“There is something wrong here, Chaplain,” the general said. “How is it that these men have such a low rate of VD?”
“Sir,” the Chaplain replied knowledgeably, “I believe it is because the Battalion Commander has restricted them to the Base Camp.”
The general looked at Patch, who was seated in the front row. “Is that true, Jason? Your men are not allowed out?”
“That is correct, General,” Patch said, getting to his feet. “As you know, they have been through some very rough combat, and I am concerned about turning them loose on the civilian population at this point.”
The general pondered this for a moment. “Well, how do you explain that five of your men still reported in with venereal disease last week, then?”
“I am afraid,” Patch said gravely, “that some of them are having liaisons with prostitutes through the barbed wire. I am told it goes on late at night.”
The general’s face seemed to screw up into a knot. “You mean to say your troops line up to receive sex through a barricade of barbed wire—they’re doing it standing up while everyone else can go to town?”
“It is what I have been told,” Patch said. “It seems to be the only logical explanation.”
“Good God,” the general sighed. “I don’t think it would hurt anything to let them out—if you put some limitations on it—especially if everyone else can.”
“Well, I could certainly . . .”
“Hell,” the general said, a twinkle suddenly in his eye, “that VD rate ought not to be five—it oughta be a hundred and five.”
“Yessir,” Patch said obediently.
“You know,” the general continued, “when I was in Korea there wasn’t a Red Cross girl who’d come within fifty miles of our division.”
“Begging your pardon, General,” the Chaplain interjected meekly, “but if I may say so, incidence of venereal disease is quite high in this area, and as you know, the Army considers it an important morale factor . . .”
General Butterworth eyed the Chaplain impatiently. “Those poor devils,” he said, “will go through a lot before they get back home to Palookaville, U.S.A., and I believe they are entitled to a piece of ass when they have the opportunity.”
The Chaplain’s mind raced for a counterpoint. Certainly there must be one. Sex outside of marriage was sinful. Obviously, if that many men had gotten VD, they must all be doing it. The entire Brigade was sinning, and nobody cared and they were even encouraging it. Lamely, though, he returned to a more practical argument.
“With your indulgence, sir, the manuals are very explicit regarding morale problems associated with venereal disease . . .”
“Chaplain,” the general said, “those manuals were written long ago—probably before I was in the Army and certainly before you were. Maybe then we were fighting to preserve some high sense of honor. Perhaps even with some kind of divine guidance. But I can assure you that is not the case in this lousy war. Sometimes late at night I wonder why we are in it. The bastards themselves who live here don’t give a damn. The people back home don’t seem to either, and every day I’m sending out boys not much older than my own kids to get blown all over the landscape while we sit here powerless to raise a finger against the principal cause of the trouble Up North.
“Give me three armored divisions and I would roll across the DMZ and put an end to this foolishness in a couple of weeks. Then we could go home. But it’s not going to work out like that. So if you want to do something useful, go and pray for those boys who are going to do the fighting—and they are going to have to do it, because that is the way things are—and they’re going to do a good job of it, too. And as far as this VD thing goes, if there is one thing I am convinced of after twenty-three years of military service it is this: men that won’t fuck won’t fight.”
There was a long pause, during which no one even coughed or breathed heavily, and then the general left the tent and stalked up the little hill where his own quarters were. He had his supper brought to him, and he did not come out until the following day. But that same night, Four/Seven received the good news that they could leave the encampment and visit all but a few off-limits places in the native village.
The forward encampment of an Infantry brigade is a bustling, teeming place of decisions and preparation. It has been so since the days of Alexander the Great and the legions of Caesar. Day begins before dawn, and night never ends but simply enmeshes itself with the next day, and the next and the next, and at any time the whole affair is likely to just up and move some place else. But while it is stationary, life goes on as it does in any great city: there are many things to be attended to; there is confusion and laughter and tragedy and foolishness and heartbreak—for the inhabitants are, of course, mere mortal men trying to do the best they can, and in some cases more and in some cases less . . . and it was so on a given week at the place called Monkey Mountain in the late autumn of nineteen hundred and sixty-six:
A corporal with a reputation for scrounging was provided a truck by his commander and sent forty miles away to a Supply depot to see if he could steal some sets of new jungle fatigues. Six hours later he returned with a huge CONEX container which, when pried open, was found to contain approximately one hundred fifty thousand tent pegs. He was told to “get rid of it,” and reassigned a week later to a forward line unit.
