A few minutes later he tried again.
“No,” she said, moving his hand, “I told you I don’t want to. Not here.”
“What’s wrong with here? I live here—it’s my home,” he said.
She sat up on the bed and adjusted her sweater. He lay beside her sullenly, his hands behind his head. “Listen,” she said after a while. “I know what you think. You think I’m a good lay, don’t you?”
When he protested, she cut him off.
“It just isn’t true—I mean, about me going to bed with everybody. I see how they look at me in the PX. They’re always trying to get me to sleep with them because they’re officers. Well, I don’t sleep with people I don’t like. I mean, I don’t even know you . . .”
He started to protest again, but she bent over and kissed him softly.
“I really like you. You don’t stare at me and say all those things—you know what I mean. You just pay your check . . . That’s why I went out with you,” she said.
He pulled her down beside him, and when he tugged at the elastic again there was only a mild reproach.
A little before midnight they left the BOQ. He drove her to a girlfriend’s house where she was to spend the night, and on the way she held his hand in the car. At the door they kissed for a long time, and after she went inside he stood on the porch for a moment to light a cigarette. It was a tiny house in nineteen-thirties style—what his father would call a “shotgun house” because of its narrowness. He’d got a whiff of house odor when she’d opened the door—the sickly-sweet smell of food and people in a shut-in place. The stark glow of a television set danced on the walls in a darkened front room. He tried to imagine the girlfriend.
As he walked down the steps he felt warm and satisfied. He was glad he’d met her—there weren’t many like her around an Army post—and what a body! So what if she wasn’t a whiz kid? At least she knew it herself and wasn’t ashamed of it. They’d actually had a good time together, and he was going to call her again—maybe tomorrow . . .
Two boys stepped out of the bushes in front of Kahn as he walked to the street. For an instant he was startled, but they stepped aside to let him pass. His car was beneath a street light in front of the house next door. As he turned down the sidewalk, the larger boy, a tall, rawboned youth of about eighteen, fell into step beside him. The other—shorter, squatter—followed behind.
“Hey, let me ask you somethin’,” the tall boy said. His hair was black and slicked down. He was holding a beer.
“You date my sister tonight?” he said. “Your name Lootenant Kahn?”
“Yeah,” Kahn said, stopping, feeling relieved. “Are you Sally’s brother? It’s nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand. The boy did not take it. Instead he looked at Kahn with cold, narrow eyes.
“Yeah, I’m her brother. I look out after her,” he said. Kahn finally dropped his hand to his side. There was an awkward silence. What the hell can this be? he thought. Then he found out.
“I hear you a Joo,” the boy said. “That right, Lootenant?”
Kahn felt his face flush. He looked at the boy’s mean eyes in astonishment.
“Yes, I am Jewish,” he said coolly.
“Well, uh, see . . . my sister, she don’t want to go out with Joos,” the boy said. “I bet you didn’t tell her you was a Joo, did you?”
The other boy leaned against a car on the street and scratched some acne on his face. Kahn realized something was about to happen. Time was moving fast and slowly at once. Both of them were younger—but they were both pretty big.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t see what difference—”
“It makes a damn lot of difference,” the boy cut him off. “A fucking lot of difference, ’cause Sally, she don’t go out with wops, niggers or Joos—even if they are lootenants,” the boy said.
“Does your father know you’re—”
“Fuck my father,” the boy interrupted. “He don’t know shit. Joos are dirty people—my sister don’t date dirty people. You stay away from my sister, hear?”
Kahn had taken several steps toward his car when the beer can hit him in the back. It knocked the breath from his lungs, and he was only vaguely aware of the boy flying through the air at him. They hit the pavement hard, and Kahn landed on his elbow. A ribbon of pain shot through his arm, and he was stunned by the boy’s punches on his face.
He rolled and struggled to his knees. He threw a wild right hand which, to his surprise, caught the boy flush on the nose. Blood spurted out. The boy hollered something unintelligible, and then Kahn felt other arms holding him from behind.
