There was no more gunfire but the yelling continued. No, not yelling, I thought. Screaming... it’s
someone screaming! Every Marine on the team was
doing what I was doing: crawling toward the sound of a
firefight. As I neared the outcrop, the screaming grew
louder. Then laughing. Laughing? Now I was confused.
I reached Ronnie, who had left the trail before
I had. He was on his stomach, his rifle on the ground,
and his head on his arms—and he was laughing! My
other teammates were on their knees, and they were
laughing too. The whole damned team was laughing. I
struggled to my feet and moved past the foliage.
rock outcrop and he thought it was an NVA. He’d
pointed his M-16 over his head and held the trigger
down until the magazine was empty. When that didn’t
work, he pulled his Ka-Bar and started stabbing at the
monkey. The monkey was beating on Angel’s head
with open palms the whole time.
It was another ten minutes before everyone was
calm enough to become a Recon team again. We reported our position and beat feet out of the area since
any local NVA would know we were there and would
be looking for us.
From that day on Angel was known as Monkey
Angel was doing pirouettes around the little Boy.—
clearing, screaming at the top of his lungs with a wild
look in his eyes and plunging his Ka-Bar, first over his
right shoulder and then over his left, at a little brown
mass sitting on top of his pack. The little brown mass
was dodging the Ka-Bar and banging on Angel’s head.
A friggin’ rock ape.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
I was leery about getting close to Angel the way
he was flinging his knife around. I retrieved his rifle
and loaded a fresh magazine although that took awhile
since I was laughing so hard my hands were shaking. I
stood at the edge of the clearing and waved my arms
but he made three circles before he noticed me. Angel
had to be exhausted after several minutes of dancing,
leaping, and thrusting his knife. He weighed maybe
125 and was carrying at least 90 pounds of assorted
weapons, food, and water in addition to the monkey on
his back. He finally stopped dancing and screamed for
me to shoot the NVA although he used a considerable
amount of vulgarity to get his point across.
I had to do something before those nasty looking claws or teeth made Angel into a medivac. Since
the little monkey had no intention of jumping off Angel’s pack, I had to prod it several times with my rifle
barrel before it shrieked and jumped back onto the
rocks. The monkey was maybe three feet tall and sixty
pounds. It seemed to be berating me for spoiling its
fun and even threw a couple of loose rocks at me.
It was a good five minutes before Angel was
calm enough to tell us what happened. Turns out the
monkey had jumped on his pack as he walked past the
The Warrior Heart November 2014 - 8