Better Times Than These (39 page)

Crump leaned over the table. “Thought you was gonna dance with her, Carruthers.”

Carruthers said nothing; he continued to glare.

Nobody knew much about Carruthers, except that he was big, and black, and quiet and Southern, and that he was the one who had led them in song the afternoon they were relieved up on The Fake. And until then nobody had paid him much attention, but afterward there was some brief curiosity about him, during which time it was rumored that he had never worn shoes until the Army gave him a pair; that he practiced a weird voodoo cult and that he was a descendant of a fierce tribe of Negroes who, because of their intense blackness, were sometimes referred to as Blue Gum Niggers.

“Hey, what’d she say, huh? She don’t wanta dance?” Crump had put down his beer and was leaning across the table.

“She nofin bu a ho!” Carruthers said, lapsing into an all-but-incomprehensible dialect. There was something scary in Carruthers’ face. In his anger it seemed to suck into a black hole inside of which two red eyes burned, and the eyes seemed not like part of the face but like separate things that lived in the hole.

“Well, what’d she say, man? Whatdaya mean she spit on you? Say, huh?”

“Yeah, say what happened,” Spudhead chimed in.

Carruthers’ huge left fist was balled up tightly and he was massaging it with his right hand, looking down angrily at the floor.

“Ho,” he said. “I ough cuttah.”

“Well, what in hell happened?” Crump said in frustration.

“Axed er ta daince—you know she don daince wid blacks . . .” His voice trailed off.

The girl had drawn herself up like royalty and was looking straight ahead, her delicate features glowing in the dim lantern light. She was far and away the prettiest girl in the bar, and maybe along the whole row of dives and brothels in the shantytown that had sprung up around the base camp at Monkey Mountain.

It was a place of filth and squalor, peopled by camp followers and other displaced persons who found it easier to live off the Americans than to try to scrape out an existence in the war-torn countryside. They slept in tin-roofed shanties or beneath straw-topped lean-tos, and mostly they were women and children and a few old men, the younger men having already been killed or conscripted by one side or the other. Their sole belongings usually consisted of a brace of pots and pans, a straw sleeping mat and the clothes on their backs.

In the daytime, the women squatted over open fires tending pots of rice or fish or water buffalo meat, chattering like magpies—or spent their time begging from the soldiers or scavenging food and other things from the land. A small cottage industry had developed, utilizing waste materials left behind by the Army, of which the most notable aspect was the transformation by old men with pointed white beards of artillery-shell casings into brass ashtrays and other useful items, which were immediately sold back to the Americans at exorbitant prices.

As prostitutes arrived in droves, entrepreneurs erected ramshackle bars, and every night these bars and the dirty streets outside them were filled with drunken, brawling soldiers from the Brigade; men willing to put up with filth and wretchedness just to get away from the Army for an hour or so.

Bravo Company had not been allowed to patronize this encampment until a few days before, and then thanks only to a directive by General Butterworth himself, who had learned, quite by accident, that Patch, fearing God-only-knew-what-kind-of trouble, had restricted Four/Seven to Base Camp the moment they returned from the field.

It happened when Chaplain Greaves got up to give his weekly report on morale at the daily briefing.

As usual, morale was high, he said, offering statistics that so many men were attending church services—or so many had reported such and such problems, but the indications were good. The last item on his agenda was a report on the rate of venereal disease within the various battalions—a function the Army had at some point lumped among the duties of its chaplains because high VD rate was considered an indication of low morale. General Butterworth usually tolerated the Chaplain’s report without comment, but that day he rose to his feet.

“Wait a minute, read that again,” the general said.

The Chaplain repeated the figures. In three battalions the rate of VD was approximately thirty cases per one hundred men—relatively high—but in Four/Seven, the Chaplain proudly reported, the rate was barely five cases per one hundred.

“There is something wrong here, Chaplain,” the general said. “How is it that these men have such a low rate of VD?”

“Sir,” the Chaplain replied knowledgeably, “I believe it is because the Battalion Commander has restricted them to the Base Camp.”

