Better Times Than These (41 page)

Back in the field, at least they could enjoy a little autonomy. The operation this time seemed far more palatable than the Ia Drang campaign: they were to perform security duty and run patrols in a valley of rice fields about twenty miles to the south. It didn’t sound too bad, and in the end they went almost happily. But they would have gone anyway, happy or not.

Kahn was worried about the company’s status. Replacements had been promised, but only half a dozen had arrived, and they were down to less than two-thirds authorized strength—but so was the entire Battalion. Nine of its twenty-two lieutenants had been lost in the Ia Drang, and they were light on noncommissioned officers too. Two new lieutenants had been assigned to replace Sharkey and Donovan, but Kahn still had no Executive Officer.

The new lieutenants, Range and Peck, were odd ducks who had been classmates at a well-established Southern military college. Both were tall and skinny, and they hung together like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. They even acted alike; they giggled and took things as a joke and sometimes behaved almost effeminately. Trunk was convinced they were homosexual, and one day he raised the subject to Kahn.

“There’s talk about them two new lieutenants, sir,” Trunk said. “Uh—that they’re, um, sort of peculiar . . .” Trunk had been making out the morning report and sipping coffee from his battered cup. Kahn was reading the file on the Carruthers incident.

“They just stick to themselves, Sergeant,” Kahn said. “They haven’t been here long enough to feel they’re a part of the Company.”

He returned to reading the file.

“What I mean is, sir, is that . . . ah . . . some of the men have—are—talking about them—like they was fairies. There’s a rumor they go off by themselves at night and—”

Kahn slammed the file shut.

“No, Sergeant, I don’t know what you mean. And if you hear any more of that kind of talk, you put a stop to it. I’ve got enough trouble in this goddamned Company without a bunch of crap like that getting started.”

And he did have trouble in the Company. It was nothing he could put his finger on, but there was something off. When he’d taken over aboard the transport at Okinawa, Kahn hadn’t known his ass from third base—but now . . . now he was past first base, and second too, and rounding third. Somewhere between the Village of the Running Man and the final knoll of The Fake, Kahn had become the Company Commander. He realized this when he realized that his fears, and his comforts, and his debt, and everything else had become subordinate to the Company, and even though there was the same sick knot in his stomach every day, he was out there, he did not cater to it, but went about his job running the Company.

Somehow, through the random happenstance of a sour appendix, he had been entrusted with a hundred-odd souls, and most of them looked to him to get them through, and maybe some hated him, and some mistrusted him, but in the end he was responsible for their day-to-day life-and-death crime-and-punishment eating-sleeping-living-defecating-fighting-crying-and-whining. A couple of years ago, he thought, if someone had tried to tell him this—while he was running around the fraternity house guzzling beer and waiting for night so he could try to get some girl into bed—he never would have believed them. All in all, he decided, he was doing pretty good.

Except for control.

He had hoped that that would somehow smooth out too, once he got settled into things—but now he wasn’t sure. There were some things beyond control, like driving a car too fast, even if you were the best driver around and everyone said you could do it. The Book gave him control on paper, but in practice it was something else.

The Book didn’t take into account what things like the enemy and weather and terrain and Lieutenant Brill could really do to control; it simply assumed you had control and proceeded from there.

When he thought of the balking on The Fake, and earlier, and of some of the people like Groutman and Brill and Patch, he worried about control. Once recently he had discussed it with Sergeant Trunk, and Trunk, sensing what he meant, had told him he had often felt the same thing in other outfits and not to worry, but then he had said something that bothered Kahn even more after he’d thought about it. “The thing is, Lieutenant,” Trunk said, “some of these shitheads are getting a little crazy.”

Carruthers presented his giant carcass to Kahn at 0800 hours on the morning of the day before they were to move out. He stood at attention before the little field desk, prepared to take whatever whipping the Massa planned to dish out.

Kahn put him at ease.

Spread out before him was Carruthers’ 201 file, the Army’s singular view of the man Carruthers, beginning with his serial number—which, in the military mind, was at least on an equal footing with his name. Besides the typed results of Holden’s investigation of the Duc Twan Bar incident, the file provided some other insights into Carruthers’ background—the most interesting of which to Kahn was that he was from Kahn’s own hometown, Savannah, Georgia.

Curious, Kahn had kept on reading. Carruthers lived with his mother and two sisters and a brother—no father was mentioned—on a little street near where Kahn’s father’s junk company was.

As Kahn remembered that street and the Negro shanties along it, which he had not thought about for a long time, he suddenly felt warm and good, and a little closer to home, just knowing this.

He considered mentioning it to Carruthers when he came in; but suddenly it dawned on Kahn that in Savannah—where everybody knew everybody—nobody knew Negroes but other Negroes, except perhaps by their first names, and looking at this file before him, ten thousand miles from home, he realized for the first time in his life that the distances between the races where he had grown up were as incomprehensible as the distances between galaxies. He pondered this for a while and shortly before Carruthers arrived decided that Carruthers was coming here for punishment anyway, so whatever he wanted to do, awkward or not, it wouldn’t be the proper time or place.

“I suppose,” Kahn said sternly, “you know why you’re here?”

Carruthers seemed forlorn and looked as if he wished Kahn would get on with it.

“Yessir, Lieutenant—I know,” he said.

“Well, what the hell do you think I ought to do with you, Carruthers? You have any suggestions?”

Carruthers said nothing. He twisted his fatigue cap in his hands. Kahn stared at him, letting the moment build. In a way, he was enjoying it. He knew what he was going to do, and the hot seat was a part of it.

