“You don’t understand,” Rings said. “This is symbolic of our common African blood.”
“Yeah, all that is cool, but I want my common African blood in my common African veins,” Peewee said.
“You ignorant!” Rings pointed at Peewee. “Maybe I am, but I ain’t bleeding.”
Rings shook his head and slid the knife across the table to me.
“I got hemophilia,” I said. “If I cut myself, I won’t stop bleeding.”
“You a Uncle Tom, what you is,” Rings said. “If you had some damn hemophilia, they wouldn’t have you in no army!”
He grabbed his knife, got up, and walked away. I watched him go.
“That fool is crazy!” Peewee said.
“I don’t know, he might have something,” I said. “Well, whatever he got, he can sure keep it. Set up the checkers.”
We played checkers until it was time for chow, the same way we had the day before. Then we ate chow and played checkers in the afternoon.
Another black guy, a specialist, fourth class, came over and joined me and Peewee. He asked where we were from, and we told him.
“I’m from Monroe, Louisiana. You ever hear of it?”
“No,” Peewee said.
“Ain’t much to it,” he said. “How long y’all been in country?”
“You mean this country?”
“You don’t have to say nothing,” he said. “You just told me.”
“How long you been here?” Peewee asked.
“I been here nine months. I got sick, and they sent me to the hospital over in the Philippines. You ever been in that hospital?”
“We just got here,” Peewee said. “How we gonna get in the hospital?”
“You just getting here don’t mean nothing,” the spec four said. “I seen a guy drop dead getting off the plane from Hawaii. The plane come down and landed just as pretty as you damn please. He come out, took him a good look around, and dropped stone dead.”
“What kind of outfit were you in?” Peewee asked. “I was with the Twenty-fourth Transportation Battalion, but I put in for a transfer ’cause I had a run-in with my commanding officer.”
“What kind of run-in?”
“I was high on guard duty,” the spec four said. “My pal brought some smoke from Saigon, and we all got stoned.”
“So what you doing now?”
“They give me a choice, transfer or court-martial,” he said. “So you know I got to transfer, because I can’t stand no jail time.”
“You been in any fighting?” Peewee asked. “They didn’t have no fighting around Cam Ranh Bay,” was the answer. “They had more fighting in a juke joint outside of Fort Eustis than I seen all the time I been over here.”
It sounded good. Peewee and the spec four played checkers for a while and then he played with an Italian from Connecticut. We told him what the spec four had said about not seeing any fighting.
“I heard it was over anyway,” th’e guy said. “They’re supposed to be signing a truce or something in Paris.” “That’s ’cause they heard I was here,” Peewee said with this real serious look on his face.
The Italian guy looked at me and looked at Peewee and shrugged. I was getting to like Peewee.
They showed a movie in the day room and passed out some beer. Three guys from each hooch, which is what they called the barracks, had to pull guard duty and the ranger volunteered for it. They had beer in the day room and a Ping-Pong table. There was a line for the Ping-Pong table, so we watched the news from the States. They didn’t mention anything about Nam.
The next morning about half of our hooch got their orders. Most of them were going to some place called Cu Chi. The rest of us sat around or played three-man basketball.
“Let’s go to town,” Peewee said.
“Where’s town?”
Peewee went into the HQ hooch to find out where town was just as they were looking for somebody else to pull guard duty, and he got put on. I went back to our hooch and wrote my first letter to Kenny. I told him that I had heard that there was going to be a truce, and there wouldn’t be any more fighting. I also told him I would bring him back a souvenir if I could.
Saturday. My ninth day in country. The army paper Stars and Stripes was full of the truce talks in Paris, but the war was still going on. In the distance F-100’s streaked across the sky. I saw a lot of planes, mostly jets and helicopters, and all ours. I didn’t see any enemy planes. I didn’t even know if they had any.
“Yo, Perry!”
“What?”
“When they going to get us into this war, man?”
“We have to get orientated first,” I said. “I heard that the orientation officer broke his ankle playing basketball.”
“He probably a damn Cong,” Peewee said. “You ready to get into it?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn straight!” Peewee said. “We got to get into it before it’s over.”
I was less nervous than I was when I first got in country. We were in Nam to stop the North Vietnamese from taking over South Vietnam. I didn’t feel really gung ho or anything, but I was ready to do my part.
One of the new guys who came in was from Fort Dix. He looked like one of the characters from an Archie Andrews comic, but he was so scared it wasn’t funny. He told us his name was Jenkins.
“What’s it like so far?” he asked Peewee.
“Ain’t nothing to it,” Peewee said.
“You been here long?” Jenkins asked.
“Eight months,” Peewee lied. “I got to kill eight more Cong before I get my quota. Then I can go home.”
“How many you kill so far?”
“A hundred and thirty-two,” Peewee said. “I weigh a hundred and forty. Whatever you weigh, that’s how many you got to kill to leave early.”
“I never heard of that,” Jenkins said.
“That ain’t for regular rotation,” Peewee went on. “That’s just so you can leave early.”
