Better Times Than These (10 page)

Wonderful, Kahn thought darkly—the damned River Blindness.

“You will remember,” Patch was saying, twisting his blond moustache, “that in this operation we will be the pursuers, not the pursued.

“What we will pursue, gentlemen, is asses—North Vietnamese asses and Vietcong asses. These are the same asses the Seventh Cavalry has pursued for exactly one hundred years.

“All of these asses,” Patch continued, “—Indian asses, Cuban asses, Mexican asses, Japanese asses and Korean asses—have one thing in common, gentlemen: whenever they have been pursued by the Seventh Cavalry, these asses begin to shit, and the Seventh Cavalry has followed the smell and kicked the last remaining ounce of shit out of them.

“And that is what you men are going to do in the Ia Drang Valley,” he said, tapping on a copy of the sheaf of papers with a pointer.

“The theory of warfare here, as I have told you before, is just the same as it was when the Seventh Cavalry was fighting Indians—and the Seventh Cavalry was designed to fight Indians.” Patch puffed on the cigar.

“Uh-oh, here it comes,” Sharkey said, rolling his big eyes toward the ceiling.

“And as all of you know by now, the Seventh Cavalry, with one minor exception, kicked ass on the Indians for nearly fifty years. The results of that effort now live on reservations.

“The only difference is that the bastards you will encounter in the Ia Drang Valley will not be Indians.” The Battalion Commander was beaming.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Sharkey murmured dejectedly.

“I want you men to take this document back to your cabins and read it carefully. Pay particular attention to the action reports and conclusions, because we’re going to discuss each part every day from now on. Your own asses might be saved by somebody else’s experience.”

“Hey, lookit this shit.” Sharkey was punching Kahn on the arm, pointing to a table of figures in the back. “Look at the fucking
casualty
figures.”

Two battalions of another division who had been in the Ia Drang had, by their own account, already dispatched some 1,423 North Vietnamese soldiers at a cost to themselves of 231 men killed and 720 wounded.

“Holy Christ,” Sharkey said. Studious Lieutenant Inge was studying the document, and the big ex-tackle Donovan was sprawled over the table resting his chin on one hand and scratching his balls with the other.

“The big mistake Colonel Custer made,” Patch droned on, “was underestimating the strength of the enemy at Little Big Horn. We will not have that difficulty, because we have accurate intelligence assessments, extremely good communications and good mobility.”

“Lookit
this . . .”
Sharkey nudged Kahn to a paragraph which began: “A majority of the contacts with the enemy have occurred in either jungle or mountainous underbush-type terrain in which visibility is poor.”

So this was it, Kahn thought: spend a year running around in the deep woods with the River Blindness. The rumors, of course, had been that they were going to the coastal plains, where there were nothing more than a few scraggly VC—certainly not that they were going to be hauled ass out in the jungle damned near to Cambodia to fuck with North Vietnamese regulars.

He might have known, being Rumors Control Officer, that the rumor hadn’t been any good.

Patch had saved the truth for now, five thousand miles out into the ocean, precisely across the International Date Line, where somehow you were propelled forward a day in time—although in time language, that day was lost to you—except that if you happened to get killed by something like the River Blindness, you would actually get to live a day longer.

If you got killed on Wednesday, for instance, it wouldn’t be a lost day at all, because your friends back home would still be living Tuesday while you were getting killed on Wednesday, so in fact it might be better to get killed over here than at home because somehow you got an extra day out of it.

As he listened to Patch’s speech, a gloom began to descend on Kahn such as he had never felt before. Not because he was afraid—although he certainly was that—or because he doubted the value of Patch’s predictions, which he did, or because he dreaded the rigors of the next year, which he also did. It was none of these; rather, it was the gloom of inevitability about the course his life was taking—or rather, was having imposed on it—and Patch’s monolithic predictions, all the inconsequentially of it, suddenly bore down on him and pressed him down into the Dismal Deeps . . .

