“Lieutenant,” Trunk said fiercely, “we got to move. We got to get up out of here.”
Kahn suddenly felt short of breath. He was trying to picture what might happen when they got up. They could make a dash for it, toward the village, in between salvos—but suppose they got up just as the mortars landed . . . suppose . . .
Then Trunk was on his feet, yelling, and dragging people up all along the dike and moving them out. Instantaneously Kahn joined him, standing on the dike, signaling with his arms for them to advance. Another salvo caught them in the open as they stumbled forward.
Two men from Sharkey’s platoon fell. Other men went to them, but the line continued to advance, and Kahn gave the signal to advance on the run. The Company lumbered forward under its heavy gear, past the body of the Running Man, leaving the injured and their helpers to their fate. As they approached the village, a patch of woods on a hill suddenly exploded, and Kahn guessed that Charlie Force had spotted the mortars and called in artillery.
No more mortars fell, and when they reached the treeline, Kahn signaled to stop, and they knelt down on line, giving the stragglers a chance to catch up. The firing in the village seemed to have ceased, and through the trees they could see the green forms of Charlie Force moving down the paths and among the huts. The radio operator handed Kahn the handset again.
“What is your situation down there?” Patch demanded.
“We need dust-off ASAP. Charlie Force is in the village now. The shooting has—ah, seems to have stopped,” Kahn said.
“I know about Charlie Force. I have been in contact with them,” Patch said crossly. “I want to know where you are and what your situation is. Can you tell me?”
“Ah, roger,” Kahn said. He noticed that his hands were shaking violently, and he was having difficulty holding down the transmit bar on the radio.
“We are on line just outside the village—we are about fifty meters away from it. We have several men injured and request dust-off immediately,” Kahn said.
“You are on line at the village—fine,” Patch said. “Now I want you to move forward slowly into the village until you link up with Charlie Force—and be careful who you shoot. I have a bird waiting and I’m on the way down there now. Your dust-off is in the air.”
They moved into the treeline, rifles at the ready, searching every hut for possible enemy supplies or people hiding. All they found was old men, women and children. They met Charlie Force near the center of the village.
Kahn told Bravo Company to take a smoke break, and then he sat down on a log next to Trunk, who had taken off his helmet and removed from his little knapsack a hopelessly stained and battered coffee cup. Trunk opened his canteen and poured the cup half full of water and set it down in front of him, stirring it slowly with a stick.
“Sergeant,” Kahn said, “I want you to know that out there in the paddy . . . I don’t know what . . .”
“We got their asses outta there, didn’t we, Lieutenant? I thought it was pretty damned good for their first time, huh?”
“Yeah,” Kahn said numbly, “I guess so. It was mine too . . .” He felt a sudden rush of blood to his feet, and the sweat in his fatigues became cold on his skin. Somewhere along the way he had twisted his ankle and it was hurting a little bit. Hazily, he watched Trunk stir the water in the coffee cup, which had now turned a dark, chocolate brown.
Kahn wondered what might have happened if Trunk hadn’t stood up and made the first move. How long would he have lain there, hugging ground, while the mortars rained down on them? Well, he just didn’t know. He wanted to believe he would have jumped up by himself in a few seconds and gotten them going. But he just didn’t know, and now he never would.
What he did know for sure was that he’d felt as helpless as a sailor in a fog. Not a captain, but a sailor, waiting for someone to tell him what to do, and when that finally happened, in the form of Patch’s orders, there had been a strange, two-way pulling, one way going with his instincts and another going against them, but the one against them—the moving out—was what had saved their asses, although he hadn’t seen it that way then. What bothered him most was that this two-way pulling had damn near thrown him into a panic, and made him wonder now if he was really fit to run this or any other outfit.
Trunk tossed his stirring stick aside. “Want some mocha, Lieutenant?” He offered the cup to Kahn.
“What is it?” Kahn asked. He peered at the substance inside the cup.
“Sort of like coffee,” Trunk said. He took a swallow himself and shuddered.
