Better Times Than These

  “Just remember this,” Patch said, “your men are your problem. You’re running the show, and I’m telling you how to do it. If they’re getting blown away by booby traps, tell ’em to go after the guys who make them. It isn’t Little Red Riding Hood who’s putting them there.

  “Well,” he said, “I gotta go—looks like the weather’s closing in.” Kahn followed him outside.

  “By the way, what’s all this stuff they’ve put on the bushes?” Patch said, indicating a dozen or so scrubby trees festooned with the tops of C-ration tins, empty cartridge brass and other bright and decorative items.

  “Christmas trees, Colonel,” said Kahn. “It’s Christmas this week, you know, and—”

  “Have them get rid of them,” Patch interrupted. “Sooner the better.”

  Kahn was stunned. “Sir, may I ask why? The men have worked hard on them for a week now—and it’s put them in pretty good spirits . . .”

  “I think you’re wrong. It only makes them more lonely. Hurts morale. Saw it in Korea. In this battalion there’s not going to be any outward celebration of Christmas. Doesn’t mean they can’t recognize Christmas, but no dog-and-pony show. They all know about it, but there’s no need to dwell on it. Plenty of time to celebrate when they get back home.” The colonel started downhill for the helicopter, and Kahn fell in beside him.

  “Colonel,” he said pleadingly, “I know these men. And if I have to go out there with my thumb up my ass and—”

  “Better than a sharp stick, my boy—better than a sharp stick.” Patch grinned drily.

  “By the way, I’m sending you a new Executive Officer in a few days.” He stepped up his pace and was gone.

  The hours dissolved into days and the days into weeks, and always there was the rain.

  Sometimes it would last for days on end, a relentless drizzle blowing down from the north; sometimes it would pour down in torrents out of the west, with brief periods of cessation during which the sky would hang heavy with dark, sullen clouds.

  The mood of the men matched the weather. They had been resentful over the curtailing of their Christmas but finally took it in stride like everything else. They had gotten better at their jobs, and casualties began to drop. Everyone kept his own DEROS calendar—an Army acronym for Date Effective Return from Overseas—to mark his remaining time, and through this hopeful practice the days settled into a crazy kind of routine in which each man lived for the particular hour he had set for himself to strike off another day. And before them lay the valley, a patchwork sea of thin brown mud alive now with thousands of bright green rice shoots. Around its edges the jungle lapped out in poison green, beckoning maddeningly for their presence. And always there was the rain . . .

  If it had not been for Sergeant Trunk, Kahn’s troubles would have been worse than they were. The two of them had lapsed into sort of father-mother roles—Kahn giving the orders, and expecting them to be carried out; Trunk dealing with the day-to-day gripes, fuck-ups and confusion. He scolded and blustered around the company area, putting things as he wanted them, trying to keep the place as habitable as possible, handing out discipline and trying to keep supply moving. In between all this he somehow found time to help the men with personal problems; arrange their R&R leaves; see to their general health and welfare, in such ways as getting a hot meal flown out once in a while; and do other things to keep the Company running. Supply, however, remained a major problem.

  Patch had done what he could, but because of the weather, helicopter pilots were often as not unable or unwilling to fly, and the Company had to make do with what was on hand. Beyond that, because of the huge buildup of new troop units all over the country, most items of necessity were in hot demand and short supply. In time, after sending in requisition slips and engaging in repeated arguments via the field radio, Kahn turned to the time-honored military practice of cannibalization.

  He instructed Trunk to inventory their available gear, whatever the condition, matched it with the company Table of Organization and Equipment and arrived at a formula for stripping one piece of equipment to make another functional again. If, for instance, a mortar was out of commission because the aiming sight was busted and another down because it had no baseplate, he would cannibalize a third to repair the other two. If a machine gun’s sear was worn down or its spring loose, he would strip it down and allocate the parts to guns with other problems. This worked well enough for a while, but the supply famine persisted, and in the end Kahn resorted to the ultimate cannibalization. He cannibalized a man.

