“No, I can just…” Jenkins’ voice trailed off.
“Do it again!” Peewee nudged Jenkins’ foot.
Jenkins did it again, and Peewee cracked up again. I thought Jenkins was going to be fun after all.
Peewee pulled the net over the back end of the truck and tied it down. Then we started off. The back of the truck was like an oven. We started off reasonably slowly, and I got my first glimpse of the base. It looked okay. The movement cooled the truck off a little, and I thought the ride wouldn’t be bad. Then we went through the gate and an outer checkpoint, and the driver picked up speed. We were bounced around the back of the truck like crazy. I had to hold onto the sides and keep standing. Sitting in the bouncing truck was impossible.
We arrived at headquarters company a half hour or so after we left the main base at Chu Lai. The captain who greeted us was wearing a flak jacket, the heavy vest that was supposed to stop bullets and shrapnel. There were big rings of sweat under his arms and a pool of sweat in the hollow of his neck.
He glanced at each of us and checked our names off on his copy of our orders.
The GIs I saw at Chu Lai looked sharp enough to be in a parade; these guys looked as if they had just come in from a hard day’s work, a damn hard day’s work. Most of the guys who had come with us from Chu Lai were assigned to one of the row of hooches behind us. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins were told we would be going out to Alpha Company.
A chopper was supposed to take us and one other guy out to the company. In the meantime we had to load a pump onto the truck we came on. The pump wasn’t crated, and it was hard to get a grip on it. Peewee and Jenkins were on one side of it, and I was on the other, but we couldn’t get it up on the truck. Then an officer sent another guy over. His name tag read Johnson. He was black and as tall as I was, but bigger.
“We re supposed to — ” Peewee was pointing to the pump when Johnson reached down and grabbed it. He grunted, rocked backward, and brought the pump to his knees. He grunted again, lifted the pump onto the back of the truck, turned slowly, and walked away.
“Amen!” Peewee called out behind him. “Amen!”
“Sir?”
“What is it?”
“Did you notice that I had a medical profile?”
The captain looked at his clipboard, looked up at me, and then back down to the clipboard.
“I don’t see anything about a profile here,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Perry, sir.”
“You got a lot of pain?”
“No, but every once in a while the knee sort of gives way,” I said. “That’s why they gave me the profile.”
“You get to your company commander, mention your profile to him.”
“The officer at the replacement company said…”
He was already walking away, and I had the feeling that he wasn’t particularly interested in my profile.
We were told by a corporal that Alpha Company was “In the Deep.”
“In the Deep what?” Peewee asked.
“In the Deep Boonies,” was the answer.
We were supposed to get to the “Deep Boonies” by chopper. We waited for three hours for one to come and get us, but none came. We found a mess hall and ate. Jenkins didn’t feel like eating. I could tell he was still scared out of his mind.
“What were you trained for?” I asked him.
“My MOS is infantry.”
“You went to advanced training for infantry?” Peewee looked up at Jenkins.
“Yeah.”
“You look like a clerk-typist or something like that,” Peewee said.
“My father’s a colonel,” Jenkins said. “He wanted me to be infantry. He’s got this thing, he calls it his game plan. First I volunteer for the army, then I volunteer for infantry and take advanced individual training in infantry. I serve my time over here, then I go to Officers Candidate School.”
There were Vietnamese people working behind the counter. They looked peaceful enough, and so small. I was six-three, and many of them seemed a good foot shorter than I was.
Johnson, the guy who had lifted the pump onto the truck, turned out to be going to Alpha Company with us. He brought his gear over and sat with us. “Where you from?” Peewee asked Johnson. “Savannah.”
“Savannah, Georgia?”
“You ever been there?”
“No, and I don’t want to go to there, either.” “How you know what it like if you ain’t never been there?” Johnson was eating his second dish of ice cream. He was about as black as a human being could get and as thick as he was wide. Even the whites of his eyes were dark. When he wasn’t talking or chewing, his mouth sort of hung open. It hung open as he stared across the table at Peewee.
“I ain’t never been to hell,” Peewee said. “But I heard enough about it not to want to go there for no damn vacation.”
“Where you from?” Johnson was pissed at Peewee for dumping on Georgia.
“Chicago.”
“Chicago ain’t nothing.”
“Neither is your daddy,” Peewee said.
Peewee didn’t raise his voice when he said it, and he didn’t smile. What he was saying was that he didn’t care how big Johnson was. I glanced over at
Jenkins, who was looking down into his food.
“You kinda little to be talking about somebody’s daddy.” Johnson pushed the words out through thick lips.
“No shit?”
“You guys think we should stay in here or get back outside in case they come looking for us?” I asked, hoping to cut off a confrontation.
They both looked at me like I had said something wrong. I was in the wrong war.
We finished eating and went back out to the pickup zone where the chopper was supposed to be. We asked around to see if anybody had been looking for us.
“You guys waiting for a lift to Alpha Company?” A short guy wearing what I thought was a flight suit came over to us.
“Yeah,” Johnson said.
“I’m looking around for some smokes,” the short guy said. “You guys wait here.”
He started off toward some low Quonset huts off to the left. It was getting cooler, but the humidity was so high I was dripping wet. We found some shade, dropped our gear, and Johnson and Peewee went off looking for a latrine. Jenkins sat on the ground with his head in his hands, and I asked him how he was doing.
“I think I’m going to die over here,” he said.
“You’re not going to die,” I said. “Most guys over here won’t ever fire their rifles. I mean, they won’t ever really shoot at anybody.”
“Who told you that?”
“A major I had at Devens,” I said.
“He probably wasn’t ever over here,” Jenkins said.
“Hey, it won’t be that bad, man.”
“Thanks.” He looked up at me and forced a smile. Jenkins acted as if he didn’t want to talk anymore and so I didn’t talk, either. Peewee came back from the latrine.
“Where’s Johnson?”
“That country fool?” Peewee sat on the ground between me and Jenkins. “He in there, sitting on the john, trying to figure out how to shit.”
“You better leave that guy alone.”
“He better leave Peewee alone,” was the answer.
The chopper pilot got back an hour after sunset and said we’d have to wait until morning. You could smell the booze from three feet away. He was so high he couldn’t stand straight. I figured the guy must have been a career guy. A lot of the career guys drank heavily. It took us two more hours to find a place to bunk for the night.
In the middle of the night I woke. I thought I was hearing thunder. Then I realized that it was artillery. I went outside and looked around. In the distance someone was shooting off flares. In a way it was beautiful, like brilliant white and red flowers against the dark sky. They left behind puffs of colored smoke that drifted away like tiny fain-clouds.