Better Times Than These (28 page)

A few feet away, Sergeant Trunk was burrowed into a little mound of dirt, facing in the opposite direction. Kahn heard him yelling something, but could not hear what it was for all the racket and confusion. The back of Trunk’s neck convulsed with each yell, and Kahn finally craned toward him to find out what he was saying. Suddenly, Trunk turned and shouted in Kahn’s face, “They ain’t firing, Lieutenant—we gotta return fire!” They stared at each other for a moment; then Trunk was on his hands and knees crawling off down the line toward the other men, still screaming through the boiling, smoking gloom.

Oh, Lord,
Kahn pleaded.
Oh, please God.

He was not a religious man. They hadn’t made him go to Temple after he was sixteen. And he had done bad things in his life. Some of them came to him now. Why should God help him? What had he done for God? Not a goddamn thing . . .

A huge explosion cracked behind him, and there was a fierce whirring sound in the air. Something hot stung the back of Kahn’s hand, and he recoiled from it. A thin stream of blood ran down his fingers, dripping into the dirt.

Oh, God, he thought again. I’m hit! And suddenly his mind was filled with the fat, chortling face of the helicopter pilot back at Bragg who had told them of the River Blindness. Ha, ha, very funny. Go down to the river and get your eyes shot out. His face felt numb. He pinched his cheeks. They were numb. Oh, God, I have got to do
something!
A kind of fear-anger swept over him, and he raised himself up on his knees. Oh, God, he thought, here goes.

“Are we going to take this?” Kahn bellowed.

Bateson, the radio operator, who was huddled beside him, looked up in astonishment. Kahn’s eyes were as wild as those of a panicked racehorse.
“Get up and return fire,”
he roared. He got to his feet in a half-crouch, bent over at the waist, still yelling at the top of his lungs, and took off down the line in the opposite way from the direction Trunk had gone. He came to a pile of white-faced men who had pressed themselves into the ground about ten yards away.

“Off your asses!” Kahn bellowed. “Get up there! Return fire!” He seized one of the men by the back of his flak jacket and pulled him upright. It was Carruthers, the giant black private. Bullets cracked around them. A look of utter horror crossed Carruthers’ face and he struggled to press himself back into the dirt.

“Get up there, I said!” Kahn raged. He kneed Carruthers in the buttocks and jerked him up again and screamed in his face,
“Return fire, you sorry bastard!”
The bullets above their heads continued to whizz and thunk into tree trunks. Carruthers’ eyes bugged out, but he slowly began to crawl to the top of the bunker. The two other men were watching with strained faces. Kahn glared ferociously at them and they too began to crawl up. Carruthers peeked over the top of the earth pile and stuck his rifle out and fired a burst into the jungle. The others did the same as Kahn stood, bent over, watching them. When he was satisfied, he took off again, followed by Bateson with the radio, who was crawling on his hands and knees.
Why am I here?
Kahn thought.
Oh, God, why am I here?

Ten yards farther down he came across a lone dead man, shot through the throat. The dead man’s legs and buttocks were on top of the bunker, but his trunk and widespread arms lay on Kahn’s side of it. A large pool of blood had drained from the wound and settled at the bottom of the slope. Kahn grabbed the dead man’s arm and yanked him down out of the field of fire, and he rolled face down into the pool of his own blood. Kahn thought he recognized him as Spate, one of those involved in the rock fight on the beach, whose brother had been killed by a grenade in the Marines.

Oh, God, why am I here?

A searing flash and a gigantic cracking blast ahead in the jungle announced the arrival of the artillery.

“That’s it,” he yelled to Bateson. “Put me on!”

Kahn grabbed the handset. “Okay, okay, no corrections, shoot again.”

Seconds later, there were more thunderous explosions. The jungle lit up like a neon light. “Keep it coming,” he shrieked into the radio. The rounds continued in salvos of three, at intervals of about forty-five seconds. Finally Kahn pressed the transmit bar again. “Okay, hold it up,” he panted. A final salvo burst into the twilight. For a few moments, uncanny silence unfolded over the Boo Hoo Forest; then the first painful moans and some low cursing rose into the darkness.

