Fallen Angels (7 page)

The air in Nam was always hard to breathe; it was heavy, thicker than the air back home. Now it was harder. I opened my mouth wide and sucked in as much air as I could, but it didn’t seem to be enough.

We waited ten minutes. Nothing. Then we began to hear small-arms firing off to our right. I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. You could smell it, though. You could smell the stink of gunpowder and hear the distant burping of the machine guns.

We waited twenty minutes. Nothing. The sound of gunfire subsided. The smoke didn’t. It drifted our way like a gentle mist through the tall trees. Behind us the choppers were coming in again. They went back into the landing zone. Then they were gone again.

We waited. Forty minutes.

“Brunner! Back up!”

We started out, moving less quickly than when we came in. The landing zone, without the excitement, the fear, was a longer distance away.

We reached it finally, and I was near enough to Carroll to hear him call the choppers in. We were on the choppers and out in minutes, with Simpson screaming at us to get our weapons on safety.

We got to the base area, and I remembered Jenkins. I was behind Brunner and followed the path he walked.

We got back to the hooch, and Simpson came in.

“How did Charlie Company do?” Walowick asked.

“They lost nine people,” Sergeant Simpson said. “One platoon lost one man, got six wounded.”

“How many VCs were out there?” I asked.

“They don’t know, but what they do know is that they didn’t have on no damn pajamas. They was North Vietnamese regulars.”

“They still talking about us going to Hawaii?” Walowick asked.

“Yeah, they talking about bringing some Lurp teams up here, too,” Sergeant Simpson said. “That the stuff I don’t like.”

When he left, I asked Walowick what a Lurp team was.

“It’s a long-range surveillance team,” Walowick said. “They don’t fight if they can help it. They just go out and see what’s out there.”

“Why does Sergeant Simpson think that’s so bad?” “I don’t know,” Walowick said. “But he didn’t live to be a short-timer by being stupid.”

Lieutenant Carroll came and asked me about my profile. He said that he saw that I had mentioned it when I first got into the company. I told him how I had hurt the knee playing ball.

“It bother you too much to go on patrols?”

“Not so far,” I said. “I just don’t want to get messed up because of the knee.”

He looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he looked away for a moment and back at me. “Perry, I don’t want to take you into combat if the knee’s really bad,” he said. “It’s not just you, I mean. Everybody in the squad depends on everybody else.”

“I guess it’s not really that bad,” I said.

“Look, I don’t want to avoid the issue,” he said. “If you tell me you can’t go on patrol, I’ll see if I

can get you transferred to another outfit. If you tell me that you can go on patrol, then we’ll just wait until the profile comes down and take a look.”

“I’ll wait for it,” I said.

“I don’t like putting you on the spot,” he said. “I really don’t. But we re all in this mess together.”

“Sure.”

When he left, Peewee asked me what the conversation was about and I told him.

“Don’t go being no fucking hero,” Peewee said.

“What would you have said?” I asked him.

“Probably the same thing you did, but I would have been pissed off at myself,” he said.

“I’m a little pissed,” I said.

I really wasn’t pissed, because I knew the real question wasn’t about my knee. I thought the knee would be okay. The real question was what I was doing, what any of us were doing, in Nam.

I got guard duty with Lobel. Sergeant Walcott from Bravo Company was sergeant of the guard, and he gave us a pep talk. We were on from eight to midnight.

There were sandbags around the shallow foxhole we had to sit in. At Fort Devens a four-foot-deep hole was plenty. Now it didn’t seem so great. It was about seven feet wide. I had my M-16 and Lobel had his and an M-79 grenade launcher. There were sandbags piled in front of the foxhole, with a place to shoot through. The perimeter of the camp was marked by intricate patterns of barbed wire barriers. The wire itself had razor-sharp protrusions as well as trip flares planted throughout. Lobel and I had to watch about sixty meters of the wire to make sure that no VC broke through.

“Perry, you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You look a little uptight.”

“I feel a little uptight.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Still thinking about Jenkins, I guess,” I answered.

