Better Times Than These (42 page)

“Do what—kill them?” the first man said. “Old Brill’ud have your ass hanging high for that, I’ll bet.”

“Brill—shit,” interrupted the second man. “He’d like to do it himself, he got the chance. That is one mean sombitch, that Lieutenant Brill . . .”

“Nah, I ain’t talkin’ about killing ’em; I said there’s
two
ways to find out,” the man with the cigarette said. He chambered a round into the rifle and peered down over the top of the trench. “I’m jest talkin’ about a little experiment, that’s all. Just to see if they run.”

He giggled indifferently, and then a dark, brooding look came over his face as he pointed the rifle toward the plodding men, aiming it just a little ahead of the water buffalo.

The single shot cracked the stillness of the morning, and a tiny geyser of water flew up a few yards in front of the buffalo. All three—the two farmers and the buffalo—stopped in their tracks. The farmers looked at each other, the one-legged one resting heavily on his crutch. The buffalo looked from side to side. None looked up to where the shot had come from. Then methodically, as though nothing had happened, they plodded forward again, infuriatingly, toward the tiny hamlet in the coconut trees.

“Shit,” said one of the men in the trench. “That don’t prove nothin’.” He looked back up the hill at several figures, including a scowling Sergeant Trunk hurrying down at them to find out what had happened.

“Hell it don’t,” said the man who had fired the rifle. “Proves them bastards smarter than we think.”

Such was the mood of Bravo Company in Christmas week, nineteen hundred and sixty-six: halfway around the world from home, halfway through its yearlong tour of duty. For three weeks the men had languished on the hill, which in another time might have been called the “front,” except that here there was no front. There was a “rear,” and everybody spoke of it, but no front, because once you left the rear they were at not only your front but your back and sides and top and bottom as well.

Since early morning they had been waiting for orders for today’s patrols, faces hollow and cadaverous beneath sodden camouflaged helmets, voices ticking out a monotonous litany of boredom and unrest. As they had been told it would be, this was indeed a far cry from the fighting in the Ia Drang; but as it turned out, even more maddening because it wasn’t really fighting at all, but more like a daily game of Russian roulette—and all the more frustrating because here they had time on their hands to think about it.

Each morning, one or more platoons would be sent out to work their way through a section of the valley on a “search and destroy” mission. In time it became obvious that the word “search” under these circumstances was idiotic. Whatever VC there were would long since have been waved off by the villagers, most of whom were known sympathizers if not part-time VC themselves. What remained was a web of mines and booby traps and an occasional sniper. The people they had been sent here to protect were evidently not interested in their protection, and the Company soon came to regard them as worthless.

They spoke with bitterness of the fact that few if any inhabitants of the valley ever stepped on a mine or set off a booby trap, while they encountered these dreaded obstacles day upon day. If shots were fired at them from a hamlet, they were invariably greeted with a silent, resentful, know-nothing reception when they arrived to investigate. And if by chance they happened to see and kill the sniper, chances were his body would be dragged away later by one or more wailing women.

For young men who a few scant months before had been repairing automobiles, mending sewer pipe, studying in high school or slinging hash for a living, it was a difficult situation to comprehend. The ultimate effect was to inspire a bullyish attitude—different from, but somehow related to, the ruthlessness they had felt during the Ia Drang fight—and if a few of them were comfortable with it, others were not, and yet it overtook them just the same.

This was illustrated by an incident that had happened a few weeks before in another company of the Battalion operating in a valley nearby.

Colonel Patch had been on his way to visit the Command Post when his helicopter was fired on from a tiny hamlet. When he arrived at the CP, the colonel was livid and decreed that the hamlet should be evacuated immediately and then wiped off the face of the earth by artillery and air strikes. As the story went, Patch first secured permission from Headquarters to declare the hamlet a “free-fire zone,” then requested a helicopter equipped with loudspeakers to fly over and announce to its inhabitants that they had three hours to gather their belongings and leave. Patch considered this a sort of updated version of the ancient practice of plowing up the site of a conquered city and sowing the ground with salt.

