Better Times Than These (24 page)

“Heard a couple of your men caught something—but they’re going to be all right, huh?”

“They’ll be all right,” Kahn said. “One’s going home, though.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and leaned forward, boots sinking into the soft earth. He was dead tired and his ankle still hurt and he had planned to get some sleep until Patch sent word he wanted to see him in the TOC after chow.

“Heard you really did a number today,” McCrary said. “Mostly all you come up with out there is a mouthful of wind . . .” Kahn noticed that McCrary, whom everyone called “Digger,” was breathing heavily as they trudged up the hill. Evidently they didn’t get much exercise in Graves Registration.

“The Ia Drang, now—it’s something else,” McCrary continued. “When it’s hot out there, I’m all over the place. They get too busy to police up their own dead. Usually it’s just one—maybe two—they can’t find . . .”

McCrary looked forlorn. In the weeks he had known him, Kahn had noticed that McCrary talked incessantly about his work—as if by sharing the experience he could somehow be relieved of its burden.

McCrary continued to talk, but Kahn was barely listening. He was thinking about earlier, when he and Holden had been drinking beer alone in the mess before McCrary came in and Sharkey and Donovan had passed by the table where they were sitting. Kahn had motioned for them to sit down, but Sharkey told him, “No, thanks, sir, we’re going to play cards,” and had gone on by to join a group of second lieutenants in a poker game.

That, of course, hadn’t bothered Kahn, but the
“No, sir”
had. Ever since Okinawa, when Patch had given him the Company, and during the rest of the trip on the transport, and the weeks at Monkey Mountain, Sharkey had been gradually putting a certain distance between himself and Kahn. Kahn hadn’t noticed it at first, but pretty soon Sharkey had stopped calling him by his first name, and he hadn’t been as loose around him as he used to be.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t friendly or anything, because he still was, but in front of the men he had begun addressing Kahn as
sir,
which was absolutely proper, though he hadn’t done that when Kahn was Exec. Now that Kahn was CO, Sharkey’s West Point drilling had begun to take hold of him, or at least that was the way Kahn figured it. And then, a few days back, Sharkey had called him “sir” for the first time in private, though even that hadn’t been clear until now.

It had been when Kahn inquired about Sharkey’s new teeth, which had been fitted and ordered but had still not arrived. Sharkey said he had no word when the teeth would be forthcoming but wished the hell they would because he was having trouble eating. When Kahn asked if there was anything he could do, Sharkey smiled his toothless grin and replied, “Yessir, you can put an end to these rumors that I’m sucking cocks on the side; you’re still Rumors Control Officer, right?” Kahn didn’t know about the “Yessir” then, because it might have been just a figure of speech or whatever, but this time there was no mistaking it.

If that was the way Sharkey was going to be, then all right, Kahn thought. Let him pal around with the second lieutenants and call me “sir.” Kahn had found new friends in Holden and Digger McCrary—unlikely as they were: the mortician, the stockbroker and the geologist—and if his old friend Sharkey couldn’t understand that Kahn’s new status shouldn’t have meant squat to their friendship, to hell with it, then. But he still missed having Sharkey to kid around with, and now he felt a little uncomfortable about it, because he was starting to feel the distance too.

Ahead, the TOC glowed like a huge jack-o’-lantern.

Far to the west, the sky flickered with lightninglike flashes from an Artillery battery, silhouetting the two men against the top of the rise. Moments later the muffled
whump, whump, whump
rolled across the rice fields as if someone were dropping huge anvils in the mountains.

“Well, I guess I’ll go down to the morgue and catch up on some paperwork,” McCrary said. “Why don’t you drop by later?—I’ve got some vanilla ice cream in the cold locker; it keeps great in there . . .” He waved and stumbled off along a rutted path behind the TOC.

More flashes appeared behind the western mountains, and Kahn paused before going inside. He had a sudden compulsion to experience the completed act, the sound being a final confirmation of an event that had already occurred seconds earlier, a dozen miles away.

Whump, whump, whump, whump.
The explosions finally reached him, distorted by time and distance, leaving the results to his imagination. I am, he thought, the apex of a very odd triangle.

