Fallen Angels

Peewee and I had breakfast together. I asked him if he liked the army […]

“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.

Sometimes, when I was tired and the competition was really rough, things would change for me. There would be a flow of action around me and it would seem as if I were outside of myself, watching myself play ball, watching myself try to establish a place for myself on the hard park courts. It was then that I would feel a pressure to give in, to let a rebound go over my head, to take the outside shot when I knew I had to take the ball inside. I told Kenny about the feeling and he hadn’t understood it. I told Mrs. Liebow, my English teacher, and she said it was what separated heroes from humans, the not giving in, and I hadn’t understood that. It was a weakness in my game, not about being a hero.

“You call that a sport?” Monaco asked. “I mean, there you are, you gotta weigh two hundred pounds, and you got a rifle, and you’re against a squirrel that weighs maybe two or three pounds, and he ain’t got nothing.”

“Man, it’s a damn sport!” Simpson protested […]

“The way I figure it,” Monaco went on, “if you hunt a squirrel with a rifle, what do you hunt a bear with? Artillery?”

“Call in some white phosphorous on him,” Brew said. “That’ll get his attention until the jets zero in.”

[…]

“You don’t know nothing about no hunting!” Simpson was getting pissed. “You don’t know what hunting is!”

“What he’s trying to say […] is that the white phosphorous is enough. After it burns the bear’s ass off, then the good sergeant will finish him off with a couple of frag grenades,” [said Lobel].

[…] Sergeant Simpson got up and left the hooch.

The village was a good ten minutes away and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.

I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.

On the way to the chopper, I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.

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

“No sweat […] 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 are 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 […] that was a firefight […] Anytime anybody is getting shot at it’s a firefight. […] Anyway, I was playing Lee Marvin as a tough sergeant. That’s my best part.”

An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?

What was worse than thinking about him dead was the way we looked at him. At least we had cared for Jenkins, had trembled when he died. He was one of us, an American, a human. But the dead Vietnamese soldier, his body sprawled out in the mud, was no longer a human being. He was a thing, a trophy. I wondered if I would become a trophy.

“We won.” Walowick came in after the volleyball game and sat on the edge of the bunk. “They’re paying us off in beer.”

“Way to go,” I said.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Seeing that dead gook mess you up some?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe even more than Jenkins.”

“Who’s Jenkins?”

“[Walowick] called [Johnson] a cootie, sir,” [I said.]

“A what?” [Captain Stewart asked.]

“That’s what he called me,” Johnson said.

“What the fuck’s a cootie?”

“It’s a bug,” Walowick said.

“That’s like calling me a nigger,” Johnson said.

“Is that a racial thing?” Captain Stewart looked at Walowick.

“A cootie’s a cootie,” Walowick shrugged. “He shouldn’t have called me no farm boy. If he calls me a farm boy, I’m gonna call him a cootie again.”

That’s when Johnson hit Walowick again, and the fight started again. This time Lieutenant Carroll got out of the way. When the fight was over, Captain Stewart told them both to stop talking to each other. That was that.

[The wounded] were all over the place. The medics were so busy they were just tagging guys. The ones they thought they could save they worked on, the others they marked their wounds down. One kid, the angry stain of blood on his T-shirt growing with every breath, watched calmly as the medic wrote up the tag. The medic tied it to his lapel and patted the kid’s shoulder. When the medic left, the kid tried to read the tag without taking it off.

If there were time—if the medic had finished with the one he was fairly sure he could save—he would come back to the kid to see what he could do […] One guy had a plasma bottle strapped to his helmet. He was going through his pockets looking for matches to light his cigarette. He found them but they were soaked through with his own blood. Scotty lit his cigarette.

Then I asked him about the letter.

“You know why that letter sucks?” he asked.

“How come?”

“Because I joined the friggin’ army in the first place so he would stop thinking I was a faggot,” Lobel said. “Now he thinks I’m a creep because I’m in the army.”

“What the hell does he know?”

“You know what I hope?” Lobel asked. “I hope I get killed over here so he has to fit that shit between his vodka martinis.”

“The next time we call for artillery, we’ll aim it right at your pad at home,” I said.

“You know what that jackass doesn’t know?” Lobel said, looking away from me, “He don’t know that now I can go back home and blow him away. That’s what I’m fucking trained for man. That’s what I’m fucking trained for.”

The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into a coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.

“The guy’s got to be a spook,” Gearhart said. “You know, CIA.”

“What do they do over here?” Monaco asked.

“Below the DMZ they do pacification stuff, look around to see who is infiltrating, that kind of thing. Then they do a lot of stuff above the ’Z. The navy guys slip them in on the west and the Green Berets slip them around the ’Z through Laos. Down here she’s probably his cover.”

“Is the kid a spook, too?” Monaco asked.

“Who knows?” Gearhart answered. “This is a funny war.”

I didn’t like the idea of having people who were civilians around. It just didn’t seem right somehow.