  The man was named Dunbar, a rifleman in Peck’s platoon whom no one considered very useful anyway. One day, after listening to a series of desperate pleas for this item or that, Kahn stormed out of his tent, and the first person he saw was Dunbar, lounging stupidly under his shelter half.

  “Come in here for a minute,” Kahn said. Dunbar looked at him dully, then rose up and followed his commander inside.

  “Dunbar,” Kahn said, “is your equipment in good order?”

  Dunbar replied that it was.

  “Good,” Kahn said. “Now, what I am going to say to you is strictly between the two of us—understand?”

  Dunbar nodded his head.

  “With any luck at all,” Kahn said, “a chopper with water and C-rats is going to land here in an hour. When it leaves, I want you on it.”

  Dunbar looked at Kahn blankly for a moment, seeming not to comprehend what he had been told.

  Kahn took out a piece of paper and sat down at his desk and began writing on it.

  “When you get to Monkey Mountain, go to the hospital and give them this note. It says you have been sick. It says you probably have a bad case of malaria or some other strange tropical ailment and you are unfit for duty. It says this illness comes and goes every few weeks and that I, your Company Commander, request that you be observed for at least that length of time and not be allowed to return to the field until you’re well. Got it?”

  “Uh, Lieutenant,” Dunbar protested, “I ain’t sick—I ain’t been nothin’ but wet since I come out here.”

  Kahn overrode him. “This is your chance for a few weeks in the rear. Just do as I say. Don’t argue with me.”

  “Yessir,” Dunbar said, his face brightening.

  “Now what I want you to do is gather up all your gear and take it to Sergeant Trunk. Everything you’ve got—your rifle, your pack, your poncho liner, grenades, fatigues, boots—everything. Leave it all here. Understand?”

  A befuddled look filled Dunbar’s face. “My fatigues, sir—and my boots?”

  “That’s right, Dunbar. When you get on that chopper I don’t want you wearing anything but skivvies and dog tags. Leave everything else with Sergeant Trunk—we need it.” Kahn continued to write.

  “But, sir,” Dunbar said pleadingly, “I . . . I can’t go back to base camp like that—in my underwear.” He sounded as if he might begin to cry.

  “Why not?” Kahn said acidly.

  “Because, uh . . .” Dunbar thought for a moment. He knew there must be a reason. “Uh . . . because I’ll get into trouble,” he said.

  “No, you won’t,” Kahn said. He bore down again with the pen. “I’m going to say in this note that your illness prevents you from wearing clothes. They . . . ah . . . irritate your skin. Just show it to anyone who questions you.”

  “But, sir—” Dunbar protested.

  “Listen, Dunbar,” Kahn cut in, “I am going to tell you a secret.” He beckoned him closer. “You are being cannibalized.”

  “Cannibalized, sir? . . .” Dunbar repeated the word, and then said it a second time, a little proudly, as though he suddenly understood an honor was being bestowed upon him.

  “Cannibalized,” Kahn said majestically. “I figure you’re the best man for the job.”

  Dunbar straightened out of his slouch. “Okay, sir. I’ll get them things over to First Sergeant right now,” he said. There was a touch of giddiness in his voice.

  “Good.” Kahn handed him the
note. “And good luck.”

  Dunbar bounced out of the tent, and Kahn leaned back in his chair. Not long afterward, two men passing by the tent heard what sounded to them like hysterical laughter from inside. They pulled up short and looked at each other. The laughter continued—a weird, nutty laughter like that of a crazy person. The two men shook their heads and resumed walking. The way everything else had been going lately, it was not inconceivable that the Company Commander himself had gone Asiatic.

  It was a Thursday early in January, but it could have been any day of the week, for none but a very few ever cared about days of the week; most counted time only as it applied to the magical DEROS date. Yet this particular Thursday marked the beginning of a strange and terrifying new atmosphere that descended on Bravo Company and eased it into a morale twilight from which it would never fully recover.

