Better Times Than These (25 page)

The radio conversation between the platoon under fire and its commander had died down to an occasional exchange as they tried to direct two Medevac helicopters to a cleared landing space. Patch turned to Kahn and put his hand on his shoulder.

“You know, you look pretty tired, Billy. You ought to get some rest. There’s a briefing at oh eight hundred; I’ll see you then.” He walked him to the flap of the tent.

“By the way,” Patch said. “What we talked about here is just between us. I’ll spring it on the others tomorrow—understand?”

“Yes, sir, and thank you,” Kahn said. He walked out into the dark, alone with the deep, starry sky, and the first thing that crossed his mind was that he sure would like to have some of that vanilla ice cream McCrary was keeping cold down in his morgue.

20

T
he mist lay like white chalk across the valley floor, and above it the treetops of the Boo Hoo Forest loomed like strange, stark sentries. Beyond rose the blue-green peaks of the Drang Mountains, one after another as far as the eye could see, looking the way an enormous cloud bank might appear from above.

They were moving across a marshy depression west of the river, a mile from where the helicopters had set down. The cleared spaces once had been farmed for rice, but were now overgrown in tall brown elephant grass. Beside them and ahead, they could hear the sounds of other men, but because of the mist they could not see them any more than they could the treetops or the mountain crests. They could barely make out the pale, white sun, low in the eastern sky but rising quickly to turn their day into a sweat-drenched, steaming nightmare. Already they had an inkling of this, and they sensed what to expect, because by now they had been here long enough to know.

The order of march was Alpha Company in the lead, Charlie Company behind on the right flank and Bravo Company behind on the left. Weapons Company, with its heavy mortars, was in the rear, as were two companies from another battalion who were in reserve. Behind all of this were various support units.

This moving mass of flesh and metal, if it could have been seen from the air, might have appeared as a giant arrowhead, half a mile across at its widest point and nearly half again that long from end to end. Patch had likened it to a ball-point pen, the tip being Alpha Company and the sheath being Bravo and Charlie companies and the reserve and support units. His plan was that the tip would penetrate into the jungle until it met resistance, then withdraw into the protective sheath, which would move up and envelop the enemy.

They were still a distance from the outer edges of the Boo Hoo Forest, moving across the hummocks and swamps to ensure that the North Vietnamese were not in fact here, instead of where they were supposed to be.

Brill swatted at a ball of gnats that had risen out of a mud heap and were swarming around his head. He felt a strange elation in all of this and for the past half-hour had been thinking about a girl he had screwed Fourth of July night, just before they left. There had been a big party at Laguna Beach, and he had driven down with some people he barely knew. In fact, Brill hadn’t even been invited to the party, but heard about it and hooked a ride.

The girl was about eighteen and sort of flaky, with long blond hair and a tight-looking ass in cutoff blue jeans and a tied-up work shirt. She was sitting on a big red cushion on the floor, stoned out of her skull. He hadn’t spoken to her all night, but now that they were the only two left in the room, Brill took a swig of vodka and orange juice he had been sipping since sundown, walked over to her and said as firmly as he could, “Why don’t we get out of here?”

Blearily she looked up, her bored expression never changing, and said, “Yeah, why not?”

He had no idea where to take her. He was considering a walk to the beach when she said, “You want to take my car—it’s a faaaaast muthah.” and led him to a silver Porsche parked on the lawn.

Brill figured he was ninety miles an hour even before he got into the driver’s seat.

He spun the Porsche onto the winding highway and headed south for his uncle’s beach house forty miles away. His uncle was probably still in New York, and he remembered that the key was hanging inside the pumphouse. When they walked inside, he turned on the lights, and the Porsche-driving eighteen-year-old sucked in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “Oh wowww,” she said.

She didn’t seem to need warming up, so Brill told her to take off her clothes. Moments later she reappeared from the bathroom unashamedly naked and slid under the covers of the big round bed. Brill had stripped too and threw the blankets off immediately. Without further ceremony he mounted her savagely, and she began to cry out in the brightly lit room, “Oooh, please don’t be so rough,” but he did not stop or slow up, and instead continued pounding her and pounding her until she started to scream—not screams of joy but screams of agony—and tried to struggle upward toward the headboard, but he pulled her down roughly and banged her mercilessly; which was what he was remembering now in the heat of the jungle morning—her face contorted, her hands grasping the headboard trying to escape the pounding. He remembered thinking, She’s dry—why the hell is she dry? Then he’d said it aloud: “You’re dry—damn it—
why are you dry?”
and kept banging away and saying it over and over in a bitten, deliberate voice, oblivious to her replies, and toward the end, when he felt himself coming, he had taken her hair in his hands and lifted her head and pounded it against the pillow again and again, bellowing the question
“Why are you dry?”
until she was nearly hysterical, screaming and sobbing some answer he did not understand because he wasn’t listening.

Brill wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve. The ball of gnats had disappeared, and he reached to his canteen for a swallow of water.

He remembered the girl lying in the darkness afterward when he had finally turned out the lights. “You never even kissed me,” she had said haltingly. He had said nothing but had lain there next to her, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, wishing she would shut up. After a while, she turned to him in sleep and threw an arm across his waist. He threw it aside and turned over toward the edge of the bed, eyes still wide open, staring at nothing. The next morning he sent her on her way in the silver Porsche, and as soon as she was out of sight he straightened up the bedroom and walked out into the warm California sun, without showering, or shaving, or having coffee or even so much as a glass of orange juice—even though all this was available—and stuck out his thumb on the highway, northward toward LA, feeling elated, feeling mean, the same as he was feeling now.

