“You any good?” Brunner asked.
“Damn straight.”
“What position you play?”
“Linebacker.”
“You’re too small to play linebacker,” Monaco said.
“I played it,” Gearhart said.
“When you get in country?”
“Two months ago.”
“Where you been?” Peewee asked. “Mr. Cong been asking for you.”
“Taking reconnaisance training,” Lieutenant Gearhart said. “I was supposed to be with the Seventy-fifth’s program, but they needed officers here, so here I am.”
“How are things going down in the south?” “Okay. They think we’ve seen the worst of it.” That afternoon, orders came through for Brunner and Lobel to be promoted to sergeant, and everybody else in the squad moved up to corporal. I didn’t even know that Lobel had been a corporal. The word was that everybody was getting short on people. “Say, Peewee?”
“What?”
“Why you think Lieutenant Carroll got it?”
“The Man dialed his number,” Peewee said. “You really believe that?” I asked.
“Can’t handle nothing deeper,” Peewee said.
He got up and started fixing his mosquito netting. He had got some new netting from a guy in supply and was tacking it around his bunk.
I wanted to talk to him more about why Lieutenant Carroll had died. I wanted to talk to everybody about it, but nobody could deal with it. Lobel had thought it was his fault. He said if he had shot more maybe he would have got the guy that got Carroll. Maybe. Maybe, even, that was why Carroll got nailed, because somebody didn’t shoot enough, or maybe somebody didn’t order enough bombs dropped, or enough shells fired into some sector three months ago. But why was Carroll even here? What was he doing so far from Kansas City? So far from his bookstore on Minnesota Avenue?
I hadn’t put a reason for his dying in the letter to his wife. I wondered if that had been the reason Captain Stewart had asked me to write it. I started writing a letter to Kenny. What I wanted to put in it was the reason for my dying, if I should die. I knew that I wanted to live because I was afraid of dying, and I knew that I could come up with reasons for wanting to live.
A memory came from so long ago. It was the glow of the light through the spread that I had pulled over my head when Mama got to the part about “If I should die before I wake.”
It was another letter that never got finished.
The next afternoon we had to run escort service for a civilian pacification team. These guys wanted to know exactly how to go about winning over the people. That’s what they said, anyway. There were four young guys, college types, and one of them had his wife and kid with him. The guy acted sincere as hell, and Brunner was sucking up to him like crazy. I thought the guy was an asshole for bringing his wife and kid to Nam.
“His wife is probably a spook, too,” Gearhart said.
“A what?” Peewee looked at me.
“The guy’s got to be a spook,” Gearhart said. “You know, CIA.”
“What they do over here?” Monaco asked.
“Below the DMZ they do pacification stuff, look around to see who is infiltrating, that kind of thing. Then they do a lot of stuff above the Z. The navy guys slip them in on the west and the Green Berets slip them around the Z through Laos. Down here she’s probably his cover.”
“Is the kid a spook, too?” Monaco asked.
“Who knows?” Gearhart answered. “This is a funny war.”
I didn’t like the idea of having people who were civilians around. It just didn’t seem right somehow.
We took trucks to the hamlet we were going to. If I didn’t like choppers that much, I hated trucks. You were in a truck, and you expected bullets coming through the sides any minute. Me, Brew, and Peewee were the only ones wearing flak jackets. The damn things were too hot and too heavy.
We got to the hamlet and just hung around while the civilians set up a screen and started showing Walt Disney movies.
“What the fuck am I doing running around over here protecting Donald Duck?” Peewee complained. “That little dude is three times older’n me and ain’t got a scratch on him.”
“That’s cause he don’t wear no pants,” Sergeant Simpson said. “You go around with no pants on you got to be cool.”
“What kind of freaky mess you talking about?” Peewee asked. “Donald Duck wears pants.
“No he don’t.”
Peewee and Sergeant Simpson watched the movies with the kids and made notes about who had pants on and who didn’t. Sergeant Simpson was right about Donald Duck not having on pants. Peewee got pissed. I think he was really pissed because he thought Simpson was putting down Donald Duck.
Halfway through the movies we heard the sounds of big guns being fired in the distance. Sergeant
Simpson said that a lot of it was Cong artillery. It kept up for nearly three hours without letting up. There was a lot of air activity, and we actually saw a jet go down.
The jet was streaking across the sky, and then we saw a rocket go up. I didn’t know it was a rocket but Lieutenant Gearhart did. I didn’t actually see the rocket hit the jet but I saw the jet twist in the air, hesitate for a long moment, and then start down.
“There’s a chute!” Monaco spotted it first.
We watched the parachute come down slowly, and the plane streak away. We couldn’t figure out what had happened with the plane. Then a heavy stream of smoke came from it, and it disappeared. Sergeant Simpson got on the radio to spot the parachute, but he said it was already on the waves.
All the time we were showing the movies the civilians were talking to the villagers. The woman let some people play with the kid. I got near enough to her to hear her talking Vietnamese.
When it was time to leave, a chopper took the civilians someplace. They thanked us and told us we were doing a good job. They weren’t the kind of people that had to be in Vietnam. I wondered just what kind of people they were.
Peewee got a letter. I hoped it was from his woman, but it wasn’t.
“Say, Perry, what’s your mama’s name?”
“I don’t play that ‘mama’ stuff, Peewee,” I said.
“No, I ain’t running no dozens, man,” Peewee said. “I just want to know her name.”
“Mabel.”
“What’s my name?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not telling you,” I said. “My name is Peewee Gates,” Peewee said. “And what is the name on this letter?”
I looked at the letter. It had his name on it, but it was from Mama.
“How come my mother is sending you a letter?” I asked.
“You must have told her about me.”
“Yeah, I did. Open it up.”
“Don’t be telling me when to open my mail,” Peewee said.
Peewee didn’t open the letter all day. I tried to figure out what Mama would have to say to Peewee. I had written to her and told her that Lieutenant Carroll had died. Maybe that worried her. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her that. People back home didn’t want to know about the war, I knew that. But Mama was used to hard times, I thought it would be okay to tell her.
Usually Peewee and I went to chow together, but I told him I wasn’t hungry. When he went I looked under his bunk and took Mama’s letter out.
Dear Peewee,
Richard has told me all about you and you sound like a very fine boy. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope you get the chance to go home to your family. I do not know why Richard went into the army, because he did not seem to be the type. Only I think he was not happy at home. If something happens to him please tell him that I love him very much. You seem to be his friend and he will believe you.
You can write to me if you want to.
Mabel Perry
It made me sad that Mama had written to Peewee to say that she loved me. She hadn’t even told me that when I was leaving.