Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

Our squad was on the deep flank and I was far man.

We had to cross a paddy field to get to the wood line that led to the hill we were going to explore. This was why the ARVNs didn’t want to go first. The paddy area was at least the size of a football field and exposed.

I breathed a little easier when we reached the wood line. Lieutenant Gearhart picked the route with the most cover for us. We went through a heavy canopy area, and the branches scratched my face and ripped at my hands. I was jumping through bushes, hoping I didn’t hit any booby traps, avoiding anything that looked like it might be a step easier. I was struggling to keep up. The two weeks in the hospital had done a number on me. Just two lousy weeks. The M-16 felt like sixteen pounds instead of five.

Jamal carried the radio, and Gearhart was on it. He gave us the signal to stay put, and I got down behind a fallen tree.

Peewee crawled over to me.

“I got a coin back home,” he said. “You go in my room and look in the back of the closet on the floor. You find a sneaker there and in the sneaker there’s a sock with some stuff in it. Most of the stuff ain’t worth nothing, but that coin is real old.”

“Yeah?”

“If I don’t get out this shit you go get that coin,” Peewee said. “My moms might be a little uptight thinking you trying to rip her off or some shit. But if you got to buy it from her you do that. We get out this particular mess, and I’ll write her and tell her to save it for you.”

That’s all he said. Then he started crawling back to his position. It meant he had a bad feeling about this place.

We heard some light fire on the other side of the mountain. The sixty was stuttering. Once in a while I thought I heard the M-i6s, but I couldn’t be sure.

Some rounds of high explosives came in on top of the hill.

I tensed. I looked over to where Lobel was snuggling up to the base of a tree trunk. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he returned it.

We waited. I checked my watch and it was 1000 hours. The barrage on the hill stopped. The sounds of a firefight on the other side of the hill picked up. Still, our squad waited. Gearhart was signaling. I looked over at him. He was pointing toward the trees. Okay, look out for snipers.

I tried to make myself smaller.

Don’t think, just be alert. Sergeant Simpson used to say it over and over again. But I was thinking.

Gearhart waved his arm in the air. Crap. We started getting up. I had to pee. I’d do it later. I must have had a pee ratio of three to one in Nam versus the amount of times I had peed in Harlem.

We had to move around the base of the hill to another area. Gearhart took us away from the wood line and back toward the paddies.

“What the fuck’s he doing?” Peewee asked.

“Trying to draw fire,” Walowick said.

We were showing ourselves, being targets. We moved along the edge of the paddy. The ground was muddy, oozing with water.

“Stay away from the dikes!” Sergeant Dongan called out.

“Keep your distances!”

I was wearing a flak jacket. Peewee had found two and had given me one. It weighed a ton. We kept moving. We kept slipping in the mud. Monaco had pushed forward faster than the rest of us. I think he wanted the point. He hit a dry spot and stopped. He held his rifle over his head and we all stopped. He knelt and then stepped off the dry spot into the paddy.

We all followed him into the paddy. When I passed the dry spot I saw how smooth it looked. Maybe it was too smooth. Maybe it was mined. That’s what Monaco must have thought.

I thought that if I got killed, I would want it to be over quick. I wanted to be hit and not even realize what was happening. I’d be gone, like Lieutenant Carroll. Over. Out. I don’t want to lay screaming. I don’t want to be carried in a medevac chopper while guys you could be home playing ball with were banging on your chest, trying to get your heart beating again.

Don’t think.

The rice paddy seemed forever. The water was up past my ankles, and the stink was something else.

“Johnson, hit that line of trees!” Dongan called out.

Johnson held the sixty at his waist. He leaned into it and fired. I saw that he had something on his left hand. It looked like one of those mittens you used to handle hot pots, only it was silver.

We kept moving. The rice paddy ended. We were crouched, moving forward toward the wood line again. We hadn’t drawn fire.

We moved up the hill. It was steep. We slid and fell. I fell, and let myself slide backward. I was afraid to catch on to anything. We fired a few shots, even though we didn’t see anything.

We went up thirty, forty meters. Nothing. Gearhart signaled us to stop.

We looked around and found cover.

Wait. It was 1130 hours.

We dug in. Charlie had taught us well. We rested. We sat. Gearhart was on the radio. I tried to read him from where I was. Next to Gearhart, lying exhausted on the ground, was Jamal.

Lobel was sitting against a tree. When I saw him I froze. His eyes were open but there was no expression in them.

“Lobel!” I called to him.

“Wha?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, I thought you were dead.”

He smiled. His face was caked with dirt, and the smile showed his teeth. The blank expression in his eyes never changed.

We waited until almost 1200 hours before Gearhart signaled for us to move out. We moved back down the hill. We backed down the best we could. We got to the bottom and then ran the distance back to the paddy. Then we started back through it. It began to rain lightly.

The trip back through the paddy went faster than it did the other way. We got away from the paddy and started moving toward the LZ. Stewart was already there when we got there. He was pissed.

He told Gearhart to “get over to the command post.” Gearhart glanced toward us and then left.

“What was that all about?” Lobel and Walowick came over to where the rest of the squad was already sitting.

“All I know is that Gearhart got the order to regroup here,” Jamal said.

“It’s my lunch time,” Peewee said. “So we had to break.”

“Check your weapon,” Dongan said to Johnson.

“It’s okay,” Johnson said, not moving.

“I said check your fucking weapon!”

Johnson looked up at Dongan and then started stripping the sixty.

“What makes you such a hotshot?” Monaco asked Dongan.

“When you were still pissing your pants I was kicking ass, kid,” Dongan said. “This ain’t no fucking war. These slants can’t fight. You go up against the Koreans, then you got your damn hands full.”

We listened to Sergeant Dongan talk about how hard things had been in the Korean war, and how tough the Koreans had been. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been in Korea, and I hadn’t been in any other wars. I was in Nam, here and now, and here is where my war was.

Gearhart came back. Brunner, kissing ass as usual, got up from a box he was sitting on so Gearhart could sit on it. Gearhart sat on it. I didn’t think Lieutenant Carroll would have done that.

“The Vietnamese officer, Colonel Hai, has changed his mind,” Gearhart said. “Now he wants his men to take the hill.”

“We was on the damn hill already,” Peewee said. “That’s why Stewart is pissed,” Gearhart said. “After we reached the hill without drawing fire, Hai thinks it’s safe. So he’ll send his men up, then he’ll write up his report and take credit for the body count.”

“What we do, stay here?”

“No, we follow them back up the hill,” Gearhart said.

The ARVNs had an ONTOS, an antitank weapon, that was supposed to lead the way. But there was no way the tracked vehicle was going to get through the mud. And if it did get to the base of the hill, there was no way it was going up the hill through the trees unless somebody chopped out a path for it. At least we didn’t have to do that.