Peewee and I found the hut with the salves and went inside. There were two women and a kid sitting on the floor. One of the women was old, the other not much more than a girl. The kid was two at most and didn’t have any pants on. The whole place stunk of urine and God knows what!
“What medicine good fo’?” Peewee asked in his best “Let’s go talk to the Indians” dialogue.
The two women just looked at us.
“What medicine good fo ?” Peewee asked again. “My-America number one!” the girl said. “Vietcong number ten!”
“Yeah, I know we number one,” Peewee said. “But what the damn medicine good fo’?”
I took a bottle of salve, put some on my finger — the smell of it was awful — and put it near my mouth. I raised my eyebrows.
“No-no,” the old woman took the salve from me, took some of it on two bony fingers, and started rubbing it in my hair.
She said something to the younger woman, and she reached up and felt my hair. I remembered in the orientation lecture that you weren’t supposed to touch the head of a Vietnamese person.
“If they rubbing our heads for luck I’m gonna bum this mother down,” Peewee laughed. He was comfortable with the Vietnamese.
We tried to work out what all the salves were for. The first salve was something that was supposed to make hair grow. We couldn’t figure out most of the others, but we did figure that one was to rub on a girl’s stomach to either get her pregnant or after she got pregnant, we couldn’t figure out which, and the last was to put on your feet.
Peewee paid them three hundred piasters, about three dollars, for four bottles of the hair stuff and the feet stuff. He said that he was going to take the stuff home and make a fortune growing hair. I told him not to mix them up; we didn’t want people growing hair between their toes.
A chopper brought in some hot food for us and some grain and a box of chicks for the people in the hamlet.
Brunner told Carroll that he thought that one of the older girls in the hamlet was a VC. Carroll told him not to worry about it.
“We re not playing I Declare War today,” Lieutenant Carroll said. “That comes next week. This week you have a choice of stickball, ring-a-levio, and pacification.”
There was another outfit doing a pacification project a few kilometers from us, and the chopper that had picked them up was waiting with our chopper. We loaded up and both choppers cut their engines. Then — bingo — they both started up, and we raced back to the base. Our chopper lost by a few seconds.
When we got back there was a lot of yelling in the camp. We were having roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, and carrot cake again for supper, and everybody was pissed. An officer wanted to start an investigation and somebody else wanted to frag the cooks.
It wasn’t the greatest supper in the world, and the cooks served it in flak jackets.
Lieutenant Carroll said that we were going on another pacification mission the next day, then an hour later he came and told us that we weren’t.
“How come?” Brew was trying to increase his vocabulary and was working on a quiz in Reader’s Digest.
“That’s just the way it is,” Carroll said.
Later Monaco heard from Sergeant Simpson that Captain Stewart got us out .of it.
“You can’t get a body count on a pacification run,” Monaco said.
Peewee got a letter from Earlene that said she still loved him even though she married somebody else. She said she was pregnant, and if the baby was a boy she was going to name it Harry after him. Also, Lobel got a letter from his father. The letter was really full of crap. He read it out loud. The whole thing was about how could he go into the war and kill innocent people.
“Young men all over the country are burning their draft cards and resisting the war machine,” Lobel read. “He probably got ‘war machine’ from one of his fifteen-year-old girlfriends.”
Lobel didn’t make a big thing over it, but I didn’t think it was really that cool with him. I sat with him at chow and listened for a while as he talked about movies. Then I asked him about the letter.
“You know why this letter sucks?” he asked. “How come?”
“Because I joined the friggin’ army in the first place so he would stop thinking I was a faggot,” Lobel said. “Now he thinks I’m a creep because I’m in the army.”
“What the hell does he know?”
“You know what I hope?” Lobel asked. “I hope I get killed over here so he has to fit that shit between his vodka martinis.”
“The next time we call for artillery, we’ll aim right at your pad at home,” I said.
“You know what that jackass doesn’t know?” Lobel said, looking away from me. “He don’t know that now I can go back home and blow him away. That’s what I’m fucking trained for, man. That’s what I’m fucking trained for.”
Mail call. Got a letter from Kenny. He said a guy is starting a basketball league for kids from nine to eleven. He said he didn’t think he was that good in basketball, but he wanted to enter. Everybody on the winning team would get a trophy. He needed ten dollars though, and Mama didn’t have the money.
I answered him right away. I told him that he would do just fine in basketball. I put twenty dollars in the letter for him.
It was good having Kenny need me. I almost cried as I thought about him. It had been tough on me not being able to go to college, but things had been tough on him, too. In a neighborhood where you had to be tough just to get to the store with money for a loaf of bread, Kenny wasn’t tough at all. I had been sort of a father to him since our folks split, and I know he missed me.
I thought about what Lobel had said. Here he was with a gun ready to kill people to prove that he wasn’t queer, and I was ready to kill people because I wanted to get away from home.
I told myself I would write to Kenny more, and to Mama, too.
“Hey, Perry, what you thinking about?”
“My brother,” I said to Peewee.
“Why don’t you think about girls so we can get some more sex in the atmosphere?”
“Right on.”
Two American Red Cross workers came around and passed out candy and stuff. They were the first American women we had seen in a long while, and the guys just kept looking at them. A funny thing happened. One of them — her name was Sam — asked me what I was going to do when I got home. The question embarrassed me. I was so embarrassed I think she felt bad.
She made a few jokes, and I laughed harder than I should have, and she went off to the next guy.
I remembered sitting in the counselor’s office my second week in high school. The counselor, a short, red-haired woman, with blue eyes that bulged slightly
from a thin face, had asked me what I had wanted to do in life.
“I’d like to be a philosopher,” I had said.
She had started laughing and apologizing at the same time. It was simply not the kind of thing, she explained, that she had expected.
I was hurt. I didn’t even know what a philosopher did for sure, but her laughing messed me up. After that I never told anyone I wanted to be a philosopher again, or even a writer. I started telling people in school that I wanted to work on a newspaper. Around the block I told people that I either wanted to play ball or teach. But I was always uncomfortable with the question. Even when Kenny had asked me, I couldn’t come up with anything easily.
“Something important?” he had offered.
“Yeah.” It was a good answer, and we both had a feel for what it meant.