Fallen Angels (22 page)

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.

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.”

There was no way to find any VC in the area. A shot would come from the woods, and you’d return fire, killing a lot of the vegetation without ever hitting the sniper. If you did hit him, you wouldn’t know about it.

The guy that got hit was a private. Everybody was standing around him congratulating him on his wound. He’d have a chance to get back to Chu Lai for a week or so, and it wasn’t a bad hit. It was funny. A guy could get hit, be inches from being killed or crippled for life, and make a joke of it. It was all part of Nam. Some parts you could laugh at, like getting hit in the ass. Other parts, like the kid blowing up, you tried to shut out of your mind.

Johnson came over to where I was trying to down some scrambled eggs before the flying bugs got them. What I would do is to wave my fork over the eggs until all the bugs flew away, then grab a forkful before they came back. Johnson sat down on the ground next to me and watched me for a while.

“The officers ain’t eating no powdered eggs,” Johnson said.

“What are they eating?”

“Dehydrated potatoes.”

“How come they get all the good stuff?”

“They having a big fight over at HQ hooch,” Johnson said.

“What about?”

“We suppose to go on a joint patrol with the ARVNs and the ARVN colonel wants us to get into position first. Cap’n Stewart wants the ARVNs to go in first.” “Stewart told you that?”

“Gearhart.” Johnson grunted the name.

“He say anything else about Dongan?”

“Nothing he can say,” Johnson said. “Dongan made them switches too fast. Soon’s he got here he looked around and did his thing. He might know how to keep himself together, but I don’t want him doing it by getting me killed.”

There was something about Johnson that was different than the rest of us. There was a knowing about him, as if he had been here before, as if dying and fighting was something he had been bom to. When he talked about Dongan, I listened.

“First thing he done was to sit down and have him a beer with Brunner, then he had him a beer with Walowick. He don’t like Lobel because he think Lobel’s a faggot. He even ask me if he was a faggot.” It made me feel good to hear Johnson say that. I didn’t think he would have said it when he first came into the army, or even when he first got into the squad. But we had all learned something about dying, and about trying to keep each other alive. It was good.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say nothing,” Johnson said. “I don’t talk that shit. A man in Nam fighting by my side is a man fighting by my side. I don’t care what he doing in bed.”

We watched as the guy who had been hit in the rear end came out of the tent. He had a big smile on his face. His boots were unlaced and he was walking with a limp. The medic was just helping him into a jeep when he got hit a second time. It was another titi hit, on his hand, but this time somebody saw where the fire had come from.

A squad went out to look for the sniper. He probably could have stayed in his tree or his hole for the rest of the war without being caught, but he elected to fire on the squad. They pinned him down with automatic fire while the mortar squads set up. It must have cost ten thousand dollars to kill him.

“You hear what happened?” Peewee’s fatigues hung on him loosely. There were dark stains under the arms that were ringed with salt at the edges.

“What happened?” Johnson looked at Peewee.

“The little Viet colonel gave Stewart a direct order to take some damn hill. Stewart said he wasn’t going up first and the colonel called Division.”

“Now what going to happen?” Johnson asked.

“Now we going up the damn hill first,” Peewee said.

“What it is,” Lieutenant Gearhart was saying, “is a small hill overlooking a village called Phuoc Ha Two. There’s been activity on the hill, and they want it checked out. The thing is, this colonel is the same one who was leading some ARVN troops that got ambushed along Route 534. Got a whole battalion wasted.”

“Let’s just not go,” Peewee said.

“Division said we had to go, so we’re going,” Gearhart answered. “We’re going to call in artillery to soften up the area, then explore the slopes off the paddies. All we want to do is draw fire if there’s any unfriendlies there.”

Peewee wrote down the number of the highway that the ARVN colonel’s battalion had been ambushed on and said that he was going to send it to his barber, who took numbers back home, and have him play it for the whole month.

“I feel lucky,” he said.

It was the first time I had seen Peewee actually smile since I was back. It was funny that he should smile when we might be going into a firefight.

First we choppered into a hot LZ and the pilots jerked us out and took us out of there and into the valley itself, which didn’t seem hot. We were getting fire support from Tam Ky, and there was no response from the hill we were supposed to be moving onto. That didn’t mean a damn thing. I had heard stories about artillery fire taking off the entire top of a mountain and then having the Congs come out of the ground. Their bunkers were deeper than ours, a lot deeper.

The new LZ was a makeshift number. We were bunched up pretty good, and I was just praying that we hit the wood line before we got fire. The enemy was close enough for us to hear the sounds of their mortars firing. The rounds were going long but, more important, they weren’t detonating. You could hear them whistling overhead, but then there wouldn’t be an explosion. We figured it was either defective equipment or the Cong mortar squad didn’t know how to arm them. That wouldn’t last long.

