I put the letter back and wrote to Mama. I told her that I loved her very much and missed her very much. I had always had a small war with Mama. I was always the bright one and she always the one that didn’t understand what I needed. Now all I could think of was how much I needed her.
Walowick got a rash on the inside of his thigh, his back, and on the inside of his arms. It looked terrible. Everybody took a look at it and offered their opinion on what it might be. Lieutenant Gearhart came in to our hooch and saw it and asked Walowick if he had been having intimate relations with anything with a reptilian background.
“Like a snake or a lizard,” Gearhart said with a big smile on his face.
“Go fuck yourself!” Walowick said.
Gearhart didn’t like Walowick saying that. You could see it all over his face, but he didn’t say anything.
Late that night we watched some television. Security was getting tighter, and we had to cover the windows of the hooch the television was in, which made it just about too hot to watch the thing. We watched Gunsmoke and then a Christmas show. I forgot it was almost Christmas. It got me a little sad, and I was just about to go back to our hooch when all of a sudden, there we were, on television. It was the time we had gone out with the television crew.
“There I go,” Peewee said. “You know, I sure don’t look like no damn soldier.”
“What you look like is a VC,” Monaco said.
I watched the film with the others. They made little comments about how they had felt walking that day, and how they were surprised at how the cameras made us look.
“Where am I?” I didn’t see myself.
“There you go, behind me.”
I looked older than I thought I did in real life. Older and sloppier.
The pictures also made it look as if the photographers were leading the patrol. But what the squad wasn’t talking about was the guy walking behind Walowick. Lieutenant Carroll turned back to make sure we had kept our distances. He seemed for a moment to look directly into the camera. His eyes were quiet, serious, as they always were. And then, as he had to, he turned away from us.
Chapter 12
“I think you should major in math,” Peewee said. Walowick had a catalogue from the college he wanted to go to when he got back to the World and Peewee was telling him what to take.
“I’m no good in math,” Walowick said. “I think I’ll take music or something like that. Something easy.”
“Why don’t you go to the University of Chicago?” Brunner said. “That’s got a good reputation. Who ever heard of Knox College?”
“That sounds like that School of Hard Knocks I been hearing about,” Peewee said.
“Knox is good and it’s in my hometown,” Walowick said. “My cousin went there.”
“They got any brothers going to that school?” I asked.
“The first colored senator went to Knox,” Walowick said. “The whole town has a good history with helping coloreds and stuff like that. The underground railroad used to go through Galesburg.” “You study math like I told you,” Peewee said in a gruff voice. “Then I’ll let you come to Chicago and be a big-time numbers man.”
“Walowick would rather stay over here than go to Chicago,” Sergeant Simpson chimed in. “He figure he stay over here he’ll be safer.”
“What else you got in the mail?” Monaco asked. “A newspaper,” Walowick said. “Only thing in it is the stuff about guys burning their draft cards.”
“Faggots and Commies,” Brunner said. “Anybody who wouldn’t stand up for their country is either a faggot or a Commie.”
“They’re doing what they think is right,” Monaco said. “Maybe they are right, who knows?”
“That’s why we got four and five-man squads,” Brunner said, “’Cause those jerks are home smoking dope and burning their draft cards. You get blown away because you don’t have a full squad, you can thank those creeps.”
“I almost went to Canada when I got notice to go down to register,” Brew said.
“Yeah, but then you got it together,” Brunner said.
“No, man, I didn’t have the nerve.” Brew had a sheepish grin on his face.
A rat scurried up the side of the hooch, jumped onto Walowick’s bunk, and stopped right in the middle of it. We had put some poison around, and we figured he must have been dying. It was about seven to eight inches long and bloated up.
“Brunner, get your piece,” Sergeant Simpson said.
Brunner had a twenty-two air rifle. He got it, kneeled down, and shot the rat. It died right on Walowick’s bunk, and Walowick got pissed off. He left the hooch and told Brunner he had better have his bunk cleaned up before he got back. The rest of us got up and split and left Brunner and the rat in the hooch.
What Brew had said about not having the nerve to go to Canada shook me. Here he was in Nam, getting shot at every day, afraid of every noise, every step, and yet he had been afraid of going to Canada. It shook me because I knew what he meant. Sometimes standing alone seemed to be the hardest thing in the world to do, even when being in the crowd meant you could be killed.
We got hit by a rocket attack that night. It came on us all of a sudden. I woke up screaming. The sounds of the explosions rattled through the hooches, and we couldn’t tell where the rockets were hitting. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and ran for the bunker.
The noise messed me up. I jumped with every explosion, I trembled as the ground shook around me.
“Look for sappers! Look for sappers!”
Sergeant Simpson was calling out for us to look out for sappers, the Vietnamese suicide squads. He had sixty-two days to go and he was trying to stay alive.
“Somebody send up a flare!” Monaco.
“I’m going to get some!” Peewee. The squad had settled down. I was still shaking. I heard somebody screaming for a medic.
The flare went up and there was some firing, but we didn’t see any sappers. The rockets stopped, the flares died down, they put out the fires. The night had us again.
Captain Stewart came around to check for casualties. He started talking about how we had to be more aggressive, how we had to go out to get the VC.
“We got to keep them up a few nights,” he said. He patted Sergeant Simpson on the shoulder.
When he left I could see that Sergeant Simpson didn’t look good.
“You okay, Sarge?” I asked.
“That man bucking for major real bad,” he said. “He gonna get somebody killed before he makes it.”
I couldn’t sleep, and sat outside in the bunker, trying to catch a little breeze. Johnson was there, too.
“This reminds me of a Harlem night,” I said. “Sometimes the little apartment we lived in would be so hot you couldn’t sleep for days.”
“Wish I was anyplace I could call home,” Johnson said.
“Wherever it is, I’ll think more of it the next time I get there,” I said.
“Yeah.” He looked away. “What you think about them protesters?”
I was surprised at the question. I looked up and saw that he was leaning back against the sandbags. I could just see his silhouette, helmet pushed back, rifle across his lap.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You think much about why you were going to fight before you came in?” “Unh-uh. You?”
“No, but I’m thinking a lot about it now.”
“’Cause they shooting at your ass?”
“Sounds like a good enough reason to be thinking about it,” I said.
“You trying to figure out who the good guys, huh?” Johnson spoke slowly. “So what you come up with?” “I guess somebody back home knows what they’re doing,” I said. “What it means and everything. You talk about Communists — stuff like that — and it doesn’t mean much when you’re in school. Then when you get over here the only thing they’re talking about is keeping your ass in one piece.”