Better Times Than These (30 page)

“I think it blew my boot off, Lieutenant,” Moose said nervously. He nodded to a completely intact boot lying on the trail a few feet away. “It don’t hurt or anything—it just feels numb. I’m afraid it’s going to start hurting in a minute,” he said.

“You hang in there, sport,” Sharkey said. “We’re going to get you out of here.” He squatted next to him, cradling his arms and shoulders while someone administered a Syrette of morphine.

Sharkey was speaking to Kahn on the radio when Moose began to scream. He began in deep gasps, then burst into racked sobs which grew into a steady, hysterical high-pitched bleat. Sharkey took the radioman a little farther off down the trail because he couldn’t hear what was being said. As he walked, he sighed to himself through his still-missing teeth. It was going to be a long operation.

For nine more days they pushed through, alternating the point, but that didn’t seem to make things any better. Each step forward was taken in terror. The mine that had blown off the foot of Moose the mortarman was only the beginning. As the North Vietnamese withdrew deeper into the forest, they littered the trails and jungle with mines and booby traps. A dozen men had been hurt and two killed, but none from Bravo Company. They were harassed constantly by snipers, which slowed the advance to an antlike crawl.

In between these dangers, a series of running battles took place. The North Vietnamese would set up ahead and open up on them with machine guns and rockets, and for a few minutes the jungle would reverberate with an unearthly racket while invisible men shot at other invisible men. Patch’s revised plan, in which the unit under fire would withdraw into the sheath of the pen and wait for Artillery, worked well enough for a couple of days, but the North Vietnamese quickly caught on and would move in behind the withdrawing men into the protected zone and continue to lay down heated fire.

Still they plodded on. Every few days the Air Force would drop a “daisy-cutter” bomb ahead of the advance—a gigantic blockbuster that would blow an enormous hole in the jungle, through which helicopters could descend to resupply them. Still whatever relief was gained when the enemy periodically absented himself from the fighting was quickly replaced by the treachery of the jungle, which was fully as hostile to them as the North Vietnamese.

Beginning the second day, a malicious gray-green mold began to appear on things. First it was noticed on the plastic stocks of rifles and exposed metal of other gear. It appeared on clothing and boots, inside helmet liners and on ammunition clips and bandoliers. It spread itself over radios and constantly had to be wiped off. Finally, the men themselves began to mold. In the mornings when they got up, men could be seen, in addition to their other regimens, scrubbing vigorously at their arms and necks to get rid of the mold.

Other discomforts arose. Skin began to shrivel and peel off. Tiny warts appeared on many of the men, particularly on the fingers and in the region of the crotch. Medical advice was sought, and word came back over the radio that the warts were the product of a virus that would eventually run its course. Also, after several days, everyone was covered with cuts and scratches from brambles, and these abrasions did not heal normally but became more and more infected. The shrapnel wound on Kahn’s hand became inflamed and pussy and started to ache, and he knew it was a matter of time before he would have to do something about it.

Insects and other living things assailed them. Worst were the leeches that crawled under their clothing, silently and unnoticed, and clung, sucking blood, until they created an odd, tingling sensation. These were usually burned off with lit cigarettes, which became another part of their morning duties. They were pestered relentlessly by bugs, the most annoying of which was a fierce winged insect known as “the grabass bug.” At dusk, hundreds of these creatures began darting around and smacking into people, sometimes taking a bite of skin.

On the fifth day, a man in Alpha Company was bitten by a snake.

He had accidentally sat down on it during a smoke break, and the snake snapped through his fatigues and punctured his thigh. No one, including the bitten man, actually saw the snake, so consequently no one knew what first-aid treatment to give. If the snake was merely the common bamboo viper variety, the man would begin to suffer a painful but survivable kind of blood poisoning; but on the other hand, if it was a member of the nerve-attacking krait family, the man would soon have no need of medication. It was decided to wait a few minutes to see what symptoms occurred.

Reports that reached Bravo Company later described the victim as catatonic as he was being evacuated, but they never learned of his final disposition. Later that afternoon, instructions were issued over the radio for every man to take care where he sat and what he touched because there were poisonous snakes in the jungle.