“Don’t let him go—hold him,” the boy panted.
Kahn struggled frantically. There seemed to be a lot of noise, and time moved very slowly again. The boy hit him twice in the stomach. This isn’t happening, he thought—I don’t believe this. Somehow he got an arm free and pulled the acne-faced boy down. The three of them were on the ground cursing and punching. Then other voices were there, and two beefy men jerked them apart. Five or six people were on the sidewalk; a woman was screaming something. One of the men, wearing an undershirt, held the brother tightly by the scruff of the collar. “What the hell is this?” he demanded. The brother continued to hurl incoherent threats at Kahn.
When he was let go, Kahn picked up his cap, which had fallen into the gutter, and wiped his mouth. Blood came off on his sleeve, and he spat a bright red wad onto the ground.
“He’ll tell you,” Kahn said, jerking his thumb at the brother, who, still held tightly by one of the men, continued to rain curses and threats.
He got into his car, grateful that it started up right away. As he pulled off, he saw several people standing on the porch of Sally’s girlfriend’s house, but she was not among them. He thought he saw her inside the door, peering out, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t slow down for a second look.
23
A brilliant tropical moon illuminated the heavens and the earth, reflecting the day’s sun, which long since had disappeared behind the chain of rugged mountains that lay before them. From its bivouac in some low foothills, Bravo Company could gaze up at the peaks which, bathed in the silver moonglow, appeared as black forbidden castles in the sky.
For six days following Kahn’s departure they had forged ahead, with Sharkey in command. The ordeal of the jungle had ended that morning, and the rest of the day they had worked their way through low, dried-out scrub brush to the new Battalion staging area where they would stay the night, then be thrown back into the breach.
For several days there had been savage fighting up and down the rows of mountains at the northeast end of the valley. The North Vietnamese division had miraculously slipped past the Mechanized Infantry regiment and was now firmly entrenched in the mountains. American units had emerged from the jungle in hot pursuit, but the battle was not going well. One group of North Vietnamese, possibly of regimental size, clung tenaciously to the high ground they could see from here, and seemed determined to fight it out. Several assaults, including an attempt by one of the Airborne companies, had been driven pell-mell down the slopes under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire.
Tomorrow it was Bravo Company’s turn. Officially they were “in reserve,” but they had been told to expect to attack behind Alpha and Charlie companies and secure the crest of a hill known as “The Fake” which was so named because it did not appear on any of their maps. Actually, The Fake was a series of five rolling, successively higher knolls, which was probably why it had been skipped over by the cartographers. But from the perspective of the men below, it was assuredly a difficult and dangerous obstacle.
Their first objective would be to move to the second knoll and relieve a company of the Airborne battalion which had been under heavy fire for a day and a half; then push on to the next knoll and the next. All during the night artillery from far-off batteries had been pounding The Fake and some mountains beyond. Since the staging area had been used by other outfits, there were already holes dug, and Br
avo Company simply took them over, grateful they did not have to dig their own.
They lay there during the night, filthy and exhausted, nervously awaiting the dawn, a few sleeping fitfully when they could. Ammunition was running low and they were nearly out of grenades. Somewhere between “Nobody told me to do it” and “I ordered it done,” these items had been forgotten, and it was obvious they were going nowhere until they arrived. Some place in the rear, at this very moment, supply sergeants were yelling at beleaguered privates stacking up crates of these munitions for loading aboard the morning helicopters; but not knowing this for sure, Bravo Company sweated in its ratlike holes and prayed silently that the supplies might somehow fail to arrive.
Three days earlier, Kahn had been released from the field hospital with an improved but still tender hand, and he had been going back for treatment twice a day. In the morning he would board one of the Supply helicopters and rejoin the Company. Patch occasionally briefed him on the changing situation, but Kahn could still not picture it completely. At least, he thought, they were out of the jungle. He could not imagine anything as bad as that.