“You trying to figure out who the good guys, huh?” Johnson spoke slowly. “So what you come up with?”

“I guess somebody back home knows what they’re doing,” I said. “What it means and everything. You talk about Communists—stuff like that—and it doesn’t mean much when you’re in school. Then when you get over here the only thing they’re talking about is keeping your ass in one piece.”

“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.”

“That might be a good reason to be over here,” I said.

“That’s for people like you to mess with,” Johnson said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Then why you messin’ with it?”

“You know, I never thought much about black people before I got into the army. I don’t think I was prejudiced or anything—I just didn’t think much about black people.”

“Well, we’re here,” I said.

“I think I should let his parents know what happened […] I don’t want to be let off the hook.”

“The letter I wrote […] is going to sit better with his family. You might feel bad, like you need to get something off your chest, but don’t drop it on his folks. It’s going to be hard enough just having him dead.”

He looked at me, then pushed the letter across the table. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

I wanted to be pissed at him. I wanted to think that he was crap because of what he said about black people. But the only thing I could think about was that I was glad it was Turner, and not me.

The village looked like the one they had constructed for practice at Fort Devens. Only here there were real people […]

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.

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.

I had come into the army at seventeen, and I remembered who I was, and who I was had been a kid. The war hadn’t meant anything to me then, maybe because I had never gone through anything like it before. All I had thought about combat was that I would never die, that our side would win, and that we would all go home somehow satisfied. And now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find something more than the kid I was. Maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and find the man I would be. I hoped I did it before I got killed.

Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.

“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.

“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”

[…]

“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.

[…]

“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight, he shouldn’t have extended.”

What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.

But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.

“Sometimes,” he said, “prayer can be very comforting. I wonder if any of you men would like to pray with me?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” I said.

“Try me,” he said.

“I just don’t want to pray,” I said.

“Figure you don’t want to make your peace if you’re not ready to die?”

I smiled. I had to smile. He was right and he knew it. “Something like that.”

“You ever go into combat?”

“Into combat? Yes. I’ve never fired a weapon at anyone, though.”

“You figure if you don’t shoot at anybody, God’s going to take care of you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I sure as hell hope so.”

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 mosquitos.”

“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 mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.

The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn’t help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open.

“He forgot the tags,” Gearhart said. “He left them in the hut.”

“How they gonna let their folks know they dead?” Peewee said.

Gearhart didn’t answer.

What would they do for a body? Would they send home an empty coffin? Would they scrounge pieces from Graves Registration? What would they say to their parents? Their wives? We lost your son, ma’am. Somewhere in the forests he lies, perhaps behind some rock, some tree?

We burned his body, ma’am. In a rite hurried by fear and panic, we burned what was left of him and ran for our own lives.

Yes, and we’re sorry.

Perhaps they would tell them nothing. Not having a body in hand, not having the lifeless form to send with the flat, they would not acknowledge that there was a death at all.

Yes, and we’re sorry.

I just told him that war was about us killing people and about people killing us […] I had thought this war was right, but it was only right from a distance. Maybe when we all got back to the World and everybody thought we were heroes for winning it, then it would seem right from there. Or maybe if I made it back and I got old I would think back on it and would seem right from there. But when the killing started, there was no right or wrong except in the way you did your job, except in the way that you were part of the killing.

What you thought about, what filled you up more than anything, was the being scared and hearing your heart thump in your temples and all the noises, the terrible noises, the screeches and the booms and the guys crying for their mothers or their wives.

Thoughts came. What would Morningside Avenue look like now? It would be day and the park would be filled with kids, their screaming and laughter would slide along the light beams into the helter skelter world of monkey bars and swings. On the courts there would be a tough game. Black bodies sweating and grunting to get the points that would let them sweat and grunt in the sun for another game. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. The only thing that was real was me and Peewee, sitting in this spider’s grave, waiting for death.

[…]

Pray.

God….What to pray? What to tell God? That I’m scared? […] That I didn’t want to die? That I was like everybody else over here, trying to cling to a few more days of life?

Peewee moved, adjusted position.

“I got to shit,” he said.

It was Monaco. He was sitting against a tree. He had his head in his hands. His piece was about ten meters in front of him. I wanted to go to him, but Peewee stopped me.

“He ain’t sitting there for nothing,” he said.

I looked around. Nothing. What the hell was wrong with this damn war? You never saw anything. There was never anything until it was on top of your ass, and you were screaming and shooting and too scared to figure out anything.

I got to sit up in a wheelchair, and the leg felt all right in spite of the cast. It felt good. I hoped it wasn’t. I could make it with a limp. I just didn’t want to go back to the boonies anymore.

We got a call from Lieutenant Gearhart on the ham radio network. He told us the other guys in the squad were all right. It was nice of him to call us, but it wasn’t true. Monaco wasn’t all right. Monaco was like me and Peewee. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren’t all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.

He also told us that Captain Stewart had been promoted.