A family of Vietnamese was badly afflicted after they cooked their food in some helicopter fuel mistakenly left at the site where the Brigade kitchen staff normally dumped their leftover grease. The Office of Civil Affairs quickly paid them off and the incident was forgotten.
A lieutenant colonel who had caught the clap was told to provide the hospital with samples of urine and semen. As he sat on the latrine attempting to produce the semen, a private first class assigned to clean the commode accidentally walked in on him, thereby earning the officer an unfortunate nickname that remained with him for the rest of his tour.
A terse message was received at Headquarters announcing that a certain Supply lieutenant who had been sent to the coast to supervise the off-loading of materiel had inadvertently been sunning himself aboard an aircraft carrier when it weighed anchor and he would have to be flown back when the ship reached Guam.
A twenty-year-old draftee who had studied concert piano cried for four hours from his hospital bed after seeing that his hand had been amputated.
Several thousand board feet of lumber were delivered to a nearby village by the U.S. Aid Mission for reconstruction of a burned-out church. Three hours later the same pile of lumber was observed in the back of a Vietnamese Army truck, bound for the black market in Saigon.
A master sergeant who had just consumed a fifth of bourbon accidentally shot himself to death while cleaning his .45.
A private first class was given a seven-and-one-half-minute break from KP after receiving notice that his wife had given birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound girl.
A newly commissioned captain on his way to an artillery outpost forgot to gas up his jeep and was found shot by the roadside as he walked back with a jerry can.
A Thanksgiving dinner planned by the Chaplain for children at a nearby orphanage almost turned into an international incident when the orphans, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of turkeys, Pilgrims and Indians, became violently ill after eating the meal. A doctor was summoned, and after a hasty examination he declared that nothing was wrong except that the American food was too rich for children accustomed to a diet of rice and fish.
A nineteen-year-old helicopter pilot was grounded for a week for flying into a tree and shattering his windscreen.
An Air Force major who had received the Silver Star for heroism got drunk the night before he was to be shipped back to the States and decided it would be a good thing to sing to the men before leaving. After being hooted out of the officers’-club tent, he made his way to the enlisted men’s beer hall and, unaccompanied, sang all three verses of “America the Beautiful” and would have sung more if the MPs had no
t arrived and suggested, politely, that he leave.
Two cooks got into a knife fight over what ingredients should be put into a bean soup. One was sent to the hospital, and the other was chained to a tree overnight. Both were back in the kitchen the next morning. The bean soup had been consumed with no extraordinary complaints.
A battery of 105-millimeter howitzers was instructed to test-fire a Korean War-vintage propaganda-leaflet shell to see if it could still be used. When the lanyard was pulled, the roll of leaflets flew out in a gigantic flaming wad, immolating three native huts and severely frightening their occupants.
A Vietnamese child who had been trampled nearly to death by a water buffalo was patched up in the camp hospital. Afterward, his family tried to sue the Army.
A four-foot-long cobra wandered into the TOC by mistake, and thirty-seven fully armed officers and men ran out into the night. The snake wound itself around the Sergeant Major’s chair and was finally dispatched by the Sergeant Major himself with a 12-gauge shotgun borrowed from the MPs. The chair also did not survive.
A captain sat down to write his wife that their application to adopt a war orphan had been turned down by the bureaucracy in Saigon. No reason had been stated. Halfway, he stopped and took out some photographs of the child and began to cry uncontrollably.