“Oh.” Jenkins took it all in.
“Air force guys can get their quota in one or two days,” Peewee said.
“What did you do, machine gun most of them?” Jenkins’ eyes were wide.
“No, man,” Peewee shook his head. “They issue you so many bullets per week, see? But each one you turn back in you get a quarter for. So mostly I sneak up on the suckers and cut their throats. That way I save my bullets. Way I figure, by the time I get back to the World I have me enough to buy a little Chevy.”
“None of that is true,” Jenkins said. He was pissed at Peewee for pulling his leg.
The sergeant came in and picked three guys for guard duty. The ranger volunteered again, and they got Jenkins and one other guy. Jenkins was shaking when he left the hooch.
“Don’t forget to save your bullets!” Peewee called out to him.
That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn’t bite Asians.
We finally got the orientation lecture. This young-looking lieutenant showed us a slide of a map of Nam. Then he showed us where we were.
“You are not in Disneyland,” he said. “The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.
“Take your pills. Once a week for malaria, twice a week if you’re too stupid to remember the day you last took them.
“Stay away from the women. They got venereal diseases over here that eat penicillin for breakfast. Three quarters of the women over here have it.
“They got crabs over here that line up every morning to get a shot of DDT. It wakes them up, gets their day started right.
“Stay away from the black market. Anything you buy that’s worth a damn w
ill be taken away from you, or you’ll lose it.
“Stay away from dope. There’s only two kinds of people in Nam. People who are alert twenty-four hours a day, and people who are dead.
“If you see anything else they got over here that we don’t have at home, stay away from it. What these people use on a daily basis will kill you as fast as an RPG.”
“What’s an RPG?” a guy in the front asked. “That’s a rocket-propelled grenade. Stay away from them, too. If you have any more questions, ask your unit commanders when you reach them. Good luck.” When we got outside, the mosquitoes got us. The lieutenant hadn’t even mentioned them, but we had been given a supply of insect repellent.
Orders. Me, Peewee, Jenkins, and another guy were assigned to the 196th. We were going to Chu Lai. I remembered that was where Judy Duncan was assigned.
“What’s that like?” Jenkins asked the sergeant in headquarters.
“That’s First Corps,” the sergeant said. “All you do up there is look around for charlie, and when you see him you call the marines. Light stuff.”
“Charlie?” Jenkins looked toward me and Peewee.
“Charlie is the bad guy over here.” The sergeant put his arm around Jenkins’ shoulders. He was obviously enjoying himself.
“Sometimes we call him charlie, sometimes we call him Victor Charlie, sometimes we call him Vietcong. That is, unless he sends us his business card with his full name and address on it.”
We packed our gear and lined up outside, waiting for the truck to the airport. We were going to Chu Lai in a C-47. I thought guys from other hooches were going, but there were only the four of us.
“I bet I kill me a Cong before you get one,” Peewee said.
“You can have them all,” I said.
“You scared?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You ain’t scared?”
“No, man, I’m just surprised,” Peewee said. “I didn’t think they was going to have no real fighting in this here war.”
“How come?”
“I tell you how I got in this mess?”
“Unh-uh.”
“Me and this dude I used to hang with sometimes was out in front of the projects where I lived, and he said to me he was gonna join the army. So he said to come on down to the recruiting office with him.” Peewee was sitting on his gear, picking out his hair. “So we go on down, and the recruiting sergeant ask him if he ever got into any trouble. Stick, that was this guy’s name, said yeah. He already done shot him four or five people.
“The recruiting sergeant said he can’t get in no army ’cause they don’t be taking no rowdy dudes like him. I figure if they don’t take no rowdy dudes, the army had to be pretty cool. If they really meant to be doing a whole lot of killing and carrying on, they should go get them suckers from the projects, ’cause that’s all they like to do, anyway.”
“So you joined up?”
“Yeah,” Peewee said. “But I think I got tricked.”
Peewee looked out over the trucks, which were mostly packed with crates of rations and supplies. The land beyond them was flat as far as we could see in one direction. In the other direction, where we thought the action would be, there were mountains shrouded in haze.
“Hey, at least I ain’t rowdy,” I said.
Peewee looked at me and smiled. “Yo, you remember that brother wanted to mingle our blood and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we could do that stuff with some spit or something,” Peewee said.
He spit on his hand and held it up. I spit on mine and we exchanged fives. It felt good.
Peewee didn’t say much after that and neither did I. I was scared. My mouth was going dry, and I could see that Peewee was scared, too. Jenkins was crying. It made me feel a little better to see him crying like that.
“Load ’em up!”
Me and Peewee got on the trucks between boxes of peanut butter, and started to the airport and to wherever the hell Chu Lai was.
Chapter 3
Most of the flight to Chu Lai was over water. A sergeant with us said that the plane swung out over the water to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Chu Lai was cooler than the area we had come from, but not much. It was still muggy. They had expected us earlier, and the lieutenant who directed us to the truck that would take us to our units seemed pissed.