As the time period drew to a close and the batteries of artillery prepared high-intensity phosphorous rounds and the big Phantom fighters boiled on their runways, Patch received a message from the helicopter pilot circling overhead that no one had been observed leaving the hamlet. The people who lived there, he reported, seemed to be coming and going as though nothing had happened or were going to happen.

The story at this point had several variants, but the most common was that Patch had gone into a wild rage and said to “Burn ’em out, then,” and when the Company Commander timidly reminded him that there were women and children in the hamlet, Patch retorted that
“Women and children burn like anything else!”
and ordered the destruction to proceed on schedule.

In fact, Patch did postpone the strike until the villagers were forcibly evacuated, but his now famous declaration,
“Women and children burn like anything else!”
circulated throughout the Battalion to the tune of dry, black laughter, a bonus contribution to the callousness they were all beginning to feel toward the Vietnamese, and in time toughness became synonymous with meanness, and not a few civilians fell victim to this attitude.

Back at higher headquarters, the hoped-for result was that the Battalion’s presence would deter the enemy from availing himself of the rice crop in these fertile valleys. But not being privy to the Big Picture, Bravo Company, like the rest, could only wonder why it was here being nickeled and dimed to bits, and curse and rage against the immemorial usage of the foot soldier.

Shortly before noon, the radioman poked his head into the Command tent where Kahn was poring over a map with his other officers.

“The Old Man’s on his way over here, sir.”

Kahn dropped his grease pencil and looked up. His face was haggard and his eyes were sunken from lack of sleep. There were lines around the corners of his mouth and nose that hadn’t been there six months ago.

“When?” he asked tiredly.

“He’s airborne now from LZ Horse—so’s I guess in just a few minutes,” the RTO said.

Kahn turned to the others. “Let’s sack this for now. I’ll put it to him when he gets here and see how it flies.”

“Jesus Christ, I should hope so,” exclaimed Lieutenant Peck. Kahn ignored him and walked out of the tent. In a few seconds the foolish look faded from Peck’s face and he turned on Brill, who had been shaving bark off a stick with his Randall knife.

“Why is
he
in such a pissy mood? He’s not the one who has to keep going out there day after day,” Peck said defensively. Brill stared at the other darkly, a smile of relish on his face, but he did not say anything and he did not stop shaving the bark off the stick.

A few tiny drops of rain began falling, and the clouds in the west had grown darker and more ominous. Somewhere in the distance, two claps of artillery thundered in well-spaced succession. Kahn walked down the forward slope of The Tit into the cleared space on one of the terraces and watched the sky to the north.

He heard the helicopter before he saw it, flying low through a pass between the hills. It circled once overhead, just low enough to scatter anything that wasn’t tied down, then dropped gently into the landing zone. Colonel Patch, wearing a wide-brimmed bush hat and a .45 slung on his hip and the small, dark glasses perched on his nose, bounded out, ducking beneath the rotors, and returned Kahn’s salute.

“Welcome to The Tit, sir,” Kahn said, forcing cheerfulness. He was a little taken aback by the comic cowboy look Patch had affected.

“Hello, Billy,” Patch said. “How’s it going?” He gazed around, hands on hips, surveying the emplacements and the panorama of the valley below. “I’d say you’ve done a pretty good job since I was here last.”

“It’s not bad except for the rain,” Kahn said. “I think we might best be relocating pretty soon, though—we’ve been up here nearly three weeks now.”

Patch peered over the dark glasses as though he had heard something unexpected.

“I wouldn’t worry much about that,” he said. “Hasn’t been any large-scale activity here in—what is it—eight or nine months? You’ve got the best defensive position in the whole Area of Operations; and that ARVN company down in the valley—been there two or three months and haven’t been touched.” Patch began walking uphill.

“That’s because they don’t do shit,” Kahn said drily, and Patch looked at him again in that same abrupt way.

They walked the rest of the way up the hill in silence, past the rolls of barbed wire and the machine-gun emplacements and makeshift living quarters of the troops. Men who had been sitting or lying down rose to their feet and saluted when the colonel passed, and others, if they were far enough away, altered their courses from his path. Halfway up, Patch thought he saw a tall soldier far ahead dart into some bushes carrying a monkeylike creature under his arm, but he wasn’t sure and decided not to make an issue of it.