“Where’d you get that cup, anyway? It looks like some kind of relic.”
“Korea,” Trunk said proudly. “Somebody hit me in the head with it, so I kept it as sort of a souvenir.”
The cup had no handle anymore, and it was stained and chipped beyond belief. Kahn was barely able to make out the insigne of some long-forgotten tactical fighter wing. There was a thick crust caked inside, almost like the charring inside a well-used smoking pipe.
Trunk explained that he’d kept it for ten years without washing it, so now he could simply pour in water and it automatically became coffee—or mocha, as he called it. “Sure you don’t want some, Lieutenant? It’ll lift you right off your feet.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kahn said. He stood up, testing the soreness of his ankle and looking around for a place to take a leak. He was goddamn glad to have Trunk around.
Meanwhile, some of the men had been taking a look at the bodies of four or five VC killed by Charlie Force. They were sprawled on the ground in odd positions, limbs askew, like preposterous rag dolls, the blood already drying on their clothing and dark yellowish skin. The men of Charlie Force had already stripped them of possible souvenirs.
Bravo Company gawked at the corpses with nervous exhilaration. Most of them had never seen dead men this way, and lying as they were, they looked like so much subhuman meat—but nevertheless remained testimony to the fact that there was an enemy here who would try to kill them if he got a chance. There was satisfaction in it—though it was an uncomfortable satisfaction, standing this close to the corpses—that they had come through the day properly. They had faced the enemy, in the form of the Running Man and these dead—who would surely have shot at them if they had seen them; had suffered the terror of the mortar fire and had moved forward through it and taken the village, so that for the time being it was theirs. But more important—and most of them knew this, because they had discussed it for days before the operation—each one of them was now entitled, by virtue of the fact that he had come under enemy fire in a combat situation, to wear the great prize of honor: the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
One who didn’t feel that way, however, was Sergeant Groutman. Badges didn’t mean shit to him. Like the bodies, he could take them or leave them, and while most of the others were taking a smoke break or gawking at the bodies, Groutman had been negotiating with one of the village girls for a quick piece of ass.
Half of Brill’s platoon, including Brill himself, was watching as Groutman bargained with the girl for her services. She was young and frail and her black peasant’s clothing soiled. Her face had been pitted by smallpox. The two of them were standing away from the rest, near a clump of foliage that opened into a trail to another part of the village. The girl seemed nervous and giggled, as she grappled in pidgin English, but she was not smiling as Groutman pressed his offer.
“Fifty Pee,” he said.
“Two hundred Pee,” she countered.
“Fifty,” Groutman declared.
“Two hundred.”
“Okay, cunt—seventy-five piasters.”
“Two hundred,” she chirped.
“You sow!” Groutman cried, using the Vietnamese word for bad.
“Me no sow—you sow!” the girl spat.
“Piss on that!” Groutman said nastily. He pushed his face close to hers. “Seventy-five Pee.”
The girl turned haughtily away, but as she did the sergeant grabbed h
er by her blouse and pulled her backward, and when she turned, her eyes were wild and frightened.
He released her and she began to back slowly down the trail. Brill and his men were sitting, watching with interest about ten yards away. Suddenly Groutman lunged for the girl, but she jumped out of reach and turned just in time to run smack into the huge bulk of Lieutenant Donovan, who appeared unexpectedly from the other direction with a squad of his men. The girl let out a shrill cry and started to go the other way, but Groutman was right in front of her. Sandwiched on the tiny path between the two large Americans, the girl began to back off into the bush and she nearly stumbled in some vines.
“What’s going on here?” Donovan said.
Groutman grinned sheepishly. “The lady and me was having a conversation, Lieutenant, that’s all.”
“It doesn’t look like it to me,” Donovan said. The squad of men behind him had crowded forward to see what was happening.
“Come ’ere, little lady,” Groutman said. The girl’s face was set in fear. She had backed as far as she could into the underbrush. Groutman took another step toward her.
“Oh, knock it off, Sergeant,” Donovan said.
“That’s what I’m trying to do, Lieutenant.” He grinned.
