“We look like Congs to you?” Peewee said.
“You look like cherries!” the sergeant said. “I’d rather go out and mess with a whole bunch of charlies instead of y’all cherries. That the truth, too!”
I made believe I was scratching my forehead so my hand would cover my face. The guy was strange. Thinking we were going to kill him when we were fighting a war with the Communists was weird.
The rest of the squad consisted of one black guy and four white guys. They played cards in the afternoon, and asked us if we had heard anything more about Hawaii. Later we played volleyball against another squad and won. Sergeant Simpson said that our victory was a good sign.
We checked our gear and watched television in the afternoon. The television was hooked up to a small generator, and we got more noise than picture, but that was okay. We watched a game show that had been taped. I knew most of the answers and impressed everybody.
It started to rain. A lieutenant, not our platoon leader, came in and spoke to Sergeant Simpson. He nodded and then, when the lieutenant had left, told us to pack up our gear. We were going on patrol.
A chopper came in quickly from just over a stand of trees. We were airborne less than a half minute after the chopper had touched down. We skimmed over the treetops for a little under ten minutes before touching down in the landing zone, or LZ, as Simpson called it.
It was exciting, a little scary. This is what I had been trained for. I thought about my knee, if it was going to be okay.
“You could get into surveillance with your test scores,” a lieutenant had said. “Maybe even army intelligence.”
An officer at the classification center had told me that if I could play ball I could always find a post to play for. I chose basketball. I was assigned to the infantry with the understanding that I was going to play ball for Fort Devens. Two good games led to a write-up in the post paper. Then I started dreaming again. Enough write-ups sent to the NBA, and who knew what might happen?
Then there was the game against Fort Monmouth. A quick move at the top of the key, drive through the middle, leap, leap, twist, and jam the ball through the hoop. I had come down amid a mass of sweating bodies, had landed on a sneaker instead of the floor. My knee had twisted. The pain burned through the joint into the thigh. My season was over.
“Perry, wake the fuck up!”
I looked at Sergeant Simpson and saw that he looked genuinely pissed.
We were going past a flat area. Off to the right there were short trees with wide trunks. A quarter mile off to our left there was a wooded area that ran halfway up a small hill. Even from where we walked I could see that near the top of the hill the trees were just charred sticks. On the very top they were black silhouettes against the sky. I looked from side to side, telling myself not to daydream again.
The regular guys in the squad walked differently. They seemed to do a kind of slow lope, lifting their feet more than they had to. I thought it must have been because of all the mud.
Monaco, a sweet-faced Italian kid who looked as scared as Jenkins, was on point-out in front of the squad. The regular squad guys took their positions, leaving me, Peewee, Johnson, and Jenkins in the middle. Simpson said that a plane had spotted two guys with what looked like surveying instruments.
“They could be laying out some kind of assault plans,” he said.
For the first ten minutes I had to wipe my right hand on my fatigues at least a dozen times. I kept imagining VC popping up and me not being ready to fire. We were on flat ground going along a row of small rice paddies. I didn’t see anything. Nobody saw anything.
We walked or, it seemed, wandered for nearly an hour before Simpson called in the chopper to take us back.
We went to a pickup zone that was different from where we had landed and squatted in the knee-high grass. Simpson and this corporal named Brunner kept us covered while we mounted the chopper. Then they were in and the chopper was off. Then we were back to our base area.
“Y’all looked okay out there,” Simpson said. “You got to stay alert like that all the time.”
We started back toward the camp. It was less than a hundred yards. We had been told that there were mine fields and trip flares planted around the perimeter. Sergeant Simpson had a map of our way back in. The path we had to walk up was covered by a brace of M-60 machine guns. The guys manning them looked bored.
There could have been a whooshing noise, I wasn’t sure. I just heard Sergeant Simpson yelling for us to stay on the path. The other regular squad guys were already down.
I was in the dirt. My eyes were closed. I could hear somebody screaming.
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Noises. Somebody saying that it was a booby trap. Sergeant Simpson talking into the radio. I opened my eyes; everybody else was up. I got up as quickly as I could.
Some of the guys were looking around, their weapons moving, shaking almost as if they were alive, looking for an enemy to fire upon.
“Keep those pieces still! Keep ’em down!” Sergeant Simpson’s voice had changed. He barked commands. “Get into the camp! Get into the camp!” Brunner was dragging somebody. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see anything. It was light out, but all I could see was a few feet in front of me. My vision didn’t go any further.
We got back to the camp. Two sergeants opened the barbed wire fence. They pulled the wounded man in. I looked.
There was a shard of metal protruding from Jenkins’ chest. The blood gurgled out of the wound it made and sprayed along the concave metallic surface. He tried to bring his hand to it, to touch it. A medic had reached him and pushed his hand away. Jenkins’ face was white and twisted as he struggled to look down at his wound. There were bubbles on the wound as he struggled for a final breath, and then that, too, stopped.
Chapter 4
“You got the tags?” The supply guy had a long face and his mouth twisted oddly when he spoke.
“How many bags you got there?” There was a neat stack of dark bags on the shelf.
“Enough,” he said, handing me the heavy plastic bag. “What he do, step on a mine?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what happens,” he said. “They sneak in and plant a mine on your path, and you don’t know where the hell to walk.”
“Oh.”
I took the bag out to where Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll waited. They lifted Jenkins by the shoulders of his uniform. Sergeant Simpson used a first aid patch to pick up something that had erupted from the hellish wound on Jenkins’ chest and fallen on the ground near him. He placed it in the bag at his side.
I thought I would throw up. I stood along with the other guys in the squad until the bag had been zipped up. We started back to the hooch. On the way I looked back at the body bag again. Sergeant Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll were talking together, the body bag was at their feet. I turned away and went to the hooch.
Monaco came over and sat on the edge of my bunk. For a while he didn’t say anything. Then he put his hand on my shoulder.
“You know him?”
“No,” I said. “I just met him at the replacement company.”
“Sometimes it goes like that,” Monaco said. He started to say something else, then shrugged it off, and left.
I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen before had been my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready, walking into the darkened church with the family and sitting in the first pews. But Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before. Seeing him lying there like that, his mouth and eyes open, had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.