Better Times Than These (47 page)

L
ieutenant Brill had been doing some patroling of his own. The same morning Kahn and Holden took off with the Crazy Horse Patrol, Brill had returned jubilantly from the largest single action the Company had seen since the fighting in the Ia Drang. He brought with him three prisoners: a man who had been carrying documents and two young nurses with medical supplies. The bodies of five more had been left behind on a trail.

They had walked into Brill’s ambush bold as brass. Madman Muntz, hiding in a clump of bamboo, had heard them first, chattering loudly as they rounded a bend. Without consultation, he depressed the trigger of his machine gun and dispatched the first three men in line. Two others fled down a branch of the trail where another section of the ambush party was waiting. The three they took prisoner had dived for some bushes and begun calling out,
“Chieu hoi,”
the accepted meaning of which was to turn oneself in voluntarily; and even though that was not exactly the case, Brill brought them in anyway and was glad he had because the man with the documents looked as if he might possess valuable information. The nurses, on the other hand, were fourteen or fifteen years old and apparently worthless, except that they had been carrying enough medical supplies to tend a full-sized platoon.

A mood of dark satisfaction swept the encampment as news of Brill’s massacre got around, not unlike the agitation that runs through schoolboy groups when two of their number engage in a fistfight. Practically all the men who had not participated in the ambush formed up around the prisoners to gawk at them, laughing and gesturing as if they had gathered at a pier to witness the display of prizewinning fish. The man, a scrawny specimen, appeared frightened as he was nudged along at rifle point, but the girls seemed placid by comparison, and perhaps even a little curious in the presence of so many youthful men.

Brill could hardly contain himself. In nearly two months Bravo Company had succeeded in killing fewer than a dozen VC and had never taken one alive, and now on a single operation he had annihilated a main-force enemy squad and captured three prisoners, one of them with obviously valuable information. He was determined to find out just what this information was.

He
would do this, First Lieutenant Victor Brill, and not some jerk-off back at Monkey Mountain. He wasn’t just going to phone it in to any Spec./4 radio operator, either. He would wait till he had it all wrapped up in a neat little action report and give it to the colonel himself. But first, he was going to have to get the information out of these people, one way or another.

Inside the tent, the pressure lantern hissed furiously like a self-contained little storm. The interpreter, a boyish-looking Vietnamese, was seated at the edge of a cot, eyeing the toothless scarecrow prisoner. Brill sat at the field desk, carving up a stick of wood with the Randall knife. For nearly a minute no one had spoken.

“Ask him what his unit is again,” Brill said.

The interpreter spoke, more sharply this time, and received the same reply.

“He still say he come from Nag Ho hamlet. He say VC come last night and make him go with them.”

“Tell him he’s lying,” Brill said masterfully. The interpreter translated.

On the field desk a map of the valley was spread out, the position of the ambush marked in red grease pencil. Brill extended a cigarette, and the prisoner accepted it with a gummy grin. Brill let him take a few drags before continuing. He hadn’t interrogated a prisoner in this kind of situation before, and his idea of how it might be done was drawn mostly from movies he had seen. He remembered Japs and Germans offering cigarettes to poker-faced, battle-wise American soldiers, who, of course, revealed nothing more than name, rank and serial number. But he figured the method was probably as good as any.

“Ask him where the VC are,” Brill said.

The interpreter spoke with the prisoner.

“He say VC in the mountains. He say VC come into his house yesterday and take him along.”

“Ask him exactly where in the mountains,” Brill said impatiently. “Tell him to show me on this map.”

The prisoner and interpreter conversed for a moment. “He say he not know where they are, Lieutenant. He say he not VC . . .”

“Fuck that!” Brill roared. He jumped up and slammed the knife into the top of the desk. The prisoner seemed impressed by this display, and his eyes darted back and forth between Brill and the interpreter.

Brill leaned across the desk so that his nose was only inches from the prisoner’s.

“Where?” he howled.

Breathing in the prisoner’s face, Brill reached down and worked the Randall knife out of the desk. The man’s eyes followed pleadingly as Brill brought the blade upward toward his bare stomach so that the point just touched the man’s navel.

Slowly the prisoner shifted his gaze to the terrain map on the desk, looking as though he had been asked to comprehend an immensely complicated mathematical problem.

“Tell him again,” Brill said. “I want to know where his unit is located.” As the interpreter spoke, Brill gently inserted the blade into the hollow of the navel until he felt it touch the knubby skin inside. The prisoner tensed and made a choked-off animal-like sound, more of fear than of pain. They stood there that way for nearly a minute. Finally the man spoke.

“He say they in the mountains,” the interpreter said.

“I know they’re in the mountains!” Brill hissed, still glaring into the prisoner’s face. “Does he suppose I think they’re bivouacked in the goddamn rice paddies?” He jabbed the point of the knife a little harder and twisted. The prisoner flinched, and a thin trickle of blood appeared at the lip of the navel and ran down into his pants. The prisoner said something very terse, but a smile came across the interpreter’s face.

“Ah,” he said, “he say they in mountain by Hung Lap hamlet. Have camp there.”

“Good,” Brill said. “Now we’re getting somewhere . . .”

The navel torture went on for nearly an hour. Each time Brill asked a question he gave the knife a little flick, and the prisoner got more and more specific in his answers until Brill had ascertained that he was a low-ranking sergeant in a VC company that had been terrorizing the valley for years and that the company was equipped with mortars and heavy machine guns, and took its orders from a North Vietnamese cadre, and other interesting things.

Brill would have liked nothing better than to saddle up and go after them, but he knew Patch would never approve of it. It would have been the perfect operation, from start to finish, provided this bastard wasn’t lying—but what kind of a man would lie when his navel was being cut out?

