Better Times Than These (29 page)

“And they would work in shifts of eight hours each. That’s about as far as you could stretch it, right?” Dunn said.

“Ah, yes . . . eight-hour shifts I suppose . . .”

“So,” Dunn said, “your plan calls for a hundred and eighty thousand infantrymen manning these guard posts, doesn’t it?”

“Well, they don’t have to be infantrymen,” Sonnebend said. “They could . . .”

“If you’re going to have machine guns, man, you’ve got to have infantrymen at them—you can’t have Transportation Corps people doing it,” Dunn said. He seemed to be getting peevish.

“And how many people would be in these strike forces you talk about? At least another hundred and fifty thousand, right?—at least a battalion every fifty miles?” Dunn said.

Sonnebend realized he was being pushed into a corner.

“So what you are saying,” Dunn said, “is that you want nearly half a million infantrymen, Captain. Do you know how many support troops you would need to keep that kind of force in the field?
Do you have any idea?”

Sonnebend knew he was trapped. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t have to have a guard post every—”

“What you are proposing is that we place nearly five million men here to patrol those borders or to support those who patrol it. Do you actually think anyone’s going to throw that many troops into this shitty war?” Dunn declared.

“Well, sir, I—”

“Well,
nothing,
Captain. Do you think that or don’t you?”

“I guess I never thought of it that way,” Sonnebend said.

Dunn finished off the last swallow of his bug juice.

“The idea is preposterous. The best thing you can do, Captain, is keep your ideas to yourself until you understand what’s going on here,” Dunn said. He rose abruptly from the table and stalked out of the chow tent.

“Well . . .” Sonnebend said sheepishly. “Well . . .”

Holden excused himself too, and walked out into the cool evening. Around the horizon he could see the faint flashing red lights of several helicopters, all of which seemed to be going in different directions. The Artillery battery had stopped firing for a moment, but through the darkness Holden could make out feverish activity in their area. Men were running with flashlights, others were carrying the big 105-millimeter rounds, and he could hear shouting and cursing. A dozen yards away at an enlisted men’s chow tent a platoon waited in line, every man armed to the teeth. There was no saluting here or other Mickey Mouse, the way there was at Monkey Mountain.

Somewhere to the west, but not far away—perhaps five miles—a great battle was raging. This encampment with its artillery and communications and ammunition stockpiles, its food supplies and its reserves and medical staff, was the main lifeline to it. No Mickey Mouse here. This was what the Army was all about. No pressed and starched fatigues, no thrice-daily briefings, no eating in tents with wood floors and electric generators and movies at night and ice cream, even if it was kept in the cold locker in the morgue . . .

Holden stood near the edge of the barbed wire looking at the dark stand of jungle in the distance, and the enormous mountains that rose behind it. He knew Kahn was out there somewhere and in a way envied him. He looked to make sure no one was watching, and then drew his .45 from its holster, running his finger along its smooth, oily barrel. For so many months he had persuaded himself that he really was a Staff man. That he disliked the notion of war. That he agreed with her. That it was, if not wrong, at least foolish. He pictured what their life might be like together: brilliant autumn weekends—he playing tennis on grass courts at the club; she watching from beneath an umbrellaed table; a cozy apartment in the city; plays and parties; the brokerage firm . . .

Well, she had torn it now, and suddenly he had no urge at all to go back to the Mickey Mouse bullshit at Monkey Mountain. The farther back you got, the more Mickey Mouse there was, and during the nearly two years he had been in, most of what he had done was kiss ass. Kiss the general’s ass, kiss the general’s staff’s asses. Now it became clear that this was not any way a Holden should serve in the Army—and Holdens had served in the Army ever since Holdens had lived in America, and they had lived there for a long, long time.

Half in and half out of a devilish dream, Holden saw himself in command of a rifle company, far away from the ass-kissing and Mickey Mouse of Monkey Mountain. If I ever have children, he thought, I sure as hell don’t want to have to tell them I spent the war fetching cigars and Coca-Cola for a general. On the spot he resolved to speak to General Butterworth when he got back, and ask for a field assignment. As it turned out, it would not be long before he got one.

The counterattack had been much more costly than Bravo Company’s initial engagement at the bunkers. Everywhere in the dark, men moved about busily collecting the wounded and reestablishing their perimeter. Eleven men had been hit badly enough to be evacuated; but since there was no place for a helicopter to land, they would have to be carried back to the aid station. Because there was concern that other Four/Seven men might mistakenly fire on them in the dark, it was decided to bring the wounded to a collection point at the company CP and move them back through the lines in a single group. The dead, of whom there were seven, could wait till daylight and be picked up by Graves Registration.

It was an eerie spectacle. For nearly an hour they searched for casualties. Flashlights jacketed in red flickered among the trees and underbrush. A few strange jungle birds had returned to their roosts and began calling out in shrill, disturbed voices. The mutterings of the searchers and the groans of the wounded rose to meet them.

Kahn, his wrist bandaged tightly in gauze and tape, moved among the wounded, offering them cigarettes and encouragement. The shrapnel had barely skimmed the back of his hand, digging out a little half-moon chunk of skin. Another eighth of an inch and he might have been out of it himself with a severed tendon or splintered bone.

There were many men, officers among them, who would have given a lot at this point for such a wound, but Kahn wasn’t thinking about that—one way or the other. He was consumed by a deep, yet controlled rage; an anger so fierce he probably could not have expressed it in words even if he had sat down and tried. It was as though he had spent the past three hours of his life in a slow-motion automobile wreck, in which he was able to experience the terror of going out of control and still observe, at the same time, the injuries to other occupants. It was a hateful, helpless feeling.

