“How many you kill so far?”
“A hundred and thirty-two,” Peewee said. “I weigh a hundred and forty. Whatever you weigh, that’s how many you got to kill to leave early.”
“I never heard of that,” Jenkins said.
“That ain’t for regular rotation,” Peewee went on. “That’s just so you can leave early.”
“Oh.” Jenkins took it all in.
“Air force guys can get their quota in one or two days,” Peewee said.
“What did you do, machine gun most of them?” Jenkins’ eyes were wide.
“No, man,” Peewee shook his head. “They issue you so many bullets per week, see? But each one you turn back in you get a quarter for. So mostly I sneak up on the suckers and cut their throats. That way I save my bullets. Way I figure, by the time I get back to the World I have me enough to buy a little Chevy.”
“None of that is true,” Jenkins said. He was pissed at Peewee for pulling his leg.
The sergeant came in and picked three guys for guard duty. The ranger volunteered again, and they got Jenkins and one other guy. Jenkins was shaking when he left the hooch.
“Don’t forget to save your bullets!” Peewee called out to him.
That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn’t bite Asians.
We finally got the orientation lecture. This young-looking lieutenant showed us a slide of a map of Nam. Then he showed us where we were.
“You are not in Disneyland,” he said. “The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.
“Take your pills. Once a week for malaria, twice a week if you’re too stupid to remember the day you last took them.
“Stay away from the women. They got venereal diseases over here that eat penicillin for breakfast. Three quarters of the women over here have it.
“They got crabs over here that line up every morning to get a shot of DDT. It wakes them up, gets their day started right.
“Stay away from the black market. Anything you buy that’s worth a damn will be taken away from you, or you’ll lose it.
“Stay away from dope. There’s only two kinds of people in Nam. People who are alert twenty-four hours a day, and people who are dead.
“If you see anything else they got over here that we don’t have at home, stay away from it. What these people use on a daily basis will kill you as fast as an RPG.”
“What’s an RPG?” a guy in the front asked. “That’s a rocket-propelled grenade. Stay away from them, too. If you have any more questions, ask your unit commanders when you reach them. Good luck.” When we got outside, the mosquitoes got us. The lieutenant hadn’t even mentioned them, but we had been given a supply of insect repellent.
Orders. Me, Peewee, Jenkins, and another guy were assigned to the 196th. We were going to Chu Lai. I remembered that was where Judy Duncan was assigned.
“What’s that like?” Jenkins asked the sergeant in headquarters.
“That’s First Corps,” the sergeant said. “All you do up there is look around for charlie, and when you see him you call the marines. Light stuff.”
“Charlie?” Jenkins looked toward me and Peewee.
“Charlie is the bad guy over here.” The sergeant put his arm around Jenkins’ shoulders. He was obviously enjoying himself.
“Sometimes we call him charlie, sometimes we call him Victor Charlie, sometimes we call him Vietcong. That is, unless he sends us his business card with his full name and address on it.”
We packed our gear and lined up outside, waiting for the truck to the airport. We were going to Chu Lai in a C-47. I thought guys from other hooches were going, but there were only the four of us.
“I bet I kill me a Cong before you get one,” Peewee said.
“You can have them all,” I said.
“You scared?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You ain’t scared?”
“No, man, I’m just surprised,” Peewee said. “I didn’t think they was going to have no real fighting in this here war.”
“How come?”
“I tell you how I got in this mess?”
“Unh-uh.”
“Me and this dude I used to hang with sometimes was out in front of the projects where I lived, and he said to me he was gonna join the army. So he said to come on down to the recruiting office with him.” Peewee was sitting on his gear, picking out his hair. “So we go on down, and the recruiting sergeant ask him if he ever got into any trouble. Stick, that was this guy’s name, said yeah. He already done shot him four or five people.
“The recruiting sergeant said he can’t get in no army ’cause they don’t be taking no rowdy dudes like him. I figure if they don’t take no rowdy dudes, the army had to be pretty cool. If they really meant to be doing a whole lot of killing and carrying on, they should go get them suckers from the projects, ’cause that’s all they like to do, anyway.”
“So you joined up?”
“Yeah,” Peewee said. “But I think I got tricked.”
Peewee looked out over the trucks, which were mostly packed with crates of rations and supplies. The land beyond them was flat as far as we could see in one direction. In the other direction, where we thought the action would be, there were mountains shrouded in haze.
“Hey, at least I ain’t rowdy,” I said.
Peewee looked at me and smiled. “Yo, you remember that brother wanted to mingle our blood and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we could do that stuff with some spit or something,” Peewee said.
He spit on his hand and held it up. I spit on mine and we exchanged fives. It felt good.
Peewee didn’t say much after that and neither did I. I was scared. My mouth was going dry, and I could see that Peewee was scared, too. Jenkins was crying. It made me feel a little better to see him crying like that.
“Load ’em up!”
Me and Peewee got on the trucks between boxes of peanut butter, and started to the airport and to wherever the hell Chu Lai was.
Chapter 3
Most of the flight to Chu Lai was over water. A sergeant with us said that the plane swung out over the water to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Chu Lai was cooler than the area we had come from, but not much. It was still muggy. They had expected us earlier, and the lieutenant who directed us to the truck that would take us to our units seemed pissed.
“We can’t hold these trucks up any longer, so you guys are going to have to chow down at your units,” he said. “When I call your name, get right in the back of the first truck. Keep your hands and arms in the truck, and leave that netting up. You don’t want to be sitting in there when some slant throws a grenade in the back.”
The lieutenant was sharp, his brass belt buckle and insignia were shined, and his uniform was creased in all the right places. Chu Lai seemed less frantic than Tan Son Nhut.
I was looking around, trying to figure out what Chu Lai was like, when I heard my name.
“Any of you guys know this Perry?” the lieutenant was asking.
“I’m Perry,” I said.
“Well, wake the hell up, soldier!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, get on the damn truck!”
“Yes, sir.”
When I got in the back of the truck, Peewee was cracking up. I laughed with him. Jenkins started imitating the sergeant, and he had his voice down perfectly.
“Hey, are you an actor?” Peewee asked.