Free Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers Page A

lit up.
    We got back to the base, and they took off the VC first. They must have called ahead because there was a jeep waiting to take the VC back. Carroll went with the news team in another jeep. The rest of us walked from the chopper pad to the huts.
    We got back, and they had laid the body out on the ground. The arms were out, and the legs were crossed at the ankles. I walked by him. He wasn’t any bigger than Kenny.
    We went directly to the mess hall. They had saved lunch for us. The news guys were buzzing around, checking their gear and everything. They must have taken a hundred pictures each of the dead VC. They even put a weapon down by his body and took a picture of him with that. Simpson came over to the new guys and made sure that we all had our weapons on safe.
    We had baked chicken, carrots, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, and rolls for lunch. And strawberry ice cream.
    I sat with Peewee and asked him what he thought.
    “I done seen two VC over here so far,” he said. “One captured sucker and one dead sucker.”
    “I didn’t even see where he was hit,” I said.
    “Fool had bout twenty holes in his ass,” Peewee said. “I don’t know where you was looking at.”
    Neither did I. I couldn’t tell if there was too much to see, or if my eyes were getting bad. Maybe I just didn’t want to see some of the things I was seeing.
    Lieutenant Carroll came over and said that we had done a good job.
    It wasn’t real. We were eating baked chicken, and all I could think of was that it was pretty good. We had gone out to the jungle and seen one VC and killed him. Then we came back in time for lunch. Maybe Lobel was right. Maybe it was just some kind of movie.
    Sergeant Simpson came to our hut and brought some magazines. I asked him if they had found a rifle or anything near the body.
    “Perry wants to make sure the dude was a VC,” Brunner said. He still had his cigar in his mouth.
    “He wasn’t no VC,” Simpson said. “He was a North Vietnamese regular, from one of their big units, the 324th. They found his papers on him.”
    “What’s that mean?” I asked.
    “How I know?” Simpson said. “All I know is my time is getting short. I’m going to go take me a short nap because I ain’t got time for a long one.”
    Monaco wanted the squad to practice volleyball. He had bet twenty-five dollars on our squad versus the Blazers, a team from Charlie Company.
    “We can’t beat them,” Brew said. “They beat us six times already.”
    “You know that tall guy with the big hands?” Monaco was flossing his teeth.
    “Yeah,” Brew was putting salve on his feet. “He’s the one that spikes all the time.”
    “Well, he got hit the day before yesterday,” Monaco said. “He ain’t playing.”

Chapter 7
    Jamal, the medic, came by with malaria pills. I took one, and he sat on the edge of the bunk.
    “I see you people got three VC today,” he said.
    “Three?”
    “That’s what the report says,” Jamal said.
    “We got one VC,” I said.
    “All I know is what I see on the reports,” Jamal said. “They put three down on their reports, I send three in to Regiment.”
    “I don’t believe they put down three when everybody saw that we only got one.”
    “You’ll get used to what goes on over here,” he said. He had a singsong way of talking, like a child in a man’s body.
    “Did Captain Stewart see the report?”
    “Who do you think gave me the report?” He left some malaria pills on Peewee’s bunk and split.
    “Thanks,” I called after him as he left the hooch.
    One of the correspondents had left a New York Times behind and I went through it. Mostly it was the same old garbage. The Knicks had drafted some guy from Southern Illinois I never heard of, and they were still losing a lot of games.
    There wasn’t much about the war. A lot of VC were killed north of Saigon, and President Johnson was saying that the United States was ready to come to the peace table if the Communists were.
    It