By the ninth day, certain physical and psychological changes were beginning to appear in the men. It went without saying that everyone’s nerves were on edge; but there were other signs far more ominous to Kahn and the other officers. Everyone was run-down, and people frequently complained of dizziness and headaches. There were some cases of malaria, but these were mostly mild. However black the humor had been at the beginning of the operation, all signs of it had vanished now. The only thing that improved was the cursing, which seemed the only way the men could describe their condition.

Sometimes a man would go “apeshit” and begin to yell and curse hysterically at everyone else. Usually they would simply let him alone and he would calm down. Other times he would have to be seized and restrained.

Occasionally men could be heard at night talking to themselves or weeping. A man in Spudhead’s squad crawled off into the brush every morning and cried for five or ten minutes. Everyone could hear him sobbing, but it was never mentioned.

One day Spudhead encountered the man on his way out to take a crap and decided to ask what was wrong. Red-eyed and puffy-cheeked, the man glared at Spudhead with the air of someone whose deepest privacy had been invaded.
“What’s wrong?
I wanna get my ass out of this mutherfucking Boo Hoo Forest—that’s what’s wrong!” the man cried indignantly. He brushed past Spudhead and began putting his gear in order. He never went off into the bushes again; but also, he stopped speaking to Spudhead entirely.

There was an increasing reluctance to follow orders. Sometimes this manifested itself in out-and-out refusal to obey sergeants and officers. It was as if the men had begun to pick up the rules of the jungle, which were the rules of simple survival. Once, Brill’s platoon would not get up from a smoke break. They had run into a heavily mined trail earlier and declared that they would go no farther. Kahn and Trunk arrived at the scene and found the men clustered in little knots, their jaws set in dour, determined expressions.

Shortly after he joined the Company, Kahn had learned that Captain Thurlo had made Brill’s outfit sort of a “goon platoon,” filling it with misfits and malcontents who did not perform well elsewhere. Whatever Thurlo’s reasons were, he never explained them to Kahn, and Kahn never asked, although he would not have done it that way himself. The inevitable result was that Brill’s platoon had become the seat of whatever trouble there was in the Company, and a couple of times Kahn had toyed with the idea of turning it over to Sharkey or Donovan to shape it up. In the end, he had concluded it was too late to start mucking around; and it was certainly too late now.

Trunk strode to the center of the clearing where the platoon was gathered and surveyed their unhappy faces while Kahn remained at the edge, trying to look stern. They had planned it that way at Trunk’s suggestion—that Kahn shouldn’t get into a one-on-one in something like this if he could help it—because if he did, and if it failed, his authority would be seriously eroded. Kahn had no idea how Trunk planned to handle it, but whatever it was, he hoped it would work, because if it didn’t then he
would
have to step in.

“All right, shitheads,” Trunk said, “listen up”; but there was a mellowness in his voice that was almost soothing. Before saying anything else, Trunk hunkered down, steadying himself with his rifle, and removed his helmet, and wiped off a brow full of sweat with the back of his sleeve.

“Whatever’s going on over here,” Trunk said, “this shit’s gotta stop.” He paused for a moment and searched the eyes of the platoon. Then he pointed in the direction of Kahn.

“The Company Commander here asked me to straighten out you guys. I know what’s going on here is rough—but I ain’t driving through here in no jeep myself. I’m right here with you, and so is Lieutenant Kahn.”

Trunk stopped again, and there was some awkward coughing from his audience.

“Now,” he said, “we’re all here together, and we’ve got to go on ahead together. Otherwise, you shitheads are going to be left right out here by yourselves alone; and even if you do manage to find your way out—if the gooks don’t get you first, or the snakes or whatever—you’ll be wishing like hell they had, ’cause what the Army’ll do to you’ll be a hell of a lot worse . . .”

All the time Trunk was making his little pitch, Brill had been standing silently against a tree, whittling a stick with his knife. Beside him, squatting down, was Sergeant Groutman, a fierce, fathomless grin on his face.

