Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers

started to tell him that I wasn’t an officer. But it didn’t matter.
    As soon as we landed I was told to go back to my company. Scotty said that it was nice meeting me.
    “You okay?” Lieutenant Carroll was the first to meet me.
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “You know, the way they run this shit over the radio,” Lieutenant Carroll shook his head. “You would think all hell was breaking loose.”
    When I got to the hut, Peewee asked me what had happened.
    “We heard that you guys ran into a VC battalion or something,” he said. “’Cause I told them that Perry could handle the shit if it was only one damn battalion.”
    “I was with their fourth platoon,” I said. “We ran into their first platoon and we hit them. They must have lost over a dozen guys.”
    “You hit our own guys?” Monaco came over to where I was sitting on the bed.
    “I didn’t hit them! The platoon leader called in artillery on their position.”
    “Who spotted them?” Monaco asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Nobody knows nothing. That’s why a bunch of guys get nailed for no reason!”
    “Yo, man, I didn’t mess them up.”
    Monaco looked at me and walked away. I watched him lie down on his bunk with his face to the wall.
    “They messed up bad?” Peewee asked.
    “Yeah, real bad.”
    Thanksgiving. This year, Kenny’s birthday was on Thanksgiving, and I damn near forgot it. I figured it would take three weeks for anything to reach home from Nam. I didn’t want to send him money. He could have used the money, but I wanted to send him something more. I asked Lieutenant Carroll if he thought I could get a knife in the mail. I told him it was for Kenny.
    Lieutenant Carroll said he had something else, and he gave me a jacket he had bought in Saigon. It was black silk and there was a map in green of Nam on the back. I wanted to pay him for it, but he said no.
    I got the jacket in the last mail. Lieutenant Carroll was in the officer’s hooch, and I stopped in to see him. He was sitting in his shorts. He was drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels.
    “You know where I got this?”
    “Where?”
    “We went into a village about six months ago; I guess we surprised some VC. They left their meal, their cards, and this bottle behind. You want a drink?”
    I took a drink. It burned like hell going down. It came up easier.
    I couldn’t sleep. They all started crowding in on me. The guy with the plasma taped to his helmet, the sergeant crying. None of them were together in my mind. They just kept coming, one by one. Short movies. A few seconds of a medic putting a tag on a wounded soldier. A few seconds of a chopper taking off over the trees. A guy cradling his rifle. A body bag.
    The guys that our artillery blew away didn’t have a reason to die. They hadn’t died facing the enemy. They just died because somebody else was scared, maybe careless. They died because they were in Nam, where being scared made you do things you would regret later. We were killing our brothers, ourselves.
    Brew was getting ready to go to bed and I went over to his bunk and asked him if he knew where the Lord’s Prayer was in the Bible.
    “The Bible I got has an index,’’ he said. “You can look up anything you want in the back.”
    “Hey, that’s cool.’’
    “You can borrow mine any time you want,” he said, tossing it to me.
    “You pray a lot when you in the World?” I asked him.
    “Yeah, I prayed a lot,” Brew said. “But, man, I didn’t pray nowhere near as hard.”

Chapter 9
    Brunner came into the hooch and told us to saddle up, that we were going on a pacification mission. Monaco asked him who had given the order.
    “Just get your ass in gear,” Brunner snarled.
    “Who the hell elected you God?” Monaco hadn’t moved and neither had the rest of us.
    “How many stripes you got on your arm, Private Monaco?” Brunner walked to the end of Monaco’s bunk.
    “Enough to know that I don’t have to take any bull from you,” Monaco said.
    Brunner