Inside the CP, Kahn gave Patch the single folding chair and sat down himself on an empty ammunition crate.

“Like some Cs, Colonel?” Kahn offered. “I think we’ve got some canned peaches here.”

“No, thanks, Billy. I’ll get something back at Monkey Mountain. Can’t stay here but a few minutes, anyway—there’s an early briefing today. Take some coffee, though.”

“Coming right up,” Kahn said. He put on a heat tab and dug around in a C-ration crate. “Just the old Army stuff, sir; isn’t too good.”

“It’s fine, Billy—fine,” Patch said. “Now let’s talk about your deployment.” Then, remembering he had forgotten something, he removed the sunglasses and blinked in the darkness of the tent. Outside, the rain had picked up, coming down in needlelike bites, and a sharp, moist breeze blew in through the open flap.

“First off, I noticed your mortars up there to the right,” Patch said. “Don’t you think they’re a bit too close?”

Kahn reached for a cigarette. Patch took out a cigar and chewed on it, unlit. “I thought about that, Colonel, but it’s about the only place I can think of to put them—it’s the farthest spot up the hill. That backside drops straight down, and about the only other thing I could do is put them down in the jungle or up on another hill, and that wouldn’t be very secure.”

“I guess not,” Patch said thoughtfully, “but if you do get hit they won’t be able to help you much those last two or three hundred meters—it’s where you’ll need it, you know.” He stopped for a moment and pondered the problem. “How about if you move your perimeter down the slope a hundred or so meters—that ought to do it, huh?” Patch said, sounding pleased at his suggestion.

“Well . . . I thought about that too, Colonel, but it just seemed to me that if we go down there . . . I mean, if they’re going to hit us here, they’ve got to come all the way up here to do it.” Damn, Kahn thought, he always sounded so ineffective when he talked to Patch. The truth was—and he knew it—that he was afraid of the man; or rather, of that silver eagle on his collar, which had such control over his life; which could decide if he was to live or die or shovel shit or be disgraced or become a hero . . . or maybe it
was
the man . . . He thought of the business with Carruthers and wondered what Patch thought of Jews.

“I know what you’re saying, Kahn, but sometimes you have to sacrifice position for coverage. You have to weigh the advantages, and I’ll tell you this, if it were my company, I’d move on down that slope and make room for the mortars.”

Once he had seen Patch out of uniform, at a party off post, and he remembered thinking then how civilian clothes diminished him. But when he was wearing the uniform he was a frightening man . . . dangerous . . .

“Colonel, you’re probably right, but . . . like I said before, I think we’re gonna have to get off this hill pretty soon anyway—I think we’re stretching it now as far as—”

“Nonsense,” Patch declared. He took a long, disapproving look at Kahn. “This is the best spot in the valley to defend from. That is why I put you up here. Reconnoitered this hill myself. Couldn’t do any better. Main thing is, it commands the road to Bong Tien. Besides, they’re not going to hit a reinforced company up here. It’d take two battalions.”

“Well . . . ahm . . . I just . . .” Kahn faltered momentarily. “Maybe not . . .”

“Now, what else?” Patch said sternly. “How’s your supply?”

“Rotten, sir,” Kahn said, relieved to be off the hook, though nothing was resolved. “We’re becoming beggars. The men are trading things with the chopper crews—we ask for everything and get nothing.”

“Humm . . .” Patch said, mulling it over. “Tell you what: you make me up a list of what you need and send it on the chopper in the morning. I’ll take it to Supply personally and kick ass—okay? Well, I ought to be heading out if I’m going to make that briefing.” He stood up and put on his bush hat.

“There’s something else I’d like to speak to you about, sir,” Kahn said. He had said he would. The others expected it. Now he had to.

“Yes? What’s that?”

“It’s about the two-platoon-a-day patrols.” He noticed Patch’s eyebrows rise. This wasn’t going to go down well.

“What I mean is, we’re getting chewed to bits by these damned mines and booby traps and snipers, and . . . well, we don’t have shit to show for it.” Kahn fumbled for another cigarette. Patch looked at him impatiently.

“I’ve lost sixteen men these three weeks, and it’s getting worse. If we keep this up much longer, I’m going to be down to cooks and jeep drivers . . .”