No one slept much during the night. In addition to the evacuation detail, teams of men had to be sent back for more water and ammunition, and there was a lot of idle firing by nervous sentries.

Meantime, Colonel Patch had revised his ball-point-pen assault plan.

The point and sheath would continue to press forward, but if and when they made contact, the point would withdraw, and instead of the sheath’s moving up to envelop, a rolling artillery barrage would be laid down. Then they would all move forward together. This, Patch calculated, would be slower, but with the lessons learned from the day, he figured it would save lives. Furthermore, when Patch returned to Monkey Mountain late in the afternoon, he learned that other fish were being fried.

Since it was apparent that the fight was growing bigger, General Butterworth had consulted the Field Force Headquarters at Nha Trang and it was decided to throw more men into the battle. An Airborne battalion and a Mechanized Infantry regiment were detached from nearby and the whole shebang placed under the command of a two-star general from Headquarters.

The valley itself was twenty miles long, and nearly half that across, but the present fighting was contained in the eastern half, bounded on the north and south by tall mountains. The overall idea now was that the Brigade would continue to press forward in a giant wheeling motion to the north while the Airborne battalion drove straight across the valley from the south, toward the northern mountains. The Mechanized Infantry would work its way down an overgrown road near the base of these northern mountains, and with any luck the retreating North Vietnamese would be pushed right into their laps and the area secured within two weeks. With any luck at all. Privately, Patch fumed at the loss of his authority, but he played the good soldier and kept his counsel and chewed on his cigar.

When the new instructions were received by Bravo Company at about 0200 hours, Kahn and his officers spent the next couple of hours in one of the bunkers poring over maps and lining out their formation for the following day. Trunk was there too, working on his morning report, recording casualties and other odds and ends.

With a few hours to go before daylight, Kahn called it quits and sent everyone back to get some sleep. As he curled up on the damp floor in his poncho, Sharkey stuck his head back into the bunker. The only light he saw was the glow of Kahn’s final cigarette.

“You know the hell of it?” he said solemnly.

“No, what?”

“We ain’t gonna get to take a bath for two more weeks.” Kahn was grateful for it—that Sharkey had stopped back in that way. Like the old times. Still, as he lingered on the edge of sleep, Kahn could not understand how a man who planned a career in the Army could continue to worry so much about staying clean.

22

T
he next day, Bravo Company was assigned the point of the advance, and Operation Western Movie pressed forward again. Dawn did not come to the jungle in a rosy pink glow, but was announced by a few shrieking birds perched high enough in the trees to actually see first light. The men—who had been in various stages of rest or, in some cases, anxious, lonely terror—began to stir around in the cool gray light and raise harsh morning noises that blended into a single, if unharmonized, symphony. First there was coughing and spitting, followed by farting and belching and the sound of noses being blown. There was the spatter of urine striking the ground amid drowsy mutterings and low oaths, the rattle of steel against steel and the slapping and flapping of clothing being shaken out. The sound of a rifle company rising to greet the day is like no other sound in the world.

Cautiously, they moved through the trees toward, and then beyond, the source of yesterday’s fire. The jungle became sparser than what they had had to thrash through the first day, and it was naturally thinner—not deliberately cleared away, as it was near the bunkers. When they reached the positions where the North Vietnamese had launched their counterattack, it was evident the artillery barrage had done its job well. Trees were splintered at their bases, and everything seemed unnatural and askew. There was also firm evidence that men had been killed: evidence that included an occasional piece of a limb or an inordinate spot of blood on the ground. No bodies were found, but as in the case of the bunker fighting, there were signs that people had been dragged away.

Farther on, they crossed a slow-moving stream, and Crump, who was in the point squad, was first to notice the blood. It was pooled up in little eddies and backwaters all along the banks of the shallow water, and it expanded and contracted into and out of the lazy current like the fangs of a dark, ferocious animal. Crump hollered for his squad leader; but by then others had seen the blood, and a call was put out on the radio to hold up while two squads were sent to investigate.

An aroma of death hung in the still jungle air as the squads moved up the stream. Soon they found the source.

The bodies of a dozen North Vietnamese soldiers lay along the banks and in the ankle-deep water. All were mutilated horribly, having evidently been caught by one or more artillery rounds as they ran along the stream. It was impossible to say if they had been running away from the fighting or toward it. From their odd positions, the bodies looked as though they might have been dropped from the sky.

While the discovery of the bodies was being relayed back to Kahn, and the rest of the company waited in their tracks, the two squads began gleefully to strip the dead of souvenirs. But nothing of particular interest was found, including weapons, and from this they assumed that other North Vietnamese had stripped them earlier.

It was well into the morning, and Kahn was about to call a smoke break, when they ran into the minefield.

Every so often they had come across a sinister-looking trail. It was much easier to move along the trails than hack through the raw jungle brush, and the men used them whenever possible. Sometimes these trails crisscrossed each other. If a trail turned too far or stopped abruptly, as many of them did, they would simply go plunging off into the brush hoping to find another one ahead.

The man who stepped on the mine, a cheerful oaf they called Moose, was fortunate in a way: It only blew off his foot. If the explosion had set off one of the mortar rounds he was carrying, Moose would have been blown through the tops of the trees. Sharkey was one of the first to reach him. Moose was sitting at the edge of the trail pressing his hands together and breathing heavily. There was an almost curious look on his sweaty face. He did not look down at the stump of his leg.