Lieutenant Carroll stayed on my mind. I knew he would. I thought of his calling Jenkins a warrior angel. It was a gentle thing to say, and he had been a gentle man.
We spent another day lying around. It seemed to be what the war was about. Hours of boredom, seconds of terror.
Morning. The coffee was pretty good. Somebody had found a cache of coffee beans about two months earlier, and they had sent to Saigon for a coffee grinder. I wasn’t hungry so I just had coffee in the hooch.
Lobel came over to my bunk. He was really shaken by Carroll’s death. He sat on the edge of my bunk, and I could see he was trying to say something. He finally got it out.
“Hey, Perry, you know … I kind of feel that maybe it was my fault.”
“What?”
“You know, about Carroll?”
“Wasn’t your fault, man.”
“Throughout the whole thing I was just lying there, scared out of my mind.” There was distress on Lo-bel’s face. “I think I’m a coward.”
“Wasn’t anybody’s fault,” I said. “The Congs got him.”
“I keep thinking if I had shot more, maybe a lucky shot would have got the guy that…” he stopped and shook his head. I thought he was going to cry. “I was so scared I didn’t even see them until it was over.”
“The Congs?” Peewee had heard Lobel and sat up-
“Yeah.” Lobel was wringing his hands.
“You know, I didn’t see one till it was over,” Peewee said. “I remember what you said about Charlie Company fucking each other up, and I thought we done did the same shit until I seen that Cong laying near that tunnel. I was glad as hell to see him, too.”
“You didn’t see them during the fight?” Lobel looked up at Peewee.
“The only time I seen a live, straight-money Cong was that guy they was questioning. As far as I’m concerned, the Congs could sneak they asses clear out the damn country, and we’d be here fighting for two more years.”
“How about you, Perry?” Lobel looked at me. “Did you see them?”
“During the fight?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I saw their faces over the muzzle fire. I just fired where I thought they were. I’ve never aimed at anything. I’ve never seen anything to shoot at.”
Lobel looked down at his hands again.
Sergeant Simpson came in and said that Captain Stewart wanted me over at headquarters.
I went over and there were two colonels there. One was a marine corps guy. I started to salute but the marine corps guy just walked away from me.
Stewart motioned for me to sit down.
They had a guy tied up in the middle of the room. I guessed he was VC. A Vietnamese interpreter was talking to him.
I couldn’t understand any Vietnamese, but I listened all the same. An orderly had made coffee and passed it around. He brought me a cup and I thanked him with a nod. It was black, and it didn’t have any sugar but I didn’t want to get up and get the milk and sugar next to the marine colonel.
“What’s he talking about, Vinh?” the colonel asked.
“He says he’s a fisherman. He says he works on Song Bong River, but he doesn’t have an accent like that, he has an accent from the north. Then he say that the VC make him fight with them, but he doesn’t want to. He says that if he is killed his people don’t get his body from the VC. He doesn’t want to be buried under a tree in the forest. That’s what the VC do.”
“Tell him I don’t believe a word he’s saying,” the marine colonel said. “Tell him that if he doesn’t tell me the truth pretty soon I’m going to have to shoot him.”
The Vietnamese spoke to the prisoner again. This time his words were harsher. He slapped him a few times, then took his gun out.
The VC was rocking and talking as fast as he could. His voice rose as he spoke. The Vietnamese officer hit the prisoner with his pistol butt.
“Is he saying the same thing?” The army colonel asked. His name tag read Mulig.
“Now he say they make him fight with the Second Division,” the interpreter said. “He says he hates army life.”
“The Second?” The marine colonel looked at the VC as if he were seeing him for the first time. “He actually said the Second?”
“That’s what he said,” the interpreter reported.
“That’s the fifth one we got from the Second in the last two days. Something’s up. Get him over to Chu Lai to intelligence there. Let them work him over for a bit.”
The marine colonel and the army colonel both left. Captain Stewart talked to the major who stayed behind for a few minutes and then the major left. The orderly went to Captain Stewart and spoke to him. I heard him mention my name. Stewart, who had been leaning on the edge of a desk, came over to me.
“Your name Perry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You wrote the letter to Lieutenant Carroll’s wife?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn good letter, boy.” Captain Stewart wiped away some tobacco juice from his chin with his thumb. “You know how to type? I can use somebody in here who can type and speak English.”
“I can’t type, sir.”
“Well, it’s still a damn good letter,” he said. He turned and walked away.
I finished the coffee as two guys blindfolded the VC to take him back to Chu Lai. He was trembling.
“They found some tortured marines up near the demilitarized zone,” the orderly said. “He probably thinks they’re going to do the same thing to him.”
“Tortured?”
“They tie them to trees and pull their guts out,” the orderly said. “Then they just leave them there. That marine colonel said when they found them they were still alive and begging for somebody to kill them.”
“For the marines to kill them? They begged for the marines to kill them?”
“Yeah,” the orderly said. “And now they think that a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regulars are coming through Laos and Cambodia now.”
“Damn!”
“To say the least,” the orderly said.
Back at the hooch I told Peewee what the orderly had said. Peewee asked what had happened to the truce, and I told him I didn’t know.
We had a halfhearted volleyball game against some guys from HQ company. They beat us easily and made a lot of noise about how good they were. Peewee wanted to take a shot at one of them. When I got back to the hooch after the game, I saw the Vietnamese house girl putting something on the end of my bunk. I went to see what it was and saw that it was Lieutenant Carroll’s pictures. For some reason I put them with my stuff.
The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into his coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.
We got a new platoon leader, a Lieutenant Gearhart, and he chewed tobacco. He could have been twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, no older. Captain Stewart brought him around and introduced him.
“The first thing Lieutenant Gearhart is going to do is to make sure that we get some gooks for Lieutenant Carroll,” Stewart said. “Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Gearhart answered.
“Where you from?” Monaco asked.
“Wilmington, Delaware,” he said.
“What the hell do they have in Delaware?”
“The DuPont company, mostly,” he said. “And Delaware State. I played football for Delaware.”