“Connecticut.”
“That’s very nice up there in Connecticut,” he said. “Whereabouts exactly?”
“Talmadge.”
“I don’t believe I know it. That anywhere near New Haven?”
“About halfway between New Haven and New York.”
“I’m from Newark,” he said. “New Jersey.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I got people in New Haven. Relatives.”
“I went to school there,” I said.
“Yeah? What school?”
“Yale.”
“Oh, yeah? The college there?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened? You flunk out?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“I quit.”
“How come?”
“Just like that,” I said, and shrugged.
“Didn’t you like it?”
“I liked it fine.”
“Then why’d you quit?”
“It was a personal matter.”
“You knock up a girl or something?”
“No,” I said, and suddenly burst out laughing.
“If you did, who cares? This is Vietnam, we’re lucky we get out of here without having our asses cracked,” he said and, pleased by my spontaneous laughter, began laughing with me.
The red silk pajamas came as a surprise that night to everyone in the hootch. But it was Jimmy Wyatt, a black kid from Philadelphia, who started giggling when he saw them. Depending on what season it was, we slept either in our underwear or all our clothes, not because civilian pajamas were outlawed (they weren’t), and not because we were worried about additional laundry charges (most of us sent our laundry out to be done, the way American sailors on Chinese gunboats did in the early 1900s, preferring the native work to the slob jobs done by the PX or QM concessions), and not because we thought it might be necessary to pull on our pants in a hurry (we were all fairly confident that Charlie would never get through the perimeter), but merely because you didn’t wear pajamas in the goddamn Army. I had never seen a soldier wearing pajamas, not at Fort Gordon where I’d taken my Basic, and not at Fort Jackson where I’d had my AIT, and certainly not here in Vietnam. But Rudy Webb readied into his duffle that first night, and pulled out a pair of blazing red silk pajamas we later learned he had bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a big yellow dragon embroidered on the back, and without a sign of embarrassment or a word of introduction, put them on and then picked up his toilet kit and started heading out of the hootch toward the latrine. Jimmy Wyatt, who was tall and skinny and who had played center for his high school’s basketball team, was stretched out on his cot reading a comic. It got very cold at night in September, even when it wasn’t raining, and so Jimmy was fully dressed except for his boots, and he had wrapped his legs in a blanket besides, and he seemed very cozy and happy and thoroughly engrossed in his reading. His short-timer’s calendar hung on the wall behind him, the gatefold from last month’s Playboy, over which he had drawn a grid of tiny squares covering the girl’s body and representing the number of days to the end of his tour. Each time we got back from the boonies, Jimmy filled in more of the squares with his pencil. He had forty-two days to go, and the only open squares were on the girl’s huge breasts and belly. He turned a page in the comic as Rudy walked past, and I suppose the dazzling display of red silk caught his eye because he looked up and suddenly began giggling. Rudy stopped dead in his tracks, as though he had been anticipating some comment on his sleeping attire, and was now more than ready to deal with it. There was a smile on his face as he turned to Jimmy. I was writing a letter to Dana at the other end of the hootch, and when I looked up the first thing I saw was Rudy’s smile, and I remember thinking what an odd smile it was, and then he said, “What’s the matter, pal?”
“Man, those are some classy pajamas,” Jimmy said, giggling in his very high, almost girlish way.
“You like them, huh?” Rudy said, still smiling.
“Oh, yeah, man, I really dig them,” Jimmy said.
“Then what’s so funny?” Rudy asked, and the smile dropped from his face.
Still giggling, Jimmy said, “Nothing.”
“Then what the hell are you laughing like an idiot for?” Rudy said.
“Who’s laughing like an idiot?” Jimmy asked, and since he was no longer giggling, there was a certain comic validity to the question. In fact, I expected the whole thing to fizzle right then and there, expected it to pass into company lore, Remember the night ole Rudy Webb put on them red p.j.’s and skinny Jimmy Wyatt start laughing like a fool, and then they both rolling on the floor in tears, oh, man, we sure had some high old times in Vietnam, d’in we? Lloyd Parsons, who was sitting on his cot just opposite me, glanced up, and with a note of authority befitting the highest-ranking man in the hootch, said, “Hey, you guys, knock off the shit,” and that certainly should have been the end of it.
But without glancing at Lloyd, his eyes on Jimmy who was still stretched out on his bunk tensed now for a move, anticipating trouble, Rudy said, “Maybe he’d like to tell me what’s so fucking funny about my pajamas.”
“Hey, man, bug off,” Jimmy said, “you and your pajamas both. You was going out to brush your teeth, so why don’t you go brush them, huh?” He picked up his comic, searching for his lost place, and Rudy took one quick step toward him and slapped it out of his hands. It fell to the floor with a tiny flutter that crashed through the hootch like a mortar explosion. Jimmy lay still and silent for a moment. His hands were empty, but he deliberately held them frozen where they’d been when he was holding the comic. Slowly, deliberately, like a challenged gunslick, he raised his eyes to Rudy’s face, and then opened the blanket, swung his long legs over the side of the cot and stood up.
Rudy was waiting.
With the toilet kit still clutched in his left hand, he threw his right fist full into Jimmy’s face, sending him falling back onto the cot, and almost collapsing it. Dropping the kit and rushing up tight to the side of the cot, fists clenched, he waited for Jimmy to get to his feet again, but Jimmy was too smart to stand up into another punch. He swung out on the opposite side of the cot instead, giving himself the full clearance of the hootch aisle, and then backed cautiously toward the door to move outside, where he would have plenty of room to maneuver and where his longer reach might easily give him the edge in a jabbing fight. Rudy bounded out of the hootch, yelling something about the pajamas having cost him thirty-five dollars, and Lloyd and I both ran out after him, anxious to put an end to this thing; we had never had a fight in our hootch before, and we did not want one now. The two men were warily circling each other when we reached them. Lloyd stepped close to them and said, almost in a whisper, “Come on, you guys, save that for Charlie.”
“This is Charlie,” Jimmy answered.
They were referring, of course, to the Vietcong, the V.C., Victor Charlie in the Army’s phonetic alphabet, shortened by the fighting men of America, ta-ra, to plain old Charlie, the enemy out there in the boondocks. Or at least I was certain that Lloyd was referring to the men in the black pajamas, but I wasn’t too sure that Jimmy’s man in the red pajamas wasn’t quite another Charlie, a different Charlie, the Charlie who was the enemy back home in the really distant boonies of America, Charlie nonetheless, Mister Charlie the white man. For a startling moment, I wondered if the double meaning had been intended. We had never had any racial bullshit in our hootch, but news from home traveled very fast these days, and the race riots this month in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, Mississippi, and Christ knew where else had caused at least some consternation among the black troops. So maybe this was it, maybe Jimmy Wyatt had suddenly stopped worrying about the big Yellow-Red color war we were fighting out there in the boonies and was insisting instead on making his war very real and personal — stating it plainly in black and white, so to speak.