At the same time Kahn’s company was being counterattacked by the North Vietnamese, Holden, Major Dunn and Captain Sonnebend, the new Brigade Public Information Officer, were sitting down to chow in the tiny officers’ mess tent at Firebase Meathead. They had driven down from Monkey Mountain that afternoon, Dunn to check his communications setup and Holden to escort Sonnebend closer to the action—a suggestion, if it could be called that, of General Butterworth’s.

Holden had brought Sonnebend in to introduce him to the general that morning, and after a brief talk, the general had declared that if Sonnebend was to be Brigade PIO, he ought to see some of the countryside.

“There’s a hell of an operation going on out there now—might be the biggest of the war,” the general had said. Then he had turned to Holden: “Frank, it might be a good idea if you went along too and introduced the captain around.” It seemed to Holden that the general was very cavalier about getting people into dangerous situations.

Sonnebend had been talking continuously since their arrival at Firebase Meathead, giving his theory of how the war should be fought, while Holden and Dunn sat silently across the table, chewing their food.

Holden didn’t like Sonnebend. The impression he formed during the ten-mile ride down from Monkey Mountain was that the new captain was fatuous, and thoroughly out of place in the military.

As their jeep bounded down the rutted jungle road, Sonnebend had been a nervous wreck. Once, when they slowed behind a deuce-and-a-half full of soldiers, Sonnebend had extended his hand, palm up, beneath Holden’s chin.

“Say, Holden, did you ever stick a pencil point in your hand?”

Holden looked and saw nothing. “Where is it, Captain?”

“There, just under the thumb,” Sonnebend said. “I tried to get most of it out, but I’ve heard you can get lead poisoning from pencils if you aren’t careful.”

Holden took a closer look. He couldn’t tell if the black dot was actually a piece of pencil point in the skin or just skin made black when it had gone in.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Captain,” he said politely. “It’ll probably work its way out by itself in a day or so. Doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Sonnebend seemed disappointed. “No, it doesn’t hurt, but I’m worried about the lead poisoning.”

Ahead, a truck growled in the mud.

“There are a lot of things you can get lead poisoning from around here, Captain, but I don’t think that’s one of them,” Holden said. He exchanged glances with Major Dunn, who was sitting in the front of the jeep.

“Why do you think we’ve stopped?” Sonnebend asked furtively. He had been staring down the road, which ran straight for a hundred yards or so, then dipped down and out of sight into a dark stretch of jungle. “You don’t think they’ve seen an ambush or anything down there . . .”

“Nothing to worry about, Captain,” Major Dunn said patiently. “I’ve been down this road before. We have a checkpoint at a little bridge just below that curve. All the fighting is way to the west of here.”

“Ah, yes,” Sonnebend said. “I was just wondering.” His face was covered with sweat, and there were dark stains under his armpits. Already the temperature was above 100 degrees. “I’m not feeling very well,” he said. “It must be the heat.”

The truckload of men ahead began to move again, and the driver put the jeep into gear. As they lurched forward, Captain Sonnebend resolutely fingered his holstered .45 and alternately looked at his palm. Holden leaned back in the low, uncomfortable canvas seat and closed his eyes. No wonder the Army is screwed up, he thought, with straphangers like this in charge of things. The hot sun baked through his closed eyelids, and his world became a swirl of black bugs moving against a brilliant yellow frame. Soon he indulged himself again and began thinking about Becky, and the pain returned, as it had many times each day, ever since her letter had arrived last week.

It had been the last of four in a row he’d received. Each of the others had been the same—filled, unavoidably, with her antiwar activity. She rarely mentioned it outright, but of course, he’d read between the lines. When she spoke of the “work” she had to do, Holden knew it wasn’t schoolwork. And when she’d been in “the city” for a few days, she sure as hell hadn’t been shopping at Bloomingdale’s. Over the weeks, the language in the letters had become stronger. Where at first there had been a hell or a damn, now there was shit or fuck, and she spoke of “pigs” and “us” and “them.”

Then she lowered the boom.

It
was
Widenfield. At last his suspicions were confirmed. She
was
still seeing him, though she still claimed the relationship was platonic. But for both their sakes, she could not keep up the charade any longer.

In spite of what she’d told him before he left—with all of its brutal honesty—he now felt deceived.