The general looked at Patch, who was seated in the front row. “Is that true, Jason? Your men are not allowed out?”

“That is correct, General,” Patch said, getting to his feet. “As you know, they have been through some very rough combat, and I am concerned about turning them loose on the civilian population at this point.”

The general pondered this for a moment. “Well, how do you explain that five of your men still reported in with venereal disease last week, then?”

“I am afraid,” Patch said gravely, “that some of them are having liaisons with prostitutes through the barbed wire. I am told it goes on late at night.”

The general’s face seemed to screw up into a knot. “You mean to say your troops line up to receive sex through a barricade of barbed wire—they’re doing it standing up while everyone else can go to town?”

“It is what I have been told,” Patch said. “It seems to be the only logical explanation.”

“Good God,” the general sighed. “I don’t think it would hurt anything to let them out—if you put some limitations on it—especially if everyone else can.”

“Well, I could certainly . . .”

“Hell,” the general said, a twinkle suddenly in his eye, “that VD rate ought not to be five—it oughta be a hundred and five.”

“Yessir,” Patch said obediently.

“You know,” the general continued, “when I was in Korea there wasn’t a Red Cross girl who’d come within fifty miles of our division.”

“Begging your pardon, General,” the Chaplain interjected meekly, “but if I may say so, incidence of venereal disease is quite high in this area, and as you know, the Army considers it an important morale factor . . .”

General Butterworth eyed the Chaplain impatiently. “Those poor devils,” he said, “will go through a lot before they get back home to Palookaville, U.S.A., and I believe they are entitled to a piece of ass when they have the opportunity.”

The Chaplain’s mind raced for a counterpoint. Certainly there must be one. Sex outside of marriage was sinful. Obviously, if that many men had gotten VD, they must all be doing it. The entire Brigade was sinning, and nobody cared and they were even encouraging it. Lamely, though, he returned to a more practical argument.

“With your indulgence, sir, the manuals are very explicit regarding morale problems associated with venereal disease . . .”

“Chaplain,” the general said, “those manuals were written long ago—probably before I was in the Army and certainly before you were. Maybe then we were fighting to preserve some high sense of honor. Perhaps even with some kind of divine guidance. But I can assure you that is not the case in this lousy war. Sometimes late at night I wonder why we are in it. The bastards themselves who live here don’t give a damn. The people back home don’t seem to either, and every day I’m sending out boys not much older than my own kids to get blown all over the landscape while we sit here powerless to raise a finger against the principal cause of the trouble Up North.

“Give me three armored divisions and I would roll across the DMZ and put an end to this foolishness in a couple of weeks. Then we could go home. But it’s not going to work out like that. So if you want to do something useful, go and pray for those boys who are going to do the fighting—and they are going to have to do it, because that is the way things are—and they’re going to do a good job of it, too. And as far as this VD thing goes, if there is one thing I am convinced of after twenty-three years of military service it is this: men that won’t fuck won’t fight.”

There was a long pause, during which no one even coughed or breathed heavily, and then the general left the tent and stalked up the little hill where his own quarters were. He had his supper brought to him, and he did not come out until the following day. But that same night, Four/Seven received the good news that they could leave the encampment and visit all but a few off-limits places in the native village.

The forward encampment of an Infantry brigade is a bustling, teeming place of decisions and preparation. It has been so since the days of Alexander the Great and the legions of Caesar. Day begins before dawn, and night never ends but simply enmeshes itself with the next day, and the next and the next, and at any time the whole affair is likely to just up and move some place else. But while it is stationary, life goes on as it does in any great city: there are many things to be attended to; there is confusion and laughter and tragedy and foolishness and heartbreak—for the inhabitants are, of course, mere mortal men trying to do the best they can, and in some cases more and in some cases less . . . and it was so on a given week at the place called Monkey Mountain in the late autumn of nineteen hundred and sixty-six:

A corporal with a reputation for scrounging was provided a truck by his commander and sent forty miles away to a Supply depot to see if he could steal some sets of new jungle fatigues. Six hours later he returned with a huge CONEX container which, when pried open, was found to contain approximately one hundred fifty thousand tent pegs. He was told to “get rid of it,” and reassigned a week later to a forward line unit.

