Vietnam. There were mountains in the distance. A helicopter hovered over the far end of the field, tilted at a crazy angle, and then flew off. I watched it until it was almost out of sight.
Most of the guys around the landing field were in fatigues. No different than Fort Devens, except that half of them carried their rifles around with them. There were a lot of pistols, too. You didn’t see many pistols stateside.
There were Vietnamese soldiers around, too. They were smaller than I thought they would be. I tried not to stare at them. A rumbling noise off to my left sounded like distant thunder. We knew it was artillery. My stomach felt queasy. Guys started looking at the ground. This was Nam.
We had a roll call. I listened for the sergeant to call my last name. When he did, I responded with my first name: Richard. Two marines — they had obviously been in Nam awhile — came over and stood near the sergeant and looked at us. They were unshaven. Their uniforms looked worn, darker than ours. One of them was wearing a necklace of some kind. The other one had a peace symbol painted on his helmet. They were old-looking guys, older than any of the guys just coming in.
We went back to waiting in the sun. We waited until 1600 hours. Then the trucks came.
I was assigned to the Twenty-second Replacement Company. That’s where I met Gates again, the guy who had been looking for “Congs” in Anchorage. We bunked next to each other.
Gates was brown-skinned, but he had reddish hair and freckles. I thought I was going to like him.
“You see any Vietcong?” I asked.
“Yeah, you see that girl come in here a moment ago?”
“The one cleaning the barracks?”
“Yeah, she’s a Cong, man.”
There were three or four Vietnamese civilians around our barracks. Two were painting the decorative rocks around headquarters, the kind of thing that we all did stateside, and the other two were cleaning inside.
“They’re not Vietcong.”
“Who told you that?”
“It figures,” I said. “We re fighting the Vietcong. You don’t fight somebody, then hire them to clean up.”
“I remember back home this boy come into a poolroom — ”
“Where’s back home?”
“Chicago.” Gates was lying on his back on his bunk. “Anyway, this dude come into the poolroom, and he knowed he was a good pool shot, see? So he hustled this other dude into a pool game for twenty dollars and beat him.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Well, he figured he was supposed to get his money,” Gates said. “But the boy he beat didn t want to pay him so he shot him in the stomach.
Gates stopped talking and started taking his boots off.
“So what’s the end of the story?” I asked.
“That the end. The dude that did the figuring done figured wrong. That s why you shouldn’t be figuring that chickie that be doing the cleaning ain’t no Cong.”
Right.
I started writing home. The Vietnamese cleaning lady came in again. She started dusting around the bunks. I looked over at Gates, and he was looking at me. He smiled.
“Hey, Gates,” I said, “I know you’re wrong.”
“Don’t be calling me no Gates,” he said. “You call me Peewee.”
“Okay, Peewee,” I said. “You’re still wrong.”
“I can prove it to you,” Peewee said. “Watch this.”
“Hey, you!” he sat up and called to the Vietnamese woman. “Mama Cong!”
The woman looked at him, shrugged, and then turned away.
“Mama Cong!” he repeated, louder.
“She probably doesn’t even understand English,” I said. A couple of other guys had turned to see what Peewee was doing.
“Watch if she don’t split,” Peewee said.
The woman turned again and looked at Peewee. Then she left.
“See!” There was a big smile on his face. “She’s a Cong, that’s why she left. She know Peewee got her number.”
“If you talked crazy at me,” a heavy, red-faced guy called over to Peewee, “I’d leave, too.”
“That’s cause you probably a Cong,” Peewee said. “And you a ugly-ass Cong, too.”
The guy stood up. He seemed twice as big standing as he did sitting. He came over to Peewee’s bunk and put his foot on Peewee’s bed.
“Boy,” he said, “I just finished seven months of ranger training, learning how to kill little people like you. So why don’t you just shut up?”
“Yo, you, what’s your name?” Peewee called over to me.
“Perry.”
“Perry, did this peckerwood just call me boy ?” “I think you’d better leave him alone,” I said. “Yeah, but did he just call me boy ?”
“I can answer for myself,” the ranger said. “Yes, I did call you boy,’ Boy!”
Peewee turned and looked as if he were going to put his feet on the floor. Instead he shot both legs into the ranger’s crotch. The big man doubled over, and Peewee punched him on the side of the head. Then he laid back, put his hand under his pillow, and pulled out a knife, which clicked open with a flick of the wrist.
“Now you can get up and start beating on me if you want,” Peewee said. “But if you do, I’m going to cut your damn throat soon’s you go to sleep.
The ranger got up, looked at Peewee, and started sputtering something about if Peewee didn’t have the knife what he would do. I put Peewee in the letter to Mama.
Chapter 2
A sergeant came in and put the lights out. Then he made a bunch of stupid remarks about what we should and shouldn’t do in the dark.
“Hey, Perry!” It was Peewee.
“What?”
“What did you do back in the World?”
“Just got out of school,” I said.
“You didn’t finish, either?”
“I finished high school.”
“No lie?”
“No lie.”
“Then why you come in the army?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.
I finished high school, but I hadn’t gone to the graduation exercises. It just hadn’t made sense anymore.
“You can go to City College,” the guidance counselor had said. “Your grades are good enough.”
I told her I’d think about it. What I was thinking about was that I had to get up every morning and dry the clothes I had washed the night before by putting them on the oven door, to have something to wear to high school. How was I going to get the clothes for college? How was I going to get clothes for Kenny so he would stay in school? Mama had said that she’d see to it that Kenny stayed in school if I sent the money for clothes for him. I wasn’t saving any money, the way I figured I would when I first got into the army, but I figured that might come later if I made sergeant.
I thought of writing a letter to Kenny. He would dig getting a letter from Nam. I remembered once he was involved with a pen-pal program and got a letter from some lad in Logan, West Virginia. He had looked at me with his wide, bright eyes and smiled like he couldn’t believe the great thing that had happened to him. The night before I left for the army we had sat and talked about what we were going to do in the future. No matter what I said, I knew he was sorry that I was leaving.
“Richie,” he had said before he went to sleep, “when you get to Vietnam, I hope you guys win.”
The Monarchs, the neighborhood team I played for, had just lost a tournament the week before. It had bothered me a lot. I had done well, and Kenny had said that it wasn’t my fault. I had given him a big speech about basketball being a team sport, and that my doing well didn’t matter.
“Either the team wins or the team loses,” I had said.
I had wanted to win badly. I knew I was going into the army, but for me that was a kind of defeat.