Better Times Than These (49 page)

Kahn was talking over the radio with a forward air controller cruising somewhere overhead when he saw the North Vietnamese moving toward them out of the tree line.

Everyone else saw them at about the same time, and there was a rising crackle of rifle fire. About twenty yards ahead, a man stood up and hurled a grenade at the advancing force. In mid-throw he was hit by one or more bullets and flew backward through the air as though he had been struck in the face with a bat. Everyone in the Headquarters party saw this. Judging the instantaneous strike of the bullet, it was probable that the shot had not actually been aimed at the man, but that by some stroke of bad luck he had simply risen up into it. In either case, he was now sprawled on the ground—whether wounded or dead no one knew.

Meanwhile, the two machine guns attached to the Crazy Horse Patrol had come to life and temporarily stalled the enemy attack. Kahn was craning over the top of the indentation when he saw a soldier rushing toward the spot where the hapless grenadier had fallen.

It was Carruthers, the giant Negro from Savannah—recognizable by his huge form; out of some unfathomable impulse he had gone to aid the wounded, or dead, man. He got to within five yards of him when he was sent reeling sideways by a burst of automatic-weapons fire. “Lookit that dumb nigger,” Bateson, the RTO, said. “He’s gonna get his ass wasted.” Still on his feet, Carruthers resumed course and was struck a second time and knocked flat on his butt. He sat staring for a moment before staggering to his feet and continuing toward the fallen man. A third burst of fire caught him in the chest, virtually lifting the huge body off the ground, and this time he did not get up. “Aw, shit,” said Bateson. He said it for all of them.

“Red smoke,” Kahn said into the handset, and received some kind of acknowledgment from the air controller above. The plume of red smoke was already rising above the trees, but things had changed since he had ordered it fired.

“Hang on a minute, Skyking,” he said. He craned out toward the spot where the North Vietnamese had vanished into some tall grass, just ahead of where Carruthers and the man who threw the grenade had gone down. Kahn could see nothing. For an instant he thought about the old, dilapidated row of houses in Savannah where Carruthers had grown up. He had known those old houses down on Broad Street, only a block or so from his father’s junkyard, all of them long gone now, replaced by empty lots—and Carruthers; he wondered if he had ever seen him playing around there. Sometimes he used to go down to the salvage yard and wait for his father and sometimes watch the Negro children playing in the street, but he was not allowed to play with them . . . “Dumb nigger” was what Bateson had said . . . “Aw, shit” was right . . .

“He can’t stay up there all day, Horse One,” the air controller said. “Gotta go home, chop-chop.”

“Like hell he will!” Kahn thundered. “I’ve got a real situation down here and I need support—you hang on.”

“Negative, Horse One,” the pilot of the control plane said. “My boy’s gotta feed his bird or down he goes—crash and burn.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” Kahn roared. “You get me another one up here on the double, then. I’m fighting for my ass down here.”

“Listen, buster”—the voice from the sky was cool and deliberate—“this is Lieutenant Colonel Stonebreaker. I assume you are
captain
somebody, so just keep your shirt on; I’m doing everything I can.”

Kahn was looking out toward where the bunch of North Vietnamese had disappeared into the grass. He caught a glimpse of half a dozen more of them running in a crouch around to his left. Others spotted them too, and there was a flurry of rifle fire.

“I don’t care who you are,” Kahn snapped coolly into the handset. “If you don’t get me a plane up there I’m not going to have any shirt left to keep on. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Horse One,” the airman replied. Someone handed Kahn the handset from the other radio. “It’s the Old Man, sir,” the someone said.

“I’ve got some gunships and a Medevac on the way and we’re rounding up an assault force. Can you hang on?” Patch said.

“I’m not sure,” Kahn replied. “All I can tell now is that we’re straddled on three flanks and maybe four, and I’ve got Charlies damned near close enough to spit at. Only thing they haven’t done yet is mortar us, and I expect that’s next.”

“Gunships’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes. I think we can get you reinforcements in half an hour or so. Do what you can.”

Kahn acknowledged the transmission and put the handset back. Another fierce burst of firing broke out in the direction where the line of North Vietnamese disappeared into the grass, and there was periodic firing all around. It didn’t look good, but they were a tough bunch of boys, these boys of his.

