“Get the fuck away from me,” Peewee told the medic.
“Let him look at your legs, soldier.” Captain Stewart was in our hooch.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with my damn legs,” Peewee said. “All I need is a cigarette.”
Captain Stewart gave him a cigarette and he lit up.
The medic told Peewee again to relax while he took his pants off. Peewee took his own pants off. He was right, there wasn’t anything wrong with his legs.
I laughed and Peewee laughed and we were all laughing. Then Peewee started coughing from the cigarette, and the medic gave him some water.
Stewart left after saying something about how good we had done.
Gearhart came over and talked with us for a while. Just small talk. He was shaken from what we had been through. Nobody got used to it. Good.
Brew’s hand began to jerk and that scared him. We were all jumpy. It wasn’t that we were hurt. It was just that we couldn’t get down. We had been shooting and screaming and scared that somebody, that something, was going to kill us. We just couldn’t get down that easily. It didn’t stop when they blew the whistle. I didn’t know if it would ever stop.
After a while Johnson noticed that we were all whispering. He laughed a quiet little laugh, and we all laughed about that.
“How the hell do you smoke a cigarette with half of it in your mouth?” Gearhart asked Peewee.
“You know what this is?” Peewee asked. “This is the first cigarette I’ve ever smoked.”
Later we went to the recreation hooch and watched the news. It was all about President Johnson trying to get a bill passed to help the urban poor, and then something about the Pueblo, which had been taken over by the North Koreans. Then there was a big thing on the Super Bowl, and whether or not the Packers had a dynasty going. It wasn’t real that people were thinking about things like that when all this shit was going on. It just wasn’t real.
Sleeping didn’t come hard; it didn’t come at all. I was asleep, in a way, and yet I wasn’t.
“Peewee?”
“What?”
“How you doing?”
“Okay, how you doing?”
“Okay,” I said. “You know what happened today in the hut?”
“What?”
“That VC popped up from no damn where,” I said. “First thing I heard was him trying to blow me away. His weapon didn’t work. If it had, he would have got me, Peewee. He would have got me!”
I started crying, and Peewee got up and came to my bunk. He put his arms around me and held me until we both fell asleep.
We got word that we were moving again, some place near Tam Ky. The whole outfit was going, but Alpha was going first. Captain Stewart told us we were supposed to act as advisers to the ARVN troops. Nobody trusted him.
Lobel got a map and we figured out exactly where Tam Ky was and figured we didn’t want to be there. The marines were at Chu Lai, which was pretty safe. They were also up north fighting their rear ends off. Tam Ky was being hit a lot, and Lobel figured that if the VC wanted to hit someplace near there, the ARVN base would be easier than the marines.
“You got too big a base for them to hit at Chu Lai,” he said. “They’re already fighting like crazy up north, so they hit the ARVNs at Tam Ky. It figures.”
“Hey, Lobel?” Sergeant Simpson was packing up his gear and his personal supply of ammunition. He had all of these clips that he had checked round by round, and he was taking it all with him.
“You don’t agree?” Lobel asked.
“Why don’t you go back to your damn movies, because I only got eight days left and that’s too damn short to be listening to your war theories.”
Jamal came over to tell us that he was going to be with our squad from now on. He looked scared.
“You think you’re man enough to go out with us?” Brunner said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Jamal said. “But they’re sending me, anyway.”
Mail call.
Brunner got a letter from his wife in Seattle. She was a waitress in a coffee shop down near the waterfront, and the coffee urn blew up. It burned her arm and her right leg, but it wasn’t serious, she said. Brunner went out of his mind over it. He couldn’t understand how a damn coffee urn could blow up.
I got a letter from Mama. She told me that Peewee wrote her and he seemed like the nicest boy. She wrote that she was glad that he and I were friends. I hoped she would get to meet him one day. I thought they would have got along just fine.
The thing was, I needed the people in the World to be okay, and to be the same as when I left them. I was holding on, now, and I needed something to hold on to. I had come into the army at seventeen, and I remembered who I was, and who I was had been a kid. The war hadn’t meant anything to me then, maybe because I had never gone through anything like it before. All I had thought about combat was that I would never die, that our side would win, and that we would all go home somehow satisfied. And now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find something more than the kid I was. Maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and find the man I would be. I hoped I did it before I got killed.
The rain came down in buckets. We watched a newscast that said that a guy had got a heart transplant. They had actually taken the heart out of one guy who had been in an accident and put it in another guy, a dentist. Brunner and Walowick thought it was cool, but Peewee didn’t believe it, and Monaco wondered how the guy lived between the time they took his heart out and the time they put the other guv’s in.
“The whole thing is going to be in Life next week,” Brew7 said. “You wait and see.”
I dreamt about being in the hut, and hearing the VC trying to get his rifle to work. In the dream he smiled as he worked it and I stood there crying, knowing that eventually it would work and that he would kill me. He would blow my face away the way I had blown his away in real life. I kept waking up in a kind of terror and then falling to sleep again and having the same dream.
In the morning we were roused early for the trip. Peewee was messed up, really messed up.
“What the hell happened to you?” I asked. He looked like he had been in a fight and been beaten up bad. His whole face was puffed up badly. His upper lip was so swollen he could hardly get his mouth shut.
“Nothing,” he said.
Gearhart had heard about how Peewee looked, and he came over and asked what had happened. Peewee said nothing had happened, and turned away.
“Gates, can you make it to the new base?” Gearhart asked.
“Yuh,” Peewee said. He could hardly talk. He kept packing his gear.
“Look man, we got to know what happened.” Sergeant Simpson said. “We a squad, we ain’t no strangers.”
“You know that stuff I got from that woman?” Peewee said.
“What?”
“That hair stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“I put some on my lip to grow me a mustache,” he said. He put his head down. “Guess it don’t work too cool.”
Chapter 15
I started writing a letter to Kenny. At first I thought I wanted to tell him about the war, about how I felt about the fighting. Then I knew I wanted to tell him about my killing the Cong. I started the letter off really cool, hoping that he was okay and taking care of Mama, stuff like that. Then I told him I wanted to tell him about a typical day that I had here in the Nam. Then I changed it to special day instead of typical.
Then I tried to tell him about the killing.
I started off saying that war was about destroying the enemy. Then I remembered about the news guys asking us why we were fighting in Vietnam. It wasn’t the same. Saying that you were trying to stop Communism or stuff like that was different than shooting somebody. It was different than being scared and looking at somebody who was maybe as scared as you were.