Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  The compound fences reached all the way down from the road into the water, out about a hundred yards or so, so that the men could swim out waist deep but no further. They drove past dozens of idle volleyball nets, and every hundred yards or so there were thatch-roofed cabanas so packed with men they looked as if they would explode and collapse if anyone else was crammed in.

  “The men want to go back to the ship, sir,” said Sergeant Dreyfuss, a tall black man from Chicago who rarely spoke. “It’s damn hot for them out here. The beer ran out in an hour, and they ate all the box lunches, too. The water’s full of jellyfish and it’s so hot they can’t swim. There’s not even any fresh water for them to drink.”

  “Where are we?” Kahn asked.

  “They’re about a quarter of a mile down,” Trunk said.

  The compounds they passed reminded Kahn of prisoner-of-war camps. It might have been Treblinka, or Dachau.

  “The Old Man know about this?” Kahn said.

  “I think he’s been out here,” Trunk said. “Dreyfuss and me came out to go for a swim till we saw this. I went back to Buckner and ran into the Sergeant Major and he said Colonel Patch wants to find you ’cause of Captain Thurlo.”

  “Where is the colonel?”

  “Up at the officers’ club at Kadena Air Force Base. He talked to me from a phone in the bar.”

  “Pull over by that sign there,” Trunk told the driver.

  Kahn recognized a couple of men from the Company, but most of them, like everyone else, had their fatigue blouses pulled over their heads like Arabs. As Kahn and the two sergeants emerged from the taxi, the heat engulfed them like a shroud, throbbing up from the white sand and beating down from above, as though they had stepped into some gigantic natural oven.

  They crossed the roadside ditch and were close to the compound fence before anyone on the other side noticed them. Then, slowly, the one hundred fifty men of Bravo Company began moving toward them like a flock of caged turkeys at feeding time. There wasn’t a whisper of breeze, and Kahn saw in the eyes of the approaching flock the same sad, uncomprehending look he remembered from down in the steaming troop quarters aboard ship during the typhoon; only this time they seemed angrier, perhaps because they were not in danger, only in extreme discomfort. Kahn was trying hard to think of what to say, but it was Spec./4 Hepplewhite, the Company Clerk, who spoke first.

  “Lieutenant, we’re burning up out here, we can’t swim and the beer’s run out and we’d like to go back to the boat. This is a bunch of shit, sir,” Hepplewhite said, looking at the others beside and behind him for agreement, and while they remained silent, there was agreement in their eyes.

  “Listen,” Kahn said. “I’m not in charge of this operation. But I’m going back now to see the CO and I know he’ll take care of it.” For the first time, Kahn felt he was speaking with newfound authority.

  “Let me ask this, though: would you want to stay if there was more beer?”

  No one spoke. Then Hepplewhite, who had emerged as the spokesman, finally said, “I don’t think so, sir. It isn’t so much the beer as it is just being out in the sun. They’d have to get us an awful lot of beer, we told that to Sergeant Trunk before. I think we’d just rather go on back to the boat. Couldn’t we drink the beer there?”

  “All right,” Kahn said; “all I can say is I’ll tell it to the Old Man. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t go back, but he’s the boss. I’ll tell him, okay?” and a murmur of “Okay” ran through the crowd as Kahn, Trunk and Dreyfuss made their way back to the taxi.

  “Goddamn, Trunk, you mean the Old Man’s already seen this?” Kahn said.

  “I’m damned if I know, sir. I told the Sergeant Major about it when I went up there, but you know how he is—he don’t give a shit.”

  “Did he say he’d talk to the Old Man?”

  “He just said he’d take care of it, but that means he ain’t gonna do nothin’. Like I say, he don’t really give a shit.”

  “That’s right, Lieutenant, he don’t,” Dreyfuss said.

  “Sir, you can’t help but feel sorry for them shitheads,” Trunk said.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Sergeant, that’s all I can say.”

  It had begun to dawn on Kahn that if he was to be Company Commander, there were certain bucks that stopped only with him.