“What we can do now,” Trunk said, “is to just sort of forget this happened. Go on and finish your cigarettes—or light another one if you want—but when you’re done, you do what the lieutenant here tells you, and get up and go on. You got any complaints about how you’re being treated—if you ain’t getting enough to eat, or you’re hurting—you let me know. That’s what I’m here for,” Trunk said. “I’ll fix it up with Lieutenant Kahn here.” He rose to his feet and replaced his steel pot. He fixed his gaze on Crump, who was standing a little way back from the others. Crump still had on his helmet, and his rifle was cradled in his arms.

“What da yah say, soldier?” Trunk said. Crump looked for a moment as though he were going to speak, and then a loud voice boomed out from behind Trunk:

“You dirtballs heard the First Sergeant. He’s right. We ain’t going to stay here, so let’s go.”

It was Groutman, on his feet too now, putting on his steel pot and walking to the center toward Trunk.

“C’mon,” Groutman shouted, “off your butts!” He made a little rising motion with his hand. “We’re getting out of here!” he shouted, and slowly, with some low grumbling, the platoon began to rise and put on their steel pots too, and then Brill stepped forward and began giving orders, and soon they started to form up again and get ready to be on their way.

Kahn was relieved beyond belief. He wasn’t sure what he would have done. He would probably have hollered and threatened and they would have stayed put, and—well, anyway, Trunk had fixed it, and again Kahn was goddamn glad to have him around. Still, what had happened here was an ominous sign, and Kahn was afraid they had not seen the last of it.

Although the officers and men of Bravo Company had no way of knowing it, from the official viewpoint, Operation Western Movie was highly successful.

Since they had entered the Ia Drang region, the four battalions, Four/Seven included, had dispatched a confirmed 477 North Vietnamese killed, and it was estimated at least twice that number had died and three times it had been wounded. They had destroyed several encampment areas and two full field hospitals, captured caches of small arms, ammunition and other equipment and destroyed tons of enemy supplies—at a loss to themselves of 43 men killed and 115 wounded. As Patch put it one afternoon during the general’s briefing, “We’re just kicking hell out of them.”

Most of the men on the ground did not see it quite this way. Crump summed up their position succinctly one night after they had unleashed an artillery barrage following a brutal ambush.

“We ain’t nothin’ but bait,” he said. “Worms dangling on a hook.”

Nevertheless, in that late-October week of nineteen sixty-six, the operation was deemed so satisfactory that the information office in Saigon decided to fly up a planeload of reporters to prove that the tide of war was finally turning in favor of the Americans. They arrived on the morning of the twelfth day—television film cameras and crews, notebooks and portable typewriters—accompanied by personable Army information officers and two major generals. After some opening remarks by General Butterworth and the Operational Commander, the briefing was turned over to Captain Sonnebend, the new Public Information Officer, who had been rehearsing his part since the night before.

“Gentlemen,” Sonnebend began enthusiastically, “the Ia Drang Valley is a place where civilization has yet to make appreciable inroads . . .”

At about the same time, Bravo Company was moving forward almost eagerly.

Since daybreak they had been pushing toward the morning’s objective: a daisy-cutter hole blown out of the jungle where the Supply helicopters would be landing later to bring them a hot meal and mail. They had the point again, and their particular mission was to secure the landing zone and link up with Second Battalion for the final push. The simple things like the need for mail and a hot meal had grown enormously important, and they were willing to work extra hard for them.

By now most of them had become at least roughly accustomed to the hardships of the jungle. Even the big-city boys were slowly beginning to change from preponderantly indoor creatures to preponderantly outdoor ones, and many signs of their former orientation had already begun to disappear.

Second Battalion had gotten ahead and was already at the landing zone when Bravo Company arrived, and the helicopters had started to land, one at a time. The men sat or lay down at the edge of the jungle, basking in the sunlight. Some of them had removed their clothes to dry, and a few were eating C rations. A detail from Second Battalion emerged from the jungle with the bodies of several dead who had been killed in a firefight the afternoon before. As they walked slowly by, the men of Bravo Company averted their eyes. They still felt a certain embarrassment at seeing their own dead, as though the dead men themselves would be embarrassed at being dead and seen in this undignified position—much the way a man felt embarrassed at being caught in the open taking a shit. But this too was beginning to change—the same way as a man caught taking a shit did not feel quite as embarrassed as he had before they entered the jungle.