“Who’s Jenkins?”

“The guy I came in with. You remember, he stepped on a mine.”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing can get through that much wire,” I said.

“Nothing can get through it without getting messed up,” Lobel answered. “But they try.”

I didn’t answer. For all the talk, the war was still far away. All you had to do was to be careful, and you’d be okay. Jenkins hadn’t been careful.

“You know, Perry, if I was going to make a movie over here, I’d make it a love story,” Lobel said dreamily.

“How come you always talk about movies?”

“Because they’re the only real thing in life,” Lobel said. He slumped down in the foxhole. “You didn’t think any of this was real, did you?”

“Look, Lobel… why don’t you get up and watch the wire with me?”

“You scared?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Oh, okay.” He got up, just like that.

There were things chirping out beyond where I could see. I remembered going to the old cowboy movies and seeing the cowboys sitting around a campfire and the Indians sneaking up on them and making noises like owls and stuff. I looked over toward Lobel, who was looking out toward the wire.

“Hey, Lobel, I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”

“No sweat.” He wore his helmet down low over his eyes and the top part of his face was in shadow. “I’m a little nervous, too. I’d be real nervous, except I know none of this is real and I’m just playing a part.”

“What part you playing?”

“The part where the star of the movie is sitting in the foxhole explaining how he feels about life and stuff like that. You never get killed in movies when you’re doing that. Anytime you get killed in a movie, it’s after you set it up.”

“You play a part when we were on patrol?”

“That wasn’t a patrol,” Lobel said. “That was a firefight.”

“I thought a firefight was when you shot at something.”

“Anytime anybody is getting shot at it’s a firefight,” Lobel said. “Anyway, I was playing Lee Marvin as a tough sergeant. That’s my best part.”

It got quiet again, then I heard somebody’s radio. It sounded a little like Wilson Pickett.

“What do you think the VC are like?” I asked. “I mean really like?”

“Who knows?”

There were two radios on. In the distance I heard what sounded like a chopper but could have been a generator. The shadows were deepening. I didn’t want to say anything else to Lobel.

There were lights on towers behind us that played on the wire. I saw something furry scurrying just outside the wire. The damned thing scared the crap out of me. I could see that it was a small animal. I knew it was a small animal. And yet it still scared me being out there in a place I was supposed to be watching.

A bug crawled on the back of my hand. I decided not to move. I had to get used to the bugs, I told myself. I felt him crawl over the back of my hand and start up my wrist. I slapped him away.

“What’s your favorite movie of all time?” Lobel asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Shane, maybe.”

“You ever see foreign movies?”

“I saw a Japanese movie I really liked once. I don’t remember the name of it.”

“What was it about?”

“This guy was a farmer. He and his wife use to carry water up a hill all day…”

“The Island. That’s the name of it,” Lobel said. “The kid gets sick and he has to go get a doctor…”

“Then the kid dies…”

“Right. The Island, good flick.” Lobel put down the grenade launcher and sat down in the foxhole again. “If you like that flick and you liked Shane, you probably qualify to be a real movie freak, like me.”

“You see a lot of movies?” I didn’t turn toward him, hoping that he would stand up again.

“My uncle’s a director,” he answered. “I’ve dated more starlets than you can imagine.”

“You got drafted?”

“Unh-uh. Enlisted.”

“How come?”

“Long story,” he said.

“Oh.”

I looked at my watch. I still had three hours to go. I had time for a long story. I hoped that Lobel didn’t fall asleep. I swept my eyes over the gate, the way they had showed us to on night maneuvers back at Devens.

I thought about Mama. I worried about her. She had hoped that when I finished high school I would get a job and help her keep the house together. When I told her I was going into the army, she cried.

“I might as well get it over with,” I had said, sitting in the tiny kitchen. Over the stove the old electric clock was five minutes early. Kenny always set it early in the mornings, knowing that by evening it would be late.

“You don’t have to go,” Mama had said. She didn’t say it as if she meant it. She said it like a little girl hoping that I wouldn’t leave. There was liquor on her breath. I had bent over and kissed her cheek, and she had put her arm around me.

