Better Times Than These (44 page)

Trunk had died quietly, and with dignity, the morning Holden arrived, victim of a land mine tripped off by a man in Peck’s platoon walking ahead of him on a patrol near An Lap hamlet, which lay in the center of the valley. An Lap had been a hotbed of trouble since the day they had come—mines, booby traps and sniper fire spread outward from it in ever-widening circles—and the purpose of the patrol that day had been to move the occupants and destroy it.

The mine that killed Trunk was what was called a “bouncing Betty”—an ingenious invention whose parts are supplied, unwillingly or unwittingly, by the opposing side. An empty C-ration can, for instance, is filled with explosive from a dud artillery shell and buried carefully in the ground. The man who trips its cord will hear a small pop as it rises a few feet into the air, and perhaps a slight hissing for a couple of seconds before it annihilates him. Trunk heard such a sound moments before he died.

It interrupted a chorus of the “Missouri Waltz” he had been humming softly between his teeth; and afterward, as he lay on the ground, his bottom half nearly severed from the top, looking upward, beyond the men hovering over him, delivered his parting words: “Them shitheads—oh, them shitheads . . .” contemptuously, in bewildered rage against a war so strange a man could be killed by a device so simple a ten-year-old child could make one—and probably
had
made it—and if there had been time, and he had not been dying, more than likely Trunk would have utilized the occasion as an instructive example to the others, for there were many dangerous things to watch out for out here . . .

Half an hour later, the rest of the patrol stormed into An Lap hamlet in a carnival of boiling vengeance and burned it to the ground. Fearful beatings were administered to the inhabitants, and Lieutenant Peck was powerless to stop them. He and his sergeant ran here and there breaking up gangs of men laying into someone, but no sooner had they separated them than another incident would break out. Some of the Vietnamese accepted this stoically, as though they were aware of what had precipitated it; others, however, shrank into terrified little groups and squatted on the ground.

Later that day, just before dusk, Kahn was sitting on the edge of his cot, bare except for undershorts, when Holden walked in. The patter of rain drummed against the canvas tent top, and the dank, acrid odor of unwashed bedding and moldy clothes hung heavily in the air. A kerosene lantern sputtered above the field desk, on which the contents of two field packs had been spread out and sorted. In a corner, a can of C-ration stew was cooking over a heat tab.

“It was really tough about your First, Billy,” Holden said glumly. “I heard he was a good soldier.”

“He was a thoroughly good soldier,” Kahn said. He leaned back on the bunk, thin and pale-looking to Holden. It was the first time he had seen him without a shirt.

“This is his stuff, huh?” Holden said, picking up a photograph. It was a picture of a man and woman copulating.

“Yeah. He never had much use for the junk most guys pick up—cameras and that kind of crap. I think the most valuable thing he owned was this.” Kahn handed him the preposterously battered coffee cup. Holden turned it in his hands.

“He got it in Korea after some kind of brawl with the Air Force,” Kahn said. “Look inside; you ever seen anything like it?”

Holden peered down inside the cup and winced. “Ugh,” he said, and put it on the desk.

“He never washed it,” Kahn said, “just poured in water and it turned into coffee. Said it would lift you right off the ground.”

“You ever try it?” Holden smiled.

“I took his word for it.”

The rain kept up its drumming against the top of the tent. The flap opened suddenly and the radio operator stuck his head in, dripping wet. “Artillery called, Lieutenant. They’re putting heat on Hill Two Forty in fifteen minutes. ARVN company may have spotted something—want to let you know.”

“Right,” Kahn said. He bent over and stirred the C-ration stew with his knife. “Damned ARVN, always seeing ghosts. You want some chow?”

“What we got?”

“Trout amandine with asparagus tips and butter sauce—look for yourself.”

Holden selected a dinner of meat loaf, circa 1957, and lit a heat tab for himself.

“You get a look around this afternoon?” Kahn asked.

“Pretty good.”

“Sorry I couldn’t go with you,” Kahn said.

“What about operations?” Holden said.

“Sucks. And that’s the best you can say for it.” Kahn lit up a cigarette.

“Bad, huh?”

