Walter Myers: Fallen Angels

“We don’t want to switch, sir,” Monaco said.

“That goes for all of us,” Peewee said.

“You talking for the squad now, Peewee?” Gearhart was cleaning his piece.

“Yeah,” Peewee nodded. “I guess so.”

Gearhart wanted to combine the other two squads, but they wouldn’t let him do it. They said that we had to have so many squads in the field, even if it was only on paper.

Brunner got a bad case of hemorrhoids. Gearhart wanted to send him to Chu Lai, but his time was short and he wanted to stay. Gearhart told me and Johnson that Brunner wanted to make Sergeant, First Class.

“Captain going to give it to him?” Johnson asked.

“Could be,” Gearhart said.

“Sucker get through a calendar, you ought to give it to him,” Johnson said.

“I didn’t think you liked him,” Gearhart said.

“You got to like a man make it through a whole calendar over here,” Johnson said.

Things were quiet for a few days, even boring. We heard all kinds of stories about how we were beating back the North Vietnamese.

“Somebody better send them a telegram so they know about it,” Peewee said.

From what I heard from guys from other outfits I thought we were winning, too, but that it was going to be a long time before it was over.

We played Pitty Pat and Dirty Hearts every day. Then Monaco came up with a new game. He found some paper and put down the names of all the movie stars and singers he could think of. Then he passed them around and we played for them. That didn’t last long. Walowick won Mary Wells from Peewee and Peewee wouldn’t give her up. Walowick called Peewee a welcher.

“A what?” Peewee threw down his cards.

“You’re a welcher!” Walowick said.

“How you spell that?”

“And you’re dumb, too,” Walowick added.

“Perry, how you spell it?” “W-E-L-C-H-E-R,” I said. “It means you don’t pay your debts.”

“What else it mean?”

I didn’t know if it meant anything else. That’s when Peewee said he was going to HQ hooch where they kept a dictionary.

“If they got anything in there about race I’m gonna come back here and shove a grenade up your ass!”

Peewee stormed out of our hooch. Brunner was shaking his head.

“Guy’s a moron,” he said.

“Suppose it does have another meaning?” Walowick said.

“Then you got a grenade up your butt,” Johnson said.

Walowick left the hooch and went looking for a dictionary so he would know if he was going to have to look out for Peewee. I found Peewee drinking a soda behind the water tank.

“You find the dictionary?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I still ain’t giving up Mary Wells.”

That night, though, Mary Wells mysteriously disappeared from under Peewee’s pillow.

Sunday. The chaplain came around and asked if we wanted to come to nondenominational services. We said we would all be at the services. Only me, Walowick, and Peewee went.

It was good. The chaplain said nice things. He asked God to bless all the guys that had been killed and wounded, and to protect all of us. We sang a hymn and ended the services holding hands and saying the Twenty-third Psalm. It made me feel good.

I went back to our hooch and hit the nets. Ramsey Lewis was on the radio and I really got into it. I could almost imagine being home. The squad had just got some new barrels for the sixties and two new M-79 S. They were sitting around a tin can full of carbon tet cleaning the cosmolene off the weapons. The whole hooch smelled of the carbon tet and the guys were getting a little giddy.

“Hey, y’all hear about the dudes collecting ears from dead Congs and wearing them around their necks?” Monaco asked.

“That’s rough stuff,” Lobel said.

“It ain’t nothing to mess with a Cong once he dead,” Johnson said. “You cut the mother’s ears off while he still alive and kicking — then you doing something.”

“And what you gonna say to Mr. Cong when he catch your ass with them damn ears?” Peewee said. “’Scuse me, Mr. Cong, I just taking these here ears to the lost and found?”

“I don’t know.” Monaco sighted down the sixty barrel. “You got to be like the Cong to get him.” “They just selling wolf tickets to themselves,” Johnson said. “They see them ears round their necks and tell themselves they ain’t scared.”

“You ain’t scared over here, you a fool,” Peewee said. “Ain’t that right Perry?”

“You guys better open the hooch door and let some of those carbon tet fumes out before we’re all high,” I said.

“That’s why they give us carbon tet,” Lobel said. “To get high.”

I wanted to get up and open the hooch door myself but just then Brunner came in. As soon as we saw him whipping out his notebook we knew we were going on patrol.

“There was some activity down near a stream about four kilometers away,” Brunner said. “We’re going to check it out to make sure that no charlies are slipping through.”

“What stream?” Monaco asked.

“The Song Nha Ngu River,” Brunner said.

Peewee had been drinking a Coke; he started with a fit of laughter, and snorted the Coke out through his nose and all down the front of his T-shirt. He started laughing and trying to wipe the snot off his chin at the same time.

“Is he high?” Brunner put on his pissed-off face.

“Naw, he ain’t high,” Johnson said. “Go on with what you got to say, man.”

Brunner shot Johnson a look and went on talking about how Intelligence had got wind of heavier than usual traffic near the stream. Peewee kept giggling.

“What the hell is so funny?” Brunner turned to him and asked.

“You say we going to the Sha Na Na River?” Peewee asked. “That’s what you said.”

“I didn’t say anything about no Sha Na Na River,” Brunner said, checking his notes.

“That’s right next to the Del Valleys,’ ” Monaco said.

“All you guys have to worry about is identifying and killing charlies,” Brunner snapped. He stood and stormed out of the hooch.

“How we gonna identify them when they don’t even know who they are?” Peewee said. “You catch you a Vietnamese and ask him what he is, and he got to check out your piece. You got an American weapon and he say GI number one. You got one of them Russian AK-47 S, and he say VC number one.”

Bad news. Gearhart was going with the other squads to patrol another sector. That made Brunner the squad leader. All we were supposed to do, according to Brunner, was to check out the river. The rivers in the area were small, almost drying out in the dry season, and swelling in the rainy season. This one crossed a road, Route 586, and it was there that the main activity had been seen.

“If they’ve seen so much activity, how come we re going out by ourselves?” I asked Brunner.

“We’re not supposed to engage any large units,” Brunner said. “Stewart said we should try to get some prisoners.”

“How long he got to go over here?” Peewee asked.

“I don’t know,” Brunner said. “Maybe a month at the most. They just turned down his extension.”

“Then we making the last big push for his promotion,” Johnson said.

The choppers did the same thing to my stomach. Just the sound of them coming in put me in a panic. My arms and legs felt heavy. My palms were sweating. I didn’t want to go out anymore. I had had enough.

“Let’s go!”

I went. Again. Don’t think, react.

The landing zone spooked me. It was supposed to be near an ARVN ranger outpost, but I didn’t see any of the South Vietnamese elite troops around.

It took us an hour of cautious walking before we spotted the stream. We stopped a distance from it, maybe the distance from home plate to the left field fence in a regular stadium. On a good day I could have hit a ball that far. How long had it been since I had hit a baseball? I figured it was only sixteen months. It seemed a different lifetime.