“Let’s hit it! Spread out!”
We spread out and started moving toward the trees. I kept as low as I could, bent over at the waist. We kept moving ahead, with Monaco running like he was crazy or something. There was no fire, and we stopped in a pretty dense area.
“Stay down, stay alert!”
We didn’t move for a while. I looked up and saw the choppers in the distance. Then they were gone. Even the sound was gone. The only thing I could hear was the heavy sound of my own breathing. We were on our own.
Simpson started going around, placing the squad. Johnson was off to one side with the .60 caliber machine gun. Brew was his feeder. I gave Johnson the thumbs-up sign and he gave it back.
The air in Nam was always hard to breathe; it was heavy, thicker than the air back home. Now it was harder. I opened my mouth wide and sucked in as much air as I could, but it didn’t seem to be enough.
We waited ten minutes. Nothing. Then we began to hear small-arms firing off to our right. I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. You could smell it, though. You could smell the stink of gunpowder and hear the distant burping of the machine guns.
We waited twenty minutes. Nothing. The sound of gunfire subsided. The smoke didn’t. It drifted our way like a gentle mist through the tall trees. Behind us the choppers were coming in again. They went back into the landing zone. Then they were gone again.
We waited. Forty minutes.
“Brunner! Back up!”
We started out, moving less quickly than when we came in. The landing zone, without the excitement, the fear, was a longer distance away.
We reached it finally, and I was near enough to Carroll to hear him call the choppers in. We were on the choppers and out in minutes, with Simpson screaming at us to get our weapons on safety.
We got to the base area, and I remembered Jenkins. I was behind Brunner and followed the path he walked.
We got back to the hooch, and Simpson came in.
“How did Charlie Company do?” Walowick asked.
“They lost nine people,” Sergeant Simpson said. “One platoon lost one man, got six wounded.”
“How many VCs were out there?” I asked.
“They don’t know, but what they do know is that they didn’t have on no damn pajamas. They was North Vietnamese regulars.”
“They still talking about us going to Hawaii?” Walowick asked.
“Yeah, they talking about bringing some Lurp teams up here, too,” Sergeant Simpson said. “That the stuff I don’t like.”
When he left, I asked Walowick what a Lurp team was.
“It’s a long-range surveillance team,” Walowick said. “They don’t fight if they can help it. They just go out and see what’s out there.”
“Why does Sergeant Simpson think that’s so bad?” “I don’t know,” Walowick said. “But he didn’t live to be a short-timer by being stupid.”
Lieutenant Carroll came and asked me about my profile. He said that he saw that I had mentioned it when I first got into the company. I told him how I had hurt the knee playing ball.
“It bother you too much to go on patrols?”
“Not so far,” I said. “I just don’t want to get messed up because of the knee.”
He looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he looked away for a moment and back at me. “Perry, I don’t want to take you into combat if the knee’s really bad,” he said. “It’s not just you, I mean. Everybody in the squad depends on everybody else.”
“I guess it’s not really that bad,” I said.
“Look, I don’t want to avoid the issue,” he said. “If you tell me you can’t go on patrol, I’ll see if I
can get you transferred to another outfit. If you tell me that you can go on patrol, then we’ll just wait until the profile comes down and take a look.”
“I’ll wait for it,” I said.
“I don’t like putting you on the spot,” he said. “I really don’t. But we re all in this mess together.”
“Sure.”
When he left, Peewee asked me what the conversation was about and I told him.
“Don’t go being no fucking hero,” Peewee said.
“What would you have said?” I asked him.
“Probably the same thing you did, but I would have been pissed off at myself,” he said.
“I’m a little pissed,” I said.
I really wasn’t pissed, because I knew the real question wasn’t about my knee. I thought the knee would be okay. The real question was what I was doing, what any of us were doing, in Nam.
Chapter 6
I got guard duty with Lobel. Sergeant Walcott from Bravo Company was sergeant of the guard, and he gave us a pep talk. We were on from eight to midnight.
There were sandbags around the shallow foxhole we had to sit in. At Fort Devens a four-foot-deep hole was plenty. Now it didn’t seem so great. It was about seven feet wide. I had my M-16 and Lobel had his and an M-79 grenade launcher. There were sandbags piled in front of the foxhole, with a place to shoot through. The perimeter of the camp was marked by intricate patterns of barbed wire barriers. The wire itself had razor-sharp protrusions as well as trip flares planted throughout. Lobel and I had to watch about sixty meters of the wire to make sure that no VC broke through.
“Perry, you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You look a little uptight.”
“I feel a little uptight.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Still thinking about Jenkins, I guess,” I answered.
“Who’s Jenkins?”
“The guy I came in with. You remember, he stepped on a mine.”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing can get through that much wire,” I said.
“Nothing can get through it without getting messed up,” Lobel answered. “But they try.”
I didn’t answer. For all the talk, the war was still far away. All you had to do was to be careful, and you’d be okay. Jenkins hadn’t been careful.
“You know, Perry, if I was going to make a movie over here, I’d make it a love story,” Lobel said dreamily.
“How come you always talk about movies?”
“Because they’re the only real thing in life,” Lobel said. He slumped down in the foxhole. “You didn’t think any of this was real, did you?”
“Look, Lobel… why don’t you get up and watch the wire with me?”
“You scared?”
“Yeah, man.”
“Oh, okay.” He got up, just like that.
There were things chirping out beyond where I could see. I remembered going to the old cowboy movies and seeing the cowboys sitting around a campfire and the Indians sneaking up on them and making noises like owls and stuff. I looked over toward Lobel, who was looking out toward the wire.
“Hey, Lobel, I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”
“No sweat.” He wore his helmet down low over his eyes and the top part of his face was in shadow. “I’m a little nervous, too. I’d be real nervous, except I know none of this is real and I’m just playing a part.”
“What part you playing?”
“The part where the star of the movie is sitting in the foxhole explaining how he feels about life and stuff like that. You never get killed in movies when you’re doing that. Anytime you get killed in a movie, it’s after you set it up.”
“You play a part when we were on patrol?”
“That wasn’t a patrol,” Lobel said. “That was a firefight.”
“I thought a firefight was when you shot at something.”
“Anytime anybody is getting shot at it’s a firefight,” Lobel said. “Anyway, I was playing Lee Marvin as a tough sergeant. That’s my best part.”
It got quiet again, then I heard somebody’s radio. It sounded a little like Wilson Pickett.
“What do you think the VC are like?” I asked. “I mean really like?”