncle Tom, what you is,” Rings said. “If you had some damn hemophilia, they wouldn’t have you in no army!”

He grabbed his knife, got up, and walked away. I watched him go.

“That fool is crazy!” Peewee said.

“I don’t know, he might have something,” I said. “Well, whatever he got, he can sure keep it. Set up the checkers.”

We played checkers until it was time for chow, the same way we had the day before. Then we ate chow and played checkers in the afternoon.

Another black guy, a specialist, fourth class, came over and joined me and Peewee. He asked where we were from, and we told him.

“I’m from Monroe, Louisiana. You ever hear of it?”

“No,” Peewee said.

“Ain’t much to it,” he said. “How long y’all been in country?”

“You mean this country?”

“You don’t have to say nothing,” he said. “You just told me.”

“How long you been here?” Peewee asked.

“I been here nine months. I got sick, and they sent me to the hospital over in the Philippines. You ever been in that hospital?”

“We just got here,” Peewee said. “How we gonna get in the hospital?”

“You just getting here don’t mean nothing,” the spec four said. “I seen a guy drop dead getting off the plane from Hawaii. The plane come down and landed just as pretty as you damn please. He come out, took him a good look around, and dropped stone dead.”

“What kind of outfit were you in?” Peewee asked. “I was with the Twenty-fourth Transportation Battalion, but I put in for a transfer ’cause I had a run-in with my commanding officer.”

“What kind of run-in?”

“I was high on guard duty,” the spec four said. “My pal brought some smoke from Saigon, and we all got stoned.”

“So what you doing now?”

“They give me a choice, transfer or court-martial,” he said. “So you know I got to transfer, because I can’t stand no jail time.”

“You been in any fighting?” Peewee asked. “They didn’t have no fighting around Cam Ranh Bay,” was the answer. “They had more fighting in a juke joint outside of Fort Eustis than I seen all the time I been over here.”

It sounded good. Peewee and the spec four played checkers for a while and then he played with an Italian from Connecticut. We told him what the spec four had said about not seeing any fighting.

“I heard it was over anyway,” th’e guy said. “They’re supposed to be signing a truce or something in Paris.” “That’s ’cause they heard I was here,” Peewee said with this real serious look on his face.

The Italian guy looked at me and looked at Peewee and shrugged. I was getting to like Peewee.

They showed a movie in the day room and passed out some beer. Three guys from each hooch, which is what they called the barracks, had to pull guard duty and the ranger volunteered for it. They had beer in the day room and a Ping-Pong table. There was a line for the Ping-Pong table, so we watched the news from the States. They didn’t mention anything about Nam.

The next morning about half of our hooch got their orders. Most of them were going to some place called Cu Chi. The rest of us sat around or played three-man basketball.

“Let’s go to town,” Peewee said.

“Where’s town?”

Peewee went into the HQ hooch to find out where town was just as they were looking for somebody else to pull guard duty, and he got put on. I went back to our hooch and wrote my first letter to Kenny. I told him that I had heard that there was going to be a truce, and there wouldn’t be any more fighting. I also told him I would bring him back a souvenir if I could.

Saturday. My ninth day in country. The army paper Stars and Stripes was full of the truce talks in Paris, but the war was still going on. In the distance F-100’s streaked across the sky. I saw a lot of planes, mostly jets and helicopters, and all ours. I didn’t see any enemy planes. I didn’t even know if they had any.

“Yo, Perry!”

“What?”

“When they going to get us into this war, man?”

“We have to get orientated first,” I said. “I heard that the orientation officer broke his ankle playing basketball.”

“He probably a damn Cong,” Peewee said. “You ready to get into it?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn straight!” Peewee said. “We got to get into it before it’s over.”

I was less nervous than I was when I first got in country. We were in Nam to stop the North Vietnamese from taking over South Vietnam. I didn’t feel really gung ho or anything, but I was ready to do my part.

One of the new guys who came in was from Fort Dix. He looked like one of the characters from an Archie Andrews comic, but he was so scared it wasn’t funny. He told us his name was Jenkins.

