“That’s Doyle for you, man,” Scotty said. “Whoever started the shooting probably didn’t even see anything, but he’s still going to call for a couple of rounds of Willy Peter, just in case.”
We waited for another minute before a lone round of white phosphorus landed in the distant trees.
“We re too close to be calling in artillery,” Scotty said.
One of our machine guns started chattering on our right, and Scotty opened up again. A moment later some more white phosphorus started coming in. The Willy Peter sent streamers of fire into the air. The smell of it was terrible. Terrible and scary. Just the idea of being hit by a white phosphorus barrage sent a chill through me. The barrage lasted for fifteen seconds, then stopped abruptly.
Scotty nudged me and pointed toward Doyle. Doyle had his helmet off and was screaming into the radio. He was gesturing wildly and then he stood up and looked toward the target area. The radio man stood and looked, too.
The machine gun on the right opened up again, and Doyle started screaming.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Doyle was jumping around and waving both of his arms over his head.
“Oh, shit!” Scotty turned around and leaned against the sandbags.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I hope not what I think it is,” Scotty said.
We waited as Doyle walked a little ahead of his position, hands on his hips, and looked out to the field ahead of us. Behind us I heard choppers. I turned and saw them headed for us. They went by us out to the target zone.
“Hey, Scotty, did we … ?”
“Yep, we just shot the shit out of the first platoon.”
We walked slowly across the field. There were some kind of crops being grown in between the trees, half of it now burned out or uprooted by the shelling. As we got near the first platoon the smell from the phosphorus grew stronger.
They were loading the guys onto the medevac choppers. Medics were running from guy to guy.
“Look in the bushes!” a captain was shouting.
We looked for wounded. They were all over the place. The medics were so busy they were just tagging guys. The ones they thought they could save they worked on, the others they marked their wounds down. One kid, the angry stain of blood on his T-shirt growing with every breath, watched calmly as the medic wrote up the tag. The medic tied it to his lapel and patted the kid’s shoulder. When the medic left, the kid tried to read the tag without taking it off.
If there were time — if the medic had finished with the ones he was fairly sure he could save — he would come back to the kid to see what he could do. I kept looking for other wounded. These were our people.
The first chopper was moving out already. They were so quick. One guy had a plasma bottle strapped to his helmet. He was going through his pockets looking for matches to light his cigarette. He found them but they were soaked through with his own blood. Scotty lit his cigarette.
A sergeant was crying. He was sitting by himself, his rifle cradled in his arms, crying softly.
Nobody was talking. There was nothing to say. More medevacs came in and took away the rest of first platoon. The last one took the body bags. There had to be at least fifteen.
We went back to the LZ an hour later. They had brought in the stand-by platoon to replace us.
A spec four from the first platoon had wandered away from the company and was riding with us. He was a young kid, really good-looking. He had bums on his arms and face. Both eyebrows were gone, but he was still good-looking. He looked so young.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Charlie Company, sir,” he said.
I started to tell him that I wasn’t an officer. But it didn’t matter.
As soon as we landed I was told to go back to my company. Scotty said that it was nice meeting me.
“You okay?” Lieutenant Carroll was the first to meet me.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You know, the way they run this shit over the radio,” Lieutenant Carroll shook his head. “You would think all hell was breaking loose.”
When I got to the hut, Peewee asked me what had happened.
“We heard that you guys ran into a VC battalion or something,” he said. “’Cause I told them that Perry could handle the shit if it was only one damn battalion.”
“I was with their fourth platoon,” I said. “We ran into their first platoon and we hit them. They must have lost over a dozen guys.”
“You hit our own guys?” Monaco came over to where I was sitting on the bed.
“I didn’t hit them! The platoon leader called in artillery on their position.”
“Who spotted them?” Monaco asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody knows nothing. That’s why a bunch of guys get nailed for no reason!”
“Yo, man, I didn’t mess them up.”
Monaco looked at me and walked away. I watched him lie down on his bunk with his face to the wall.
“They messed up bad?” Peewee asked.
“Yeah, real bad.”
Thanksgiving. This year, Kenny’s birthday was on Thanksgiving, and I damn near forgot it. I figured it would take three weeks for anything to reach home from Nam. I didn’t want to send him money. He could have used the money, but I wanted to send him something more. I asked Lieutenant Carroll if he thought I could get a knife in the mail. I told him it was for Kenny.
Lieutenant Carroll said he had something else, and he gave me a jacket he had bought in Saigon. It was black silk and there was a map in green of Nam on the back. I wanted to pay him for it, but he said no.
I got the jacket in the last mail. Lieutenant Carroll was in the officer’s hooch, and I stopped in to see him. He was sitting in his shorts. He was drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“You know where I got this?”
“Where?”
“We went into a village about six months ago; I guess we surprised some VC. They left their meal, their cards, and this bottle behind. You want a drink?”
I took a drink. It burned like hell going down. It came up easier.
I couldn’t sleep. They all started crowding in on me. The guy with the plasma taped to his helmet, the sergeant crying. None of them were together in my mind. They just kept coming, one by one. Short movies. A few seconds of a medic putting a tag on a wounded soldier. A few seconds of a chopper taking off over the trees. A guy cradling his rifle. A body bag.
The guys that our artillery blew away didn’t have a reason to die. They hadn’t died facing the enemy. They just died because somebody else was scared, maybe careless. They died because they were in Nam, where being scared made you do things you would regret later. We were killing our brothers, ourselves.
Brew was getting ready to go to bed and I went over to his bunk and asked him if he knew where the Lord’s Prayer was in the Bible.
“The Bible I got has an index,” he said. “You can look up anything you want in the back.”
“Hey, that’s cool.”
“You can borrow mine any time you want,” he said, tossing it to me.
“You pray a lot when you in the World?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I prayed a lot,” Brew said. “But, man, I didn’t pray nowhere near as hard.”
Chapter 9
Brunner came into the hooch and told us to saddle up, that we were going on a pacification mission. Monaco asked him who had given the order.
“Just get your ass in gear,” Brunner snarled.
“Who the hell elected you God?” Monaco hadn’t moved and neither had the rest of us.
“How many stripes you got on your arm, Private Monaco?” Brunner walked to the end of Monaco’s bunk.
“Enough to know that I don’t have to take any bull from you,” Monaco said.
Brunner kicked the end of Monaco’s bunk hard enough to knock some magazines onto the wooden pallets that served as a floor. Monaco reached under his bunk, grabbed a grenade, and pulled the pin.