For the next five minutes they sweated it out. The occasional firing continued, but by and large both forces simply lay hugging ground, warily, each waiting for the other to make a move. It came soon enough when the North Vietnamese decided to close the ring.

Kahn couldn’t get his mind off Carruthers’ gallant impulse to reach the injured grenade thrower. Out of what reasoning had he decided to do it?
Hit three times—three times—and kept on going
. . . was it out of love for the man? Or that he didn’t think he was going to get hurt? Or just reckless bravado? . . . He scanned the field beyond the spot where Carruthers had fallen. Nothing stirred, not even the faintest wind. No, it was none of those. It was something else Carruthers must have felt, something Kahn himself felt at times, had felt first during the counterattack in the Boo Hoo Forest and was feeling now, too. It was a crazy kind of insanity that swells in the brain—and must have swelled in Carruthers’ brain, now freshly spilled on the dirt ahead—a short-circuiting of the instinctive kernel of self-preservation by an impulse which convinces an otherwise sane man that he is already dead, so nothing matters anymore and he can operate in a fear-free little world of his own. It was not a bad feeling, this feeling, for it eclipsed the awful fear, and some men were so glad to be rid of it that they would do foolhardy things just to prove it wasn’t there anymore.

Naturally, no one would explain this to Carruthers’ mother when they gave the medal to her. The citation would read: “For an act of valor in that he, blah, blah, blah . . .” or some such as that. Kahn would have to write it himself, and some clerk-typist back at Headquarters would put the finishing touches on it, standardize the language, condense it into a paragraph or two, requisition the medal and forward the whole business through channels in sextuplicate so that there would be a copy for everybody’s file—Battalion’s, Brigade’s, Division’s, Department of the Army’s back in Washington, Carruthers’ own 201 file and finally one for his mother down in Savannah, and that would be the end of that—a neat little salutation for the dumb nigger so his mother and brothers and sisters would have something to show people when they came around to convey their respects.

Three successive explosions announced the enemy assault, and the air cracked and sang with skimming bullets. It was an act of madness to raise one’s head more than a few inches from the ground, but Kahn chanced a look. Just then he saw three North Vietnamese in bluish-green uniforms get up and start running toward the outer line of their defensive perimeter. Each carried something in his hand—a large brownish object—and Kahn watched them for four or five seconds, bobbing his head up and down to present a less favorable target; reason told him this gesture was futile, but it made him feel safer to do it. The first of the North Vietnamese men was hit by a bullet and spun down into the grass. The two others hurled their objects toward the line, and a single explosion followed. Off to the right other North Vietnamese were running too, some forward and some down toward the river. Everyone was shooting like a madman.

“Green Smoke! Green Smoke! Do you roger?” Kahn shouted into the handset.

“I roger, Horse One,” the air controller said. “Target is Green Smoke.”

“White Smoke is me,” Kahn said loudly. “I say again, White Smoke is me!”

“Roger that,” the controller droned. “White Smoke is you.”

Moments later he was back on the line, sounding perplexed.

“Horse One, this is Skyking—do you read?”

“Go ahead, Skyking.” Kahn had been trying to dig a hole with his feet and the butt of his rifle so as to hunker down a little more.
Lord, let this work,
he thought.

“Your smoke is all mixed together, Horse One. Can you give me visual from your location? Over.”

“I know it’s mixed, goddamn it!” Kahn growled. “They’re all in here with us. Just try to keep him to the outside edge of the white.”

There was a pause on the other end.

“Wilco, Horse One,” the controller said. “I hope you know what you’re doing. He’s going to be coming in pretty fast . . .”

Bateson handed Kahn the other handset.

“Horse One—Do I understand correctly that you are requesting napalm on your own position?” There was a ring of disbelief in Patch’s voice—or was it disapproval?

“Negative—but very close,” Kahn said. “We are in very close contact.”
Negative
—what a stupid word, he thought. Why couldn’t you just say “no”?

“Are you being overrun?”

“Not yet,” Kahn said. He was still digging with his feet, thankful that the ground was not very hard.

“Wait one,” Patch said tersely.

Wait One! WAIT ONE!—what the hell was that supposed to mean? If they didn’t hurry up and . . .

