Simpson put Monaco on point again, but this time he told Johnson to be the trailer. Johnson looked at me, and I could see he wasn’t happy to be the last man on the line.
The news team was in the middle. We walked along a trail for about twenty minutes with the television guys photographing us, and then headed back toward the Hueys.
We were in sight of the landing zone when Monaco opened up.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Sergeant Simpson had ducked behind a tree.
Carroll moved toward Monaco, who was still firing, and yelled something to him. Monaco stopped firing and yelled back.
Carroll put his back to a tree, pointed to his eyes, and held up one finger.
“What’s that mean?” Peewee asked.
“He means he saw one VC,” Brunner said.
We stayed low for a while, then the cameramen started getting up and easing forward.
There was another burst from Monaco, and then I heard Lobel yelling.
“There he is! There he is!”
I didn’t see anything. I looked, but I didn’t see anything. Monaco was firing on a stand of trees and soon the whole squad had opened up. Simpson was crawling back, and I saw him grab Johnson and turn him around. He wanted Johnson to watch our rear.
I looked to see what they were shooting at, but I still didn’t see anything. I decided to shoot anyway.
I looked closely at where the others were shooting, then thought I saw something move. I lifted the sixteen and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” This from Simpson.
Simpson, Monaco, and Walowick moved out. Lieutenant Carroll was telling everybody to hold their fire.
They found the guy. Walowick dragged him out of the trees. The newsmen went to take his picture while Simpson was posting us around the LZ. My hands were sweating. I looked at my rifle, wondering why it hadn’t fired.
“You okay, Perry?” Lieutenant Carroll came over to me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Soon as you fire off a clip put a new one in,” he said. “We got better supplies than the VC, we have to use them. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
I looked at the rifle after he had left. Then I shoved in a clip. I had forgotten to load the damn thing.
The newsmen were on the chopper first, then the rest of the squad. Brunner threw on the VC before he got on.
I didn’t want to look at the VC. I knew, by the way that Brunner had thrown him on, that he was dead. The news guys were getting still photos of the dead VC. Brunner took out a cigar and lit up.
We got back to the base, and they took off the VC first. They must have called ahead because there was a jeep waiting to take the VC back. Carroll went with the news team in another jeep. The rest of us walked from the chopper pad to the huts.
We got back, and they had laid the body out on the ground. The arms were out, and the legs were crossed at the ankles. I walked by him. He wasn’t any bigger than Kenny.
We went directly to the mess hall. They had saved lunch for us. The news guys were buzzing around, checking their gear and everything. They must have taken a hundred pictures each of the dead VC. They even put a weapon down by his body and took a picture of him with that. Simpson came over to the new guys and made sure that we all had our weapons on safe.
We had baked chicken, carrots, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, and rolls for lunch. And strawberry ice cream.
I sat with Peewee and asked him what he thought.
“I done seen two VC over here so far,” he said. “One captured sucker and one dead sucker.”
“I didn’t even see where he was hit,” I said.
“Fool had bout twenty holes in his ass,” Peewee said. “I don’t know where you was looking at.”
Neither did I. I couldn’t tell if there was too much to see, or if my eyes were getting bad. Maybe I just didn’t want to see some of the things I was seeing.
Lieutenant Carroll came over and said that we had done a good job.
It wasn’t real. We were eating baked chicken, and all I could think of was that it was pretty good. We had gone out to the jungle and seen one VC and killed him. Then we came back in time for lunch. Maybe Lobel was right. Maybe it was just some kind of movie.
Sergeant Simpson came to our hut and brought some magazines. I asked him if they had found a rifle or anything near the body.
“Perry wants to make sure the dude was a VC,” Brunner said. He still had his cigar in his mouth.
“He wasn’t no VC,” Simpson said. “He was a North Vietnamese regular, from one of their big units, the 324th. They found his papers on him.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“How I know?” Simpson said. “All I know is my time is getting short. I’m going to go take me a short nap because I ain’t got time for a long one.”
Monaco wanted the squad to practice volleyball. He had bet twenty-five dollars on our squad versus the Blazers, a team from Charlie Company.
“We can’t beat them,” Brew said. “They beat us six times already.”
“You know that tall guy with the big hands?” Monaco was flossing his teeth.
“Yeah,” Brew was putting salve on his feet. “He’s the one that spikes all the time.”
“Well, he got hit the day before yesterday,” Monaco said. “He ain’t playing.”
Chapter 7
Jamal, the medic, came by with malaria pills. I took one, and he sat on the edge of the bunk.
“I see you people got three VC today,” he said.
“Three?”
“That’s what the report says,” Jamal said.
“We got one VC,” I said.
“All I know is what I see on the reports,” Jamal said. “They put three down on their reports, I send three in to Regiment.”
“I don’t believe they put down three when everybody saw that we only got one.”
“You’ll get used to what goes on over here,” he said. He had a singsong way of talking, like a child in a man’s body.
“Did Captain Stewart see the report?”
“Who do you think gave me the report?” He left some malaria pills on Peewee’s bunk and split.
“Thanks,” I called after him as he left the hooch.
One of the correspondents had left a New York Times behind and I went through it. Mostly it was the same old garbage. The Knicks had drafted some guy from Southern Illinois I never heard of, and they were still losing a lot of games.
There wasn’t much about the war. A lot of VC were killed north of Saigon, and President Johnson was saying that the United States was ready to come to the peace table if the Communists were.
It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet, and the weather was already cold in New York. I imagined the brothers hustling down Lenox Avenue trying to get away from the wind. Howard, a guy I used to play ball with, crossed my mind. He was somebody I could write to. He’d probably write back. Three years before, he had pulled a robbery in midtown and been sent up to a prison in Stormville, New York. I had written to him the whole time he was up there. He used to tell me how much he appreciated the letters. Maybe he would answer my letters from Nam.
Mail call was hard when you didn’t get any mail. I thought that what I needed was to have something more in the World than I had. I remembered what Lobel had said about the starlet, but it was silly. I needed something real. It didn’t even have to be something that was going on at the time, a plan for when I got back would have been fine. I couldn’t think of anything and felt depressed.
An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?