  Two things happened that day: the first was the death of Sergeant Trunk, and the second, though of lesser import, was the arrival of the new Company Exec—First Lieutenant C. Francis Holden.

  Holden arrived on the mail chopper, early in the morning, fatigues freshly starched and lugging his gear bundled in three packs. The rifle slung over his shoulder was new and unscratched as though it had never fired a shot in anger, which in fact it had not. Trudging up the hill from the landing zone, Holden passed by scruffy-looking soldiers who might have been taken for wild animals in their rain-soaked, seedy, unshaven state. They watched him too, curiously and suspiciously, as they would have watched anyone who would soon have a bit of control over their lives.

  Kahn was in his tent, stretched out on the cot asleep in his skivvies, when Holden poked his head in.

  “Pardon me,” he announced very loudly, “I am looking for Epsom Downs.”

  Kahn snapped bolt upright as though he had received a hotfoot, eyes wide as saucers. A feeble “huh” issued from his throat as he stared dumbly at the figure standing over him.

  “Jesus, Billy, I didn’t mean to give you a scare,” Holden said. “Say hello to your new Exec.”

  Kahn shook his head to clear the sleep away.

  “Frank Holden—you’re kidding me . . . How in the hell . . .” He swung his legs off the cot and sat on the edge rubbing his eyes. “Well I’ll be damned . . . Uh . . . put your gear down.” Kahn stuck out his hand. “I was just catching up on a few, uh . . . was up most of the night . . .” He stood up and extended a hand.

  “So you’re it, huh? Well, how in hell did you get yourself assigned to a busted-up outfit like this?”

  “Lucky, I guess,” Holden said. “Here, I brought you something.” He reached into his pack and took out a black woolen sock, from which he removed a still-cold can of beer.

  “An appreciation for our boys at the front,” he said cheerfully.

  Kahn accepted the beer groggily. “Manna from Heaven. You bring one for you?”

  “Whole pack of it,” Holden said. “Figured the beer hall closed early out here.”

  “The beer hall is now open,” Kahn said authoritatively, punching a hole in the can with his knife. “Welcome to Disneyland.”

  28

  The death of Trunk seemed to crystallize the men into sullen, animalistic bands, isolated from the Army, the war and in some cases from one another. There was no explanation for this, except that for all his bellowing and bluster, the First Sergeant had—like a human ball of green tape—managed to hold the Company together.

  Trunk had died quietly, and with dignity, the morning Holden arrived, victim of a land mine tripped off by a man in Peck’s platoon walking ahead of him on a patrol near An Lap hamlet, which lay in the center of the valley. An Lap had been a hotbed of trouble since the day they had come—mines, booby traps and sniper fire spread outward from it in ever-widening circles—and the purpose of the patrol that day had been to move the occupants and destroy it.

  The mine that killed Trunk was what was called a “bouncing Betty”—an ingenious invention whose parts are supplied, unwillingly or unwittingly, by the opposing side. An empty C-ration can, for instance, is filled with explosive from a dud artillery shell and buried carefully in the ground. The man who trips its cord will hear a small pop as it rises a few feet into the air, and perhaps a slight hissing for a couple of seconds before it annihilates him. Trunk heard such a sound moments before he died.

  It interrupted a chorus of the “Missouri Waltz” he had been humming softly between his teeth; and afterward, as he lay on the ground, his bottom half nearly severed from the top, looking upward, beyond the men hovering over him, delivered his parting words: “Them shitheads—oh, them shitheads . . .” contemptuously, in bewildered rage against a war so strange a man could be killed by a device so simple a ten-year-old child could make one—and probably had made it—and if there had been time, and he had not been dying, more than likely Trunk would have utilized the occasion as an instructive example to the others, for there were many dangerous things to watch out for out here . . .

  Half an hour later, the rest of the patrol stormed into An Lap hamlet in a carnival of boiling vengeance and burned it to the ground. Fearful beatings were administered to the inhabitants, and Lieutenant Peck was powerless to stop them. He and his sergeant ran here and there breaking up gangs of men laying into someone, but no sooner had they separated them than another incident would break out. Some of the Vietnamese accepted this stoically, as though they were aware of what had precipitated it; others, however, shrank into terrified little groups and squatted on the ground.