A black lieutenant took Charlie Company to the right of the hill we were supposed to hit and Lieutenant Gearhart took us to the left. We started advancing in as wide a skirmish line as I had seen, but there was still no return fire.

Our squad was on the deep flank and I was far man.

We had to cross a paddy field to get to the wood line that led to the hill we were going to explore. This was why the ARVNs didn’t want to go first. The paddy area was at least the size of a football field and exposed.

I breathed a little easier when we reached the wood line. Lieutenant Gearhart picked the route with the most cover for us. We went through a heavy canopy area, and the branches scratched my face and ripped at my hands. I was jumping through bushes, hoping I didn’t hit any booby traps, avoiding anything that looked like it might be a step easier. I was struggling to keep up. The two weeks in the hospital had done a number on me. Just two lousy weeks. The M-16 felt like sixteen pounds instead of five.

Jamal carried the radio, and Gearhart was on it. He gave us the signal to stay put, and I got down behind a fallen tree.

Peewee crawled over to me.

“I got a coin back home,” he said. “You go in my room and look in the back of the closet on the floor. You find a sneaker there and in the sneaker there’s a sock with some stuff in it. Most of the stuff ain’t worth nothing, but that coin is real old.”

“Yeah?”

“If I don’t get out this shit you go get that coin,” Peewee said. “My moms might be a little uptight thinking you trying to rip her off or some shit. But if you got to buy it from her you do that. We get out this particular mess, and I’ll write her and tell her to save it for you.”

That’s all he said. Then he started crawling back to his position. It meant he had a bad feeling about this place.

We heard some light fire on the other side of the mountain. The sixty was stuttering. Once in a while I thought I heard the M-i6s, but I couldn’t be sure.

Some rounds of high explosives came in on top of the hill.

I tensed. I looked over to where Lobel was snuggling up to the base of a tree trunk. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he returned it.

We waited. I checked my watch and it was 1000 hours. The barrage on the hill stopped. The sounds of a firefight on the other side of the hill picked up. Still, our squad waited. Gearhart was signaling. I looked over at him. He was pointing toward the trees. Okay, look out for snipers.

I tried to make myself smaller.

Don’t think, just be alert. Sergeant Simpson used to say it over and over again. But I was thinking.

Gearhart waved his arm in the air. Crap. We started getting up. I had to pee. I’d do it later. I must have had a pee ratio of three to one in Nam versus the amount of times I had peed in Harlem.

We had to move around the base of the hill to another area. Gearhart took us away from the wood line and back toward the paddies.

“What the fuck’s he doing?” Peewee asked.

“Trying to draw fire,” Walowick said.

We were showing ourselves, being targets. We moved along the edge of the paddy. The ground was muddy, oozing with water.

“Stay away from the dikes!” Sergeant Dongan called out.

“Keep your distances!”

I was wearing a flak jacket. Peewee had found two and had given me one. It weighed a ton. We kept moving. We kept slipping in the mud. Monaco had pushed forward faster than the rest of us. I think he wanted the point. He hit a dry spot and stopped. He held his rifle over his head and we all stopped. He knelt and then stepped off the dry spot into the paddy.

We all followed him into the paddy. When I passed the dry spot I saw how smooth it looked. Maybe it was too smooth. Maybe it was mined. That’s what Monaco must have thought.

I thought that if I got killed, I would want it to be over quick. I wanted to be hit and not even realize what was happening. I’d be gone, like Lieutenant Carroll. Over. Out. I don’t want to lay screaming. I don’t want to be carried in a medevac chopper while guys you could be home playing ball with were banging on your chest, trying to get your heart beating again.

Don’t think.

The rice paddy seemed forever. The water was up past my ankles, and the stink was something else.

“Johnson, hit that line of trees!” Dongan called out.

Johnson held the sixty at his waist. He leaned into it and fired. I saw that he had something on his left hand. It looked like one of those mittens you used to handle hot pots, only it was silver.

We kept moving. The rice paddy ended. We were crouched, moving forward toward the wood line again. We hadn’t drawn fire.

We moved up the hill. It was steep. We slid and fell. I fell, and let myself slide backward. I was afraid to catch on to anything. We fired a few shots, even though we didn’t see anything.

We went up thirty, forty meters. Nothing. Gearhart signaled us to stop.

We looked around and found cover.

Wait. It was 1130 hours.

We dug in. Charlie had taught us well. We rested. We sat. Gearhart was on the radio. I tried to read him from where I was. Next to Gearhart, lying exhausted on the ground, was Jamal.