Better Times Than These (58 page)

By the light of the pressure lantern in his leaking tent, the new Commander of Bravo Company had concluded a letter which began
“Dear Becky”
:

I’ve torn up every letter I tried to write you until this one, but it’s going out in the morning mail.

It has been more than four months since you wrote that you were dumping our relationship to go with Widenfield and do all that silly crap you and he are involved with. I don’t know if you planned it that way or not, but your letter arrived exactly a year to the day we met at Cory’s party. Nice timing.

All those months we were seeing each other before I left I kept my mouth shut about what you were doing. I figured you would come to your senses sooner or later, but in fact, you only got worse. I don’t know why I put up with it for so long, except that I loved you and hoped you would change.

It has taken me a long time to get used to the idea, but at last I can truthfully say it is finished between you and me. Not that you’d give a damn. I’m sorry, but not sad, because there are things more important than merely loving somebody and I’m just beginning to understand them.

I’m really in the war now—not just running errands for the general. I am commanding a rifle company in the field, and for the first time in my life I can honestly say that I feel completely and totally in control—of myself, of the Company, and of where I fit into this world.

I needed to write this letter, so I did. Now the radio is squawking and I’d better go out and see what’s up. Before I do, I’d like to say good luck, and goodbye.

Regards,
Frank

He left the letter on the field table and walked outside. Bateson, the RTO, was hurrying toward him, and they met halfway in the rain.

“Lieutenant, sir,” Bateson said breathlessly, “LZ Horse is getting zapped, and so is an ARVN compound up by Tien Trang. Battalion put out a Condition Red as of now. They’ve overrun some Artillery battery too. The colonel says to be ready to help out if he gives the word and for us not to call unless it’s bad because they got all the traffic they can handle right now.”

Holden stood motionless for a moment, the rain dripping off his helmet, “All right; go stand by the radio and get me some runners to keep me posted,” he said. “And get somebody to tell Sergeant Dreyfuss to start putting out the word and then tell him to find me—I’ll be down on the perimeter somewhere.”

Holden walked back into the tent and picked up the letter. He folded it neatly and tucked it into his top pocket. Then he slipped on his poncho, strapped on his .45 and picked up his rifle and several clips of ammunition, which he stuck into the pistol belt. One last look around the tent; then he turned out the lantern. As he walked out into the wetness, there was a faint, featureless grumbling of artillery. It seemed far away but fairly constant, and through the rain he could make out the flashes, pink and low behind the mountains. Below him, an unseen tidal wave was swelling across the valley, gathering strength from hamlet to hamlet.

No one saw the flash, but the single
crump
of a mortar incoming reverberated up the hillside. People began to shout and curse, and in the few seconds before it landed, Holden suddenly realized he’d made his first mistake a few hours earlier by not looking into the comings and goings of the women carrying the rice into the huts at the bottom of the hill—because, damn it, there wasn’t any harvest yet, so why should . . . ? In that same instant there was the sigh of the incoming round, and he went to ground cursing himself again for not having dealt with the rise on the perimeter where the machine guns couldn’t get to—Damn, damn, I should have done it! I should have!

The round burst behind him, far uphill where the old positions had been. Holden got to his feet and dashed back to the CP, grabbing the telephone to the mortar section, screaming for illumination flares, which came almost instantaneously because they had anticipated the call. Bateson had Battalion standing by as Holden yelled into another phone linked to the listening post down the hillside. As the flares lit up, the garbled cursing at the other end communicated a dark picture of what was yet to come. Then Holden heard the bugles too.

Madman Muntz, squinting over the top of his hole, could barely make out the moving forms below, but he saw enough in the eerie light to know that this was no ordinary probe. There seemed to be several groups; in one he counted about fifty people, in another twice that number and in a third, which had already reached the base of the hill, there were about two dozen men.

Then, as his eyes adjusted to the light, his breath caught up in his throat. Behind the three groups there seemed to be a huge mob stretching as far as he could see in the fast-fading flare. Among them he thought he even saw women and small children carrying boxes and baskets. And people were blowing whistles and bugles.

