Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

I believed him. Monaco was Italian, but he was the same as the black guys in Dongan’s eyes. Maybe because he got along with us so well, I don’t know.

We went out on guard duty at 2000 hours. It was my first real duty since I had got back to the squad. I hit the guard position and inspected it. It looked okay. It was a foxhole with sandbags around the top, and boards at the bottom to stand on. The boards were rickety, but they were better than oozing down into the mud. I lifted the boards and dug it down another foot.

Noises.

The crickets and creepy crawlies were out in force. Crickets made a terrible racket. Things slithering through the grass could wake up the dead. The moon, floating above us, scraped against the clouds.

Noises.

My watch’s ticking was louder than my heartbeat.

There was something out there. No, it was just the darkness. What was out there was me, fearful, crying in the night. I was afraid. I thought of Father Santora.

A noise.

Was it a click? What was it?

Another noise.

I saw Sergeant Dongan move his right arm. He seemed to be groping about in the darkness. He found something. He swung his arm in a tight arc. A grenade.

Thump. It hit. Nothing. It didn’t go off. I glanced up. There was movement, what might be a voice.

Sergeant Dongan fired a short burst. There was a muffled scream.

He fired off a flare. It went high into the air, ignited, then parachuted slowly toward the ground, lighting the entire area. There was one dead VC, a sapper with his wire cutters still in his hand, his lifeless body draped across the wire. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything else. Slowly the light from the flare died. It was dark. The bogeymen could come out again.

Minutes passed. An hour passed. We were relieved by a crew of grim-faced ARVN marines.

“What a time for a dud grenade,” Lobel said.

“Ain’t threw no dud,” Dongan said. “Threw a damn rock. That gook ducked his head down when he heard it land. Then he wondered why it didn’t go off. Stuck his head up and I popped him. Learned that from the Third Marines!”

The man knew what he was doing. He knew how to stay alive.

Back at the hooch Lobel came over and sat on Peewee’s bunk. Peewee said that anybody who sat on his bunk had to give him a kiss. Lobel said he wasn’t a faggot, and Peewee said he was sorry about that because he could have really used a kiss.

“You guys think we re going to have a race problem over here?” Lobel asked.

“Not as long as everybody over here got them a gun,” Peewee said.

Lobel stood up. “Well, just in case we do,” he said. “I want you to know you got the Jew on your side.”

“Who’s the Jew?” Peewee asked.

“Me, I’m a Jew.”

“You ain’t no Jew,” Peewee said. “You too tall.”

“Fuck you, Peewee.”

“There you go with them promises again,” Peewee said.

The rain stopped. We sat. We did nothing. The war was a million miles away. Walowick told me and Peewee that they were talking about progress in the Paris peace talks.

“Perry?” Peewee was hanging over the edge of his bunk directing traffic for an ant traffic jam.

“What?”

“You ever have your black ass in Paris?”

“No.”

“Where you been?”

“New York.”

“You know where I been?”

“Where?”

“Chicago and Petersburg, Virginia. I got me a cousin in Petersburg. He work in a library down there.”

“What he do?”

“He run the whole thing.”

“How he get to do that?”

“He just smart as hell,” Peewee said.

A joint operation. Captain Stewart came around to tell us how we had to look good because we were going to be working with the marines. He made it sound like a job.

“We’ll be going into the Phuoc Ha Valley. The marine unit will move in first and clear the area,” he said. “Then we’ll secure it and establish an LZ in the valley. Is that clear?”

We didn’t do anything. Like half the plans that came down from regiment, this one was canceled. The marines had started a counteroffensive up near Khe Sanh, and moved up there instead of into the Phuoc Ha Valley. We were glad of that, damn glad.

Lobel tried to get up a volleyball game but nobody wanted to play. We got Gearhart to requisition some gloves and baseballs from battalion supply.

We got word that General Westmoreland wanted us to “maximize” destruction of the enemy.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Peewee asked. “We get a Cong, we supposed to kill his ass twice?” “No, monkey face, it means that we re supposed to kill as many of these gooks as we can,” Brunner said.

“You going to ‘monkey face’ your way right to Arlington Cemetery,” Peewee said.

Later, lying in the bunk sweltering in the heat,

I wondered what it did mean about “maximizing” destruction. Would it mean that we would simply kill more?

But who would we kill? Maybe we would be quicker to shoot in the hamlets. Maybe we would stop pretending that we knew who the enemy was and let ourselves believe that all the Vietnamese were the enemy. That would be the easy way. The women, the babies, the old men with their rounded backs and thin brown legs. They would be the enemy, all of them, and we would be those who killed the enemy.

Okay. I got a letter from Peewee’s girlfriend. The first thing she told me is that Peewee said I’m nice-looking and educated. Then she went on to say how she was sorry she couldn’t wait for Peewee anymore. Peewee wasn’t around when I got the letter so I just burned it.

I got a letter from Kenny, too. He said he had a part-time job working at Kelly’s Drugs on the comer of Lenox and 118th Street. For some reason I felt so proud of him, that he would do that. I just hoped Mama was letting him keep all the money he made.

He also said that he heard that Johnny Robinson got killed in the Nam.

Johnny Robinson? The last time I remember seeing him was when we were playing three on three in Morningside Park. Johnny couldn’t play that well, but he always tried hard. I had always thought he was younger than me. I didn’t know how he could even be in the Nam.

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.