Johnson slept naked on one side, snoring. Peewee lay on his back, arms and legs spread, eyes not completely closed. Jenkins had his head under the blanket.
Morning. The chopper pilot came to get us. He was bright-eyed, shorter than I thought he was the night before. We piled our gear on and climbed on. It was my first chopper ride. I had missed that part of training when I got the medical profile. No marching. No prolonged field duty. No combat. I had seen the doctor at Fort Devens sign it. He was supposed to have sent it to the company.
The chopper trembled and rattled. Then it lifted slowly, tilted, and jerked into the air. It was the noise I hated. More than the wind through the open door. More than the slow speed, or the sitting still in the air waiting to fall, I hated the noise.
I looked over at Johnson. The one expression he had in the world was on his face. Peewee was busy looking out the door. Jenkins had his eyes closed and his knuckles were white from holding onto the seat.
“Which one of you is Perry?” We had reached Alpha Company in the boonies and were sitting in the commanding officer’s hooch. A stream of tobacco juice oozed from the side of the captain’s mouth.
“I am.”
“You supposed to have a profile or something, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, they got it listed that you’re concerned with it,” the captain said. “You got any pains or anything?”
“Not right now,” I said. “But I got a bad knee.”
“You been wounded in the knees?”
“From playing basketball,” I said.
“Yeah, okay,” the captain looked me up and down. “I’m sending a radio message through to look up your medical records. In the meantime I’ll just let you stay with the squad. You’ll be okay.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fact is, all you guys better go on over and stay with the squad for a few days. I got word this morning that we’ll probably be moving down to Third Corps and then ship over to Hawaii from there.”
“Hawaii?”
“Yeah, looks like this thing is about over,” the captain said. “What I want you boys to do is to listen to your squad leaders and try to keep yourselves alive.”
We got weapons. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins got the usual M-16 rifles. Johnson, who had had machine-gun training, got an M-60. It was a big, wicked-looking weapon that made the M-i6’s look almost fragile in comparison. Johnson signed for it, took it by the handle, and walked away without even looking at it. They fit each other.
We were asked if we wanted anything else. Peewee asked for and got a pistol in addition to his M-16.
“You want a pistol?” the armorer asked me.
“What for?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I didn’t want to be close enough to anybody to shoot him with a pistol.
“Make sure you keep those M-i6’s clean,” he said. “Don’t go believing that stuff about how it’s going to work no matter what happens to it. You don’t clean that piece, charlie is going to clean your ass.”
We were assigned a hooch and found bunks. I wondered what had happened to the guys who had had the bunks before we got them, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask anybody.
“Okay, listen up!” A soft-voiced lieutenant stuck his head into the tent. His name tag read “Carroll.” “I’m your platoon leader. You guys have any problems, you let me know through your squad leader. Anything really heavy, and you can come right to me with it. This is a book platoon. We do everything by the book. You new guys better listen and learn. That way you get to be old guys.
“Everybody’s talking about Hawaii. There’s plenty of time to think about getting out of here and getting to Hawaii when we re at the airport on the way out. Until then, keep your mind on your work. That’s all and good luck.”
The rest of the squad was outside playing volleyball. We unloaded our gear and picked out bunks to lie on. There was gear on some of the other bunks. An M-79 grenade launcher lay across one. There were copies of Playboy on another.
“Hey, Johnson, bet you didn’t have nothing this good down in Georgia, huh?” Peewee said.
“You really need to die young, don’t you?” Johnson grunted the words out.
“What you do in Georgia, anyway?” Peewee said. Johnson got up on one elbow and looked over at him. I thought he was mad, but he just grinned at Peewee. “If the man give me a job back home I wouldn’t be doing this job over here,” he said. “Guess you didn’t know that, huh?”
They kept at it for a while, Peewee agitating until I felt that for him it was just some kind of sport. Find somebody big and mean-looking to mess with and then push your luck.
I started writing a letter to Mama. I hadn’t written much during basic training, but now I wanted to, and I really wasn’t sure why. I started writing’about the trip over, remembered that I had already written about that, and started again. The second start was about how I was glad that the war was in Vietnam and not home, but that didn’t sound right, either. I was looking for things to say but everything sounded lame.
The track over the gym in Stuyvesant High School was so small you had to run around it nearly fifteen times to go a mile. As I ran around that day I could hear Mrs. Liebow’s words echo in my ears.
“You have to get out of yourself, Perry,” she had said. “You’re too young to be just an observer in life.”
I was fifteen, and painfully aware that I was “just an observer in life.” I didn’t want to get into what was going on at home, about how Mom seemed to be falling apart, and how I couldn’t think about much else than keeping us together.
Being an observer hadn’t been so bad in Stuyvesant. There was always a way to frame things, to put them into a romantic setting, that made you feel good. Even the loneliness I felt sometimes was okay. I could break the loneliness, the feeling of not belonging to the life that teemed around me, by going to the basketball courts. I was somebody else there: Mr. In-Your-Face, jiving and driving, looping and hooping, staying clean and being mean, the inside rover till the game was over.
But sometimes even that didn’t work. Sometimes, when I was tired and the competition was really rough, things would change for me. There would be a flow of action around me and it would seem as if I were outside of myself, watching myself play ball, watching myself trying to establish a place for myself on the hard park courts. It was then that I would feel a pressure to give in, to let a rebound go over my head, to take the outside shot when I knew I had to take the ball inside. I told Kenny about the feeling, and he hadn’t understood it. I told Mrs. Liebow, my English teacher, and she said that it was what separated heroes from humans, the not giving in, and I hadn’t understood that. It was a weakness in my game, not about being a hero.
Peewee said something that pissed Johnson off, and Johnson started to get off his bunk. Peewee pulled his M-16 across his body.
“Come on,” he said. “I got something for you, Georgia Boy.”
I wanted to say something to Peewee but thought better of it. It came to me that Peewee could be crazy. I caught Jenkins looking at me and shrugged.
The squad we were assigned to came in. They were arguing over who won a volleyball game. They saw us, and one guy beckoned for me to get up. He looked around, and then pointed to another bunk. I got up and moved my gear to it, and he laid on the bunk that I had been on.
“You the cherries?” A tall, thin-faced sergeant.
“We’re the new men,” Peewee said.
“What’s your name?” the sergeant asked.
“My friends call me Peewee. You can call me Mr. Gates.”
“Uh-huh. Well, my name is Simpson and I’m the sergeant of this here squad. I’m gonna tell you guys something,” the sergeant was black with a high voice that seemed to get higher with every word. “I ain’t got but one hundred and twenty days left over here. If we go to Hawaii, then I ain’t got that. Now I ain’t about to let neither one of you fools kill me, you hear?”