Alone in the officers’-club tent, he was nursing a beer when the first of the “regulars” began to wander in from their staff jobs. They bellied up to the plywood box set up as a bar, paying him no attention. Because he was clean, he thought, they probably assumed he was on a staff too. At the hospital, he had visited the shower tent twice and often three times a day. He had thrown away his ratty fatigues and been issued new ones; still, considering the dirt and grime that seemed impossible to remove from under his fingernails and the patches of skin that peeled off from his arms and neck, he wondered if he would ever be completely clean again.
During his six-day stay in the rear, Kahn had not been preoccupied with thoughts of the Company. On the contrary, he had managed to put it out of his mind, except when he attended the twice-daily briefings on the progress of Operation Western Movie.
He went to these briefings for lack of anything better to do, and would sit quietly near an aisle while the general and other luminaries listened to the clipped assessments of Staff men outlining the features of the campaign. No one had ever asked him for an opinion, and he had not volunteered any. Obviously, back here they were not interested in his opinion. Everything that was done was done on paper; or, when the situation demanded, over the field radio—the reports coming in out of a black void, orders going out into the void, none of it having much relation to reality.
Kahn knew that the task force had completed its sweep of the Boo Hoo Forest and now, all along a ten-mile stretch of the northern mountains, little battles were taking place, some high in the hills, some down in ravines and some in the bordering jungle. The battles were connected by pinpoint markings on maps in the TOC and the briefing tent, but totally isolated from one another by jungle, high ground and other natural obstacles. Frequently, the enemy broke off contact after a few minutes, vanishing phantomlike into the gloomy forest; other times he would hold ground and make the Americans pay dearly for their assaults.
In the past few days, the focus of it all had become a series of enemy redoubts located on some hills and knolls known collectively as The Fake. Earlier in the day Patch had confirmed to Kahn that when he returned to the Company in the morning, their assignment would be to help break up one of these redoubts.
In the briefing tent, however, Bravo Company was merely an impersonal black square on a map overlay. Each day, the square was dutifully moved around, along with other black squares, by the G-3 Operations staff. There were red squares also on the map, and they were moved around by the G-2 Intelligence people. Sometimes the red and black squares would be moved very close together until it began to remind Kahn of a disorderly kind of checkers game, the red and the black hopping wildly about on a board of grids.
In a way, it all made sense here—the black squares chasing the red squares up and down the grids, occasionally landing right on top of one another. The black squares seemed to be winning, because there now were more of them than the red. On the final day he was there, two red squares disappeared entirely from the grid. Really, it was quite funny, and sometimes Kahn felt an urge to laugh out loud. But he didn’t dare. These people were playing a high-stakes game here, and he knew it would not be funny to them.
The officers’-club tent was already full of raucous, drinking men when Major Dunn came in. He looked haggard, and when he removed his cap, Kahn thought that his gray hair looked thinner; but this was not surprising, because Kahn had noticed for the first time a few days ago that his own hair was thinner and chunks of it sometimes came out in his comb. Dunn smiled wearily and dropped his cap on the table. “Hi,” he said. “I’ll get a beer and join you.”
The first thing Dunn noticed when he sat down was Kahn’s bandaged hand.
“Jeez,” he breathed, “got hit, huh—shrapnel?”
“It got infected,” Kahn said modestly. It was good to see old Dunn again, even if he did tend to talk a little too much about his personal life.
“Gosh,” Dunn said sympathetically, “I hope they took care of it—those things can be dangerous out here.”
They drank several beers, and Dunn pressed for news of the fighting. He seemed genuinely interested, and whenever Kahn described a particularly harrowing incident, Dunn would wince in sympathy and shake his head. He seemed happy to have someone to talk with; and finally, he got around to the subject of his wife.
“She doesn’t want a divorce—at least, not right now. What she said was the future is ‘uncertain.’ That’s how she put it—uncertain,” he said.
The letter had arrived two weeks before and was waiting for him when he returned from Firebase Meathead. There was another man, an officer at the post; that was all Dunn knew . . . he had no suspects.
“I didn’t want to believe she was fooling around, but I guess I always figured she must have been—she’s so damned pretty—a Fraulein—a real German beauty,” he said.