A family of Vietnamese was badly afflicted after they cooked their food in some helicopter fuel mistakenly left at the site where the Brigade kitchen staff normally dumped their leftover grease. The Office of Civil Affairs quickly paid them off and the incident was forgotten.

A lieutenant colonel who had caught the clap was told to provide the hospital with samples of urine and semen. As he sat on the latrine attempting to produce the semen, a private first class assigned to clean the commode accidentally walked in on him, thereby earning the officer an unfortunate nickname that remained with him for the rest of his tour.

A terse message was received at Headquarters announcing that a certain Supply lieutenant who had been sent to the coast to supervise the off-loading of materiel had inadvertently been sunning himself aboard an aircraft carrier when it weighed anchor and he would have to be flown back when the ship reached Guam.

A twenty-year-old draftee who had studied concert piano cried for four hours from his hospital bed after seeing that his hand had been amputated.

Several thousand board feet of lumber were delivered to a nearby village by the U.S. Aid Mission for reconstruction of a burned-out church. Three hours later the same pile of lumber was observed in the back of a Vietnamese Army truck, bound for the black market in Saigon.

A master sergeant who had just consumed a fifth of bourbon accidentally shot himself to death while cleaning his .45.

A private first class was given a seven-and-one-half-minute break from KP after receiving notice that his wife had given birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound girl.

A newly commissioned captain on his way to an artillery outpost forgot to gas up his jeep and was found shot by the roadside as he walked back with a jerry can.

A Thanksgiving dinner planned by the Chaplain for children at a nearby orphanage almost turned into an international incident when the orphans, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of turkeys, Pilgrims and Indians, became violently ill after eating the meal. A doctor was summoned, and after a hasty examination he declared that nothing was wrong except that the American food was too rich for children accustomed to a diet of rice and fish.

A nineteen-year-old helicopter pilot was grounded for a week for flying into a tree and shattering his windscreen.

An Air Force major who had received the Silver Star for heroism got drunk the night before he was to be shipped back to the States and decided it would be a good thing to sing to the men before leaving. After being hooted out of the officers’-club tent, he made his way to the enlisted men’s beer hall and, unaccompanied, sang all three verses of “America the Beautiful” and would have sung more if the MPs had not arrived and suggested, politely, that he leave.

Two cooks got into a knife fight over what ingredients should be put into a bean soup. One was sent to the hospital, and the other was chained to a tree overnight. Both were back in the kitchen the next morning. The bean soup had been consumed with no extraordinary complaints.

A battery of 105-millimeter howitzers was instructed to test-fire a Korean War-vintage propaganda-leaflet shell to see if it could still be used. When the lanyard was pulled, the roll of leaflets flew out in a gigantic flaming wad, immolating three native huts and severely frightening their occupants.

A Vietnamese child who had been trampled nearly to death by a water buffalo was patched up in the camp hospital. Afterward, his family tried to sue the Army.

A four-foot-long cobra wandered into the TOC by mistake, and thirty-seven fully armed officers and men ran out into the night. The snake wound itself around the Sergeant Major’s chair and was finally dispatched by the Sergeant Major himself with a 12-gauge shotgun borrowed from the MPs. The chair also did not survive.

A captain sat down to write his wife that their application to adopt a war orphan had been turned down by the bureaucracy in Saigon. No reason had been stated. Halfway, he stopped and took out some photographs of the child and began to cry uncontrollably.

A scandalous court-martial was averted by the reassignment of the Mess Sergeant and his assistant following a meal in the enlisted men’s mess served to Colonel Patch and the Brigade Sergeant Major. The colonel’s investigation revealed that the Mess Sergeant had been selling off the best of the Army-supplied food on the Vietnamese black market and substituting a heavy diet of potatoes in its place. The offenders were called in by the Sergeant Major, who pointed to the dictum above his desk and ordered them to report to a rifle company operating deep in enemy territory, “. . . and never again return to base camp . . .”