Kahn had always known that someday he must do his part. His father had told him that since childhood—“Every man owes a debt. It must be paid. After that you are free to enjoy what this country has to offer”—and ever since he could remember, Kahn had prepared himself to pay his debt, as though when he had paid it an enormous stone would be lifted off his back and he would be welcomed and congratulated into previously denied regions.

Being a Jew from the South was both a blessing and a curse. For the first few years, except for his family, he had been practically alone in his Jewishness, until just before he entered high school. They had recently moved into the little cul-de-sac by the golf course.

Each year the dozen or so homeowners there erected fancy Christmas decorations on their houses, and people from all over town drove by each night to look at the display. A month before Christmas—and a week after they had moved in—a neighbor came to Kahn’s house late in the afternoon. She was in charge of decorations that year and said she needed help.

“We are doing The Twelve Days of Christmas this year,” the woman had told his mother. “You will be the Five Gold Rings,” she announced. “They’re making up the displays in a warehouse downtown.

“I know you and your husband are of the Jewish faith, but this is more than a religious thing,” she said. “We have done it for years. Everyone in town expects it. It is a neighborhood thing.”

Kahn’s mother had listened politely, and when his father came home, she had told him what had happened.

“Sixty-five dollars—for what? Goy decorations?” he cried.

“She says it is not a religious thing,” his mother said.

“The hell it’s not. Let them have eleven days of Christmas instead—I’m not shelling out for their holiday. What would they do if we asked them to stick a ten-foot candle on their roofs during Passover? They would throw me out the door,” he said.

In the end, Five Gold Rings that blinked on and off were installed on the Kahns’ roof, but not before bitter argument within the family. “Keep the peace; we’ve just moved here,” his mother said. The passersby oohed and ahhed, and except for an occasional snide comment that the Gold Rings looked as though they belonged outside a pawnshop, the affair by and large had been insignificant—except to young Billy Kahn, who for the first time realized he
was
in fact different from the rest; that he probably
had
to pay that debt to be accepted, the debt of Gold Rings and going out for the football team and joining the Army and how—whether he wished to or not—the debt of killing gooks—or getting killed by gooks in the land of the River Blindness. And later, what then? Was the debt ever to be paid off, as his father had said, or would it hover over him forever, presenting itself for payment, open-ended, in infinite installments throughout his life, administered by some terrible hovering debt bird?

Why did he owe this debt?—and to whom? Was it for being a Jew? Or being a Jew in America? Was it for killing Christ? Was he to be held responsible for
that
by the people who insisted on Gold Rings on top of his home? Was it the reason some girls in high school and college had shunned him, put him off forever with excuses? Was he being blamed as a Christ killer? And if so, would he be redeemed by becoming a gook killer? As if someone would finally say, “Yes, Mr. Kahn, you have paid off your debt for killing the Savior by killing for your country. You are paid in full; you are free to go.”

Well, probably not.

Probably this debt would remain to be administered by the specter of a giant hovering bird, never satiated even after the football, and the gook killing, and whatever came after; which was why, as he heard Patch’s speech, the great blanket of gloom had spread itself over Lieutenant Billy Kahn.

“Hey, Billy, lookit this,” Sharkey was muttering, nudging Kahn again, pointing to a paragraph which began: “Unlike Viet Cong, the NVA in the Ia Drang region will engage and attack in strength at any time of the day . . .” Kahn looked at him sourly. “For Godssake, Sharkey,” he hissed, “will you keep quiet!”

At the same time, in the movie auditorium two decks below, a separate briefing was being conducted for the enlisted men, but the document they were shown was stamped only CONFIDENTIAL and it was much shorter and did not show things like casualty figures or enemy strengths that the officers’ report did. But the men felt good afterward because at last the Army had given them a kind of tangible purpose for being here, and they felt a little proud and sort of important that this great army had decided to share its secrets with them and give them a real mission. And because of this, many of the men became more serious during the next few days as they contemplated actually going into combat, and a few of them even took on rough and mean airs.