He had written her back the next day. It was a painful letter, full of thoughts and reminiscences, and he had spent most of the night composing it. He told her how much he loved her. That he felt very helpless being here. That he did not want a divorce. That it would all be different when he came home.
“I’m out after this, you know,” Dunn said. “Twenty years—that’s a damned good pension: six hundred a month plus privileges. I’m going to take over my old man’s radio shop in Jersey City, do some expanding. Hell, I know radios; it’ll be easy to step in.”
Kahn listened as Dunn laid out his plan for “the next twenty.” He had it all worked out: a house outside of town, the radio store, moving into television—mostly used, reconditioned sets; then perhaps a dealership. The talk went on for half an hour, and more beer was consumed. Finally, Dunn returned to the problem of the other man.
“Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” he asked. “I mean, what would you do?” He sucked deeply on the beer. “I bet you’d tell her to fuck off, right?”
Kahn wasn’t sure what to say. A sad, quizzical expression crossed Dunn’s face. Kahn remembered the same look when they had spoken in the bow of the transport, an almost tormented look. Before Kahn could answer, Dunn slammed down the glass on the table.
“Just tell her to fuck off—that’s what you’d do—isn’t it?” he cried. His voice was high-pitched and angry.
Some at the bar turned, and the laughter and talk suddenly quieted. Dunn’s mouth was pursed, and a black scowl enveloped his brow.
“How do you like it?” he bellowed, slamming the table with the glass again. “The daughter of a goddamn sheep farmer! Where would she be now—shearing goddamn sheep! And look at her—she was nothing before. I suppose if I’d made the list . . .”
Anger spread in waves over his face and voice. He spun around and glowered at the astonished crew at the bar, and they slowly went back to their drinks. The laughter and conversation rose again.
“All of my life,” Dunn said in
a low, trembling voice, “I have tried to do the right thing, and somehow I’ve messed it up. Do you know how that feels? How could you?”
His voice rose again, and the bar crew quieted down once more.
“Well, I’ll tell you this—anybody that wants to hear it!” he roared. “This time, I’m going to look out for old Number Thirty-seven—old . . . Number . . . Thirty . . . seven . . . you hear!” As Kahn and the others watched dumbfounded, Dunn got to his feet and with the bent-over stance of a high school fullback, he hurled himself through the side of the tent, ripping up pegs and ropes, bellowing like a stricken cow into the soft, moonlit night.
The first light of dawn grew from rosy pink to gray, then blue, and while the last morning stars sparkled in the west the bombardment of The Fake began. From a gun park nine miles away, big 175-millimeter guns lobbed a thunderous barrage up and down the knolls.
The brilliant flashes and trembling of the earth greeted the early-November morning while Bravo Company waited in its holes and sweated it out, observing its objective in daylight for the first time. The artillery tore overhead like invisible freight trains, ripping the air apart and exploding with such unimaginable impact that a few of the men actually thought they had gone deaf. From this distance, the knolls did not appear particularly hard to negotiate. The artillery of today and other days had scorched and shredded the earth, leaving only a few patches of trees isolated like tiny islands in a bare brown sea of earth.
The barrage lifted as quickly as it had begun, and they heard the sound of helicopters flying toward them, low over the trees. Moments later they came in, dumping out supplies, their engines still running. The last to land deposited Kahn and three nervous replacements sent forward at the last minute after committing certain sins in the rear.
Alpha Company was milling around in loose platoon formation, checking its equipment and preparing to move out. Charlie Company would follow them, and then Bravo Company. Already there seemed to be a firefight in progress on the second knoll, but no people were visible, and Sharkey hurriedly tried to fill Kahn in on the day’s program and the week just past. There had been more trouble with the men while he had been gone—most of it in Brill’s platoon. Also, a man in Weapons Platoon had threatened the life of Lieutenant Inge, and Inge was considering proceedings against him. Many of the men were weak with dysentery and other illnesses, and some of their gear was in lousy shape.
Better Times Than These Page 23