“Terrible. But there’s not much we can do. Patch is all gung ho about running these damned two-platoon patrols every day, and . . . you saw what happened today—scratch one first-rate top sergeant. But what can I do? Every time we go out there somebody gets blown away, and we don’t have ding-dong to show for it. I’ve never heard of a place mined like this.”

“Hmmm . . .”

“What I’d like to do is run a single patrol every other day—mix ’em up a bit—and ambush at night sometimes: catch the bastards moving. The way it is now, we might as well mail them a schedule.”

“What’s the Old Man say?”

“He says to keep smiling.”

Holden pulled two beer cans from his pack, and they dined on the C-ration supper while Kahn pointed out the tactical situation on a map laid out between them.

I wonder, he thought, I really wonder . . . Fucking Patch . . . sending out an exec with no field experience when there must be a dozen platoon leaders from other companies . . . What’s he trying to do?

He was of course glad to see Holden, because it had been depressing and lonely after Sharkey and Donovan—and now Trunk—were gone. But what he needed most right now wasn’t a friend. Right how he needed a solid hand who could step in and take over certain duties in the Company.

From the blackness across the valley a rumble of artillery shuddered through the gloom, its flashes visible through the open flap like fireflies fluttering against the mountainside.

“How about the platoon leaders? Anything I should know?”

Kahn lit another heat tab for coffee and stood at the opening staring out at the little show.

“Well, there’s Peck, First Platoon, and Range, he’s got Third. They came about the same time, and they both went to, uh . . .” He thought for a moment before remembering the name of the school.

“Lord,” said Holden, “that’s worse than the Academy.”

He gave Holden a rundown on the other officers. He told him what he knew about Peck and Range, leaving out the still persistent rumors that they were queer. He filled him in on Lieutenant Inge and the reserved, studious way he ran the mortar platoon. He told him as much as he could about the noncoms, and that he had decided to make Sergeant Dreyfuss the new First Sergeant. Outside, the artillery continued to gnash and tear at the neighboring hillside. Finally he got around to Lieutenant Brill, and since it was fresh in his mind, Kahn told Holden about the incident with the ear.

Three days before, Brill had returned from patrol with an ear. He had strung it around his neck with a piece of commo wire: a brownish, shriveling, disgusting human ear. Kahn had noticed it while Brill was making his report to him, and when he asked what it was, Brill cheerfully reported that he had taken it from a man “who didn’t need it anymore.”

Kahn hit the ceiling.

“Damn it!” he’d said. “You know the standing orders about mutilations—and here you are, an officer, wearing that thing in front of your platoon.”

Brill sullenly protested that it wasn’t anything but a fucking gook anyway—and one that had sniped at them at that; but Kahn cut him short.

“Look,” Kahn said, “you know we don’t go for that kind of shit out here. Get rid of it.” Afterward, he’d told Trunk to put out the word again that there were to be no mutilations. It was just like Brill, he thought, to pull some kind of maniac thing like that.

Holden did not seem surprised. He recalled a case back at Monkey Mountain of a man who was court-martialed when he was found with a tentful of anatomical parts, pickled in various containers. Word had gotten out that the man was “building himself a gook.”

“The thing about Brill,” Kahn said, “is nobody pays much attention to him. I guess I’m as guilty as the rest.”

“He sounds kind of crazy to me,” Holden offered.

“I guess maybe all of us are,” Kahn said.

They talked a little while longer about other things, and Kahn promised Holden he would take him on a thorough tour of the area the next day.

The artillery fire had ceased, and the overhead lantern flickered for a few seconds and went out. Holden put on his helmet and stood up. “Think I’ll turn in and start out fresh in the morning—with my thumb up my ass.”

“Better than a sharp stick,” Kahn said knowingly. They both laughed.

In the week that followed, the mood of the men did not improve.

Insolence, sometimes bordering on insubordination, fist fighting and a general malaise marked the company spirit. The two new lieutenants, Range and Peck, complained on different occasions that they were unable to get their platoons to move into preassigned positions and, worse, had heard vague, unsettling rumors against their lives, none of which could be proved.

