Friendly Fire (32 page)

Mrs. Hamilton told how hard she had had to work this past summer, how, because of her husband's injuries, she had had to bring in the hay. She had done most of the gardening and milking herself.

“You know,” Gene said to Mr. Hamilton, “the one thing you keep thinking when you have a son in combat is that it can't happen to him. But it did. It did. When I think of the reason, the causes that took our sons.…” He saw that Mr. Hamilton's face had tightened again.

“Leroy was a wonderful boy,” he replied. And that was all he would say.

When it was time to go back inside, Mrs. Hamilton showed Peg the pieced quilts she made during the winters, two or three each year. She opened a trunk and lifted out and unfolded the one she had made especially for Leroy. When she spread it out for Peg to look at, she began to cry again.

The Mullens left early the next morning for their Iowa farm.

Six days after their return, Peg and Gene were listening to the morning news about the Vietnam War when there was a knock at their kitchen door.

“I'll get it, Mother,” Gene said. He walked down the back steps and peered through the storm door. A young black man looked at him from the other side. Gene opened the door a crack and said, “Yes? Can I help you?”

“Mr. Mullen? Mr. Gene Mullen?” the young man said.

“Yes, that's right.”

“I'm Martin Culpepper.”

Gene took Martin's hand in both of his and squeezed it in joy. He whirled around and shouted up the stairway, “Mother? Mother? It's Martin! Martin Culpepper. He's back from Vietnam!”

“For heaven's sakes, Gene,” Peg called back, “don't just stand there, let Martin come on in!”

Martin Luther Culpepper was then twenty-one years old. He had been born in Mississippi, but three months later his family had moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where his father, the Reverend G. L. Culpepper, took a job with the Rath Packing Company and became the pastor of the New Zion Baptist Church. Martin attended local schools, and upon receiving his high school diploma, too, went to work for Rath. At night Martin attended the Hawkeye Institute of Technology, where he was learning welding with the hope that this skill would keep him out of the Army. It didn't. He was drafted six months later.

“It's the only way they would have gotten me,” he told the Mullens. Culpepper was nineteen when he was inducted. Like Michael, Martin was sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for basic and advanced infantry training. He arrived in Vietnam a week after Michael Mullen.

Culpepper was pleased to be assigned to Charlie Company. He had been told that more Iowans were there and that “if things got hot, Charlie Company had the most dependable people. They didn't get rattled.” That is how, he told the Mullens, he came to be with their son on that steep, wooded hilltop on that terrible night five months later when Michael Mullen died.

“All right now, Martin,” Gene said, hitching his chair up to the kitchen table so that he and Culpepper could sit close. “We want to know what happened. Who was responsible that night? Who called in the shot?
Who-killed-our-boy?
”

Peg had a pad of paper and pencil and was prepared to take notes. “We want you to tell it like it really is, Martin. Give us their names,” Peg said. “What were you doing that night? There was no enemy around. Why were you in the mountains? Why did they call in artillery? Start at the beginning, and tell us everything.”

“Well, we heard it might have been any one of three things,” Culpepper said. “We were told that the gun was the same gun that had killed some guys in Bravo Company a couple of months before—”

“The same gun!” Peg interrupted. “There was something wrong with it?”

“We heard something about a gun that always fired low,” Culpepper said. “We also heard that the officer in charge of the guns was drunk, or that the guys firing were drunk and—”

BLAM! Gene's fist slammed the table in rage. He pointed his finger in Martin's face. “Now, I want you to tell me this, Martin: Who was drunk? WHO WAS DRUNK and killed my boy?”

“I don't know who it was, Mr. Mullen. Nobody ever told us any names.”

“You heard the officer was drunk, am I right?” Gene asked.

“Well, we heard that, yes. But we also heard there was something wrong with the gun.”

“Martin, you said it could have been any one of three reasons,” Peg said. “What was the third?”

“There was a rumor that someone back on the hill they were firing from had failed to correct for the height of our hill,” Culpepper said. “When the lifers came out the next day, they tried to get us to say it had been Vietcong.”

“That's typical,” Peg said disgustedly. “They wouldn't want to accept the blame. Because somebody was drunk or high on drugs or something.”