Muntz depressed the barrel of his machine gun to the first wave, but they were still too far away for him to open fire. They were plodding uphill very slowly and deliberately, and all at once he thought of rats: a horde of rats, which brought to mind a story he had once heard about rats—or something like rats—that gathered in groups once a year to make their way to seaside cliffs over which they plunged to their deaths, apparently happily, stopping for nothing. That in itself was very scary.

By now the mortar section had begun to plop shells down into the rice paddy, but they seemed ineffective as the ratlike horde continued its advance. Holden was still in the CP tent, feeling a little panicky because he didn’t know if he should remain there by the phones and radios or be outside directing the fight. He could think of about ten things he ought to be doing—and even then he still didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on. Bateson had the Artillery Section on the radio, and Holden requested firing of Defensive Targets, which had been preset some time before. All four field phones were ringing like crazy, and while waiting for an answer, Holden screamed at three of the worried-looking runners Bateson had selected, “Don’t just stand there—answer the goddamn phones!” and the runners gratefully leaped for the phone table and began taking calls.

The popping of small-arms fire below grew steadily as the fighting was joined. Holden glanced at his watch: exactly 9
P.M.
He closed his eyes. “When I open them . . . this will be gone.” He knew when he thought it, it was silly. Then the incoming mortars began raining down on them, and were answered by their own mortars and by the first of the DTs, which cracked and split violently in the valley.

In his hole on the perimeter, Crump had been taking an occasional well-aimed shot at the advancing enemy, but there were so many of them now, he was having difficulty deciding whom to shoot at. They were coming up in long files, through the sheets of rain, taking cover wherever they could, but always coming. As another flare lit up, Crump rapidly squeezed off three rounds, and several men in one of the files toppled in a dominolike heap. Others clambered over or around them.

Off to one side, standing plainly in the open, one man was spurring the others on by waving a pistol and yelling.

He was standing in an odd way, bent over a little to one side, and in the dimming light Crump saw that one of his trouser legs was pinned up at the knee and he was leaning on a crutch. As the flare flickered out, Crump got a look at the man’s face, which seemed terribly familiar, and as he lined his sights directly at the trunk of the one-legged man, the flare died out. Another burst, but the man was gone, and Crump was left to curse his luck and wonder if he’d been right.

The tone of the call that came into the TOC from Bravo Company, even through the radio jargon, was so desperate that any officer or enlisted man in hearing distance stopped what he was doing and turned to listen. They too were on alert at Monkey Mountain, but what the caller said—
“I think we’re being overrun”
—pierced the tent like a distant scream in the night. For an hour Patch and his staff had been directing support for the fighting, but as the attacks on their tentacles mounted, more men and equipment were being consumed than could be marshaled. Captain Flynn, the aide, was trying to soothe the frightened voice on the radio when Patch took the handset.

“What is your situation? Over.”

“Sir, Lieutenant Range is dead and so is Lieutenant Peck, and the CO—I don’t know where he is . . .”

“And the First Sergeant?”

“He’s in pretty bad shape. Most everybody’s hurt or killed. Everything’s falling apart—we gotta have help fast, sir.”

“Who’s running things now?”

“Lieutenant Inge. He’s out now trying to pull the men together so we can make a stand if we have to. Please hurry, sir. Over.”

Patch digested this information grimly. Everyone who had been listening was now looking at him.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re on the way. It’ll take about half an hour—maybe forty-five minutes, though. You hang on down there, hear? Over.”

There was a pause, and the person at the other end was depressing the transmit bar so Patch could not get through. Then the radio crackled again.

“Sir . . . my name is DiGeorgio . . .”

“Roger, DiGeorgio—you hang on there, now. And one more thing: we’ll be coming up on your right flank. I guess you’ll tell those guys to watch who they shoot? Over.”

“Roger, sir,” DiGeorgio said. Something else was said, but it got garbled in the transmission.

“Goddamn it!” Patch spat, “we’ve got to pull some kind of relief together. What in hell have we got?”

“Colonel,” said Flynn, “there are about half a dozen APCs in motor pool—down for something—but I’ll bet most of them’ll run. We might be able to scare up a tank, and there’s that platoon from C Company and a lot of straphangers waiting around for something. I could take them down there myself.”