The lead elements of Alpha Company had disappeared into the jungle, and within minutes the entire formation began to jam up like a coiled-down spring. The sun, having burned off the morning mist, was now in the process of broiling Four/Seven, and a fearful uncertainty had spread over everyone. Somehow being in the open had not been so bad, but going into jungle was a different matter. Days before, word had gotten around that a certain number of casualties were anticipated and, in fact, had been planned for and counted on. Rumor placed this figure anywhere between 10 and 25 percent, depending upon who was telling the story. But whatever it really was, each of them was aware in some way that men were going to die here, possibly today, and maybe even in a few minutes. In many cases, the uncertainty had manifested itself in the lower bowel and worked from there into a general feeling of nausea and weakness that tended to drag them down under their already heavy loads. The climate and the food, in the weeks since their arrival, had thrown their stomachs into a constant state of turmoil, and each morning they would return from the latrines with passionate oaths against an affliction called “Ho Chi Minh’s Revenge.” For many of these men, a brighter part of their day had been the relief of a good, clean shit, and now even this simple pleasure had been denied them.

The line began to advance again, and the first elements of Bravo Company were swallowed up in the Boo Hoo Forest. As they moved through the first scrubby jungle brush, Madman Muntz, shouldering the big Colt Arms M-60 machine gun, turned to his squadmate Spudhead Miter, who was carrying belts of ammunition for it draped around his neck like some absurd Mexican bandit, and said with a dour grin, “I hope you got insurance,” and Spudhead, thrashing his way through some waist-high kupi plants, called back, “Lot of damned good it’ll do us now.” It was 10:35
A.M.
, and they were whistling in the dark.

By the end of the hour, they had advanced only a few dozen yards. People were confused and cursing with mechanical passion. The swearing had improved dramatically since they had left the billets at Monkey Mountain for Firebase Meathead, the abandoned airstrip near the Ia Drang.

If the shitsmoke from the officers’ latrine had been a nuisance, it was nothing compared with what they had to deal with at Firebase Meathead. As their convoy had descended over the last low hills, they got their first look at their new home from several miles away. All they could see of it was a gigantic cloud of red dust, swirling hundreds of feet into the air, blown up by arriving and departing helicopters. Later they were let out into this cloud of dust, and covered in seconds with a thin sienna grime that stuck to their sweat-stained flesh and stung their eyes and clogged their lungs.

Almost immediately everyone’s nose was assailed by a new and horrifying stench which, they soon learned, emanated from the corpses of several dozen South Vietnamese soldiers which had been neatly stacked at the end of the runway like so many cords of firewood. The South Vietnamese unit that had evacuated the strip a week earlier had simply left the corpses behind for the Americans to deal with, and they had been roasting in the sun inside their flimsy black body bags long enough to produce an awful collective aroma that mixed with the red dust and stifling heat to spread an atmosphere of vileness over the whole encampment.

During the next two days, Firebase Meathead began to take on the appearance of a hobo jungle. The men lived in scrubby dirt-packed areas on both sides of the landing strip. They erected whatever shelters they could. Some put up two-man pup tents and others erected more elaborate affairs, but most merely staked out their ponchos a foot or so above the ground and lived under them. Beginning just after dawn, helicopters and the big cargo planes began landing, delivering supplies and more men. Convoys arrived later in the day with other cargoes, joining with the aircraft to produce an earsplitting roar and raise the cloud of red dust to its most impressive bloom.

Bravo Company, like the rest of Four/Seven, was put to work much of the time stringing concertina wire, setting out claymore mines, arranging aiming stakes, digging slit trenches and latrines, burying garbage and performing other duties attendant to the war. When they were not doing these things, most of the men spent their hours scrounging anything they could lay their hands on to make their lives more comfortable. Sometimes piles of lumber would mysteriously disappear after being off-loaded from a truck, then reappear just as mysteriously in the troop area beneath a siding of tin that had also disappeared without explanation. Large pots and pans would be found missing from the field kitchen, only to turn up a few days later in someone’s tent. Even though they knew these accommodations were very temporary, and that they would be moving on in a few days, almost all the men took part in the scrounging because, in addition to it being a good way to pass the time, by improving their condition—if only a little—they were able to bring a sense of order and permanence to their lives.

Crump and DiGeorgio shared a shelter with the banana-cat, and by the end of the second day, thanks to DiGeorgio’s prestigious scrounging, they had erected a small but very livable house of wood, tin and canvas. Crump had already made arrangements with three men from the Engineers company to turn over the house to them when he pulled out, in exchange for which they would keep and feed the banana-cat until he returned.

Also on the second day, the pile of corpses was removed by an infuriated deuce-and-a-half crew whose instructions from Colonel Patch were to “take the whole load of them back up to Pleiku and dump them inside the ARVN compound.”

On the third day, just after sunset, they were mortared briefly and a man in Alpha Company was wounded in the buttocks as he waited in the chow line.

On the morning of the fourth day, as the trucks and aircraft began bringing in their supplies, Four/Seven jumped off on Operation Western Movie. While they stood choking and gagging on the landing strip, waiting to board the helicopters, somebody was heard to complain loudly that the Army could have selected a more agreeable site for its firebase.

“Bullshit,” someone grumbled back through the haze. “If there wasn’t no dust here, the Army would truck it in and have somebody to stir it up.”

None of them, not even the few tough sergeants who had served on Guadalcanal or Bougainville twenty-five years before, were prepared for the Boo Hoo Forest. It was a dark, unwholesome place bathed in an awkward kind of twilight on even the brightest days.