The discontent was so general that Kahn was completely baffled as to how to deal with it. Punishing a man or a couple of men was one thing, but the problem became infinitely more complex when it involved practically the whole Company. It wasn’t so much a concerted stand against the officers or their orders; it was more a kind of mobocracy in which the officers were still loosely in control. How much of it had to do directly with Trunk’s death was hard to tell. There was the rain, too, and the boredom spliced in with the nerve-scraping, screaming heebie-jeebies of the daily patrols and the tasteless food and having to piss and defecate into open holes in the ground and the absence of women and other things.

But Trunk’s death had made it all the worse, and the brutality inflicted on the Vietnamese in the valley was henceforth done in his name.

Of course, not everyone felt this way, and at least one man was deeply troubled by it.

Ever since the letters from Julie and his father, Spudhead had been walking a pretty shaky plank between sanity and the horrors, but now he felt himself sliding slowly off. First there were physical symptoms: headaches, dizziness, the stomach sickness—he almost always felt like throwing up—but beyond that something else was wrong . . . wrong, wrong, wrong . . . and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was except that, basically, he felt sad.

At first he mistook his sadness for the regular depression that troubled everyone. But finally it came to him that what he was actually feeling was sorrow. Sorrow for his dead companymates—and sorrow for the Vietnamese who were being killed, and sorrow for Julie, who was worried about him. He remembered the ponchos lined up on the Blood Alley Road where the personnel carrier had been mined. He was sorry for the men who had been inside it. He was sorry for the Running Man they had killed outside the village, and for Sergeant Trunk and Lieutenant Donovan and the soldier whose head had been cut off and stuck on the stump up on The Fake, and for the blackened “crispy critters” . . . and for Lieutenant Sharkey and Moose, the mortarman, and for the people in the An Lap hamlet whose houses had been burned. It was very different from the regular depression, which was temporary and was sometimes even replaced by a strong euphoria which made him feel very fierce and powerful and self-righteous.

But the sorrow was different.

It did not come and go. It came and stayed and got worse. Sometimes he could put it out of his thoughts by thinking other things. But it was still there, somewhere. It was not the war itself that made him sorry—he still believed in it, even after Julie’s letter; it had to do with his being in the war. But he still couldn’t quite figure it out. He knew he wasn’t very smart—but he wasn’t dumb either. And it didn’t take any great brains to see that there was an enemy who was trying to kill him and who was against his country.

To complicate things more, fear began to creep into his life. Not the animal terror he had felt in the Boo Hoo Forest and on The Fake, but plain, simple fear which, like the sorrow, did not come and go but stayed in varying degrees all the time. He had a singular vision of himself dead. He was being carried off in a poncho, his muddy boots dangling out of one end. Rain would drip down on his face, which was tranquil and unmutilated. He could not tell what had killed him, because he could not see inside the poncho, except for the face and feet, and they were unmarked. He had this vision at least several times a day. Each time he would squint deeper into his mind to try to find out what had killed him, but he never could. Some other soldiers were standing around while the poncho was carried past, but every time he tried to ask them what had killed him, the poncho would disappear from his view like a character walking offstage—and then, slowly, the whole vision would fade out and he would be forced to conjure it up all over again.

It got so bad Spudhead stopped talking to people. Even his close friend Madman Muntz told him he was an asshole. Finally he decided he was going to have to talk to somebody or he would go crazy—if he wasn’t already. There were a lot of things to think about these days. And a lot of hours to think them!

The probe came just before midnight, two weeks to the day after Trunk’s death. In the intervening time, five men had been lost, and the atmosphere of malevolence remained over Bravo Company like the smell of rotting cabbages.

It was a light probe—although they could not know this and at first treated it like a full-scale assault; but it achieved its purpose of checking out the Company defenses so that a full and detailed map could be made, and when the enemy digested this information he must have been surprised to learn that the positions marked were almost identical to those gleaned from a similar probe eight months earlier, a few days before the Airborne company was overrun.

Kahn had spent the day in the field, with Holden shadowing him around. It surprised Kahn how quickly Holden was picking up on things, and he was already beginning to turn over some duties to him.