I wouldn’t have joined if I had seen anything else to do. When I figured I couldn’t afford college, I just didn’t want to be in Harlem anymore.

There was an old woman who used to sell the Daily News outside of Sydenham Hospital. She was the first person I told about going into the army.

“Why you want to go off to war?” she asked. She was short and dark with eyebrows turned white with age, although her hair was only lightly streaked with grey. Her voice was high and wavered uncertainly as she spoke.

“Got to get away from here,” I said. “See something new.”

“What you want to get away from here for?” she asked. “You got your peoples here. They ain’t got this many black folks no place else in the world, cept maybe Africa and Haiti. You ain’t going there, is you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then stay on around here!” she said, a smile lighting her face. “You ain’t doing no better than us, child.”

“Perry, what the hell you thinking about?” Lobel looked up at me.

“An old black woman in Harlem.”

“No market,” Lobel said.

“What?”

“No market for old black women,” Lobel went on. “If we’re going to make a fortune on the silver screen, we got to figure what’s going to sell. What we need is young girls. You got a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Didn’t think that much about them,” I said. “Between playing ball and school I filled my time up pretty good. I wish I had one to write to now, though.”

“You worried about it?”

“Worried?” I looked at him, he was looking out toward the wire again. “No, I’m not worried. Just wish I had somebody else to write to, that’s all.”

“You want to write to a starlet?” Lobel asked. “I know one who can just about read, she might know how to write.”

“I mean a real girlfriend,” I said.

“There you go again,” he sighed, stood up, and picked up the grenade launcher. “You’re really hooked on reality. It’s a bad scene, Perry.’’

“You got a girlfriend?”

“Nope, and I’m worried about it, too.”

“How come?”

“Because I’ll be twenty on the third of May and I’m still a virgin.”

“Big deal.”

“What do you mean, big deal? I could be playing the part of the baby-faced virgin who gets killed and all you see is a pan shot of him near the end of the flick. You think I want that?”

“I thought you were playing Lee Marvin,” I said. “Don’t you know what role you’re playing?”

“No, not for sure. You know what role you’re playing?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “What roles you got?” “The role you got to stay away from is the role of the good black guy who everybody thinks is a coward and then gets killed saving everybody else. That’s a bummer. You can’t be the romantic lead.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have a girlfriend, you just said so.”

“I met a nurse on the plane coming over here.” “White or black?”

“White.”

“No good, then it becomes one of those noble flicks about interracial love, and they kill you off at the end so they can show it in Georgia.”

“Shit.”

“That’s why I keep saying we should make this whole war into a musical. A big Busby Berkley number. Thousands of little VCs running up and down stairs in their little black PJs. We won’t even have to pay them scale.”

Captain Stewart came around with a television crew, and we were all filmed. First they got us cleaning our weapons. Then they asked each one of us why we were fighting in Nam. This is what everybody said:

Lieutenant Carroll said that we had to demonstrate that America stood for something, and that’s what we were doing.

Sergeant Simpson said that we were trying to free the South Vietnamese people to do what they wanted to do.

Brunner said he was fighting because he hated Communism.

Walowick said that he was fighting because his country asked him to. I liked that.

Lobel said something about the domino theory, how if Vietnam fell to the Communists then the rest of Asia might fall.

Brew said the same thing about the domino theory. I think he was just repeating what he had heard Lobel say.

I said that we either defended our country abroad, or we would be forced to fight in the streets of America, which everybody seemed to like.

Then the news team got to Peewee and asked him why he was fighting in Vietnam.

“Vietnam?” Peewee looked around like he was shocked or something. “I must have got off on the wrong stop, I thought this was St. Louis!”

The news guys just walked away from him, and then they started talking to Brunner, who talked a good five minutes. Captain Stewart watched Brunner, and I could see he liked what Brunner was saying. He left for a few minutes and then came back and told Lieutenant Carroll that we had to go on patrol. Captain Stewart said that the television guys were coming with us.