“We can’t hold these trucks up any longer, so you guys are going to have to chow down at your units,” he said. “When I call your name, get right in the back of the first truck. Keep your hands and arms in the truck, and leave that netting up. You don’t want to be sitting in there when some slant throws a grenade in the back.”
The lieutenant was sharp, his brass belt buckle and insignia were shined, and his uniform was creased in all the right places. Chu Lai seemed less frantic than Tan Son Nhut.
I was looking around, trying to figure out what Chu Lai was like, when I heard my name.
“Any of you guys know this Perry?” the lieutenant was asking.
“I’m Perry,” I said.
“Well, wake the hell up, soldier!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, get on the damn truck!”
“Yes, sir.”
When I got in the back of the truck, Peewee was cracking up. I laughed with him. Jenkins started imitating the sergeant, and he had his voice down perfectly.
“Hey, are you an actor?” Peewee asked.
“No, I can just…” Jenkins’ voice trailed off.
“Do it again!” Peewee nudged Jenkins’ foot.
Jenkins did it again, and Peewee cracked up again. I thought Jenkins was going to be fun after all.
Peewee pulled the net over the back end of the truck and tied it down. Then we started off. The back of the truck was like an oven. We started off reasonably slowly, and I got my first glimpse of the base. It looked okay. The movement cooled the truck off a little, and I thought the ride wouldn’t be bad. Then we went through the gate and an outer checkpoint, and the driver picked up speed. We were bounced around the back of the truck like crazy. I had to hold onto the sides and keep standing. Sitting in the bouncing truck was impossible.
We arrived at headquarters company a half hour or so after we left the main base at Chu Lai. The captain who greeted us was wearing a flak jacket, the heavy vest that was supposed to stop bullets and shrapnel. There were big rings of sweat under his arms and a pool of sweat in the hollow of his neck.
He glanced at each of us and checked our names off on his copy of our orders.
The GIs I saw at Chu Lai looked sharp enough to be in a parade; these guys looked as if they had just come in from a hard day’s work, a damn hard day’s work. Most of the guys who had come with us from Chu Lai were assigned to one of the row of hooches behind us. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins were told we would be going out to Alpha Company.
A chopper was supposed to take us and one other guy out to the company. In the meantime we had to load a pump onto the truck we came on. The pump wasn’t crated, and it was hard to get a grip on it. Peewee and Jenkins were on one side of it, and I was on the other, but we couldn’t get it up on the truck. Then an officer sent another guy over. His name tag read Johnson. He was black and as tall as I was, but bigger.
“We re supposed to — ” Peewee was pointing to the pump when Johnson reached down and grabbed it. He grunted, rocked backward, and brought the pump to his knees. He grunted again, lifted the pump onto the back of the truck, turned slowly, and walked away.
“Amen!” Peewee called out behind him. “Amen!”
“Sir?”
“What is it?”
“Did you notice that I had a medical profile?”
The captain looked at his clipboard, looked up at me, and then back down to the clipboard.
“I don’t see anything about a profile here,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Perry, sir.”
“You got a lot of pain?”
“No, but every once in a while the knee sort of gives way,” I sa
id. “That’s why they gave me the profile.”
“You get to your company commander, mention your profile to him.”
“The officer at the replacement company said…”
He was already walking away, and I had the feeling that he wasn’t particularly interested in my profile.
We were told by a corporal that Alpha Company was “In the Deep. ’’
“In the Deep what?” Peewee asked.
“In the Deep Boonies,” was the answer.
We were supposed to get to the “Deep Boonies” by chopper. We waited for three hours for one to come and get us, but none came. We found a mess hall and ate. Jenkins didn’t feel like eating. I could tell he was still scared out of his mind.
“What were you trained for?” I asked him.
“My MOS is infantry.”
“You went to advanced training for infantry?” Peewee looked up at Jenkins.
“Yeah.”
“You look like a clerk-typist or something like that,” Peewee said.
“My father’s a colonel,” Jenkins said. “He wanted me to be infantry. He’s got this thing, he calls it his game plan. First I volunteer for the army, then I volunteer for infantry and take advanced individual training in infantry. I serve my time over here, then I go to Officers Candidate School.”
There were Vietnamese people working behind the counter. They looked peaceful enough, and so small. I was six-three, and many of them seemed a good foot shorter than I was.
Johnson, the guy who had lifted the pump onto the truck, turned out to be going to Alpha Company with us. He brought his gear over and sat with us. “Where you from?” Peewee asked Johnson. “Savannah.”
“Savannah, Georgia?”
“You ever been there?”
“No, and I don’t want to go to there, either.” “How you know what it like if you ain’t never been there?” Johnson was eating his second dish of ice cream. He was about as black as a human being could get and as thick as he was wide. Even the whites of his eyes were dark. When he wasn’t talking or chewing, his mouth sort of hung open. It hung open as he stared across the table at Peewee.
“I ain’t never been to hell,” Peewee said. “But I heard enough about it not to want to go there for no damn vacation.”