Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online

chest — “is that the white phosphorus is enough. After it burns the bear’s ass off, then the good sergeant will finish him off with a couple of frag grenades.”
    “Lobel, y-y-you are a faggot!” Sergeant Simpson got up and left the hooch.
    We had to go to a village and do what sounded like public relations work. We were supposed to pass it around that anybody who was a Communist and who wanted to change and be on our side was welcome to come. The program was called “Chieu Hoi,” but Peewee called it “chewing the whores.”
    The village was a good ten minutes away, and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.
    I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of- the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.
    On the way to the chopper I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.
    When we landed, another squad was already at the landing zone. They told us that all the women in the village were either under six or over six hundred.
    The village stunk. You could smell it as you got near. There were huts laid out about fifteen meters from each other. Some were fairly large. There were people in the village walking around, some were building a pen of some kind. Like the guys had told us, they were either very young or very old.
    “All their men is either in the VC army or the
    ARVNs. The ARVNs is the South Vietnamese army, and they suppose to be on our side. The VC is the enemy. This is like the Civil War,” Simpson said. “Sometimes one brother go to the VC and the other brother go to the ARVN. After a while the brother who fighting with the VC either gonna get killed or want to leave and join the ARVN.”
    “They don’t care what side they fight on?” I asked. “They would if they got time to think about it,” Simpson said. “But the ARVN kick they butts if they catch them in the village and they ain’t fighting for the ARVN — ”
    “— and the VC kick they butts if they catch them and they ain’t fighting for the VC,” Peewee said.
    “Bout the size of it.”
    There was a jeep with medical supplies on it. There were aspirins, a few malaria pills, and some Band-Aids. A captain was giving them out to the squad.
    “If you give them malaria pills, make sure they take it on the spot,” he said. “We don’t want this stuff falling into the hands of the VC.”
    “So why we giving it to them?” Peewee asked. “To make them love us,” the captain said. He had a smirk on his face.
    When we got to the village, some of the people ignored us while others came up and begged for C rations and whatever else we would give them. Lobel and I gave chocolate bars to a Vietnamese woman. A small girl clung to the woman’s legs, and Lobel asked her name. The woman told us the girl’s name was An Linh. She was about seven, maybe eight. She was small, like all the Vietnamese, compared to us Americans. She looked like a little doll with dark black eyes that dominated a round, brown face. She could have been black, maybe Puerto Rican.
    Lobel gave her some candy and carried her around on his shoulders. I shook her hand, and she seemed to want to hold on to my fingers, so the three of us went around the village. Sergeant Simpson let a young boy wear his canteen.
    We broke out more C rations, the canned stuff the army passes off for food, and shared them with the kids. Me and Lobel ate with An Linh. A woman, her head too big for her small body, brought us some rice, and Lobel took some.
    “Not bad,” he said.
    I didn’t want any rice. It smelled okay, but I was afraid of being poisoned. My mind went back to Jenkins and how he had been afraid of dying. We hadn’t mentioned his name since he got it. I wanted to ask Lobel about that, but I didn’t.
    “If I owned this village,” Lobel was saying,