“Okay,” Kahn said finally, fingering the sheet of paper from Holden’s report. “I’ve read this and I’ve talked to the Battalion Commander, and he has authorized me to deal with you as I see fit.”

Carruthers nodded his head.

“According to these findings, you were present at an off-limits establishment and you cut this girl with a knife—is that correct?”

Carruthers looked away, out through the tent flap.

“Goddamn it!—stop looking around. Stand at attention.

“And because of what you did, this girl is now demanding that the United States Government pay her hundreds of dollars in damages—did you know that?”

Carruthers shook his head.

“And do you realize what this sort of thing does to our relations with the people of this country?”

Carruthers shook his head again. He seemed totally downcast.

“All right, you can stand at ease,” Kahn said. The huge body seemed to slump outward. An awkward silence followed.

“Carruthers,” Kahn said at last, “I said before that I have talked all of this over with the Battalion Commander. I hope you realize you could go to the stockade for a good many years . . .

“However,” Kahn continued, “it has been decided that instead of recommending you for court-martial, I will administer Company punishment. There are two reasons for that. First, you didn’t hurt the girl badly, and second, I need every man I can lay my hands on . . .

“But,” Kahn said as sternly as possible, “I want you to promise me right now that you will never carry a knife again when you are off duty and that you won’t go into any place that is off limits during the rest of your tour here. Is that clear?”

Gratitude flowed from Carruthers like flour down a chute, and he began to burble his assent in the same dialect that had given Colonel Patch so much difficulty.

“All right, all right.” Kahn waved him off. “Now I have to do something about you, so I’m going to put you on KP for two weeks. Report to the mess sergeant first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you, sir,” Carruthers said. If he had had a forelock, he would probably have tugged it.

“Okay, that’s it—go on back to your platoon.”

Carruthers stopped at the tent flap and turned around. He opened his mouth for a second, but nothing came out.

“Something else?” Kahn said.

“I wanta axe you sompin . . . Lieutenant . . . ah.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Ain’t you from Savannah?”

Kahn was dumbfounded.

“Yes, I am,” he barked. “Now get the hell out of here.”

27

T
hree men sat in the trench—two of them eating a C-ration breakfast, the other smoking a damp cigarette and gently fingering his rifle. The sky was white and glum, and long banks of gray, rain-laden clouds billowed threateningly above the distant mountains at the end of the valley.

“Fuckin’ rain,” one of the men said crossly, tossing an empty can outside the trench. “I gotta get outta this dump.”

“It could always be worse,” the second man said.

“Oh, yeah?” said the first. “Whatta they gonna do, send me to Vietnam?”

Below in the inundated rice paddy, two listless farmers, their baggy black trousers rolled to the knee, slogged toward a tiny hamlet half hidden by tall coconut palms. All morning the three in the trench had watched them working the field, stooping over in their peculiar, jerky way, the first guiding a rude plow behind a plodding water buffalo, the second following behind, sticking small rice plants into the ankle-deep muck.

It was infuriating to the men in the trench.

Never once—either from fear or from ignorance—had the two Vietnamese acknowledged the presence of the armed encampment above.

“Lookit them bastards,” the man with the cigarette said.

“Yeah,” said the other. “What they got to worry about, huh?”

“Squat,” said the third. “They don’t worry about squat.”

Sometime earlier, Bravo Company had emerged from its rain-soaked burrows on the scrubby hillside and with a sure sense of futility, the men set about hanging and drying their clothing and gear, knowing well that the effort would be undone with the next rain. The rains had been intermittent for the past week—sharp, torrential showers two or three times a day that left everything a sodden, clammy mess. With the onset of the monsoon season, the rains would eventually take over everything, and in time it would be the brief absence of rain that would seem unusual.

The men sat around in uninspired little knots, griping, joking, passing time until the day’s patrol order was issued. The piece of terrain they were situated on was referred to as “The Tit,” because when viewed from the side it resembled a large, well-shaped breast. At the very peak there was a rock outcropping where they had set up an observation post that commanded a view of the whole valley. Naturally, this was called “The Nipple.” On the backside of The Nipple, The Tit broke off to an almost sheer escarpment down seventy or eighty feet into dense jungle. The front side, which faced the valley, was a gradual slope of five or six hundred yards, broken occasionally by gentle terraced rises, and it was between the last of these rises and The Nipple that Kahn had placed his command post.

Everyone was aware that eight months earlier, an Airborne company had been overrun on this same hill by a large but still unidentified force of Vietcong. Nevertheless, Bravo Company now eagerly occupied their vacated holes and makeshift shelters—grateful that it saved them the trouble of constructing their own. When it had first been suggested that Hill 67—its official designation—resembled a tit, exhaustive jokes had been made for several days, and Kahn himself got into the spirit when, at the end of the first week, he was required to change his radio call sign and declared that henceforth he would be known as “Big Tit” and his platoons as “Tit-One,” “Tit-Two” and so on. What with the rain and other discomforts, it was hard to raise a laugh of any kind out of this bunch.

The two rice farmers were passing directly beneath the three men in the trench. They observed that one of them had lost a leg, and hobbled along on a makeshift crutch.

“If those two ain’t VC, I’ll kiss yore ass,” the first man said.

“Hell, they
all
VC,” replied the second. He spat on the wet earth beside him. “Only thing’s to catch ’em at it.”

“Two ways you can tell for sure,” the man with the cigarette said.

“What’s that?”

“If he runs, he’s VC—if he’s dead, he’s VC. Them’s two good ways,” the man said with a fierce grin.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You wanta find out?” the man with the cigarette said.