“I mean it, Sergeant. Go on back to your platoon,” Donovan said sternly.
Brill, who had heard but not seen all of the confrontation because they were halfway down the trail, suddenly arrived on the scene.
“Brill, if this man belongs to you, you better get him squared away,” Donovan said.
Brill turned to Groutman, who had abandoned his interest in the girl. “All right, Sergeant, what’s happened? What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Groutman said darkly. “I was just trying to make a deal with this gook when the lieutenant here—”
“Deal, hell!” Donovan said. “He’s fooling around with her. You know we can’t—”
“Go on back to the platoon, Ed,” Brill said. Groutman glanced at him sourly, but said nothing and stalked back down the trail. When he had disappeared, Brill turned to Donovan.
“Look, Donovan, the sergeant wasn’t hurting anything. I saw most of it until you came up. He was just—”
“Like hell,” Donovan said. “I saw what was going on.”
“Listen, I can take care of my platoon, and if there’s any problem you ought to go through me instead of—”
“Oh, fuck off, Brill,” Donovan said. “You can’t clean your own shoes.” He walked away, the squad following behind him.
Brill stood and watched them go, and afterward, instead of returning to his platoon right away, he went down the trail a little farther and took out the Randall knife, and when he was certain he was alone he seized it by the blade and threw it savagely at a thick-trunked tree.
19
“I’m sure glad you guys didn’t give me any business out there today,” McCrary, the Graves Registration lieutenant, said. They were plodding in the darkness from the officers’-mess tent up the rise where the Tactical Operations Center was situated.
“Heard a couple of your men caught something—but they’re going to be all right, huh?”
“They’ll be all right,” Kahn said. “One’s going home, though.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and leaned forward, boots sinking into the soft earth. He was dead tired and his ankle still hurt and he had planned to get some sleep until Patch sent word he wanted to see him in the TOC after chow.
“Heard you really did a number today,” McCrary said. “Mostly all you come up with out there is a mouthful of wind . . .” Kahn noticed that McCrary, whom everyone called “Digger,” was breathing heavily as they trudged up the hill. Evidently they didn’t get much exercise in Graves Registration.
“The Ia Drang, now—it’s something else,” McCrary continued. “When it’s hot out there, I’m all over the place. They get too busy to police up their own dead. Usually it’s just one—maybe two—they can’t find . . .”
McCrary looked forlorn. In the weeks he had known him, Kahn had noticed that McCrary talked incessantly about his work—as if by sharing the experience he could somehow be relieved of its burden.
McCrary continued to talk, but Kahn was barely listening. He was thinking about earlier, when he and Holden had been drinking beer alone in the mess before McCrary came in and Sharkey and Donovan had passed by the table where they were sitting. Kahn had motioned for them to sit down, but Sharkey told him, “No, thanks, sir, we’re going to play cards,” and had gone on by to join a group of second lieutenants in a poker game.
That, of course, hadn’t bothered Kahn, but the “No, sir” had. Ever since Okinawa, when Patch had given him the Company, and during the rest of the trip on the transport, and the weeks at Monkey Mountain, Sharkey had been gradually putting a certain distance between himself and Kahn. Kahn hadn’t noticed it at first, but pretty soon Sharkey had stopped calling him by his first name, and he hadn’t been as loose around him as he used to be.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t friendly or anything, because he still was, but in front of the men he had begun addressing Kahn as sir, which was absolutely proper, though he hadn’t done that when Kahn was Exec. Now that Kahn was CO, Sharkey’s West Point drilling had begun to take hold of him, or at least that was the way Kahn figured it. And then, a few days back, Sharkey had called him “sir” for the first time in private, though even that hadn’t been clear until now.
It had been when Kahn inquired about Sharkey’s new teeth, which had been fitted and ordered but had still not arrived. Sharkey said he had no word when the teeth would be forthcoming but wished the hell they would because he was having trouble eating. When Kahn asked if there was anything he could do, Sharkey smiled his toothless grin and replied, “Yessir, you can put an end to these rumors that I’m sucking cocks on the side; you’re still Rumors Control Officer, right?” Kahn didn’t know about the “Yessir” then, because it might have been just a figure of speech or whatever, but this time there was no mistaking it.