“Was there a lot of drugs around?” Gene asked.

Culpepper looked uncomfortable. “While I was there, they called us in the Third Platoon a bunch of dope addicts, pot heads, acid freaks—you name it. But we weren't really. We smoked, sure. At one time everybody in the platoon had smoked pot except the lieutenant.”

“Did Michael?” Peg asked.

“Smoke? No, no. Mike never smoked,” Culpepper said. “I didn't know Mike all that well—I knew him, you understand, but we were in different platoons. I liked him. He was just a regular guy, calm and quiet. He didn't do too many things to excess. He didn't gamble or anything like the normal guys did. Everybody on payday—well, somebody would get out the dice, they'd scrape some place out on the ground, get out the money and the dice. Mike would come around and watch once in a while, but he didn't gamble. There was one kid nicknamed Perfect—everybody had nicknames.” Culpepper smiled. “There was Perfect and Razzle-Dazzle and the Prince.… Nobody ever calls you by your full or last name. You get a nickname, and everybody sort of adopts it. Everybody called me Pep, for instance, or Pepper.…”

“Did Mike have a nickname?” Gene asked.

Culpepper thought for a moment. “No, I don't think so. Everybody just called him Mike. This one guy, though, Perfect, he could gamble damned good. He'd sometimes send home as much as a thousand dollars a month. Bought himself a brand-new Dodge Charger with it. It was waiting for him when he came home—only he got killed.” Culpepper began to fiddle with a pencil. “He got hit sixteen or seventeen times—not the same night as Michael. It was later on.” He looked up at the Mullens. “People don't realize the feelings of people who have been to Vietnam and what happens afterward. The average GI when he comes back, he don't say nothing about the war. The first thing everybody asked me when I got back was, ‘Hey, man, did you kill somebody, man?' That's the first thing my old buddies asked me last night. They always want to know if you killed somebody. ‘No, you didn't,' they'd say. ‘You didn't kill nobody. I don't believe you.'… They want to know, ‘Did you see any action?'

“I said, ‘Yeah, we got shot at.'

“‘Really?' they'd want to know.

“‘Yeah,' I'd say, ‘I saw some action,' but you don't want to talk about it,” Culpepper told the Mullens. “It brings up bad memories. Like the night Perfect got killed. And Cocoanut. They were two of my best buddies.” Culpepper was rolling the pencil between his palms, looking down at the table. “I just got through talking to them,” he said. “They'd walked out to set up some Claymores, and I'd said, ‘Okay, I'll pass the word around that you're out there.' It had just gotten dark.” Culpepper pushed away from the table and stood up. He went over to the sink and looked out the kitchen window.

“What happened to them, Martin?” Gene asked quietly.

Culpepper turned back. “We didn't even see the dinks, Mr. Mullen. They'd crawled almost up to us and I was just sitting there, and suddenly all hell breaks loose!” He cradled an imaginary machine gun in his hands.
“Buh-buh-buh-Bam! Buh-buh-buh-Bam!
Probably three, four machine guns. We didn't—my gun was back at the foxhole, I didn't even, hell, I didn't have a chance to do anything. I ran for my foxhole, and the others thought I'd been killed because I disappeared in a bunch of dust. Perfect and Cocoanut were out front. Just as I got into my hole, I heard Cocoanut say, ‘Hey, man, I'm hit!
I'm hit!'
I went to get up, and that's when they started firing RPG rounds—”

“What's that?” Peg asked.

