Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

“Hey, good-looking!”

I was half asleep. I saw the name tag first, it read “Duncan.” It was the nurse I had come to Nam with.

“How you doing?”

“I’m doing okay,” she said, sitting on the side of the bed. “How you doing?”

“Okay,” I answered. My mouth was dry, and I took some water from the table near the bed.

“I saw your chart,” she said. “I was looking in on another guy when I saw you sleeping and thought I recognized you. You been out in the boonies much?”

“Long enough to think this is heaven,” I said.

“Sometimes I feel like I would rather be out there myself,” she said. “I guess that’s stupid, right?”

“Hey, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I’m just a little slow or something.”

“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “You get hurt and it makes you confused. I’ve seen it a lot of times.” “You been here long?”

“Just transferred in when things started picking up during the Tet,” she said.

“How’s it going for you? Judy? Right?”

“Right. It’s going okay, I guess. Different than I thought it was going to be.”

“Different?”

“Well, when I first talked to you in Anchorage and we were headed this way, I imagined myself rushing around and fixing up neat little bullet holes and giving out peppermints. That’s not the way it is. You see that.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I have to see some other guys. You take care of yourself, Perry. Perry, what’s your first name?” “Richie.”

“Richie, you take care of yourself.”

She kissed me and left. A couple of guys made comments about her kissing me. One asked me if I was getting over with her. I shrugged him off without answering. He mumbled something about guys from the boonies being strange.

Maybe they were right. I had felt awkward talking to Judy. I was glad to see her, but I couldn’t talk to her. The words didn’t have the right proportion somehow. There was this feeling that everything I was going to say was either too loud or too strange for a world in which people did normal things.

I thought about Judy. She had seemed so upbeat on the plane. She had come over to me and started talking. Now she seemed tired, sad. I hoped she would be okay.

I cried for Brew. Sometimes, even when I wasn’t thinking about him, or at least when I didn’t know I was thinking of him, I would find myself crying. And when the tears came, I thought about Brew and the sound the zipper made in the chopper.

Days went by. Stars and Stripes had a story about the Pueblo, and some guys were talking about the possibility of the U.S. getting involved with Korea again.

The chaplain and a colonel came in and talked to a bunch of us. The chaplain said that everything we did we did for the highest reasons that men knew.

“You are defending freedom,” he said. “You are defending the freedom of Americans and of the South Vietnamese. Your acts of heroism and courage are celebrations of life, and all America thanks you.”

Then the colonel gave out Purple Hearts to the guys who didn’t already have them. I decided to send my medal for being wounded in action to Kenny.

I wrote to Kenny again. I told him that I had read about the garbage strike in New York. I told him that when I got back to the World we would do a lot of things together. Maybe we would go downtown, to the museums. Kenny liked museums. I think, in a way, he felt safe in them. I told him we would go to games at Madison Square Garden, maybe even take Mama if she wanted to go.

I thought about what Peewee had said. That I had better think about killing the Congs before they killed me. That had better be my reason, he had said, until I got back to the World. Maybe it was right. But it meant being some other person than I was when I got to Nam. Maybe that was what I had to be. Somebody else.

When the doctors had finished looking at the wounds, I knew what they would say. They said I looked okay. The shrapnel — small slivers of metal — hadn’t hit anything vital. They were pretty sure they had dug out all the pieces. The doctor made a joke about missing a piece that I could tell my grandchildren about. The wrist had healed nicely. The doctor showed me the chip in the bone in the first X ray. Then he showed me a second X ray, it was cloudy, and I didn’t make anything of it. He said it showed that the bone was growing back.

They had to come. My orders to rejoin my unit. When the clerk brought them, he made me sign for them. He left, and I threw them on the bed and went to breakfast. When I got back they were still there.

I read all the orders on the page, not just mine. Baines. Jones, Edward. Jones, Nance. Naylor. Perry.

No. I said no to myself. I wouldn’t go back. I would go AWOL. I packed my things.

I went to the john and puked my guts out. I was scared. I felt almost the way I had in the chopper.

I couldn’t breathe, my hands were sweating. What would I do? I had heard of guys running away to

Sweden. How the hell did you get to Sweden from Nam? Was there still a Sweden to run to?

The orders said that I was to report back to my outfit, where I would report to my commanding officer.

I went to say good-bye to Joe Derby and some of the other guys. The guy on the spit was gone. I hoped he made it.

“Get back to the World, Perry,” Derby said.

“I’m pushing for it, man.”

Everything was going too fast. I couldn’t handle it. No way.

The plane was full of marines, fresh from Camp Lejeune. They were tough, full of themselves. They seemed so young. They kidded back and forth among themselves. They had weapons. Some of them looked at me, and some asked me questions. Had I been in country long? Had I seen any action? They were itching to get into combat.

I had been in the country four months. I hadn’t seen a lot of action, but enough. Lord knows it was enough.

We were camped at an old landing strip just north of Tam Ky and less than a thousand meters from Highway 1. I was glad to be near the highway. To the west, rice paddies stretched for what seemed miles. The dikes were twisted, uneven. I wondered how many battles had been fought along them. There were guys, mostly ARVN troops, sitting in tight little circles under the trees. I looked around for Americans, and finally found some. I asked them if they knew where Alpha Company was.

“Up the hill a piece,” a tired-looking guy said.

I walked up the hill slowly. I could see small clusters of soldiers sitting around. It was less than a company. Maybe a squad or two at the most.

I was afraid again. I had felt it coming when I got my orders. I had felt it on the chopper. Now it sat like a heavy ball in my guts.

The dirt on the hill was soft beneath my feet. Trees once splintered had begun to grow again along the path up. I stepped on the bootprints that were there. The Vietnamese voices below me, ARVN troops, followed me up the hill.

Peewee was standing near a tree, peeing. God bless Peewee.

“Hey, buddy, you see any soldiers around here?” “Man, you as sneaky as the damn Congs,” Peewee said, looking up. “I didn’t even hear you coming.”

“How’s it going?”

“Not too cool,” Peewee said. He was rearranging his clothes as he talked.

“What’s up?”

“First things first,” he said. “How the fuck you doing?”

“No big deal,” I said. “A couple of scratches.”

“I was hoping you were back in the World,” Peewee said. “I was hoping you was back in Harlem getting loved up by three big-hipped mamas and wearing you some wing-tipped kicks by now.”

“I was kind of hoping myself,” I said.

“We ain’t done a thing since you been gone but sit out here in this fucking rain and mud,” Peewee said. “I been sitting in this shit so long my piles got wrinkles.”