“What’s it like so far?” he asked Peewee.

“Ain’t nothing to it,” Peewee said.

“You been here long?” Jenkins asked.

“Eight months,” Peewee lied. “I got to kill eight more Cong before I get my quota. Then I can go home.”

“How many you kill so far?”

“A hundred and thirty-two,” Peewee said. “I weigh a hundred and forty. Whatever you weigh, that’s how many you got to kill to leave early.”

“I never heard of that,” Jenkins said.

“That ain’t for regular rotation,” Peewee went on. “That’s just so you can leave early.”

“Oh.” Jenkins took it all in.

“Air force guys can get their quota in one or two days,” Peewee said.

“What did you do, machine gun most of them?” Jenkins’ eyes were wide.

“No, man,” Peewee shook his head. “They issue you so many bullets per week, see? But each one you turn back in you get a quarter for. So mostly I sneak up on the suckers and cut their throats. That way I save my bullets. Way I figure, by the time I get back to the World I have me enough to buy a little Chevy.”

“None of that is true,” Jenkins said. He was pissed at Peewee for pulling his leg.

The sergeant came in and picked three guys for guard duty. The ranger volunteered again, and they got Jenkins and one other guy. Jenkins was shaking when he left the hooch.

“Don’t forget to save your bullets!” Peewee called out to him.

That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn’t bite Asians.

We finally got the orientation lecture. This young-looking lieutenant showed us a slide of a map of Nam. Then he showed us where we were.

“You are not in Disneyland,” he said. “The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

“Take your pills. Once a week for malaria, twice a week if you’re too stupid to remember the day you last took them.

“Stay away from the women. They got venereal diseases over here that eat penicillin for breakfast. Three quarters of the women over here have it.

“They got crabs over here that line up every morning to get a shot of DDT. It wakes them up, gets their day started right.

“Stay away from the black market. Anything you buy that’s worth a damn will be taken away from you, or you’ll lose it.

“Stay away from dope. There’s only two kinds of people in Nam. People who are alert twenty-four hours a day, and people who are dead.

“If you see anything else they got over here that we don’t have at home, stay away from it. What these people use on a daily basis will kill you as fast as an RPG.”

“What’s an RPG?” a guy in the front asked. “That’s a rocket-propelled grenade. Stay away from them, too. If you have any more questions, ask your unit commanders when you reach them. Good luck.” When we got outside, the mosquitoes got us. The lieutenant hadn’t even mentioned them, but we had been given a supply of insect repellent.

Orders. Me, Peewee, Jenkins, and another guy were assigned to the 196th. We were going to Chu Lai. I remembered that was where Judy Duncan was assigned.

“What’s that like?” Jenkins asked the sergeant in headquarters.

“That’s First Corps,” the sergeant said. “All you do up there is look around for charlie, and when you see him you call the marines. Light stuff.”

“Charlie?” Jenkins looked toward me and Peewee.

“Charlie is the bad guy over here.” The sergeant put his arm around Jenkins’ shoulders. He was obviously enjoying himself.

“Sometimes we call him charlie, sometimes we call him Victor Charlie, sometimes we call him Vietcong. That is, unless he sends us his business card with his full name and address on it.”

We packed our gear and lined up outside, waiting for the truck to the airport. We were going to Chu Lai in a C-47. I thought guys from other hooches were going, but there were only the four of us.

“I bet I kill me a Cong before you get one,” Peewee said.

“You can have them all,” I said.

“You scared?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You ain’t scared?”

“No, man, I’m just surprised,” Peewee said. “I didn’t think they was going to have no real fighting in this here war.”

“How come?”

“I tell you how I got in this mess?”

“Unh-uh.”

“Me and this dude I used to hang with sometimes was out in front of the projects where I lived, and he said to me he was gonna join the army. So he said to come on down to the recruiting office with him.” Peewee was sitting on his gear, picking out his hair. “So we go on down, and the recruiting sergeant ask him if he ever got into any trouble. Stick, that was this guy’s name, said yeah. He already done shot him four or five people.