Better Times Than These (22 page)

The shithouse had been the subject of bitter controversy ever since they had arrived. It was an officers’ shithouse, consisting of a long wooden shed inside which half a dozen round holes had been cut in a long plywood board. Beneath each hole was a sawed-in-half fifty-five-gallon oil drum filled with low-grade kerosene. Every day, the shithouse detail would pull out the drums and light a match to them, and whatever was inside would burn for half an hour with a foul, black stench.

The trouble was that the shithouse had been established very close to where Bravo Company was billeted. When the convoy arrived, a grinning, red-faced Quartermaster sergeant had ushered them to a line of newly erected wood-floored forty-man tents, with rolled-up sides and mosquito netting, where they would live until they went into the field, and where they would stay whenever they returned to pull palace guard, and where they would store all their regular gear. It was their permanent home as long as the Brigade stayed at Monkey Mountain.

The morning of the second day, they discovered the location was not ideal.

Shortly after sunup the shithouse detail went to work, and soon great billows of black smoke wafted through the tents of Bravo Company and part of Charlie Company as well, and the men, who had just gotten up and were performing their morning regiments, began gagging and coughing and cursing fiercely at the indignity of the consumptive shitsmoke. Even the banana-cat was outraged, and it screeched and chattered and batted furiously at its nose.

Trunk was infuriated and stalked off to find the red-faced Quartermaster sergeant who had put them there. When he was unable to locate him, he went to the Brigade Sergeant Major, who was eating his breakfast in the senior noncoms’ mess. The Brigade Sergeant Major looked at Trunk with dark, cobralike eyes as he explained the situation, and when he had finished, the Brigade Sergeant Major put down a forkful of watery eggs and stared silently out the tent flap as though he did not need to deal with such problems so early in the morning.

“Well, Trunk,” he said in slowly measured words, “why don’t we give it a while? The wind doesn’t always blow in your direction—maybe it’s just a fluke.

“The trouble is, we had the damned thing up on the north perimeter, but the wind that comes out of the valley blew the smoke into the general’s tent, and he raised hell with me for it. I’d like to move it to the other side of the compound, but it’s gotta be close enough for the officers to get to it or they’re gonna raise hell with me again. I’m in a bind over this, Trunk—we can’t go moving the thing all over hell’s creation. Besides, you guys are going into the bush in a few days and you won’t have to worry about it no more anyway,” the Brigade Sergeant Major said.

Trunk tried to gloss over the bad news, but after a week the projected wind shift had not occurred, and the tents and the men in them were beginning to take on a smell of their own. Every morning they spoke of taking matters into their own hands—and then Spudhead’s name came up on the duty roster to burn the shit barrels in the officers’ latrine.

No one in charge ever knew if it was accidental or on purpose, but the latrine went up like tinder when the barrel of kerosene Spudhead was lighting tipped over, spilling its flaming contents against the shed.

The latrine’s lone occupant, a second lieutenant of Engineers, had gone unnoticed by the shithouse detail, because they were working strictly from the rear of the shed. The first they learned of his presence was a muffled cry from within: “Hey, what’s going on out there!”

But before anyone could answer, a great rush of fire and smoke lapped through the dry-board wall, and the lieutenant of Engineers bounded out of the flaming latrine like a man in a sack race, his bare ass gleaming in the morning sun, shouting disjointed curses at Spudhead and the others.

“Are you goddamn bastards crazy?” he bellowed. His eyes were wild, as though he had been raised from sleep by a trombone played in his ear. “I could have been burned alive in there!”

When he was partially recovered, the Engineer lieutenant took charge of the fire-fighting effort. But by then it was too late, since the detail had no tools with which to extinguish the blaze; the most they could do was try to stomp out some burning grass around the edges, and in the end they just stood around and observed the immolation.

“You bunch of fucking numbnuts,” the lieutenant of Engineers said sourly. “If you were in my outfit I’d have your asses court-martialed.

“I might even do it anyway,” he said. “That was a damned fine latrine.”

Spudhead looked like a man who had just been fired out of a cannon. His face was black and his eyebrows singed off. Miraculously, he wasn’t hurt badly, and when he came back from the infirmary that afternoon, Spudhead had already become a sort of folk hero to the rest of the company.

That evening in the mess tent, he was seated at a long table with Madman Muntz and Crump when DiGeorgio stood up from his table at the other end of the tent and shouted:

“WHO BURNED THE SHITHOUSE DOWN?”

At once, an obviously orchestrated chorus of a hundred men began chanting:

“SPUDHEAD, SPUDHEAD, SPUDHEAD,” over and over again, and this was repeated at various times each day: at chow; at the outdoor movie at night; in lines where they waited to be issued equipment and sometimes in the tent after lights-out. Finally, Spudhead began to wonder if the cry would follow him around the rest of his life.

Two weeks later, Bravo Company saw its first action, killed its first enemy, suffered its first casualties and got a slight glimpse of what was to come.

Several days earlier, a patrol operating near a village not far from Monkey Mountain had killed a North Vietnamese officer and removed two documents from his body. One was an important-looking paper, sealed and signed by some high-ranking official. The other was an almost illegibly scrawled note on a piece of rice paper. Both were sent back to Intelligence headquarters, translated, assimilated and presented at the staff briefing the following day. The official-looking document turned out to be a plea from the Assistant Chief of Political Operations saying North Vietnamese soldiers should refrain from defecating in the rice fields because it was creating ill will among the people. The scrawled note, however, indicated that the enemy had established a staging area in the village near the spot where the officer was killed. It was to be Bravo Company’s baptism of fire.