The triangle he saw was marked at one of the angles by the men who fired the artillery, at another by the men who received it and at the third by himself—three vastly different views of the same event, distinguished merely by a factor of relative proximity. In a way, it was like the Dismal Deeps Effect aboard the transport, except that here the effect was perceivable—but only because it was not deep enough, or far enough away. God, Kahn thought, I am going nuts . . . This is ridiculous nonsense . . . I am so tired . . . so goddamn tired . . .

The TOC was a place of high-pitched tumult, the kind of formless clamor one might expect during a panic in a stock exchange.

Rows of enormous terrain maps stretched from one end of the tent to the other, held in freshly built wood easels. The acetate overlays that covered them were a maze of black, red, orange and yellow grease-pencil markings showing friendly positions, enemy positions, free-fire zones, artillery targets, aircraft landing strips and dozens of other things not indicated in the brown contours and green terrain features originally reproduced in the basement of a government building in Washington, D.C. These markings were continually being fiddled with by bored-looking enlisted men who moved among the maps erasing and redrawing as the situation changed.

In the background, a dozen radios crackled—monitored by stern-looking officers attentive to the nervous chatter of commanders reporting in from the blackness, asking for things, giving positions, wishing for the sun to rise. One radio carried a frantic conversation between a platoon leader under fire and his Company Commander. A staff officer who had been listening for several minutes finally threw up his hands in despair. “Why don’t they shut the hell up so we can see what they need?” he cried. “What do they think—talking is going to help?”

Outside, diesel-driven generators hummed and growled; their thick black cables snaked into the TOC like garden hoses. Here was the nerve center of the Infantry brigade: a clearinghouse for three thousand armed men; for artillery—the 105s and 155s and the big 175-millimeter guns posted on hillsides miles away, poised to deliver fire on a moment’s notice; for supersonic Air Force fighters carrying two thousand pounds of deadly explosives; for huge B-52 bombers which, summoned under the code word “Arclight,” flew in nightly from Guam and the Philippines so high it was impossible to see them, unloaded destruction enough to wreck a small city, then flew homeward again, their weary crews joking, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches—oblivious to the effects of their deposit. All of this was presided over by smartly schooled officers in starched fatigues, carrying .45-caliber pistols in brown holsters, moving briskly about the wood-floored tent, providing wonderfully skilled administration to this vast armament—the best, in fact, that money could buy.

And it was massed, the whole of it, against a shrewd army of little brown men, largely unseen unless they wanted to be; dressed in shoes made of discarded automobile tires; employing every crude device at their disposal—bamboo stakes and tin-can mines and water buffalo . . . And in the end, all the awesome power of planes and cannon and bombs dispatched by the TOC would be reduced to one simple, time-honored military equation: men would have to fight other men, measuring each other, sweat for sweat, blood for blood, in the deep tangled jungles, craggy mountainsides and steaming rice paddies. And the men selected for this task—Bravo Company among them—were known, in the lingo of Monkey Mountain, as “freshmeat.”

Patch was alone in a corner of the TOC, studying a map of the eastern sector of the Ia Drang. A cigar protruded beneath his blond moustache, which he had allowed to grow longer, Cavalry style. Kahn reported in.

“Ah, Kahn,” Patch said. “Good.” He seemed less animated than he’d been earlier when he had landed near the village and taken charge of the mopping-up operations. Kahn was surprised at his efficiency in directing the search for enemy arms and supplies. Patch had taken time to talk to some of the men and officers and had moved them out quickly when the work was done. Later, when they returned muddy and exhausted, Patch had arranged for ten cases of beer to be sent to the billets with his compliments.

“Sit down for a minute,” Patch said. “I want to talk to you.”

Kahn sank into a crude wood chair. His whole body ached and he was grateful even for this brief rest. Patch sat on a table beside him.

“I want you to know,” he said, “you did a hell of a job out there today. The general wanted me to convey his appreciation. He said you played it very nicely.” Kahn was dumbstruck, but managed to get out a weak “Thank you.”

“Yes, I’m proud of you, Billy,” Patch said. “You made a few mistakes, but we had ourselves a hell of a day.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kahn said appreciatively.

“I’m sorry about your two men—but they’ll be taken care of.”