A scandalous court-martial was averted by the reassignment of the Mess Sergeant and his assistant following a meal in the enlisted men’s mess served to Colonel Patch and the Brigade Sergeant Major. The colonel’s investigation revealed that the Mess Sergeant had been selling off the best of the Army-supplied food on the Vietnamese black market and substituting a heavy diet of potatoes in its place. The offenders were called in by the Sergeant Major, who pointed to the dictum above his desk and ordered them to report to a rifle company operating deep in enemy territory, “. . . and never again return to base camp . . .”
The Chaplain wrote eighteen letters of condolence at one sitting to the families of dead soldiers, making each one of them sound different.
The expression “Sorry about that” was repeated at least six thousand times between Reveille and Taps.
A Negro soldier named Carruthers was arrested by the MPs after he was found weeping hysterically at a table in a bar in the native village. A bloody six-inch switchblade knife was in his hand, and bystanders said he had used it to stab one of the girls who worked in the bar.
The field telephone in Kahn’s tent growled twice, and he groped out foggily for the handset.
“Is this Bravo Company, Four/Seven?” a voice asked.
“This is Lieutenant Kahn, yeah.”
The voice identified itself as that of a sergeant from the MP detachment. “We got a man down here name of Carruthers says he belongs to you.”
Kahn thought sleepily for a moment. Carruthers? Carruthers? “Ah, yeah . . . mortar platoon . . . big black guy?”
“Black as the ace of spades,” the voice said, “and he’s in a world of shit.”
“What’d he do?”
“Want me to read the charges?”
“Go ahead.”
“First off, he’s charged with assault with a deadly weapon, carrying a deadly weapon, assault with intent to do bodily harm, assault with intent to commit murder, mayhem, disfigurement and so forth; being present at an off-limits establishment and attacking a foreign national—and that ain’t all. They’re typing up some more stuff now.”
Kahn was beginning to come awake. “What in hell did he do?”
“Cut a bar girl with a knife.”
“Jesus, he must have worked her over bad.”
“Don’t know about that yet, Lieutenant; she took off and went to the doctor,” the sergeant said.
“What do you want me to do?” Kahn asked.
“Up to you, sir—he’s your man.”
“Will he keep till morning?”
“Oh, yes, sir—we got him cuffed to a CONEX container. He’s still pretty drunk and kind of wild. Might be good to let him calm down a bit.”
“Okay, Sergeant—thanks. I’ll come down first thing in the morning.” Kahn hung up the phone and lay back down on his cot. In the darkness the paperwork lay stacked before his eyes like a tall white chimney.
At fifteen minutes after seven in the morning the field telephone rang again. Kahn was shaving when someone called out his name.
“Lieutenant Kahn,” he said into the mouthpiece. From the other end a voice demanded gruffly, “Do you speak Nigger?”
“I beg your pardon?” Kahn said. He wasn’t sure if he had heard the question. It sounded like Colonel Patch.
“I asked if you speak Nigger,” the voice said again.
It was Patch. Kahn stumbled for a second. “Ah, well, sir, I uh . . . am from the South. I have spoken with a lot of Negroes.”
“Then get the hell down here and translate for me,” Patch said. “This is your problem too.” He hung up the phone.
When Kahn arrived in Patch’s headquarters, Carruthers was standing at attention in front of the colonel’s desk. Two MPs were waiting outside. Patch was scowling.
“Kahn,” Patch said, “this man has apparently done something terrible. I am trying to find out what his version is. I have asked him three times and I haven’t understood a goddamn word he says.”
Kahn looked at Carruthers. His eyes were bloodshot, and even though he was at attention he was blubbering quietly and trembling from head to toe.
“Carruthers,” Kahn said gently, “I want you to tell me very slowly what happened.”
“I already said that,” Patch grumbled in a low voice in the background.
