Fallen Angels (28 page)

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.

“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.”

“We’re all dead over here, Monaco,” I said. “We re all dead and just hoping that we come back to life when we get into the World again.”

“Yeah…” He patted me on the arm. Somebody called my name and I looked up. It was the doctor. He came and started wheeling me into the operating room. Monaco held my hand until the doctor, rolling the gumey I was on, pulled it from his hand. I had never been in love before. Maybe this was what it was like, the way I felt for Monaco and Peewee and Johnson and the rest of my squad. I hoped this was what it was like.

I dreamt about the Apollo Theater. I dreamt that I was in the Apollo and the Shirelles were there. There were a hundred girls in the audience, and they were all going crazy over the Shirelles. Peewee was there, too. He was saying something about the Shirelles not being so hot. I told him he was crazy. He said they had better singers in the projects in Chicago. I told him he was a Chicago fool. We were having a good time, me and Peewee.

Then I heard my name. I looked at Peewee to see if he was calling me, but he had his back toward me. I stood next to him and looked at his face but he was watching the stage. And still I heard my name being called.

“Perry!”

I opened my eyes. There was a nurse. She wasn’t pretty. Her eyes were brown, tired.

“Hi!” I said.

“Hi, yourself, soldier,” she answered. There was more life to the eyes. “How you feeling?”

“Okay, how’s my leg?”

“You won’t be dancing on it for a while, but it’ll come around.”

She gave me something to drink that tasted like orange juice and castor oil. She fixed my pillow and asked me where I was from.

“New York,” I said. “Where you from?”

“Puerto Rico,” she said, smiling. When she smiled she was very pretty. “Santurce. You know where it is?”

I didn’t. She started to leave and I called her back. “Look, you see a guy named Gates? Harold Gates?” “Could be around here,” she said. “You get any pain in the leg, you call the nurse. Try not to ask for painkillers unless you really need them, though, okay?”

“Sure.”

My mouth was dry and tasted like gasoline residue. The nurse wheeled me out into a small room. There was another guy there, he was bandaged around his chest. He was staring at the wall.

“How you doing?” he said.

“Okay. How do my legs look?”

He looked down at them. “They’re there,” he said.

Peewee found me two days later. He was in a wheelchair and came up alongside the bed like gang-busters.

“I got full charge of the numbers racket in this hospital,” he said. “What you want to play?”

“How the hell you doing, Peewee?”

“What number you want to play?” he insisted. “How about 3-1-2?” I said.

“That’s too long for me to write down,” he said. “I’m out of here in two weeks.”

“Back to the States?”

“Where else I’m going to go?”

“How’s your wound?”

“Nothing to it,” Peewee said. “He cut enough to make me have to have another damn operation when I get back to the States, that’s all.”

“Is it serious?”

“Serious enough to get my ass home,” Peewee said. “I’m gonna say a prayer to Buddha for the boy who done it soon’s I get a chance.”

“They didn’t tell me anything yet,” I said.

“If they say you ain’t hurt bad enough to go home you got to play crazy. Tell them you keep seeing pink-ass zebras running around the room and vou want to catch one of them and eat him.”

“I’ll tell them something,” I said.

“They ain’t getting me back in this war. We been in this shit too long, man” — Peewee shook his head — “and it’s too damn heavy.”

The nurse from Santurce was named Celia Vilas. She got us some beer, and me and Monaco drank it on the night before Monaco had to go back to the boonies. Peewee couldn’t drink anything except plain water and a little warm milk. We did a lot of drinking and a lot of crying. Me and Peewee didn’t want Monaco to have to go back. Monaco didn’t want to go, either. But he didn’t feel it was right to leave the squad unless he had to.

Peewee got sick, threw up, and busted all his stitches. The doctors had to sew him up again, and I realized that Peewee was hurt worse than I thought he was. Monaco said he would come by in the morning before his plane left and say good-bye. He didn’t. He left a note at the desk, and Celia gave it to me. It said that I had to wear a tux to his wedding.

I got to sit up in a wheelchair, and the leg felt all right in spite of the cast. It felt good. I hoped it wasn’t. I could make it with a limp. I just didn’t want to go back to the boonies anymore.

We got a call from Lieutenant Gearhart on the ham radio network. He told us the other guys in the squad were all right. It was nice of him to call us, but it wasn’t true. Monaco wasn’t all right. Monaco was like me and Peewee. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren’t all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.

He also told us that Captain Stewart had been promoted.

It was two weeks before they took the cast off. The doctor looked at the X rays and then at the wound.

“How do you feel?”

“Okay,” I heard myself saying.

He examined the chart again, then went to the foot of the bed. “You’re Richard Perry, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was your stateside station?”

“Fort Devens.”

“Why were you in combat?” he said. “You’ve got a medical profile. Did you volunteer?”

A butterfly, maybe a moth, had gotten into the room. It flittered about the ceiling, then landed on the foot of the bed opposite me.

“No, sir. They said the profile from Devens hadn’t arrived.”

He looked at the record again. “It was here since, oh yes, the eighth of March. I guess it was late. You’re going to be sent home. This is your second Purple Heart, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hope it’s your last, Corporal.”

Peewee had another operation on his stomach for something called adhesions, but he was still scheduled to leave with me.

We kept up with the war in Stars and Stripes, but it seemed different in the papers. In the papers there didn’t seem to be any cost. A hill was taken, or a hamlet, and the only body counts that were given were for the Congs. Once in a while there would be mention of our own killed, but the numbers didn’t seem to even match the numbers I saw in the hospital unit.