“Now what do you think you’re going to do with that, pretty boy?” Brunner said, looking down at Monaco.
Monaco smiled, lifted the armed grenade high over his head, and flipped it toward Brunner.
Everybody dove to the floor, screaming. I tried to pull my bunk down over me. I heard myself screaming, as if the noise I made would somehow cut off the impact of the grenade. Peewee was on the floor near me. He had one hand over his head and his helmet over his rear end.
I didn’t stop screaming until I saw Walowick, who had rolled himself into a tight little knot, get up.
Slowly we all got up. Walowick started the cursing, and we joined in. Monaco was on his bunk, laughing.
“The next time I’m going to toss you one with the powder in it,” he said to Brunner.
“You’re a fucking kid! You’re a fucking kid!” Brunner was screaming at the top of his lungs. “You call yourself a fucking soldier, but you’re a fucking kid!”
We continued cursing out Monaco. He was called every low-life and every animal we could think of, and then some. Peewee called him a faggot baboon dog, which was different.
When we finished the cursing we all laughed, all except Brunner and Brew. Brunner was still pissed, and Brew was praying. Brew’s praying bothered me. It wasn’t that I minded him being religious, it was just that I didn’t want him being closer to God than I was.
Everybody was interested in the pacification thing we were going on. It was like the closest thing to a real answer about why we were in Nam. Sergeant Simpson said that the marines had done the bulk of it in the past but that they were digging in up north to establish positions for the Tet truce.
“Keep your eyes open and don’t mess with the women folks,” Sergeant Simpson said. “Keep your weapons on safe. I don’t want none of y’all shooting me.”
I thought about my going out with Charlie Company and how we had shot at our own men. Then it left my mind. I noticed that lately there were things I would let myself think about, and things I wouldn’t. But every once in a while things would come into my mind, not like a thought but like a picture, and I felt a little strange about that. I wondered if that happened to any of the other guys.
We mounted the choppers and started out. My stomach tensed when I saw the choppers. They were like a trigger. Even when I heard them putt-putting into the area I would tense up. It meant that we were leaving the camp, leaving home. At the camp I felt safe. Outside of the camp anything was possible.
It didn’t take us long to get to the hamlet. Lieutenant Carroll was showing Sergeant Simpson the map, and I looked at it. It showed all the hills and the streams mostly. That was how we got around, following the hills and streams and paddies. Sometimes there would be a plantation that we would use as a reference, or a field of rice paddies.
The hamlet consisted of a cluster of little huts. They were put together well. Some kids came out to greet us. Most of them were young, four or five, seven at the most. The M-16 I carried felt bigger than it usually did. We came into the village to pacify the people who lived there. Lobel found me and came alongside.
“You know who we are?” he asked.
“Who?”
“You remember those cowboy movies when the bad guys ride into town? You know, the killers?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s us,” Lobel said.
“I’m not a killer,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. I hated him saying that. I hated his smiling as if he had some dark secret. Sergeant Simpson was up ahead. He didn’t walk, he loped. He was cool, simple. I trotted the few steps to catch up with him.
“I wonder what they think of this war?” I said, half to myself and half to Sergeant Simpson. I was looking at a group of Vietnamese kids playing in the mud.
“It ain’t so bad for them,” he answered.
“How can you say that? They’re just kids.”
“’Cause they don’t know nothin’ else,” Simpson said. “You look around at these kids and their mamas and you know they been fighting and getting their asses kicked since way back before I was bom. You ain’t gonna find ten of these people in all of First Corps know anything about no damn peace.”
I started telling him how he was wrong, but he cut me off. He told me not to fall asleep just because I was on a mission of peace.
We had to go into each hut with little gifts. That was to make sure that there weren’t any VC hiding out among the civilians. The people were the same. Small, withered women, skin creased over onto itself; dark, life-weary eyes that had seen everything.
I felt huge walking among them. I towered over them. I was huge, and I was armed to the teeth, and these were not my people. Maybe, they did look at me as if I were the killer in Lobel’s movie. Then, on the other hand, the hell with Lobel. I wasn’t a killer.
The Vietnamese didn’t look up at me. They looked down, or at my chest. Sometimes, when they did look directly at us, they would shade their eyes with their hands as if they were looking at something very far away. I smiled at an old man and he nodded his head. I wondered what that meant. I had been trying to be friendly, and he just nodded. Did he know that I wanted him to like me?
Walowick found a place that had jars filled with some kind of paste. He thought they might have been Molotov cocktails and called Lieutenant Carroll over. Carroll smelled the jars and shrugged it off.
“It’s some kind of salve,” he said. “Maybe it’s good for jock itch or something.”
We were supposed to smile a lot and treat the people with dignity. They were supposed to think we were the good guys. That bothered me a little. I didn’t like having to convince anybody that I was the good guy. That was where we were supposed to start from. We, the Americans, were the good guys. Otherwise it didn’t make the kind of sense I wanted it to make.
I saw Brunner pocket a small statue from one of the huts. I told him about it and he gave me the finger.
“Maybe you’ll be a better dude when you come back in your next life,” I said. “Who knows, cockroaches might be in by then.”
He took a step toward me, and Johnson — I hadn’t seen him nearby — stepped next to me. Brunner looked at Johnson, then turned on his heel and walked away.
“He ain’t spit,” Johnson said.
Johnson went off and started looking at a pig that was tied in back of one of the huts. Johnson was different than I thought he was at first. He didn’t seem that sharp, but he knew things. He knew when somebody was doing something that he didn’t like. He knew when one of the black guys was being messed with. And when he knew something he put his butt on the line. That was Johnson. Maybe back in Savannah he was different. But the war made him a certain somebody. The same way that it made Monaco a certain somebody. Monaco was the point man. Johnson had the pig, the big sixty, the heavy ’chine. Who the hell was I?
I found Peewee trying to play a game with some Vietnamese kids.
“These little fuckers trying to cheat me,” Peewee said.
The kids were laughing, having a good time. I told Peewee about the salve that Walowick had found and he wanted to go get some.
“Why, you got jock itch?”
“They got medicine for the stuff they be catching over here,” Peewee said, “Right?”
“Right.”
“And we over here, right?”
“Right.”
We slept in hooches that were surrounded by sandbags. There were vents on both ends, and sometimes they worked. Usually, though, the hooches were hot as anything. We had put straw and leaves on the roof of our hooch back at the base to keep the sun from baking us, but it didn’t help that much. The huts that the Vietnamese lived in were made on bamboo frames and covered with woven bamboo slats and dried flat leaves. The joints weren’t nailed. They were notched and tied with either rope or wire. Some of the huts had slats that could be adjusted to let the light in. They were cool enough inside, especially the ones with the high ceilings.