Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

“Everybody okay?”

“Yeah, I said we ain’t done nothing,” Peewee said. “But you see who we with down the way?”

“The ARVNs?”

“Yeah, but that ain’t the bad news,” Peewee said. “Come on, we got some bar-b-qued pork chops on the fire.”

“Where did you get pork chops?” “Walowick shot a pig and cut the sucker up,” Peewee said. “We been eating good since we been out here.”

“What’s the bad news?” I said, walking alongside of him.

We went over to where Monaco was squatting with a bottle of soda. Monaco looked up, then he stood and threw both arms around me and hugged me. It really touched me. I thought I was going to cry.

“I’m sorry you’re back,” he said. “But I’m real glad to see you, man. Real glad.”

I started to say something about being glad to see him, too, but I felt something wrong in the air. I looked from Monaco to Peewee.

“So what’s up?”

“Simpson went back to the World.”

Peewee looked up at the sky. I followed his gaze. The skies were a dirty grey. There was a thick cloud cover, heavy and threatening above us. A large bird started into the air as if it had been thrown, then stopped, spread its wings, and glided in a great arc to the west.

“He okay when he left?”

“Yeah,” Peewee said. “But I ain’t too sure about the new sergeant. He’s a first-sergeant and he old.”

“How old?”

“Guy’s at least thirty-something,” Monaco said. “He could even be forty.”

“He took Monaco off point and put me on,” Peewee said. “I didn’t think nothing about it at first until he put me on all the damn time. Then he told Brunner he didn’t want him pulling the rear. He put Johnson on the rear with the damn pig!”

“Johnson’s carrying the sixty in the rear?”

“Yeah.”

“What did Johnson say?”

“Johnson asked him to his damn face,” Peewee said. “He asked him how come he put a brother on point and another brother in the damn rear with the sixty?”

I looked at Monaco, he looked back at me.

“What did he say?”

“Dongan — that’s his name — ” Peewee said, “he said he do what he think he should do and it ain’t for Johnson to tell him what to do.”

“What did Johnson say?”

“Johnson said he gonna mess around and get himself shot in the back of the head.”

It rained for seven days straight. We sat in the rain for seven days straight. The mud oozed up into our boots, into our clothes, into our skins. There wasn’t any way to get dry.

There was talk about us standing down in Okinawa, but nobody took it seriously. There was a lot of talk about how well the other units in the outfit were doing. But the guys in the squad seemed a little different. Tired. They seemed really tired.

For the first five days after I got back I didn’t get to talk to Dongan. He nodded toward me once or twice and that was it. I got an M-16 and a grenade launcher from the armorer and found out that we had to carry more ammunition than I thought we would. Gearhart came around and talked to us a couple of times, but Dongan stayed away. Johnson was getting a thing about him. I went over and talked to Johnson. I wanted to find out more about Dongan, but Johnson wouldn’t deal with it. He asked me what I thought about Brew.

“I liked him,” I said.

“He probably back home, now,” he said.

“Brew?”

“Yeah.”

There was something about the way Johnson looked at me. I looked at Lobel, and he shook his head.

“Probably back home,” I said.

When Johnson went to chow, I asked Lobel what the hell was going on with him about Brew.

“He’s just not accepting the idea that he’s dead,” Lobel said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you ask too many questions,” Lobel said.

That’s what was going on. The questions kept coming and nobody wanted to deal with them. Johnson didn’t want to deal with Brew being dead, and Lobel didn’t want to deal with Johnson. Maybe I did ask too many questions.

The first day the weather lifted a little, a chopper came in with a priest. Peewee had made a checkerboard out of some leaves he wove together. He was good at that kind of thing. We played checkers day and night. We were playing checkers when the Huey came in with the chaplain.

The chaplain was Catholic, and the Catholic guys had a mass or something. Then he came around to the rest of us. He didn’t look like a chaplain. What he looked like was a middleweight who fought preliminaries in Atlantic City. His name was Father Santora.

“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.”

“I know how you feel,” he said. “I’m not quite ready to die just yet, either.”

“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?” Peewee asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I sure as hell hope so.” The big guns in the distance kept rumbling. The sound seemed to rumble through the hills and flatten out over the valley.

“If I pray with you, will it keep me alive?” I asked. “No.”

“What will it do for me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it can be comforting at times.”

“You can’t say anything better than that?”

He shrugged.

“You scared being over here?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he nodded his head. “I’m scared.”

We got the squad together. We told him some of the things that had happened to us. Then he prayed, asking God to take care of us and our loved ones, things like that. I really appreciated it. Then he started asking God to look out for Brew’s soul. That’s when Johnson walked away. Right in the middle of a prayer, he walked away.

Father Santora looked up at him, and he was puzzled. Or at least I think he was puzzled. When the prayer was over, Father Santora had to split.

“Where you going?” Monaco asked.

“Some place named Khe Sanh,” Father Santora said. “How come all these places over here have such foreign-sounding names?”

Johnson and Dongan got into a pretty heavy argument about how Johnson was keeping the sixty. Dongan didn’t think the extra barrel that Johnson had to keep was clean enough. Johnson was telling him that he needed a grenade up his ass. They got real close to each other, and Johnson pushed Dongan away from him.

Lieutenant Gearhart got Johnson away from Sergeant Dongan and started pushing him toward the HQ hooch. Peewee told Johnson that if anything funky went down that he could count on him.

“You can count on me, too,” I said. I meant it, too.

The squad didn’t need any crap to get us separated. I knew that, and I was sure that Peewee did, too. But we didn’t have to take any crap, either.

Guard duty. Me, Lobel, Peewee, and Sergeant Dongan. He said that he wanted to pull guard to check us out. When he said that, Peewee opened his pants and told him to check out his crotch.

Sergeant Dongan was from Richmond, Indiana. He sounded southern, he looked southern, and he seemed to think southern. Brunner was sucking up to him, as per usual.

Johnson outlined the problem. “Me, Peewee, Perry, and Monaco is the niggers of this outfit,” he said. “We got to keep a serious watch on our asses.”