“Right—good,” Patch said. “Get the APCs and I’ll take care of the tank. Round up every cook and shitkicker you can find. You sure they can get down that road? We don’t want ’em to get stuck five miles away.”

“I’m pretty sure, sir—I flew over it a few days ago.”

“All right—but look, I can’t spare you to go, so we’ll have to find somebody else. Think of somebody—quick.”

A look of relief disguised in disappointment filled Flynn’s face. “Ah, the only one I can think of is Lieutenant Styles in MPs,”

“Colonel Patch,” said a voice from behind, “I can take that column down there.”

Patch looked over his shoulder directly into the face of Major Dunn, who had been standing by his bank of radios most of the night.

“Major,” Patch said curtly, “that is very admirable, but with the communications situation we have here—”

“Colonel, there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do for the communications situation at this point. These men are perfectly competent technicians and they have everything under control. I’m just in the way here. I would appreciate it very much if you were to permit me to do this. I have friends there.”

They looked at each other closely, the West Point colonel and the bootstrap major with the sad eyes and graying hair, and for an instant Patch saw a fierce determination in Dunn’s eyes which he had recognized before in certain officers of proven field merit.

“Major, you’re in charge. Captain Flynn will go with you to motor pool.” He turned to Flynn. “Brief him on what to do, Tom—and try to scare up some NCOs.”

Major Dunn’s relief column had been grinding down the rain-swept, pitted spur with nightmare slowness for half an hour, lights out since they had turned off the main road. Locked in the darkness of the steel personnel carriers was a nervous grab bag of jeep drivers, mechanics, KPs, new arrivals, men going to R&R—or returning from it—and others unfortunate enough to have been swept up in Captain Flynn’s dragnet.

“I think I see it, sir,” the driver of the second vehicle called back into the cabin. Major Dunn crawled forward, and through the viewing slit could make out pale flashes against the lowered sky. The driver resumed his radio conversation with the big tank ahead. Dunn punched him on the shoulder. “Try to raise them again—maybe we’re close enough now.” The driver reached over and switched frequencies. A minute later he turned and shook his head.

“Nothing, sir,” he shouted back. “I’ll see if the tank can get them—he’s got better radio . . . JEEZUS!” A searing flash of hot light burst through the slit, and the carrier jolted sideways and slammed to a stop. There was another awful explosion, and through the observation slit Dunn could see flames and smoke silhouetted against the blackness.

“Jesus God,” the driver shrieked, “the tank . . .”

“Back it up! Back it up!” an Armor lieutenant was screaming. “Tell them to back it up back there!”

“What the hell’s this?” Dunn exclaimed. The vehicle had gone into reverse and was backing up as fast as it could go. “What are you doing?” He grabbed the lieutenant’s shoulder.

“We’re backing up—They got the tank—Get the hell out of here!” the lieutenant cried.

“You can’t do that!” Dunn said. “We’ll have to go around it.”

“SOP,” the lieutenant said. “We get fire, we back up—C’mon, Red, move it!”

“Screw SOP!” Dunn bellowed. “Get this goddamn thing going forward again. Do you know what’s going on up there?”

“Sir, I am not going to put this vehicle in that kind of situation. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” the lieutenant said.

Dunn grabbed the driver and screamed in his face, “I am ordering you to get this thing out of reverse and move out. I am a major—do you hear me, soldier?”

The driver eased off the accelerator, and the APC came to a throbbing halt. He looked at the lieutenant of Armor.

“What do I do now, sir?” he said.

“Do what he says,” the lieutenant mumbled helplessly. “Major,” he said, “you must be out of your fucking mind.”

Just as the APC lurched forward, a terrific explosion lifted it up on one side and shuddered through every inch of metal, dashing men to the floor in a terrified tangled pile.

“Get back—back up!” the lieutenant screamed again, but the driver had already opened the top hatch and was standing ready to scramble out. “She’s dead, sir; we gotta get . . .” His words were lost in another explosion, worse than the first, which filled the inside of the cabin with thick awful smoke and heat and knocked Major Dunn hard against the side. He felt his hand break at the wrist, felt it crush and give way and the stab of pain, and when he looked into the cabin he could see nothing, nor hear a sound, but there were people in there, because he could glimpse them through the faint smoky light.