SUMMARY
After receiving news of Charlie Company being pinned down in Khe Sanh due to battalion sized VC forces, Alpha Company (the one that is Perry is in) has been called to come to Khe Sanh as reinforcements. The landing of the helicopter was very violent, and the group nearly crashed. Their job was to secure the landing zone, and fortunately, there were no casualties in their group. However, Charlie Company lost nine people in total, and it was revealed that they were against North Vietnamese regulars, soldiers much deadlier than the Viet Cong. Soon after, Lieutenant Carroll talked to Perry about his medical profile and said that he doesn’t have to go on patrols if his knee is hurting him too bad.
One day, a television crew came around and began interviewing the soldiers about their reasons for fighting in Nam. Lieutenant said that it was to demonstrate that America stood for something. Sergeant Simpson said it was to free the South Vietnamese people. Walowick said he only fought because his country asked him to. Lobel and Brew said that if Vietnam fell to the Communists then the rest of Asia would fall to influence as well. Finally, Perry answered by saying that if we defended our country abroad, then we would not have to fight in the streets of America. Peewee did not give a meaningful answer so he didn’t get featured.
At 1200 hours, Alpha Company headed north to a sandy area about two kilometers from the sea. It was then that the group spotted a Viet Cong and began shooting at him. They lay his body out on the ground and began examining him. The news people were very nosy and took hundreds of pictures of the dead man. It was soon discovered that he too, was a North Vietnamese regular, thanks to papers that he carried with him. Throughout most of the day, the Vietnamese soldier was all he could think of. He felt ashamed as to how his fellow comrades though of him as a trophy, when in fact that man was as human as any American soldier.
At 0400 hours, Perry got a terrible virus of some sort and had to go to the latrine far too often. He went on sick call and missed the company’s patrol session at 0800. Because he had missed patrol with the group, Lieutenant Carroll had orders to send him to Charlie Company temporarily for another patrol. Unfortunately, his time there did not go too well, as they accidently fired artillery on their first platoon, killing most of them.
Moving on to better news, Thanksgiving was here and it was also his brother Kenny’s birthday. Money would be too easy of a gift, and he wanted for it to be more meaningful. He asked Lieutenant Carroll if he could send Kenny a knife, but Carroll had an even better idea, and he gave Perry a jacket he had bought in Saigon (it was black silk and there was a map in green of Vietnam on the back).
Finally, in this section, Alpha Company was assigned to go on another pacification mission (going into villages and befriending the villagers). Then Perry got a letter from Kenny saying that he wanted to enter a local basketball league but he doubted his skills and plus needed ten dollars. Like a good brother, Perry gave Kenny words of encouragement and slipped in twenty dollars in the letter.
QUOTE
“ How come you always talk about movies?...Because they’re the only real things in life…You didn’t think any of this was real did you?...I’d be real nervous, except I know none of this is real and I’m just playing a part” (Myers 71-72).
REACTION
I feel that this quote really sums up what this section is all about. At some points I the story, you see Perry asking himself what he was doing fighting in this war. Sometimes he would say that he is fighting to help with his college tuition, and sometimes he would say he is fighting because here was nothing else to do in the World. The World is what a lot of the soldiers call the states. For me, this implies that in the soldier’s mind, Vietnam is not reality at all, and they are just trying to fight this war and win, in order to go back home to reality. Therefore, when Lobel says that movies are more real than this war, I feel that there is some truth to it. A lot of Americans in the 1960s also did not like this war, as they felt that it is something that America should have never been involved in the first place. Since The U.S did lose this war, it has always been sort of blurry in American history.
I felt kind of bad for Perry on page 84, because he mentioned that he wanted to have something more in the World than he already had. The back story of this thought is when Lobel and Perry had a conversation about their girlfriends. When Lobel had suggested he meet one of his starlet girls, but Perry dismissed the idea, saying that he wanted something real. I felt bad for him because he didn’t have anything to look forward to when he got home in addition to his family. He wanted to go to Vietnam in order to gain a better understanding of what he needed, but he still couldn’t find it.
Sometimes all of the action, violence, and deaths happening in stories like this, it can be easy to feel kind of down in the dumps. Fortunately, there were two funny moments that resonated with me in the reading of this section. The first moment was when they talked about Perry having that stomach virus on page 88. It was funny how Jamal, the medic said that all Perry got was the runs. But Perry kept on being paranoid and stubborn, thinking that he had been badly poisoned. Also, on page 108-109, there was a scene where Brunner and Monaco were having a dispute and out of nowhere, Monaco took out a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it towards Brunner. It wasn’t funny at first, but after reading further and finding out that the grenade did not have any powder in it, it became very amusing indeed.