In the dark stillness of early morning, they slogged across the rice fields like a gang of New Year’s drunks, muttering bitten curses at the muck and unseen lumps of earth that caused them to stumble and slip. They had been walking for nearly an hour since the trucks had let them off by the roadside several miles away. Anything that might rattle, including their dog tags, had been fastened in place by the green tape. The M-16 rifles had been meticulously cleaned and loaded; the canvas-covered jungle boots were completely soaked, but extra socks had been stuffed into packs and pockets. To the smallest detail, every preparation had been taken and with the kind of care and thoroughness they would not take again to quite the same degree.

It was a one-shot deal, Patch told the officers’ briefing the night before. “A live-fire exercise,” he called it.

Two platoons from another battalion which had been in the bush for nearly a week would begin before dawn to close in on the village from some hills to the west. The theory of attack was that the two platoons, known as Charlie Force, would drive the enemy out of the village and Bravo Company would act as a blocking force to gun them down as they ran away. It was as simple as that—but of course, it wasn’t.

A little light finally appeared from behind the eastern ridge, and Kahn halted the line to get his bearings. A stand of trees was barely visible ahead of them, but there was no sign of a village. It took ten minutes of precious darkness to locate it. Sharkey, on the left flank, got word down that his men had it in sight far to their left, which meant the whole line had drifted nearly a quarter-mile out of position. Kahn had just hurriedly ordered the line to move left when Bateson, his radio operator, handed him the handset. “The colonel wants you, sir,” the radio operator whispered.

Kahn identified himself, and Patch’s voice came back in his ear, clearly irritated.

“Why haven’t I heard from you?—You were supposed to be in position fifteen minutes ago. What’s going on down there?” he growled.

“We have it in sight and are getting into position now,” Kahn replied.

“You get moving and get back to me on the double—do you understand?” Patch said.

By now they could see the village among the trees—ten or fifteen thatched-roofed huts that looked deserted in the thin gray light. Kahn arranged the company in a slight arc behind a low dike in the paddy and informed Patch, who was in the command post at Monkey Mountain, that they were set up.

“Okay, okay,” Patch said. “Anything that moves now—anything that moves . . .”

They waited for a long time. Nothing stirred in the village or the rice fields, and there was no sign of Charlie Force. As the light brightened behind the eastern mountains, each of them was deep in his own thoughts: some about what might be forthcoming from the village, some about homes and friends and some, more immediately, about their present condition, especially those unlucky enough to be lying in a watery part of the paddy.

Today they had reached the ultimate milestone in their soldiers’ careers. The first had been their induction into the service, passing the requisite physical and mental and moral tests. The second had been their completion of basic training: the long, rigorous hours of drilling and instruction and cleaning their barracks and themselves and learning to live with the Army and with one another to the satisfaction of their superiors so that at the end they were awarded the privilege of contributing to the service of their country and not merely taking from it. Third was their delivery to this war in which the elected leaders had seen fit to engage. Now, at any moment, each of them would become an individual, final extension of a great policy-making scheme that involved the entire political, social and economic fabric of the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

Looking out at the village, bathed now in the glow of a warm morning sun, few of them saw it that way, but they were all aware, more or less, of what was expected of them; that their duty here was to kill on sight anyone who ran out of that treeline, because they had been informed in no uncertain terms that whosoever did would be no friend of the United States of America or of theirs . . .

Bateson, lying with his ear glued to the radio handset, started for a second, then handed it to Kahn. “It’s the Old Man again, sir,” he said.

“They’re moving in now,” Patch said; “be ready.”

As he finished the sentence, there was the sound of rifle fire popping across the paddies from the other side of the village. It began as sporadic bursts, but quickly increased to a steady cacophony. From behind the dike Bravo Company could distinguish two different types of fire, although one type, louder and slower, was less intense than the other.

Kahn had a sick knot in his stomach, not so much from fear as from uncertainty. He worried that he might not do the right thing. Today he could see in the eyes of the men that they were looking at him in a different way than before—he was now their sole leader, guide and savior—and he knew that he somehow had to get over the urge to save his own skin he had felt ever since the sun came up.

He was scanning the village intently through his field glasses when he saw the man run out.

The man was dressed in standard black peasant’s clothing, and from this distance he seemed to be running in a jerky, pantherlike way, crouching every so often behind a dike. It was impossible to tell if he was armed, and Kahn figured that if he kept his course the man would run right into Brill’s lap.

Brill’s platoon had the right flank, and when Brill saw the man running he frantically motioned the platoon to scrunch down lower so as not to alert him. Crump took a final look and simply turned over on his back with his head resting against the dike, and began counting. It was just like hunting deer, Crump thought as he lay there, barely breathing, remembering the lessons he had been taught in dark Mississippi forests: “Just take a look and drop down, count the seconds it’ll take till he gets into range, then rise up slow and bring the barrel down on him. Either he’s coming your way or he isn’t. Watching ain’t going to change it.”

Patch was on the radio again, and there was a coolness in his voice as though he were deliberately trying to keep himself calm.

“Charlie Force has contact,” he said. “I want you to be ready to advance at my command.”

Kahn had his glasses on the spot where the running man had crouched last, and the handset was tucked under his chin. He had just pressed the transmission bar to tell Patch they had a suspected VC in sight when the man leaped up and began to run again toward Brill’s position. Why don’t they shoot? Kahn thought. He’s clear in range by now. Is it because they’re waiting for me to tell them? Hadn’t it been clear? Maybe not—maybe they were waiting for him to give the order, the order to execute the Running Man. But he had said it already: “Anything that moves . . .”