“They messed up at least one person from each hut,” Peewee said.
“They cut a baby’s head off.” Monaco spoke slowly. His face was dark, his mouth quivered between words. “How the hell do you kill a friggin’ baby?”
“Like the major say,” Peewee said. “They showin’ the people we can’t protect them so they might as well be on charlie’s side. You know what this is like?”
“Like a trip to friggin’ hell,” Monaco said.
“No, man, this is like the projects in Chicago,” Peewee said. “The police can’t protect your ass from the muggers and shit, and the muggers don’t protect your ass from the police.”
“This ain’t like Chicago,” Monaco said. “They don’t kill babies in no Chicago.”
Stewart told us to go to each hut and pick out the wounded who looked most like they were going to live and get them ready for evacuation.
“If you see anybody who looks like a VC make a note of it,” he said.
Body counts. I looked over at Simpson, but he was looking away.
I thought I remembered where An Linh lived and I went to look for her. I found her and an old woman who looked like she could have been her greatgrandmother. They looked okay. When An Linh saw me, she started crying and tried to get behind the old woman. Okay, I could dig where she was coming from.
I looked around for An Linh’s mother. I didn’t see her. I tried once or twice to ask the old woman, but I couldn’t get through to her. She was squatting against the wall, one thin brown arm raised, the hand over her forehead. She looked as if she might have been still in shock.
I was glad to see that An Linh was all right. It was what it was getting to be: hoping that what you liked, what you had seen before, remained whole.
I didn’t have anything to give to An Linh, so I gave her a dollar. I knew there wasn’t much she could do with it in the boonies, but I gave it to her anyway. As I left she followed me with her eyes, and I wondered what she saw.
The next hut looked empty. There were two bowls on the table. One still had some kind of food — it looked like a thick soup — in it. The VC must have caught them by surprise, in the middle of a meal, maybe saying grace.
There were pictures on a small wicker chest. I went to see them. A thin Vietnamese man in shirtsleeves stood squinting at the camera. On one side of him was a woman and on the other side a bicycle. He had both of his hands on the bicycle.
A click! Another!
I turned to look at the muzzle of a gun.
Click! Click!
I couldn’t move. It was like a dream. I was watching it, but I couldn’t move. It was a dream of my death. A gun was pointed at my chest. A small brown man was pumping the bolt frantically to get it to work.
Click! Click! Click!
He came at me and swung the butt of the rifle toward my head. I blocked it with my arm and backed away. He swung again and hit my shoulder, the rifle glancing up from my shoulder into the side of my face. I pulled the trigger of my rifle without lifting it. He went down on one knee. Then it was as if I were suddenly awake. I lifted the M-16 and started firing it in his face. I emptied the clip. I snatched another one from my belt, slammed it in, and fired that point-blank.
“Don’t move!” I screamed at him. “Don’t move!”
“Perry! Back away!”
Sergeant Simpson’s voice snapped at me from the doorway.
“Back away, man!”
I backed away, keeping my rifle pointed at the VC. Sergeant Simpson went over to him. Then he lowered his rifle.
“He ain’t in this war no more,” he said.
By that time a couple of other guys had shown up. I thought my hands were bleeding, but I went to check out the VC before I put my piece down.
There was no face. Just an angry mass of red flesh where the face had been. Part of an eyeball dangled from one side of the head. At the top there were masses of different-colored flesh. The white parts were the worst. There was a tooth, a bit of skull. I turned away. I vomited.
My hands weren’t bleeding. It was that much sweat, pouring down my arms and forearms and from my palms. I heard Sergeant Simpson tell Peewee to stay with me. Peewee put his arm around my waist and told me to come on. We left the hut and went to the next one. “They got some tea on the stove in there,” Peewee said.
I went in with Peewee, then pulled myself together. I didn’t want the tea. Maybe I was afraid of it. Peewee said that we should go outside and sit down. I said okay.
We had just left the hut when Peewee stopped and turned around.
“Wait a minute,” he said. His voice was lower than usual, almost a rumble from his throat. He started back toward the hut.
I went after him. We walked into the hut, and he went over toward the corner. There was a rattan throw mat on the floor. One comer of it was around a bamboo pole that was about six feet high. Peewee aimed at the mat and fired twice.
“I just thought that could have been a breathing tube or somethin’,” Peewee said.
I tried to move the mat with my foot. It didn’t move. I looked around until I saw a piece of string. I tied it to the mat and went across the room.
“I’ll jerk the string,” I said. “You cover it.”
I jerked it and the mat came up. Even from where we stood, we could see the body. He wasn’t dead. Captain Stewart came in and asked w’hat was going on. Peewee pointed toward the wounded Cong. Captain Stewart finished him off.
The company surrounded the hamlet. Captain Stewart called in evacuation helicopters. We loaded up the villagers who were still there. He didn’t know how many more Congs were hiding in the huts, half buried under furniture or mats, but he wasn’t going to risk any of us to find out. We moved the rest of the people out to the landing zone and burned the whole place down.
Two VC came out from one hut that we were burning. They had their hands up. A woman from the village went over and stabbed one in the side. He tried to get her knife away from her, and two guys lit him up. His body jerked around like a rag puppet being dragged by a dog.
I had killed a man. I thought about how he looked, how I had felt. I remembered looking down at him, the M-16 in my hands, my forearms aching from the tension of holding it. I remembered looking downi at him and feeling my own face tom apart.
I thought of the other one, too. It was a nightmare. A nightmare of me crouching somewhere listening to the enemy above. Maybe they wouldn’t see me, just take a shot to see if I was there.
The wounded were taken out first. Our squad was on perimeter patrol while others lifted the litters onto the choppers. The throaty sound of the mortars could still be heard, and the incoming fire was getting closer. They were calling in artillery to shut down the incoming mortars even though it was estimated that the mortars were almost on top of us.
The first choppers lifted off and the others started coming in. I couldn’t believe they would come in with all the heat in the area, but they came. Great insects, angry and buzzing over the steaming jungle, ignoring the fact that every hostile in the area was trying to bring them down. Any direct hit would bring death to the entire crew, and they all had to know it, and still they came.
I looked over my shoulder at the choppers as they landed, blowing away the loose grass and debris on the ground. A glassine bandage wrapping danced across the area between the huts, flattened itself momentarily against the small, still body of a dead NVA soldier, and then flew off into the jungle.
The chopper crews. They were the stuff of heroes. Swooping from the skies like great heavenly birds gathering the angels who had fallen below.
When we got back to the compound, Peewee couldn’t walk. He jumped from the chopper and his legs gave way under him. Johnson had to carry him to the hooch. They got him back to our hut, and Gearhart got a medic over.