Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers Page B

Vietnamese kids playing in the mud.
    “It ain’t so bad for them,” he answered.
    “How can you say that? They’re just kids.”
    “’Cause they don’t know nothin’ else,” Simpson said. “You look around at these kids and their mamas and you know they been fighting and getting their asses kicked since way back before I was bom. You ain’t gonna find ten of these people in all of First Corps know anything about no damn peace.”
    I started telling him how he was wrong, but he cut me off. He told me not to fall asleep just because I was on a mission of peace.
    We had to go into each hut with little gifts. That was to make sure that there weren’t any VC hiding out among the civilians. The people were the same. Small, withered women, skin creased over onto itself; dark, life-weary eyes that had seen everything.
    I felt huge walking among them. I towered over them. I was huge, and I was armed to the teeth, and these were not my people. Maybe, they did look at me as if I were the killer in Lobel’s movie. Then, on the other hand, the hell with Lobel. I wasn’t a killer.
    The Vietnamese didn’t look up at me. They looked down, or at my chest. Sometimes, when they did look directly at us, they would shade their eyes with their hands as if they were looking at something very far away. I smiled at an old man and he nodded his head. I wondered what that meant. I had been trying to be friendly, and he just nodded. Did he know that I wanted him to like me?
    Walowick found a place that had jars filled with some kind of paste. He thought they might have been Molotov cocktails and called Lieutenant Carroll over. Carroll smelled the jars and shrugged it off.
    “It’s some kind of salve,” he said. “Maybe it’s good for jock itch or something.”
    We were supposed to smile a lot and treat the people with dignity. They were supposed to think we were the good guys. That bothered me a little. I didn’t like having to convince anybody that I was the good guy. That was where we were supposed to start from. We, the Americans, were the good guys. Otherwise it didn’t make the kind of sense I wanted it to make.
    I saw Brunner pocket a small statue from one of the huts. I told him about it and he gave me the finger.
    “Maybe you’ll be a better dude when you come back in your next life,” I said. “Who knows, cockroaches might be in by then.”
    He took a step toward me, and Johnson — I hadn’t seen him nearby — stepped next to me. Brunner looked at Johnson, then turned on his heel and walked away.
    “He ain’t spit,” Johnson said.
    Johnson went off and started looking at a pig that was tied in back of one of the huts. Johnson was different than I thought he was at first. He didn’t seem that sharp, but he knew things. He knew when somebody was doing something that he didn’t like. He knew when one of the black guys was being messed with. And when he knew something he put his butt on the line. That was Johnson. Maybe back in Savannah he was different. But the war made him a certain somebody. The same way that it made Monaco a certain somebody. Monaco was the point man. Johnson had the pig, the big sixty, the heavy ’chine. Who the hell was I?
    I found Peewee trying to play a game with some Vietnamese kids.
    “These little fuckers trying to cheat me,” Peewee said.
    The kids were laughing, having a good time. I told Peewee about the salve that Walowick had found and he wanted to go get some.
    “Why, you got jock itch?”
    “They got medicine for the stuff they be catching over here,” Peewee said, “Right?”
    “Right.”
    “And we over here, right?”
    “Right.”
    We slept in hooches that were surrounded by sandbags. There were vents on both ends, and sometimes they worked. Usually, though, the hooches were hot as anything. We had put straw and leaves on the roof of our hooch back at the base to keep the sun from baking us, but it didn’t help that much. The huts that the Vietnamese lived in were