“Those armor-piercing grenades they got,” Culpepper said. “One hit in front of my position, one hit to the left. Cocoanut said,
‘I'm hit!'
and oh, God, I heard Perfect groan from real low in his throat, ‘I'm h-h-hit
unh-h-h-h,'
like that, and I knew he was hit bad. Then another RPG hit right beside Cocoanut, BOOM! He never knew what hit him … and Perfect, he's out there, and guys run out through all this damn fire and stuff and grab him, start dragging him back, but they couldn't get back to the bunkers.” Culpepper remained standing, looking down at Peg and Gene seated at their kitchen table. “We couldn't even shoot back. They caught us lax, the way they wanted. Everybody goofing off, nobody paying attention, people just sitting around.…” He slid back into his chair and turned to the Mullens in agony. “We'd been searching for them all day long! And we couldn't find them. We were all relaxed; nobody was watching, no more than just watching out front. It wasn't quite dark. You could sort of see. I guess they'd been crawling along the ground. We figured some of them must have been as close as fifteen, twenty feet before everything broke loose.” Culpepper wrung his hands together. “Perfect lay out there moaning. He kept moaning and
moaning
and MOANING! Things like that, you know, guys who … people.…” He pulled his hands apart and wiped them on his trouser legs. “You don't want to tell people about it because it brings all these bad memories back.…”

“You don't have to tell us, Martin,” Peg said. “Not if you don't want to.”

But Culpepper did want to tell the Mullens. He wanted them to know what it had been like in Vietnam.

With tears in his eyes he described Perfect's wounds, how Perfect had lain in the open for ten minutes, been hit over and over again until he had no back left and the medics couldn't understand how he hadn't been killed right away.

Cocoanut, too, had been hit several times in one leg, had three holes in his arm when the RPG round exploded beside him, tore off his unwounded leg and killed him. Both Perfect and Cocoanut had been in Vietnam for a long time. One had spent ten months there; the other had less than thirty days left in his tour. Martin tried to explain the anguish their deaths had caused him, how he had felt the pain one experienced losing a close member of the family. “It hurts so much,” he told Peg, “but you know the kind of hurt I mean.”

“I know,” she said. “So does Gene.”

Culpepper glanced at Gene. “I wanted to kill people after that.”

“Did you?” Gene asked.

“Yes.” Culpepper nodded.

He told them about the time his machine-gun squad had been sent out with a different infantry company and set up along a hedgerow. Culpepper's assistant machine gunner had spotted a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regular crawling toward a young unsuspecting American soldier who had been sitting helmetless, his M-79 grenade launcher open on his lap. Culpepper could tell that the NVA soldier would emerge from the hedgerow between the unwary American soldier and his own position. Two other GIs were at the other end of the hedgerow. The NVA soldier would be trapped between them. Culpepper and the others could walk up behind him and capture him alive. “The kid with the M-79 was just sitting there playing,” Culpepper said. “The gook got right up to the corner and saw him. He didn't run. He just stopped and froze. I was standing in a crouch. All I could see was the top part of him; then he saw me and made a quick move toward his shoulder, whirled around toward me, and I stitched him,
buh-buh-buh-bup!
I felt so damned
good!
I'd killed me one of them sonuvabitchin' gooks!” Martin paused, half embarrassed by his language. Gene indicated with a little wave of his hand that it was all right, that Martin should go on.

Culpepper told how he had fired fourteen times, knew he'd hit the North Vietnamese soldier in the chest. “I saw him dead and I realized I'd killed another human being, you know? It made me want to cry. I can't explain the feeling.… I haven't gotten over it yet.” He looked up at Gene. “He had had two grenades. I thought he'd had a pistol. That he was reaching for a pistol, see? There was no way to tell. I felt
so bad
about killing him. Here I was sinking down lower and lower, feeling worse and worse about it all the time because I'd killed a human being and everybody was pounding me on the back, saying, ‘Man, you got that sonuvabitch! You killed one!' After that I started getting scared.”

Culpepper explained how they then started seeing the enemy all over the place. Three here, four there. The men began shooting. They could hear semiautomatic fire coming from the village, more shots from the company perimeter behind them to their right. Culpepper and his machine-gun squad picked up and moved back to the safety of the company line. He didn't sleep that night. “I thought every little noise was an elephant coming through the bushes. Your nerves can only take so much. They say people turn into animals in a war,” he told Peg, “but not really. You get so your body changes. Your senses change so that the least little noise wakes you up automatically. When I got out of the field and back to the rear, I'd sit down to eat and my nerves were so bad my hands would start shaking, and I'd have to stop in the middle of the meal. Put my hands under the table because I was embarrassed, you know? I didn't want people to see.… My hands still shake. My nerves are still bad. I guess I'm going to be that way for a long time.”