Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

The ARVNs were on the left. I saw them. I fired in their direction. I don’t know why. I stopped and tried to pull myself together.

The charlies were still ahead of us. They had backed themselves into a tight knot in the middle of the field. There must have been sixty, maybe seventy of them. We fired at them, and fired at them, and fired at them. Bodies once alive, then lifeless, seemed to live again as the bullets tore into the dead flesh and made it dance in the afternoon sun. I breathed in some bugs without bothering to spit them out.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Gearhart.

The other side of the clearing was burning. The sudden darkness of a jet surprised me. Surprised all of us. One guy opened up. The jet roared and dropped a bomb just over the clearing. Napalm.

It burst into the trees, rolling, rushing, a gale of fire through the trees.

Couldn’t breathe. I went down. Guys were dropping around me as the heat from the napalm sucked up the air. The trees above us caught fire. My skin was full of tiny pin pricks. The napalm was too close. We started moving into the clearing.

A Cong, maybe the one who had fired the RPG, was lying on top of a pile of bodies. His chest and stomach were open. There were tubes and organs and the redness of working parts that no longer worked.

“Perry!” It was Peewee.

“Wha?”

He pointed. I looked. It was a soldier. He had been white, round-faced. Now the bottom of one leg was off. Most of the flesh from the thigh was off, too. The white, twisted bone angled out oddly from the hip. His eyes were open, his mouth was open as wide as it would go, the teeth bared.

“Look at his hands, man.”

The hands were around the neck of a NVA soldier. There were no other wounds on the NVA. The GI had killed him from the other side of death.

I walked away. People were not supposed to be made like that. People were not supposed to be twisted bone and tubes that popped out at crazy kid’s-toys angles. People were supposed to be sitting and talking and doing. Yes, doing.

When the ARVN troops first reached us we didn’t notice anything unusual. Then we heard one of their officers yelling and motioning for us to move back toward the hamlet.

“What the hell is this?” Peewee reached for his rifle.

Gearhart saw that the ARVN troops were surrounding us. I almost freaked out. I thought the ARVN troops must have been Congs in disguise.

“What the fuck is this all about?” Gearhart was asking.

Then we saw. The choppers started down. The ARVN officer simply wanted to get out first.

“Put your hands up! Put your hands up!” Gearhart shouted.

He threw down his weapon and put his hands high over his head. Peewee lifted the muzzle of his rifle.

“No, put your hands up high,” Gearhart shouted. “Like this!”

He put his hands up even higher.

We finally figured out what Gearhart had in mind and put our hands up. He was letting the guys in the choppers know what was up. The door gunners on the choppers opened up on the knot of ARVNs behind us. We got our pieces and started firing into them. They broke it off quickly and moved away.

We started scrambling to the choppers, fighting off any ARVNs that tried to get on before us. The chopper I was trying to get on dipped down and almost knocked me off. Then it seemed to leap into the air with me hanging onto one side. Somebody pulled me in. I felt something slip by me, clutch at my ass, my leg, hold onto my ankle for a long second, and then let it go. I thought my ankle was broken. I twisted to see who was behind me. There was nobody, nothing but the empty space of the door. Somebody had fallen out.

It was forever getting back to the base. We were jumbled over each other, our bodies aching and too tired to move.

We got to the base, and somebody came up with some coffee. I had never been a coffee drinker in the World, but now I wanted it. Now I needed it, anything that promised to get me to the next minute. Gearhart told us to get some rest.

“Sleep,” he said.

Sleep. Rest. The words had lost their meaning. Trying to reach sleep, any kind of real sleep, was hard. It was as if I just faded out sometimes, and then faded back in when we got called. Most of it wasn’t rest, either. You had to be away from the boonies for three, maybe four days before you felt rested. It wasn’t so much the running around, or the fighting, it was the tension.

Monaco’s screaming woke me with a start. I jumped up reaching for my rifle.

“There they are! There they are!” he was screaming. He fell to the floor and shot a burst toward the door of the hooch.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Walowick was yelling.

Lobel and Johnson jumped on Monaco and wrestled his weapon away from him. I was behind my bunk looking toward the door.

“Be cool! Be cool!” Johnson called out.

“Oh, God!” Monaco had his hands to his head. They were helping him up.

“What the fuck is going on?” I looked toward Peewee, who was standing flat against the wall.

“I swore I thought I saw some Congs dragging a guy through the bushes,” Monaco said. “I saw it just as plain as anything.”

“You were probably dreaming,” I said, getting up from the floor.

“No, man, I was awake,” Monaco said. “I saw these two Congs dragging a guy into the bushes.”

Monaco shook his head and sat down on his bunk. Everybody else cooled out. Some guys from another squad came over to find out what the shooting was about, and Walowick told them a guy was working on his rifle and it went off.

When they saw that Monaco was okay, Lobel and Brunner walked him over to the mess tent to get some coffee.

“Hey, Perry,” Walowick sat on the edge of the bunk.

“What?”

“You know what happened to Monaco?”

“No, what?”

“I mean, you know what he just did? Thought he was seeing something he had seen before?” “Yeah?”

“That happened to me once,” he said. “I was on guard and some VC tried to get through the barbed wire. We were firing on them, and out of the comer of my eye I saw one that had already got through. He came at me and I turned and got him, and then I went back to firing on the other guys trying to get through. We stopped them, and I didn’t think much of it. But the next day I was playing volleyball and just as I turned…

Walowick paused as if he were trying to remember exactly what had happened.

“You thought you saw guys coming through the wire again?”

“No, not coming through the wire,” he said. “I thought I saw the guy that had broken through. I screamed and dove for the ground. It was pretty embarrassing.”

“It’s understandable, though.”

“You understand it?”

“No.”

Monaco was cool by the next day. He made a lot of jokes about what had happened, but I thought he was worried about it.

It was a dreary Friday, the rain beat down on the tin roof of the hooch all morning, and we were all down. Jamal was typing up a report on

Brew and noticed it was his birthday. If Brew had made it he would have been nineteen on the twenty-sixth.

“We could have had a birthday party for the guy,” Peewee said. He was cleaning his gear.

I had been trying to get the mud from my boots, gave it up, and went to the mess tent. I asked the cook if he had any cake or anything and he came up with some pound cake and some fruit cocktail. I took it back to the hooch and we celebrated Brew’s birthday.

Gearhart wrote three letters to his wife. He gave one to me, one to Walowick, and he kept one.

Gearhart said that if we got back to someplace we could mail the letter to go on and mail it. The letters were all the same he said, more or less.

“Just in case I don’t get a chance to mail it myself.” He said. “You know…”