There was something happening up north the next morning. For about an hour we heard artillery. Simpson was in our hooch, talking about squirrel hunting outside of Petersburg, Virginia, and Monaco was getting on his case.
“You call that sport?” Monaco asked. “I mean, there you are, you gotta weigh two hundred pounds, and you got a rifle, and you’re against a squirrel that weighs maybe two or three pounds, and he ain’t got nothing.”
“Man, it’s a damn sport!” Simpson protested. “You know what a sport is?”
“Do I know what a sport is?” Monaco pointed to himself. “I played football and baseball for Marist High School in Bayonne. I made All-County. That’s sport. I don’t have to shoot no little animals.”
“You had you a rifle,” Peewee said. “You could have made All-World.”
“The way I figure it,” Monaco went on, “if you hunt a squirrel with a rifle, what do you hunt a bear with? Artillery?”
“Call in some white phosphorus on him,” Brew said. “That’ll get his attention until the jets zero in.” White phosphorus, or Willy Peter as they called it, was an artillery round that burned the crap out of anything it touched.
“You don’t know nothing about no hunting!” Simpson was getting pissed. “You don’t know what hunting is!”
“What he’s trying to say,” — Lobel was flat on his back; there was a can of Coke on his chest — “is that the white phosphorus is enough. After it burns the bear’s ass off, then the good sergeant will finish him off with a couple of frag grenades.”
“Lobel, y-y-you are a faggot!” Sergeant Simpson got up and left the hooch.
We had to go to a village and do what sounded like public relations work. We were supposed to pass it around that anybody who was a Communist and who wanted to change and be on our side was welcome to come. The program was called “Chieu Hoi,” but Peewee called it “chewing the whores.”
The village was a good ten minutes away, and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.
I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of- the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.
On the way to the chopper I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.
When we landed, another squad was already at the landing zone. They told us that all the women in the village were either under six or over six hundred.
The village stunk. You could smell it as you got near. There were huts laid out about fifteen meters from each other. Some were fairly large. There were people in the village walking around, some were building a pen of some kind. Like the guys had told us, they were either very young or very old.
“All their men is either in the VC army or the
ARVNs. The ARVNs is the South Vietnamese army, and they suppose to be on our side. The VC is the enemy. This is like the Civil War,” Simpson said. “Sometimes one brother go to the VC and the other brother go to the ARVN. After a while the brother who fighting with the VC either gonna get killed or want to leave and join the ARVN.”
“They don’t care what side they fight on?” I asked. “They would if they got time to think about it,” Simpson said. “But the ARVN kick they butts if they catch them in the village and they ain’t fighting for the ARVN — ”
“— and the VC kick they butts if they catch them and they ain’t fighting for the VC,” Peewee said.
“Bout the size of it.”
There was a jeep with medical supplies on it. There were aspirins, a few malaria pills, and some Band-Aids. A captain was giving them out to the squad.
“If you give them malaria pills, make sure they take it on the spot,” he said. “We don’t want this stuff falling into the hands of the VC.”
“So why we giving it to them?” Peewee asked. “To make them love us,” the captain said. He had a smirk on his face.
When we got to the village, some of the people ignored us while others came up and begged for C rations and whatever else we would give them. Lobel and I gave chocolate bars to a Vietnamese woman. A small girl clung to the woman’s legs, and Lobel asked her name. The woman told us the girl’s name was An Linh. She was about seven, maybe eight. She was small, like all the Vietnamese, compared to us Americans. She looked like a little doll with dark black eyes that dominated a round, brown face. She could have been black, maybe Puerto Rican.
Lobel gave her some candy and carried her around on his shoulders. I shook her hand, and she seemed to want to hold on to my fingers, so the three of us went around the village. Sergeant Simpson let a young boy wear his canteen.
We broke out more C rations, the canned stuff the army passes off for food, and shared them with the kids. Me and Lobel ate with An Linh. A woman, her head too big for her small body, brought us some rice, and Lobel took some.
“Not bad,” he said.
I didn’t want any rice. It smelled okay, but I was afraid of being poisoned. My mind went back to Jenkins and how he had been afraid of dying. We hadn’t mentioned his name since he got it. I wanted to ask Lobel about that, but I didn’t.
“If I owned this village,” Lobel was saying, “I’d make it into a real jungle scene.”
“It is a real jungle scene,” I said.
“No, to make it real you have to have one side of the huts open so you can shoot inside,” Lobel said. “Then you have to get some artificial grass so it stays the same color throughout the whole picture, and finally you have to get a wind machine so you can make the grass sway.”
“Why not just shoot it naturally and save the money?” I asked.
“Aren’t you from New York?” Lobel squinted at me.
“Yeah.”
“I thought black guys from New York were supposed to be smart?” he said. “Nobody pays to see anything natural. You pay to see unnatural things look almost natural.”
“Oh.”
“Would you want to see Doris Day or some natural-looking girl with pimples on her forehead and heat rash on her chest?”
The Vietnamese woman who had brought us rice squatted at the edge of the bush to take a leak.
“See, you couldn’t have any of that,” Lobel said. “People in Hollywood don’t pee.”
We gave An Linh as much of our C rations as she could carry, and Lobel gave her a new name. “She’ll never do anything in Hollywood with her name,” he said.
We decided to call her Arielle. Lobel said that as soon as we got her to Santa Monica we had it made.
Peewee spent most of the time sitting down in a hut until Lieutenant Carroll made him walk around the village. He found a bottle of wine in one of the huts and tried to buy it for four American dollars. The people in the hut said that he could take it for nothing, but Lieutenant Carroll said not to. He finally paid two dollars for it.
“Suppose it’s poisoned or something?” I asked.
“Then I’m gonna die,” Peewee said.
“You taking it back to the base?”
“Nope.”
He borrowed a corkscrew from the woman he had bought the wine from and opened the wine and drank some of it. He made an awful face, then drank some more.
“That bad?”
“Yep, but that’s one thing I got done.”
“What is?”
“That’s the first time I ever drank wine from a bottle with a cork in it,” he said. “Now all I got to do is to make love with a foreign woman and smoke a cigar.”
We stayed around the village for the rest of the day, and then it was time to leave. The choppers came in and lifted us out, and we were back at the base before we knew it.
“Those gooks will probably be having supper with the VC by the time we sit down to chow,” Brunner said.