  Before he found the colonel, Kahn found Sharkey. He had gone back to the ship to get his briefcase, since Patch might want to go over some things and he wanted to be prepared.

  When he walked into the cabin, Sharkey was sitting on his bunk in his skivvies, spitting blood into a piece of toilet paper and holding another against his upper gums as a compress.

  “What the hell happened?” Kahn asked, stopping dead in front of him.

  Sharkey raised his gargantuan head, the bloody tissue still at his lips.

  “They hada pool ma teeth.” His big eyes were bloodshot and his upper lip swollen out from his face. He looked worse than he had after the fight.

  “What? You mean the bastards couldn’t fix them?” Kahn cried.

  “Yeah—they coulda fixed ’em okay—but Patch wouldn’t let ’em.”

  “Patch—what the hell are you talking about?”

  “The dentist said I’d have ta stay here ten days—ta wire ’em up and put ’em back right. But that fucka Patch, he said, ‘I’m gonna need all my officers when we get there,’ and I said I can catch a plane and be there before you, and he said, ‘They probably wouldn’t be able to save ’em anyway,’ and I had to get ’em pulled.”

  “Jesus Christ, how many?”

  “Thefe four—the front onef.”

  “Goddamn, what do you do now?”

  “Juft keep thif up here and stop the bleedin’ for a while.”

  “Jesus, Shark, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” Sharkey said. “I’m a tooflef wonder. I could get a job as the Company queer.”

  “That bastard,” Kahn hissed; “that bastard!”

  Kahn found Patch where Trunk had said he would, at the bar at Kadena’s officers’ club.

  “Excuse me, Colonel, you wanted to see me?” Kahn said coldly.

  “Hell, yes, I wanted to see you. Where’ve you been? I sent for you three hours ago.”

  “I was on the beach with the men, Colonel,” Kahn said, fudging the truth a little. “I don’t know if you know it, but it’s pretty bad out there—they’re sweltering.” Oh, well, here goes, Kahn thought. Patch picked up his cigar and regarded him with steely blue eyes.

  “Kahn, Captain Thurlo’s out for good. They diagnosed appendicitis and he’s going to be operated on, so there’s not much chance he’ll rejoin Battalion. I’ll have to figure something out in the next few weeks, but for now you’re it. I want you to work especially close with me because you haven’t had much experience. But you’re going to have to pull it together fast. I don’t want you running up and saying you don’t understand something or you can’t do something, because it looks like we are going to be thrown right into it pretty soon after we get there. You saw the campaign plan. You know what we’re up against. Now, I want you ready in every way. Any questions?”

  “I understand, Colonel.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Colonel, the men want to come back to the ship. I can’t say for all of them, but my men definitely want to get off that beach and I agree with them.”

  “Lieutenant Kahn,” Patch said patiently, “those men are fine out there. I just sent for the Special Services Officer and he’s going to take them more beer. I know what’s going on; I was out there earlier myself.”

  “Sir, I don’t think you appreciate how hot it really is for them. My men tell me they don’t want more beer, or they’d rather drink it back on the ship. Would it be possible to get the buses to bring them back early?”

  “Goddamn it, Kahn, those men are fine, and that beach is going to look like a picnic when they get to where we’re going. They’re going to stay right where they are, because I don’t wa
nt any goddamn AWOLs on this stopover and that’s the best way to prevent it. You understand these men have to be controlled, don’t you? Besides, the Navy doesn’t want them all over the decks while they’re loading stuff aboard.” As he was speaking, Patch had puffed up a dense cloud of blue cigar smoke which hung over his head.

  “Sir, maybe they could go some place else, then. The flies are eating them up out there, and they can’t swim, and there isn’t any shade . . .”

  “I told you they are just going to have to stay there. That’s it. Is there anything else?”

