Better Times Than These (23 page)

The single crack of Crump’s rifle jarred everyone down to the last man on the farthest flank of the line.

The Running Man stood upright for a moment, then began to waver sideways in crablike steps, his entire body twitching and jerking like a man with Saint Vitus’ Dance. He took about ten of these steps before sinking to his knees, creating in the final seconds of his life a brief little spectacle that commanded the undivided attention of the entire Company.

Kahn watched in frozen, rapt fascination, Crump’s shot still ringing in his ears, trapped like a fly in amber on a warm Asian morning. Then it dawned on him that his hand was still pressing the transmission bar on the handset. Quickly he released it and received the last sentences of furious monologue by Patch, who had been trying to get through to order the advance. Kahn was waiting for him to finish when the enemy mortar fire began dropping in around them.

Two rounds came in first, shooting high geysers of paddy mud and water and smoke just behind Sharkey’s position. The third, nearer the center, was close enough for Kahn to feel the concussion, as though someone had blown a strong, warm breath on his face.

The silence rolled back in, and there was yelling and confusion down the line where the last round exploded, and Kahn was frantically pressing the transmission bar on the radio and yelling into it as if it were a magical instrument of their deliverance. When he finished, Patch’s voice came over in the same cool way it had at first, but sternly this time, as though he were talking to a child.

“I want you to get up and move forward. I want you to get up out of there right now. Move toward the village—do you understand me?” he said.

A second salvo of mortar fire burst behind them, and Kahn squeezed down as tight as he could behind the dike, where he found himself face to face with Sergeant Trunk, who also had been listening to Colonel Patch’s vituperations over the radio. Beyond them, a vicious rattle of gunfire issued from the village, and again, for a moment, Kahn felt frozen in time. Trunk’s voice came at him extraneously, and from a great distance away, although Trunk was leaning toward him, only inches from his face.

“We going on now, Lieutenant?” Trunk asked. Kahn nodded dumbly, but didn’t move, and for an instant his eyes locked with the First Sergeant’s in a strange, silent, desperate query. Another mortar round blew up mud and water somewhere to their front.

“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 her 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.