Carruthers suddenly seemed to hyperventilate. He gasped a few times and then spewed out a glub of words, which sounded to Patch like this:
“Wellsuhlutent . . . Isndis bah wivsom gazn axed fadis gult’ daince wibme’n . . . ’n she said she ont daincewib no nigras’n she . . . a sayed ta me ta githail awayfrum er’n I’s clean’n my fangernells wibma naf’n it slipt’n cutuh . . . bud I dint meen’t isware . . .”
Carruthers’ big beefy hands were rolled into tight balls, and he began to choke and sob.
Patch glowered at Kahn. “Can you make any sense out of that?”
“I believe so, Colonel,” Kahn said, looking at Carruthers. “He says he and some other men were at a bar and he asked a girl—a bar girl—to dance with him and she refused because he’s black, and she told him to leave and—I’m not exactly sure about this part, but I believe he was cleaning his fingernails with a knife and it slipped and cut her but it was unintentional.” Somewhat composed, Carruthers nodded his head in agreement.
“That is amazing,” Patch exclaimed. “I ought to put you in for a medal.” He ordered Carruthers out of the room.
“Well,” Patch said, clearing his throat, “we’re going to have to do something about all this. These are pretty serious charges. I’ll have to appoint an investigating officer . . . Any suggestions?”
Kahn held his breath. “Uh, no, sir . . . but maybe we should look outside of Battalion . . . I mean, since the charges are serious . . .”
“Good idea,” Patch said solemnly. “Uh, how about that guy on the Old Man’s staff?—one of the aides—I’ve seen you with him in the officers’ club a few times.”
“Maybe you mean Lieutenant Holden.”
“Yeah—Holden, that’s it.” Patch smiled. He relished the idea of bogging that cocky guy down in a nightmare like this. “Get hold of him and tell him to report to me,” Patch said.
Kahn walked out light-headed. He couldn’t wait to see the expression on Holden’s face. It was like beating him at poker. Almost as good.
Holden looked at the girl across the table. He could see why Carruthers might have been taken with her. Her almond eyes were tantalizing. Her complexion was clear—unlike the faces of most of the women, who had ugly scars from smallpox. This one was different. She wore pretty clothes, and he bet she didn’t shit in the street like the others.
A cast extended from he
r wrist to her elbow and was set in a sling of silk cloth. She remained aloof while a small, smiling one-legged Vietnamese man tried to explain the consequences of what had happened to her.
“You see,” the man said in a thick but clear accent, “she no can work for long time—two, maybe three months. Regular customers—they not wait so long, so she lose ten, maybe twenty thousand piaster. Also, some maybe find new girl—not come back even after arm well—she lose from this too. She also have to buy new dress—other one ruined—all bloodstains.” The man seemed genuinely concerned.
“What does she want?” Holden asked.
“Here is list,” the man said, handing Holden a slip of paper. “She ask me to write for her. She say if Ahmercan soldier pay, she forget everything.”
Holden studied the list. The total for lost trade, future losses and the dress came to seventy-eight thousand piasters—about four hundred dollars. She asked no punitive damages.
“I see,” Holden said. “Uh . . . let me ask you this, Mr. . . . ah . . . ah . . .”
“Bac,” the man replied. “My name is Bac. I am her friend. I was soldier under Marshal Ky—until I lose leg.”
“Let me ask you, Mr. Bac, who was the lady’s doctor?”
Bac spoke to the girl and she gave a long answer.
“She say she go to doctor in Xuan Lap village, but, uh, he now gone to Qui Nhon. She not remember name—she say she was very upset.”
“Why did she go all the way to Xuan Lap? Why didn’t she go to the hospital at Tuy Than?” Holden said.
Bac spoke to the girl again.
“She say she not trust hospital at Tuy Than. Say they too busy with soldiers—not take good care of her.”
“And she says the soldier attacked her without warning—she did not say anything to him at all—is that correct?”
Bac turned to the girl.
“She say she did not speak to him. He stab her for no reason.”
“I see,” Holden said. He wrote in his notebook. “Well,” he said finally, “tell her, please, that I will get this information back to the commander of the soldier involved and I will let you know what the decision is.”