Fallen Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

mouth.
    “I am.”
    “You supposed to have a profile or something, right?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Well, they got it listed that you’re concerned with it,” the captain said. “You got any pains or anything?”
    “Not right now,” I said. “But I got a bad knee.”
    “You been wounded in the knees?”
    “From playing basketball,” I said.
    “Yeah, okay,” the captain looked me up and down. “I’m sending a radio message through to look up your medical records. In the meantime I’ll just let you stay with the squad. You’ll be okay.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Fact is, all you guys better go on over and stay with the squad for a few days. I got word this morning that we’ll probably be moving down to Third Corps and then ship over to Hawaii from there.”
    “Hawaii?”
    “Yeah, looks like this thing is about over,” the captain said. “What I want you boys to do is to listen to your squad leaders and try to keep yourselves alive.”
    We got weapons. Me, Peewee, and Jenkins got the usual M-16 rifles. Johnson, who had had machine-gun training, got an M-60. It was a big, wicked-looking weapon that made the M-i6’s look almost fragile in comparison. Johnson signed for it, took it by the handle, and walked away without even looking at it. They fit each other.
    We were asked if we wanted anything else. Peewee asked for and got a pistol in addition to his M-16.
    “You want a pistol?” the armorer asked me.
    “What for?” I asked.
    He didn’t answer. I didn’t want to be close enough to anybody to shoot him with a pistol.
    “Make sure you keep those M-i6’s clean,” he said. “Don’t go believing that stuff about how it’s going to work no matter what happens to it. You don’t clean that piece, charlie is going to clean your ass.”
    We were assigned a hooch and found bunks. I wondered what had happened to the guys who had had the bunks before we got them, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask anybody.
    “Okay, listen up!” A soft-voiced lieutenant stuck his head into the tent. His name tag read “Carroll.” “I’m your platoon leader. You guys have any problems, you let me know through your squad leader. Anything really heavy, and you can come right to me with it. This is a book platoon. We do everything by the book. You new guys better listen and learn. That way you get to be old guys.
    “Everybody’s talking about Hawaii. There’s plenty of time to think about getting out of here and getting to Hawaii when we re at the airport on the way out. Until then, keep your mind on your work. That’s all and good luck.”
    The rest of the squad was outside playing volleyball. We unloaded our gear and picked out bunks to lie on. There was gear on some of the other bunks. An M-79 grenade launcher lay across one. There were copies of Playboy on another.
    “Hey, Johnson, bet you didn’t have nothing this good down in Georgia, huh?” Peewee said.
    “You really need to die young, don’t you?” Johnson grunted the words out.
    “What you do in Georgia, anyway?” Peewee said. Johnson got up on one elbow and looked over at him. I thought he was mad, but he just grinned at Peewee. “If the man give me a job back home I wouldn’t be doing this job over here,” he said. “Guess you didn’t know that, huh?”
    They kept at it for a while, Peewee agitating until I felt that for him it was just some kind of sport. Find somebody big and mean-looking to mess with and then push your luck.
    I started writing a letter to Mama. I hadn’t written much during basic training, but now I wanted to, and I really wasn’t sure why. I started writing’about the trip over, remembered that I had already written about that, and started again. The second start was about how I was glad that the war was in Vietnam and not home, but that didn’t sound right, either. I was looking for things to say but everything sounded lame.
    The track over the gym in Stuyvesant High School was so small you had to run around it nearly