The neat pile of body bags was waiting for the rest of us. There were enough there — the supply clerk had reached for the top one without even looking — to know that they expected that many of us would be going home in them.
I didn’t know what to think about what had happened. I didn’t know what to feel. I touched my fingers to the palm of my hand. I could feel my fingers. It was only inside that I was numb.
Lieutenant Carroll, our platoon leader, came in. He was a quiet guy, with dark hair and dark, calm eyes and an uneasy smile. I never felt that he was comfortable with himself. I hadn’t had a chance to talk with him yet, but sometimes I would see him drift off into his own daydreams and be embarrassed when we caught him at it.
When the old guys — the guys that had been through it before — saw him, they put their cards down, and their magazines, and gathered around him. I got up and nudged Peewee, who was lying facedown on his bunk.
Lieutenant Carroll took off his helmet and bowed his head.
“Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, OLord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.”
In the morning, in the mess tent, I asked Lieutenant Carroll why he had called Jenkins an angel warrior.
“My father used to call all soldiers angel warriors,” he said. “Because usually they get boys to fight wars. Most of you aren’t old enough to vote yet.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” he said.
“How come you’re not retired?”
Lieutenant Carroll stayed in our hooch for a while and helped check our supplies. He asked if we were short or anything, and Monaco said we could use some more three-day passes.
“I got a letter from Virginia Union.” A brother we called Brew sat on a footlocker next to Lieutenant Carroll. His real name was Brewster, so I could see where Brew came from. “They said I can probably get into the theology school there but they can’t accept me formally until six months before my admission date.”
“Did you write to that school in New York I told you about?” Lieutenant Carroll asked.
“No,” Brew grinned. “From what I’ve heard about New York, the temptations might be too great for me.”
“If the Temptations don’t get you then you got to look out for Smokey Bobinson and the Miracles,” Peewee called out.
“You know” — Lieutenant Carroll had spread all the extra first aid packs on the floor in front of him — “my brother went to theology school and I almost followed him.”
“You can still go,” a guy called Walowick said from his bunk. “It’s good for a priest to be older.”
“I might have too many doubts, now,” Lieutenant Carroll said.
“If you turn to God, He’ll take away your doubts,” Brew said.
“I don’t have doubts about God,” Lieutenant Carroll said. “I’m just not that sure who I am anymore.”
He gathered the first aid kits together and asked Brew if he would give them out. Then he got his weapon and said he would see us later.
“He don’t look like a priest,” Peewee said after Lieutenant Carroll had left.
“He used to act more like a holy guy or something when he first got over here. He never cursed or anything like that.” Walowick was putting powder on a rash he had. “Then one day we were trying to clear a road and some guys got trapped in a ditch off to one side. We were on the other side of the road, and we could see them but we couldn’t get to them. It was getting dark, and we knew they couldn’t last. Charlie was throwing everything at them. Then Lieutenant Carroll just went wild and stormed across the fucking road. We went after him. We were shooting at guys maybe three or four feet from us. We finally wasted all of them and cleared the road. He hasn’t been the same since, but we all found out what kind of a guy he was that day. When the chips were down, he put his ass on the line for the guys.”
“You get the guys out of the ditch okay?” Peewee asked.
“Unh-uh.” Walowick shook his head. “That’s why you guys are in the squad.”
I wrote Mama a letter all about how Jenkins had got killed. Then I tore it up and decided not to tell her about it. It would only get her upset. Instead, I told her more about Peewee. I didn’t want to tell her about Jenkins for another reason, too. I didn’t know how I felt about it. In a way I was really sorry for Jenkins, but there was a small voice inside me that kept saying that I was glad that it wasn’t me that was killed. I didn’t want anybody to see me putting that in a letter.
They brought a VC into camp to question. They questioned him, and then they took him into a hooch they used for storage while they decided what they were going to do with him. Peewee had been in there to get extra clips earlier and thought he might have lost his comb there. He went into the hooch to look for his pick, and the VC was sitting in there and started a conversation with him.
“Sucker spoke better English than I did,” Peewee said.
“What was he talking about?” Brunner asked. Brunner had a thick neck and short blond hair. He also seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.
“Ask me where I was from and stuff like that,” Peewee said. “I thought he was a friendly, you know.”
“You tell him where you were from?”
“Yeah, and he told me he used to go to the flicks down on State Street and even asked me if I knew some chick named Thelma.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then he asked me for a cigarette, and we was sitting there smoking when the captain come in. That’s when all hell broke loose. The fool jumped on me and tried to get my pistol, and the captain run up to him and punched him in the face.”
Then they had tied the VC up and threw him in the back of a jeep to take to an intelligence unit, and the captain gave Peewee hell for giving information to the enemy.
Peewee said he was glad he gave him some information.
“How come?” Monaco was cleaning his rifle again. “’Cause if the Cong ever get to State Street, I want to be on their side,” Peewee said.
Walowick, a Polish kid with dimples who looked like he had more teeth than he needed, looked up from his magazine, flashed a smile, and went back to reading.
“By the time we get out of here there won’t be any Cong left,” Brunner said.
“We’d get out of here a lot faster if we took them all to Hollywood.” Lobel was tall and a little pudgy. His hair looked as if he had given himself a perm or something. He was almost as tall as me but soft-looking. He didn’t look feminine or anything, just soft.
“What are you going to do with the Vietcong in Hollywood?” I asked.
“Look what they did after World War II,” he said, getting up on one elbow. “We made a hundred war movies, and we brought all the Germans over and gave them nice little bit parts, and they were very happy. We brought the Japanese over and gave them little bit parts, and they were happy. Now all we have to do is to stop this silly war and start making the movies right away. We take all these little slant-eyes over to Universal, give them SAG cards, and put them to work.”
“That is a fag solution, only capable of coming from the mind of a fag,” Brunner said.
“Hey, Corporal,” Lobel got up on one elbow. “Just because I don’t have my serial number tattoed on my genitals does not mean I’m a fag.”
“You wouldn’t have enough room for more than three numbers, anyway,” Brunner said. He looked around to see who was laughing. Nobody was.
We got mail call and I didn’t get anything. I had to find somebody to write to beside Mama so I would get mail. I couldn’t depend on Kenny to write.