11

O
n the eleventh day, the sky broke out a thin ragged gray, and the pallid sun looked as if it would have preferred to be elsewhere that morning. A heavy swell was running up from the southwest, taking the transport abeam and tossing her about just enough to make things uncomfortable for those who had been teetering on the edge of seasickness since the first day.

The men were as listless as the weather, lying around the deck, barely speaking to one another in the clammy heat that had settled over the ship. A thick mass of clouds lay on the horizon in the direction in which they were headed, but no breeze blew. Except for the swell, a sinister calm prevailed, punctuated only by the throb of the transport’s engines.

Spudhead Miter skipped chow and went to the ship’s library to see if it had a copy of Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms,
which he had once started but never finished. He couldn’t find it, so he left through an unfamiliar hatchway door located in the rear of the little library compartment. Minutes later, Spudhead found himself in the bowels of the transport.

Past the Navy crew quarters, he went as far as he could go until he was forced to climb down a stairwell even deeper into the ship. Here he was closer to the engines, because he could feel their power vibrating through the steel bulkheads as he passed an open door inside which several sailors in white T-shirts were sitting around a large electric generator drinking coffee. The sailors noticed Spudhead passing by but seemed unmoved by his presence in their domain.

The constant swaying from the swells made Spudhead feel a little nauseated, and sensing that he had gone too far down, he climbed a flight of stairs and went along another corridor and through a hatchway, and then he was alone in a tiny foyer. Suddenly a big metal cover flew up into the air with a rattle that scared Spudhead half out of his wits, and he found himself staring into the scowling face of a sailor standing behind a counter.

“Whatduyawant?” the sailor growled.

“Huh?” Spudhead said, still tingling from fright.

“WHATDUYAWANT—I ain’t got all day, bud!” the sailor roared, and then it dawned on Spudhead that he was standing in front of the counter of the ship’s store and that outside that door behind him hundreds of men had been waiting in line for God knew how long for it to open and he had somehow found his way in ahead of them.

“Jesus . . . ah, ah,” Spudhead said.

“WHAT IN HELL DO YOU WANT, SOLDIER?” The sailor looked frantic by this time. His eyes bugged out of his head. Two other sailors working with their backs toward the counter turned to look.

“Give me a hundred Hershey Almond Bars,” Spudhead said weakly, diving for his wallet.

“Box of a hundred—here.” The sailor shoved a brown box across the counter without looking at him. “Four bucks,” he barked.

Spudhead fled back inside the door through which he had just entered, closing it behind him gently as though it were the gate to Heaven and he did not wish to disturb it. He stole back into the sleeping quarters and stashed the box of Hershey Almonds deep in his duffel bag.

When he returned to the deck, most of the men were still lying or sitting where they had been when he left. The sky had taken on a sickly pinkish tint, and the gray swells had grown ominous. Black smoke from the funnels hung crazily over the transport, settling onto the men in a gloomy kind of pall, but they accepted this without the traditional cursing, because today everyone seemed resigned that his life was to be filled with such indignities.

Several sailors walked down the rail among the men, poking around and fooling with various kinds of gear on the deck. Someone asked the sailors how many days they were from Okinawa.

“Big storm coming,” a sailor said, ignoring the question.

Shortly afterward, the afternoon briefings were canceled and Patch himself got on the loudspeaker to tell the men they were sailing toward some nasty weather. They were instructed to stay in the shelter of the boat deck and not to go outside when the weather got bad. Patch did not go into detail on the storm, which the Navy had already learned about and informed him was a killer typhoon that had wrecked two cities in the Philippines and was now spinning viciously at sea looking for further damage to do, and which the transport was trying desperately to avoid by heading northwest. But it was too late, and the best the Navy was hoping for now was that the transport would hit only the fringe of the storm.