She was terribly sorry, she said, but they had gone in “different directions”—that was how she had put it.

Different directions, he thought bitterly. That was quite literally correct.

She begged his forgiveness, but he simply no longer fitted into her life, she said. All her energies now had to go for the cause.

It was a short letter, and when it came he knew at a glance what it was. It did not open with
“Darling,”
and it did not close with
“Love,”
or
“I love you.”
It opened with
“Dear Frank”
and it closed with
“Sorry.”
When he read it, a sick knot of hurt had welled in his stomach, and then turned to despair and finally to rage. Afterward, he tried to imagine her writing it, and the face he saw was of a very determined woman.

Two emotions had tugged at him constantly since the letter had come. One was to go AWOL and see her, for he believed thoroughly he could make it right again; the other was to get the hell off Staff and into the fighting and take his mind off it.

Captain Sonnebend forked up another piece of tough fried steak. “You know,” he said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. I mean, about how to win this war.” Holden and Dunn sat across the table, saying nothing, but thinking the same thing.

“The problem isn’t the VC anymore—they’re about licked, right?—it’s the North Vietnamese . . .”

Holden shrugged. Dunn shifted in his seat but remained silent.

“So the exercise is to keep the NVA out. But we can’t just patrol eight hundred miles of jungle between the DMZ and the southern border—right?”

Dunn grunted and sawed at his own steak.

“Well, how’s this for a solution. We defoliate a strip along that whole jungle, or blast it, or whatever—maybe a hundred yards wide—all the way from the Gulf of Tonkin to the southern tip of the country. Then we string wire along it and man it with machine-gun posts every fifty yards or so and patrol it with gunships, and we have strike forces ready in case they try to break through. Anytime they do, we could blow them right out of the tub . . .”

An Artillery battery at the edge of the perimeter unleashed a furious barrage that left Holden’s ears ringing. He had no way of knowing this was the one so desperately requested by his friend Kahn. The dim light inside the tent hurt his eyes, and he let his mind return to Becky and what she probably was doing now . . . It would be, what?—7
A.M.
, her time?

He wondered if she was asleep in her dorm . . . or was she asleep with Widenfield. The vision had been driving him crazy for days, but in a perverse way he enjoyed it. In fact, he indulged himself in it so much he had invented a picture of Widenfield’s apartment near the campus, a place furnished in leather chairs and books stacked high everywhere. It was October, and there was frost there now. Becky loved fireplaces. So Widenfield had to have one. If it was 7
A.M.
, he thought, she would be awake soon. But he would probably be up first—she was so damned hard to get up in the morning. And she never slept with anything on. He pictured her in Widenfield’s bed, alone while he took a shower or made coffee, murmuring softly whenever he tried to wake her up . . . Finally she would sit up on the edge of the bed, a blanket wrapped around her full, soft body, and stumble into the bathroom. She didn’t like to make love in the morning. Strange, he thought; that had annoyed him before, but he was grateful for it now because even if she was sleeping with Widenfield, chances were they weren’t making love at the moment, so at least he didn’t have to picture that too.

“What I mean,” Sonnebend said enthusiastically, “is that we just build a big fence around the whole damned country—I know the comparison isn’t good, but it would be sort of a Berlin Wall; then all we’d have to do is rout out whatever VC are left.”

Dunn was through eating and stared thoughtfully into a cup of green Kool-Aid, known as “bug juice” because it invariably attracted gnats and other insects, which died immediately upon touching it and then floated around on top. His mind was making calculations, the kinds of calculations an electronics man might make when presented with such a theory.

“You say you want to put a guard post every fifty yards along this border, right?” Dunn said.

“Yes, about that,” Sonnebend said cheerfully.

“And there are roughly eight hundred miles of border, right?” Dunn asked.

“Roughly,” Sonnebend said.

“So that would require approximately thirty thousand guard posts, wouldn’t it—all manning machine guns?” Dunn said.

“Thirty thousand . . . well, I hadn’t exactly thought of that, but I guess so,” Sonnebend said.

“And every guard post would have to have at least two men for the machine gun, right?”

“Yes, two men. That would be correct.” Sonnebend had begun to sense that Dunn’s tone was not sympathetic to his plan.