We didn’t talk about the wounded man or about Turner, who had died. I think we were glad that we hadn’t known him better. Maybe, even, that if somebody had to die from the squad, it was better that it was a new guy. It was always better that it was someone else.
“Hey, everybody listen to this!” Monaco was in his shorts, sitting on his bed with the letter in his lap. “‘Dear Sonny, I have been thinking more and more about you every day-I know that you are a long way away, and have a lot on your mind and everything. But, Sonny, I wanted to ask you this. Will you marry me when you get home? Please think about it a lot, as I think you and I would make a nice couple. I got the idea while I was down at the mall on Route 440 yesterday. If you don’t think you want to marry me, please don’t put it in a letter. Just don’t say anything and I will know. Yours, Julie.’”
“She pregnant?” Peewee asked.
“No, she just loves me, man,” Monaco said. “This chick has been in love with me since before I even knew what love was.”
“You going to marry her?” Walowick asked.
“I don’t know, what do you guys think?”
“What she look like?” Peewee asked.
“She’s five-two, maybe five-three,” Monaco said. “Kind of fine, but she ain’t really the foxy type, you know what I mean? She’s an athlete, too. She played softball for St. Dominick’s in Jersey City.”
“We got to vote on it,” Johnson said. “I vote against it.”
“Why?” Monaco looked over at where Johnson was cleaning his machine gun.
“She a nice girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why she want to marry you?” Johnson ran the swab through the barrel of his piece. “You ain’t even got no job.”
“I’ll get a job when I get home,” Monaco said. “You see these hands? These hands can do anything in the damn world. I can make stuff, I can fix stuff,
I can do anything. Maybe I’ll even be a cop or a fireman, something like that.”
“What she do?” Johnson asked.
“She got a good job,” Monaco said. “She works for Western Electric.”
“I vote for the marriage,” Peewee said.
“Marry her,” Brunner said.
“Monaco, do you love this girl?” Brew said.
“Yeah,” Monaco said. “I love the shit out of her.”
“You go to the same church?”
“Yeah.”
“Then Reverend Brew pronounces y’all man and wife,” Peewee said.
“I think you should marry her.” Brew spoke for himself, but he looked like he didn’t mind Peewee calling him Reverend Brew.
The final vote was five to two in favor of Monaco marrying the girl. Walowick didn’t think we should vote at all, that it was a sacred decision. Johnson thought that Monaco should get a job first before he made plans to marry her, and Lobel said that he should wait until he got back to the World before he made a decision.
“You got to see her again,” Lobel said. “I can’t even think of seeing my father again and being the same guy I was when I left home. And if I’m not the same guy, he’s not the same, either.”
“He got to marry her,” Peewee said. “We done voted on it now.”
“Okay, you guys are all invited to the wedding. I’ll plan it so that the wedding will be after the last guy in the squad leaves Nam.” “How about me?” Johnson asked. “You inviting me, too?”
“Yeah, all of us.”
We started talking about weddings. Walowick said he hated weddings and funerals because all of his relatives got together and fought.
“First they dance and hug for about a half an hour,” Walowick said. “Then they drink for two hours, then they fight.”
“That’s cause they white,” Peewee said. “If they was black they could slip in some signifying along with the laughing and dancing and then skip right to the fighting before the drinking even started.”
Jamal came over from HQ and said that Captain Stewart wanted to see me.
“About my profile?”
“What profile?”
“I’m not supposed to wear boots,” I said.
“I don’t know nothing about no profile,” Jamal said. “I think it’s about Gearhart.”
I went over to HQ hut, and Captain Stewart was watching Phil Silvers on television.
“You want to tell me what happened last night?” he asked.
“About what?”
“Your patrol lost two men.” He was drinking from a cup. I was about four feet away, but I could still smell it was booze. “One killed, one wounded.” “We were waiting for the chopper and — ” “Medevac? You waiting for a medevac?”
“No, sir, we hadn’t been hit yet,” I said. “We were hoping to get away without being hit.”
“Lieutenant Gearhart mess up?”
“He shot off a flare, we got exposed,” I said. “But I think they knew we were there.”
“You’re a good man, Perry,” he said. “Why don’t you see what you can do with this letter. Give it back to me before it’s sent.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me ask you something else, too. How many of the enemy do you think were there?”
“Seemed like the place was crawling with them, sir.”
“And you guys laid down a pretty good line of fire?”
“Best we could.”
“How many you think we got?” he asked. “I know you can’t be sure, just give me a number.”
I didn’t know what to say. A picture of the paddies came into my mind.
“Twenty? Thirty?”
“Maybe not that many, sir?”
“Maybe, but it could have been.”
“It could have been, sir.”
“Good enough,” Captain Stewart nodded. “See what you can do with that letter.”
I read the letter. It was Lieutenant Gearhart to Turner’s folks. It said that it was his fault that their son was dead, and he was sorry. There was a lot of pain in the letter. It said that Turner was hit in the back after our position had been exposed to the enemy.
I rewrote the letter. I said that Turner was fighting off the enemy, trying to let the rest of us escape, when he was killed. Gearhart was in the mess hall, slumped over a cup of coffee when I found him and showed him the letter. He read it slowly, and shook his head.
“Captain Stewart told me to write it,” I said.
“If I hadn’t set off that damned flare…” His voice trailed off.
“He still might have got it,” I said. “You can’t tell.”
“You know, I never thought much about black people before I got into the army. I don’t think I was prejudiced or anything — I just didn’t think much about black people.”
“Well, we’re here,” I said.
“I think I should let his parents know what happened,” Gearhart said. “I don’t want to be let off the hook.”
“The letter I wrote,” I said, “is going to sit better with his family. You might feel bad, like you need to get something off your chest, but don’t drop it on his folks. It’s going to be hard enough just having him dead.”
He looked at me, then pushed the letter across the table. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
I wanted to be pissed at him. I wanted to think that he was crap because of what he said about black people. But the only thing I could think about was that I was glad it was Turner, and not me. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel, or what I thought I was supposed to feel.
Jamal came by and showed me the body-count figures. Stewart had listed twenty-eight of the enemy as killed.
We got the word that the first hamlet we had worked on the pacification patrol was being harassed by the VC. A Major Leff was giving us the rundown about what was going on. He seemed to know what he was talking about.