Walter Myers: Fallen Angels

“Somebody must have told them suckers I was coming.”

“Told who?” I asked.

“The Congs, man. Who you think I’m talking ’bout?”

“Why you think somebody told them you were coming?”

“’Cause I don’t see none of ’em around here. They don’t want their butts kicked.”

“Yeah, okay.” I looked at the guy’s name tag. It read “Gates.” “Hey, Gates, I’ll tell you as soon as I see some Congs.”

“I’m going on in the bathroom,” he said. “Make sure they ain’t none in there.”

“Right.”

I watched him wade through a sea of GIs, stopping now and again to talk to one of them.

“Does he really think we’re in Vietnam already?” Specialist, Fifth Class Judy Duncan looked sharp in her dress uniform as she leaned against the Coke machine. Most of us were in fatigues, the army’s work clothes. I had been sitting next to Judy on the flight from Massachusetts. She had brought along an assortment of snacks to eat on the plane and was now digging into a bag of potato chips as we waited for the plane to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska, on our way to Vietnam.

“He’s just a clown,” I said. “On the plane he asked a captain to wake him up when we reached Cong City.”

“Where you say you were from?”

“New York,” I answered. “You?”

“I tell most people I’m from Dallas,” she said. “But I’m really from Irving. That’s right outside of Dallas. I don’t think anybody is really from Dallas anymore.”

“You took advanced training at Fort Devens?” “Unh-uh. Sam Houston, in Texas. I did basic there and then went right into medical school. I got assigned to the hospital in Devens, but it got boring.”

“Now you going to see the world?”

“Something like that,” she said. She had a nice smile. “I think somebody figures if I see Nam first, everything else is going to look good to me.”

The plane had been half empty coming from Massachusetts to Anchorage. We picked up about fifty more guys in Anchorage, most of them infantry from Fort Lewis. There were a few nurses with the group, too, and Judy went and sat with them.

We were served dinner shortly after we were airborne, but I wasn’t hungry. I usually can’t eat when I’m nervous, and going to Nam made me nervous. The only reason I was going anyway was because of a paperwork mess up. At first my unit was scheduled to go to Nam, but a doctor at Fort Devens had said that my knee was too bad for combat duty. I was assigned to a supply company while I waited for new orders. But then my old company didn’t go to Nam, they went to Germany instead — which was cool because there wasn’t any fighting going on over there — and I got orders for Nam.

“Look at it this way, Perry,” the captain had said. “The only reason you’re going to Nam is that it takes forever to process a medical profile. Once it catches up with you, you’ll be headed home. In the meantime you’ll get to Nam, they’ll put you behind a desk in some headquarters company, and the worst thing that’ll happen to you is that you catch a social disease in downtown Saigon that’ll rot your twinkie off.”

I hadn’t been too worried about going to Nam. From what I had heard, the fighting was almost over, anyway.

Our next stop was Osaka, Japan, and I slept most of the way. We landed at a commercial airport because of some kind of disturbance at the military facilities. There was supposed to be a change of planes, but they didn’t have another plane available until the next morning. A tall, square-shouldered first lieutenant gave out meal tickets, and we were told we could use them at the airport cafeteria. The people at the cafeteria were civilians, and they didn’t want any part of our meal tickets, even though a sergeant tried to explain to the head of the cafeteria that the U.S. Army would redeem them. Two corporals made some noise about taking the cafeteria over. What finally went down was that we all bought our own dinners. Typical army.

We spent the rest of the night sleeping on benches in the airport. A lot of Japanese civilians gave us the once-over. I bought a few souvenirs to send home, a little parasol for Mom and some Japanese comics for my brother Ken. By morning the cafeteria mess was straightened out, and we ate anything we wanted. I talked with Judy at breakfast, and she told me how she had wanted to be a garbageman when she was a kid.

“The trucks were just the best things I had ever seen in my life,” she said. She had an order of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a small mountain of toast that was disappearing quickly. “When I found out I couldn’t be a garbageman, I settled for being a movie star, but it was definitely second-best.”

She asked me what I had wanted to be when I was a kid, and I told her that most of the time I had wanted to work in a drugstore and wear a white coat with the buttons on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” she shook her head approvingly. “That’s what I like about you, Perry, you know all the good stuff. And buttons on the shoulders are definitely the good stuff.”

When the plane took off for the final hop to Vietnam, the conversations got quieter. Everybody who could was looking out of the windows.

“Okay, listen up!” A sergeant stood in the aisles with a clipboard. “We re scheduled to arrive at Tan Son Nhut, the ree-public of Vietnam, at 1400 hours. When you deplane, you will form four ranks in the area designated by Lieutenant Wilson. There will be no grab-ass, no excessive running off at the mouth, and no wandering around. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant!” came the familiar chorus.

“You will have your gear ready to deplane the moment we touch down. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

I had to go to the john. I thought about it for a while and looked back toward the plane’s johns. Too late. The line already stretched hallway down the aisle. It was 1320 hours, twenty minutes past one o’clock civilian time. We’d be in Nam in less than an hour. I thought of writing Mom and took out my paper. All I could think of was the date: September 15, 1967-

“Hey, Perry.” Judy was leaning over my shoulder.

“How’s it going?”

“Okay. Look, I just found out the nurses are going right to Chu Lai. I just wanted to wish you luck.

“Hey, thanks.” I shook her hand. “Where’s Chu Lai?”

“Who knows?” she shrugged.

Hot. Muggy. Bright. Muggy. That was the airport at Tan Son Nhut. We deplaned, followed Lieutenant Wilson across the field into an area in front of some Quonset huts, and started forming ranks. It took a while. The sergeant with the clipboard came along and tried to encourage us as best he could.

“You faggots can’t even line up straight, how you gonna fight?” he shouted.

He kept on yelling and Lieutenant Wilson started yelling, and we finally got in order. Then a captain came out, and we were turned over to him. The sergeant’s clipboard was turned over to him, too.

“Medical personnel assigned to the Sixty-seventh Group or the 312th or the Twenty-third Battalion fall out and get in those buses over there. Everybody else stand at ease.”

When the medics fell out, Judy waved to me again, and some of the guys around me told me to go give her a kiss.

“That’s what they do in the war movies,” one guy said.

I didn’t really know Judy, and I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to kiss her in front of everybody, even if I did. We watched the medics go toward the buses while the rest of us stood in the sun. I checked my watch, and it was 1430 hours.

The next time I checked my watch it was 1530 hours, and we were still standing in the sun. Once I had figured that of the seven months I had spent in the army, four of them had been standing around waiting for something to happen. Vietnam might have been a different place, but the army hadn’t changed.