In the background, the radio conversation between the platoon under fire and its Company Commander flared up again. They could hear the sound of shooting and the desperate shouting. Patch glanced toward the radio bank. “Trouble there,” he said. Kahn nodded.

“Now,” Patch said, removing the cigar from his teeth, “there are some very basic things you have got to remember. First, about that mortar fire. You know what you should have done, right?”

“Moved out,” Kahn said. He felt a lecture coming on.

“Moved out—damned straight. Get the hell out of there. When they have your number out in the open like that, they’ll blow you to bits.”

“Yes, sir,” Kahn said.

“And you’ve got to keep me better posted. I don’t know what’s going on unless you tell me, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Kahn said. “I guess I was kind of jittery.”

“We all were,” Patch said solemnly. “But we have to get over it.”

“Yes, sir,” Kahn said. Patch was being very gentle. He didn’t know why.

“Come over here for a minute. I want to show you something,” Patch said.

They walked to one of the big terrain maps which was covered with a large white cloth. On top of the cloth, red stickers were pasted. They said TOP SECRET. Patch threw the cloth over the top of the map. The overlay was marked in black and red grease pencil. The legend at the bottom said
Sector II, Ia Drang Valley, western approaches. Estimated enemy strengths, a/o 10 Sept., 1966.

The map, if you stood back from it, was a blur of green and brown thinly spaced contour lines showing the extent of the elevation. Imposed on the acetate were dozens of red rectangles with numbers drawn above them. Each represented an enemy unit, its probable designation and the date it had been sighted. At the top of the map, in large black letters, the words OPERATION WESTERN MOVIE had been carefully inscribed.

“This is our show,” Patch stated proudly. “At least, a big part of it will be. We jump off next Sunday.”

Kahn looked at the map again. He had never seen such dense vegetation depicted on a map—even at this scale.

“If Intelligence is half right, you can see what we’re likely going to find in there,” Patch said. He kept his eyes on the map. Kahn did not say anything. His mind was numb with exhaustion, numb even to this, as though it were slipping into a frameless void.

“There’s an old French landing strip here.” Patch put his cigar on a gray line with a tiny red airplane printed above it. “I had a look at it from the air the other day.

“A South Vietnamese outfit is there now but about to move out. We’re going to call it ‘Firebase Meathead,’ ” the Colonel said grandly. Four/Seven would use this as a staging area and push out from there into a large green area bordering the Drang River, which meandered down the center of the valley. The green area was identified on the overlay as the
Boo Hoo Forest,
but on the map itself the area was marked in print as the
BUIT SUIT
, which Kahn gathered was a Vietnamese term for forest.

Patch described a circle with his cigar on the center of the green area.

“Now, this Boo Hoo Forest is where Intelligence says the 170 NVA Three Forty-two B Division has been living. If their assessments are correct, it might be very hot in there. The ARVN has already been kicked out twice, but of course you know how they are.”

Kahn listened.

“The thing,” Patch said, “is that we have to clean out this whole sector. Just annihilate the bastards and drive them up these mountains. It’s already shaping up as one of the biggest operations of the war, a lot of people are going to be watching us, all the way back to Washington.

“I’ve got a plan worked out that is going to save us time and lives, and I’m going to brief everyone on it in the morning. What do you think?” Patch said, sticking the cigar back into his mouth.

What did he think? Kahn thought. What the hell
did
he think? For the first time in months he’d actually been asked what he thought about something.

I am so tired I must be dreaming.
That was what Kahn thought.

“Uh, well, Colonel . . .” He struggled for words. “From the looks of it, the terrain is pretty rough. We might need some special equipment.”

Patch’s face lighted up. “Indeed you will—indeed you will,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve laid it all on—or at least, it’s been promised. There will be an Engineer detail with a chain-saw squad and two explosives teams. Anything we can’t get through with that the Air Force has promised to blow out of our way.”

Kahn nodded stupidly.

“The trouble is, we really don’t know what we’re going to find in there. The patrols that have gone in have only penetrated a little way, but it looks like there is an outer perimeter here”—he made a line with the cigar just inside the green area. “This seems to be the forward position of a big base camp. They say the whole area is mined and booby-trapped and they have fortifications laid out.”