If that was the way Sharkey was going to be, then all right, Kahn thought. Let him pal around with the second lieutenants and call me “sir.” Kahn had found new friends in Holden and Digger McCrary—unlikely as they were: the mortician, the stockbroker and the geologist—and if his old friend Sharkey couldn’t understand that Kahn’s new status shouldn’t have meant squat to their friendship, to hell with it, then. But he still missed having Sharkey to kid around with, and now he felt a little uncomfortable about it, because he was starting to feel the distance too.
Ahead, the TOC glowed like a huge jack-o’-lantern.
Far to the west, the sky flickered with lightninglike flashes from an Artillery battery, silhouetting the two men against the top of the rise. Moments later the muffled whump, whump, whump rolled across the rice fields as if someone were dropping huge anvils in the mountains.
“Well, I guess I’ll go down to the morgue and catch up on some paperwork,” McCrary said. “Why don’t you drop by later?—I’ve got some vanilla ice cream in the cold locker; it keeps great in there . . .” He waved and stumbled off along a rutted path behind the TOC.
More flashes appeared behind the western mountains, and Kahn paused before going inside. He had a sudden compulsion to experience the completed act, the sound being a final confirmation of an event that had already occurred seconds earlier, a dozen miles away.
Whump, whump, whump, whump. The explosions finally reached him, distorted by time and distance, leaving the results to his imagination. I am, he thought, the apex of a very odd triangle.
The triangle he saw was marked at one of the angles by the men who fired the artillery, at another by the men who received it and at the third by himself—three vastly different views of the same event, distinguished merely by a factor of relative proximity. In a way, it was like the Dismal Deeps Effect aboard the transport, except that here the effect was perceivable—but only because it was not deep enough, or far enough away. God, Kahn thou
ght, I am going nuts . . . This is ridiculous nonsense . . . I am so tired . . . so goddamn tired . . .
The TOC was a place of high-pitched tumult, the kind of formless clamor one might expect during a panic in a stock exchange.
Rows of enormous terrain maps stretched from one end of the tent to the other, held in freshly built wood easels. The acetate overlays that covered them were a maze of black, red, orange and yellow grease-pencil markings showing friendly positions, enemy positions, free-fire zones, artillery targets, aircraft landing strips and dozens of other things not indicated in the brown contours and green terrain features originally reproduced in the basement of a government building in Washington, D.C. These markings were continually being fiddled with by bored-looking enlisted men who moved among the maps erasing and redrawing as the situation changed.
In the background, a dozen radios crackled—monitored by stern-looking officers attentive to the nervous chatter of commanders reporting in from the blackness, asking for things, giving positions, wishing for the sun to rise. One radio carried a frantic conversation between a platoon leader under fire and his Company Commander. A staff officer who had been listening for several minutes finally threw up his hands in despair. “Why don’t they shut the hell up so we can see what they need?” he cried. “What do they think—talking is going to help?”
Outside, diesel-driven generators hummed and growled; their thick black cables snaked into the TOC like garden hoses. Here was the nerve center of the Infantry brigade: a clearinghouse for three thousand armed men; for artillery—the 105s and 155s and the big 175-millimeter guns posted on hillsides miles away, poised to deliver fire on a moment’s notice; for supersonic Air Force fighters carrying two thousand pounds of deadly explosives; for huge B-52 bombers which, summoned under the code word “Arclight,” flew in nightly from Guam and the Philippines so high it was impossible to see them, unloaded destruction enough to wreck a small city, then flew homeward again, their weary crews joking, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches—oblivious to the effects of their deposit. All of this was presided over by smartly schooled officers in starched fatigues, carrying .45-caliber pistols in brown holsters, moving briskly about the wood-floored tent, providing wonderfully skilled administration to this vast armament—the best, in fact, that money could buy.
Better Times Than These Page 17