It had started to rain, a downpour that trickled off into a sprinkle and promised to annoy them through the night. Brill was finishing his interrogation of the prisoner when he heard his name called from outside the tent.

“Yeah?” Brill said, and a drenched soldier entered and stood before him in the dim lantern light.

“Ah, Lieutenant, I, uh, was just down at your platoon, and, ah, I think you . . . might want to go down there, sir.” The soldier looked embarrassed and took off his helmet. He saw the prisoner, but did not look at him.

“Oh, yeah? What for?” Brill said icily.

“Well, sir, it’s them nurses. The ones they captured today . . . Ah, I ain’t sure, ’cause I was just by there to see a buddy and it was dark and all, but I think somebody might be, uh . . . fooling with them or something . . .”

Brill was standing in front of the prisoner, but had dropped the knife to his side. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, sir, like I say . . . I was just down there to see a buddy and I didn’t see nothing, except that there was some talk and I heard some sounds, ah, woman sounds . . . coming from in one of the foxholes. But I think you better get down there, sir, that’s all I came up here to say.”

“What’s your name, soldier?” Brill said.

“Poats, sir—Weapons Platoon,” he said apologetically.

“I’ll tell you what, Poats: if I were you I wouldn’t worry about what’s going on in Second Platoon. I’m running this company now and I know what the hell is going on in it, and everything’s under control. Whatever you saw or heard down there is Second Platoon’s business and not yours.”

“Yessir, ah . . . I’m sorry, sir, I just thought you might want to go down there and ah . . .” Poats stopped and began fidgeting with the helmet in his hands. “Sir, I’ll be getting on back to the mortars now,” he said, and disappeared into the darkness and rain.

Brill put the knife down on the table and told the interpreter to take the prisoner outside and tie him up. He’d found out what he wanted to know. After they had gone, he lit a cigarette and settled back on Kahn’s cot, one arm folded behind his head. The lantern hissed and sputtered out, but he made no effort to relight it. As he lay in the darkness he tried to imagine what kind of fun his guys were having with the two nurses. To hell with it, he thought. They’re entitled. They did well for him today—his men, his friends!

So what if people like Kahn, and that asshole Inge, and those two new queers, Range and Peck—and that snotty new Exec, Holden—so what if they treated him like shit? He’d tried to be friendly. He’d tried talking to them. But he wasn’t going to kiss ass for anything.

Brill knew how that kind of thing went. When he was in military school they had ignored him too. They’d all go out weekends, and the ones with cars all said, “We don’t have no room, Brill.” And like shit they hadn’t! He’d seen them—two, three people in the cars—and when his old man finally gave him money to buy his own car himself, it had been the same. They all said, “Well, I told so-and-so I’d go out with them,” and finally he’d started hanging around with freshmen who weren’t old enough to drive and didn’t give a damn who they went with—but even they didn’t pay him any attention, and as soon as they got their licenses they abandoned him too, and the last couple of years he’d spent his time with townies who went to the public school sometimes and hung around the pool hall and got into fights, and he’d even gotten into a few himself.

Yeah, screw them—screw ’em all, Brill thought. There were guys like Ed Groutman and Harley, and Maranto—
they
were his friends. He could sit around with them and tell stories and they didn’t act like they didn’t want him around. So tonight, by God, he’d given them a present . . . some present, too . . . And tomorrow assholes like Patch and the others would all know what kind of officer Victor Brill was. They might even give him a medal. Ha! fuck medals—he didn’t want any. He just wanted them to know . . .

Outside he heard a noise: a shrill, high-pitched cry too far away for him to tell the source or reason. Brill closed his eyes and returned to what was probably going on down there. Those two girls. Those two murdering zip cunts. Just thinking about it made him excited, and he opened his fly and began to stroke himself.

“What do you want us to do with these two?” Sergeant Groutman had asked.

And hadn’t he told them: “They look pretty dangerous to me, Ed—they’d kill you as soon as look at you, all you boys.”

And everyone had laughed, and Groutman said, “Mind if we ‘interrogate’ ’em, Lieutenant?” and Brill said, “You guys do what you want,” and walked away smiling, as if he had given a dog a bone.

31

C
rystalline droplets of morning dew sparkled on the grass and flowers in Happy Valley as the sun appeared fresh and blood red above the Sugar Plum Mountains. The Crazy Horse Patrol had been stirring around for half an hour, and there was a smell of coffee in the air and the sounds of people splashing at the edges of the pond they had camped beside. The sense of serenity had lasted through the night, and as they sorted and adjusted things in preparation for the day’s work, their mood was that of adventurers rather than manhunters.

Two hours later they had covered more than four miles of ground, and it had been easy going, with frequent breaks for the officer of Topographical Services to make notations. They were preparing to move on from one of these rest periods when someone saw the house.

It was hidden in dense foliage and partly covered with giant creeping vines. The sides and thatched roof were a weathered chocolate, and it seemed strange and out of place in the noonday sun. They moved on it cautiously, rifles at the ready, and inevitably the tenseness began to seep back. There were things to worry about again, all related directly to the house and what it stood for.

Quickly they discovered two things: first, it was not merely a single house, but part of a tiny village of half a dozen buried deep in the thicket; second, the village had been deserted for a long time. There were few clues as to why it was here or what had become of its occupants.

There was no evidence of farming, so the former residents must have been hunters—yet it was unusual for hunters to construct such elaborate houses. Moreover, their departure must have been very hasty, because of the sundry things left behind. Articles of clothing and other household items were hanging on the walls or left lying about as though they had been in use moments before the previous tenants departed. Various utensils surrounded the blackened ashes of cooking fires, and pots and pans were ringed with some long-ossified substance of food as though the inhabitants had simply dropped everything they were doing in a mad dash to get away.