Patch came back: “The general says to tell you ‘good luck.’ ”

The concussion of the bomb was not an earsplitting blast but an awesome volcanic tumult of roaring heat, and the gigantic orange fireball seethed and roiled upward and outward. The air became furnacelike, and for a moment Kahn thought his hands and face were on fire. In fact, they did turn reddish, and his breath was partially sucked from his mouth. The bomb must have landed a good seventy-five yards from where Kahn’s Headquarters party was, and perhaps twenty-five yards from the outer edge of the perimeter, but it expanded toward them with an awful growling sound, and for a horrifying moment they all thought they were going to be consumed. Then it receded and died down, leaving small gobs of flaming jelly everywhere—some landing on men, some burning harmlessly on the ground. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds, but no one there would ever forget it as long as he lived.

As the fire died down, an uncanny silence enveloped the battlefield. Well and wounded alike were too stupefied to do anything but thank their lucky stars they had survived it. Then through the smoke and haze they heard the sounds of rotors—followed shortly by the screaming hiss of rockets and brilliant explosions all around the line of trees where the North Vietnamese had dug in. Kahn and Holden pulled together such men as were available to begin pouring fire in that direction, and for the next few minutes the field shook with the sounds of heavy battle. At some point, a helicopter pilot radioed down that he was chasing several dozen North Vietnamese fleeing toward Candy Cane Ridge, and the air controller reported that a dozen or so more had taken off in the opposite direction. Despite this information, and the fact that even from the ground it looked as if the enemy had broken contact, the Crazy Horse Patrol kept up heavy fire until Kahn got them organized and set the mortars to laying fire along the apparent routes of retreat. The assault force Patch had thrown together was diverted to these areas also, to pursue and kill as many enemy as they could.

Although they would not find this out until later, an entire operation with a name of its own was born that afternoon, based on their firefight at the Crystal River. It would involve not only the Brigade, but the entire Division and elements from other divisions, in a two-month running battle that would be heralded in Army press releases as the “turning point of the war.” Hundreds of enemy would die, medals would be handed out, promotions secured, headlines made—all set into motion by their chance encounter with the North Vietnamese soldier who had felt an urge to relieve himself in a stream.

But this was all to come, and there was other work to be done. Sometime during the cleanup and evacuation of the wounded and dead and the other tasks attendant to the removal of the patrol from Happy Valley, Colonel Patch informed Kahn via the field radio that he was putting him in for a Silver Star.

Near dusk, they were deposited back on The Tit—bone-tired, but grateful to be home and out of the fighting. Kahn was too exhausted to do much more than fall into his cot and pass out, but something he had seen from the helicopter as they were landing had to be cleared up first.

He trudged up the hill to the CP and dropped his gear on the floor, except for his rifle, which he laid on his bunk, and was going to look for Brill when Brill entered the tent and sat down on the ammo crate.

“Hey, you guys really had some action out there, huh?” Brill said. He seemed very animated.

“Uh-huh,” Kahn said wearily, “but never mind that. What the hell went on here?”

“Oh,” Brill said, “I, ah, guess you saw the bodies, huh?” He waited expectantly for Kahn to respond, but Kahn merely sat looking at him, so Brill continued.

“We had a time ourselves—after you left. I guess you haven’t heard, but we bagged ourselves a main-force squad yesterday . . .” He began telling Kahn about the ambush, and the interrogation of the prisoner, until Kahn cut him short.

“We can get back to that. What about those bodies?” Kahn fixed his gaze directly into Brill’s eyes.

“I was coming to that,” Brill said. “Like I say, the gook sang us a nice song, and then I got a couple of guys to tie him up for the night and I went on to sleep.

“Sometime during the night,” Brill said, “the prisoner managed to get loose, but he waited till morning to make his move, probably because he felt they were less alert then. It happened about zero nine hundred,” Brill said.

“The girls were with Second Platoon, and suddenly the goddamn gook pops up out of nowhere and grabs somebody’s M-sixteen and he doesn’t say a word, he just blasts the girls and runs off into the brush. Time my guys got it together the bastard’s disappeared. I sent out a patrol, but they didn’t find a trace except that he dropped the M-sixteen about twenty-five meters outside the perimeter.”