“Get my neck!”
He threw his arm around my neck and I pulled him to his feet. We started off again.
It took another five minutes to find the pickup zone. When we got there, it was more trouble.
It was Monaco. He was sitting against a tree. He had his head in his hands. His piece was about ten meters in front of him. I wanted to go to him, but Peewee stopped me.
“He ain’t sitting there for nothing,” he said.
I looked around. Nothing. What the hell was wrong with this damn war? You never saw anything. There was never anything there until it was on top of your ass, and you were screaming and shooting and too scared to figure out anything.
Me and Peewee found some cover and watched Monaco,
“Maybe he’s dead,” I said.
“Could be.”
Monaco moved. He straightened his legs out and then brought them back up again.
Voices. We looked to see where they came from. There was a clump of bushes off to one side. It was just a little thicker than the rest, but I could still see one branch that was a little too straight. It was the barrel of a gun pointed at Monaco.
“They got him covered. He move and he dead. They waiting for a chopper to come in and get him,” Peewee said.
We looked around, trying to spot anything else we could find. There was another suspicious clump of bushes on the other side of the pickup zone.
“Let’s get the one on this side when the chopper come,” Peewee said.
“Right.”
He wanted to fight back. That was Peewee. He was hurt, maybe hurt bad, but he was still thinking about fighting back. Who the hell were these peo-pie? These soldiers? Was I really one of them? If I was, could I ever be anything else again?
Wait. Always. Wait. We waited. Across from us, no more than sixty to seventy meters, Monaco sat, looking at his hands. His helmet was pushed back on his head.
He was sitting in the shadow of death. We were all sitting in the shadow of death. I wondered what he was thinking about. Maybe he was thinking about his girl. I even hoped he was thinking about her.
We heard the chopper. It came in from behind us, like a great, angry hornet, swinging its tail. Me and Peewee opened up on the first clump of bushes.
We surprised them. It took them a while to return fire, but the chopper had them spotted. The moment the chopper opened up on the first machine gun, we started shooting at the second.
The chopper came down fast. We thought it had been hit. It landed and guys started piling out. Me and Peewee came out and started heading for the chopper. Monaco was up and had his piece.
He came running over to us and grabbed Peewee’s other side. We got to the chopper, the damn thing bounced up a foot and almost knocked Peewee’s head off. Me and Monaco grabbed his legs and threw him into the chopper. A crewman pulled him in. I thought about putting my piece on safety before crawling in.
Monaco was up and in and the other guys who had come in with the chopper were piling back in.
“Move your ass!”
I lost the little strength I had left. The wind from the chopper sent pieces of sand and dirt into my face, and I just wanted to lay down. I got my rifle in the door and reached for something to grab hold of. Somebody, I didn’t know who, was pulling on me as we started moving. The floor of the chopper smelled of oil.
Pain! God! A sudden, searing pain in my right leg. I was hit again! The pain took my breath away and I tried to twist to look at the leg. Somebody pulled it around, and I screamed. Somebody else was screaming, too. Or maybe it was me. The chopper was in the air. I couldn’t breathe. Somebody was laying on top of me.
The guy on top of me was trying to get off. I heard myself yelling as his weight came down on my leg.
The chopper veered crazily to one side, and I was struggling to hold on. My leg was burning, bursting with the pain, but I was able to hold on. The dark interior of the chopper began to spin. I called to Peewee.
“Peewee!”
“I’m making it, man,” he said, weakly.
“Monaco?”
“Hanging in, baby,” Monaco was near me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Hanging in.”
A short burst of rounds hit the side of the medevac, and I clenched my teeth and grabbed for the sides. It spun in the air, and then I felt the floor lift into me as we started away. There were bodies around me, some crying out in pain, others shaking in fear, others trying to help the wounded. One thought filled my whole being. I was still alive. Alive.
Chapter 23
“So we opened up on the guys we saw,” Monaco was saying. The smell of disinfectant, mingled with that of insect repellent, hung in the air. “We cut down a few of them, and then we looked upstream and saw the whole damn Cong army coming at us. The way we figured we had to split or die right there. Yo, man, Johnson wanted to go down right there.”
“How did they get you?” The morphine wasn’t helping the leg at all. I kept having flashes of me in a wheelchair or on crutches.
“We laid down a few bursts, threw some grenades, and made a run for it,” Monaco said. “They took cover, but they didn’t return fire. I think they thought we were an advance patrol or something. They didn’t know if they should come after us or bug out. Brunner figured that they thought we knew their size.
“They sent out a couple of squads after us. I got hit with something and went down just when the choppers landed. I got stunned or something, then I look up and see the choppers leaving, and I know I’ve had it, right?”
“You must have really freaked out.”
“I started praying to God and to Saint Jude,” Monaco said. “I mean some heavy praying. I’m making all kinds of promises, too. You know, get me out of this one and I’m going to be so cool for the rest of my life it won’t be funny.”
“I thought I was the only one making all the promises,” I said.
“If God gets even half the promises we’ve been laying down, the U.S.A. is going to be holier than the Vatican,” Monaco said. “Anyway, I stayed near the pickup zone all night in case they came back for me. Maybe I dozed off, I don’t even remember. When it got light I hear this noise, and then I saw the machine guns and I know the Congs got my ass. Every time I move a finger they lay down a burst right near me. The Congs started talking to me in English. I was so scared I couldn’t even think of nothing except dying.”
“What they say to you?”
“They said Hey, GI, how about some Cheu Hoi…”
Monaco started to cry. “Then I just sat there waiting for them to kill me.”
The dust-off choppers had taken us to Chu Lai. They had rushed Peewee right into surgery, and I was waiting to go in. A medic had come in and examined my leg. I had asked him how it looked, and he said I would be okay. I imagined him saying the same thing a hundred times a day to a hundred guys.
I was in the hospital. There were guys on both sides of the corridor. A guy across from me was twisting and screaming. The right side of his head was bandaged and so was the lower part of his face. We all had tags, and the doctors would come out, check our tags, and then take us into surgery. “What’s my tag say?” I asked Monaco.
He got up and looked at it. “‘Fracture wound, simple projectile, type O.’”
“It doesn’t say anything about amputation, does it?”
“Nah.”
“That’s good,” I said, straining to see Monaco’s face, to see if he was telling the truth.
“Hey, Perry, I got to split,” he said. He was crying again. “I been sitting here trying to think of something to say about… you know… you and Peewee saving my life and all…”
“No big deal, man,” I said. “We all got lucky.” “No, I was dead, Perry. I was actually sitting there with that Cong gun right on my ass and I was dead. You know, when it went down, when you and Peewee opened up on the gun, it was like I was brought back to life. I was dead and I was brought back to life again.”