“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.”
“That might be a good reason to be over here,” I said.
“That’s for people like you to mess with,” Johnson said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“Then why you messin’ with it?”
When I turned in, Peewee was still up. He told me he had an idea. He was going to spray the netting with this new repellent we got. I got into my bunk and pulled the mosquito netting around it and then Peewee sprayed the netting, which was supposed to be his good idea.
“Yo, Peewee, I can’t breathe in here,” I said.
“I wondered if that was going to be a problem,” Peewee said.
I fell asleep thinking about what Johnson had said. Maybe the time had passed when anybody could be a good guy.
Chapter 13
December 22, 1967. Three days before Christmas and only ten days left in the whole year. Me and Peewee spent all day talking about whether we should try to have sex with a Vietnamese girl before we got back to the States. He figured it might be our only chance to have sex with a foreign woman. “Suppose we catch something?” I said.
“That’s what combat is all about,” he said, looking in the mirror he had nailed on a pole at the end of his bunk. “Taking chances.”
“How about Walowick?” I asked.
“He didn’t mess with no women,” Peewee said. “He just got the Nam Rot.”
That was true. Walowick had been sent to the 312th to get his rash treated. Sergeant Simpson said that it usually took a week to clear up a real mean rash. By that time, according to the word going around, the war was going to be over.
Captain Stewart said that the war wasn’t over yet, and for us not to get too relaxed.
“We can spend the last weeks of the war kicking a little ass and letting them know who the hell we were,” he said.
The way the story was going around was that the Vietnamese had agreed to a truce for their New Year’s celebration, which they called Tet. Then the truce would be just extended while the talks went on, and we would all go home. Captain Stewart seemed disappointed.
I wrote Mama telling her that I expected to be home around January or February. I didn’t believe all the stories, but I did believe Jamal. Jamal said that all of the South Vietnamese officers were going home for the holidays.
“And they should know,” he said, looking like a serious bullfrog.
Then some other stuff started coming down the line. There was a lot of Cong activity and the special forces guys in Cambodia were spotting convoys.
“Them Greenies just don’t want to have a truce,” Sergeant Simpson said, “if they ain’t got them a good war, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”
Back home the World seemed to be splitting up between people who wanted to make love and people who wanted to tear the cities down. A lot of it was blacks against whites, and we didn’t talk about that too much, but we felt it.
Over the summer a kid in Harlem had been killed by a white police sergeant and there had been some riots. I told Mama in a letter to tell Kenny to be careful. Sometimes he had a fresh mouth, and I didn’t want him hurt.
Kenny was all Mama had left. She had me, in a way, but not in any real way. Kenny loved her straight up and down. He didn’t see any faults in her. I loved her, too, but not like Kenny. When you’re young, the way Kenny was, you didn’t ask much of people.
Christmas. Depression. We had roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, carrot cake, and candy canes.
They were supposed to send in a movie called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with Sidney Poi-tier. But when they opened the cans they found the movie with Julie Andrews that we had already seen.
“That other movie don’t sound like much anyway,” Monaco said. “Some black dude coming to dinner.”
“Maybe they were going to have fried chicken, and they were afraid he was going to eat too much,” Brunner said.
“Maybe they thought your mama was going to eat too much, too,” Peewee said.
That ended that conversation.
Word came in that the marines were catching hell all over the place. Some old-timers said that a piss load of marines were trapped up in the hills of Khe Sanh. The fighting was picking up. Captain Stewart was still saying that the VC were trying to get into place in time for the Tet holiday.
“The only trouble is” — Lieutenant Gearhart sat on an ammo box with his feet up on Brunner’s bed — “what they’re seeing most of is the NVA, not the VC.”
“The NVA ain’t nothing but the VC with their pajamas off,” Peewee said.
“Bullshit.” Gearhart turned and looked toward Peewee with his eyes half closed, as if he were asleep. “The NVA get up to a year of training before they even get to the south. The VC are guerrillas. The NVA is their regular army.”
“Don’t mean shit to me,” Peewee said.
“We’re talking about regiment-sized units,” Gearhart went on. “They’ve finally figured out they can’t whip us with this little guerrilla action.”
“Hey, man,” Monaco sat up. “They can’t whip us with nothing they got!”
I looked up to see if Monaco was kidding. He wasn’t. But he talked about it like it was a volleyball game or something.
The sounds of fighting, the far-off booming of the artillery, the hollow, bass-drum sound of explosions echoing off the mountains became a constant thing. Before, it had been an occasional crackle of gunfire, the steady rhythms of. 50-caliber machine guns with the .60 s answering in short riffs. Sometimes, just after the gut-shaking boom of a jet, you could see the bombs arc down and, if the wind was just right, the sound would be somewhere in between thunder and a cymbal clash. Peewee said that it sounded like a South Side jazz club when the brothers were right. A death blues for Mr. Cong.
The noises had always scared me. I had gone through basic training just fine until the end when we had to go under live fire. The noises shook you, made you want to stop and hide.
Now it was different. Now the sound swelled in my consciousness like a dull headache. It kept coming and coming, day and night. Sometimes I felt as if the sounds were inside me somehow. And there were times, I never wanted to mention them to anyone else, that I heard the sounds at night when it was very quiet, and no one else heard them.
I was ready for the truce.
Stars and Stripes talked about peace feelers in Paris. Where I was, it was raining. It rained almost every day. The ruts filled with water. There wasn’t any place to dry out.
We waited and listened to the stories coming in. They weren’t good. When the Tet started, we were put on alert. We kept hearing about truce violations. They kept talking about the body counts we picked up, but the ones they gave at the end of the reports, our own KIAs, Killed in Action, were climbing, too.
All of First Corps went on alert as we found out that all the major cities were being hit. All the way from Saigon north to the DMZ.
Interdiction patrol. That’s what they called it, but it sounded like a plain ambush to us. We were being separated from the rest of the outfit, which was supposed to be operating further north above Phuoc Ha. Meanwhile our squad was supposed to stop nighttime traffic between two hamlets.
“Titi contact,” Gearhart said, using the Vietnamese phrase for little. “All light stuff.”
Sergeant Simpson said that, because of Gearhart’s training, they were using our squad on long-range reconnaissance. We were packing up to go, when