  Later that day, just before dusk, Kahn was sitting on the edge of his cot, bare except for undershorts, when Holden walked in. The patter of rain drummed against the canvas tent top, and the dank, acrid odor of unwashed bedding and moldy clothes hung heavily in the air. A kerosene lantern sputtered above the field desk, on which the contents of two field packs had been spread out and sorted. In a corner, a can of C-ration stew was cooking over a heat tab.

  “It was really tough about your First, Billy,” Holden said glumly. “I heard he was a good soldier.”

  “He was a thoroughly good soldier,” Kahn said. He leaned back on the bunk, thin and pale-looking to Holden. It was the first time he had seen him without a shirt.

  “This is his stuff, huh?” Holden said, picking up a photograph. It was a picture of a man and woman copulating.

  “Yeah. He never had much use for the junk most guys pick up—cameras and that kind of crap. I think the most valuable thing he owned was this.” Kahn handed him the preposterously battered coffee cup. Holden turned it in his hands.

  “He got it in Korea after some kind of brawl with the Air Force,” Kahn said. “Look inside; you ever seen anything like it?”

  Holden peered down inside the cup and winced. “Ugh,” he said, and put it on the desk.

  “He never washed it,” Kahn said, “just poured in water and it turned into coffee. Said it would lift you right off the ground.”

  “You ever try it?” Holden smiled.

  “I took his word for it.”

  The rain kept up its drumming against the top of the tent. The flap opened suddenly and the radio operator stuck his head in, dripping wet. “Artillery called, Lieutenant. They’re putting heat on Hill Two Forty in fifteen minutes. ARVN company may have spotted something—want to let you know.”

  “Right,” Kahn said. He bent over and stirred the C-ration stew with his knife. “Damned ARVN, always seeing ghosts. You want some chow?”

  “What we got?”

  “Trout amandine with asparagus tips and butter sauce—look for yourself.”

  Holden selected a dinner of meat loaf, circa 1957, and lit a heat tab for himself.

  “You get a look around this afternoon?” Kahn asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t go with you,” Kahn said.

  “What about operations?” Holden said.

  “Sucks. And that’s the best you can say for it.” Kahn lit up a cigarette.

  “Bad, huh?”

&
nbsp; “Terrible. But there’s not much we can do. Patch is all gung ho about running these damned two-platoon patrols every day, and . . . you saw what happened today—scratch one first-rate top sergeant. But what can I do? Every time we go out there somebody gets blown away, and we don’t have ding-dong to show for it. I’ve never heard of a place mined like this.”

  “Hmmm . . .”

  “What I’d like to do is run a single patrol every other day—mix ’em up a bit—and ambush at night sometimes: catch the bastards moving. The way it is now, we might as well mail them a schedule.”

  “What’s the Old Man say?”

  “He says to keep smiling.”

  Holden pulled two beer cans from his pack, and they dined on the C-ration supper while Kahn pointed out the tactical situation on a map laid out between them.

  I wonder, he thought, I really wonder . . . Fucking Patch . . . sending out an exec with no field experience when there must be a dozen platoon leaders from other companies . . . What’s he trying to do?

  He was of course glad to see Holden, because it had been depressing and lonely after Sharkey and Donovan—and now Trunk—were gone. But what he needed most right now wasn’t a friend. Right how he needed a solid hand who could step in and take over certain duties in the Company.

  From the blackness across the valley a rumble of artillery shuddered through the gloom, its flashes visible through the open flap like fireflies fluttering against the mountainside.

  “How about the platoon leaders? Anything I should know?”

  Kahn lit another heat tab for coffee and stood at the opening staring out at the little show.

  “Well, there’s Peck, First Platoon, and Range, he’s got Third. They came about the same time, and they both went to, uh . . .” He thought for a moment before remembering the name of the school.