  “Yessir, there is something else—I’m concerned about Lieutenant Sharkey.” Kahn was gripping the stool he was sitting on, toying with the idea of telling the Battalion Commander what he really thought of him for doing that to Sharkey, and keeping the men on the beach and down below in the storm—all things that he knew were unnecessary; but since this idea was locked safely in his mind and he didn’t really have to let it out, he could think it all he wanted, because thinking it couldn’t hurt anything . . .

  “What about Lieutenant Sharkey? They’re going to have to pull those teeth, I’m afraid. I’m not going to have him laying up on Okinawa when we’re in Vietnam—I told him that, and he understood it.”

  “They’ve already done it,” Kahn said.

  “Did they? What’s wrong with him, then?” Kahn began to say something, but Patch interrupted. “Lieutenant Sharkey’s a big boy, Kahn. He can take it.” Patch twisted his moustache. “I explained to him his men needed him more than his teeth did. He agreed.”

  Afterward, Kahn left, disliking himself slightly, a little deeper in debt.

  The transport was at sea when the men awoke the next morning. Despite Patch’s precautions, half a dozen men went AWOL anyway, but they had all been rounded up before midnight and thrown into the brig with the ones brought on under guard at San Francisco. As an example, Patch decided to hold a court-martial of the newest AWOLs in the amphitheater, before as many of the men as possible so that they could see what going AWOL got you. He ordered the troops to watch in shifts, three companies at a time sitting through at least a couple of hours of the proceedings.

  Later that day, a few of the men on deck sensed something was a little peculiar but they weren’t sure exactly what, until somebody noticed the shadows were different from the way they had been. They were no longer headed into the afternoon sun. Instead the sun was on their right, just forward of the beam, so that the port side of the ship was in shadows from the superstructure. Toward sundown, gray-haired Major Dunn set up his transoceanic radio on the ventilator in the bow, surrounded by a dozen or so men all listening to their first propaganda broadcasts from Radio Hanoi. A woman they had heard about, called “Hanoi Hannah,” related in soothing tones how many Americans had been killed that week and how many tanks and planes had been wiped out by the advancing armies of the People’s Republic. Naturally, they all laughed at this because it was absurd, but they waited appreciatively for the half-hour of music that followed, since it was rumored to be by far the best music on the air, considerably better than the broadcasts from their own Armed Forces Radio Network.

  Kahn was standing in the stern, listening to the propellers churning beneath him. Blue water boiled up, flecked with white, leaving a V-shaped wake behind them which spread out and out until it could no longer be perceived with the human eye. He wondered just how far the shock waves would travel along the surface before they dissipated.

  Theoretically, they would go on until they were stopped by something more powerful so that it simply incorporated them into its substance, It was interesting how the waves spread out in a V, though, so that the center, over which the transport had just traveled, became the calmest part . . . the horizontal corollary to the “Dismal Deeps Effect”—that once you have passed a particular point, either above it or on it or below it, the effect is not necessarily on the particular spot that was being passed. It was kind of an interesting thought, but what the hell did it mean? Kahn mused. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, or maybe it was simply beyond his intellectual grasp. He decided to put all this away in his mind for a while and ruminate about it later. It was too pretty a day to dwell on things he had no control over anyway.

  For a long time he stood watching the wake, the sun slowly sinking on the left side of him, and although it was still bright over parts of China, which lay somewhere to the west, and beyond that bright in Europe, this particular day’s sun hadn’t even presented itself to America yet, and wouldn’t for hours.

  Part Two

  THE

  IA DRANG

  14

  Emerald mountains ringed the harbor where the transport lay, and across translucent waters palm trees rippled softly in the ocean breeze. The sun had not worked into the energy-sapping blast furnace it would become later in the day, and everyone on the beach was preparing deliberately for the unloading before it got too uncomfortable. Except for a sense of dark foreboding among the men on board, it was the picture of tropical paradise.

  Bravo Company was among the first to be off-loaded. They stood at the rail in full battle dress, but without ammunition and rations, which somebody had forgotten to have removed from the hold and which would not be provided for hours. A little procession of LCIs was motoring toward them from the beach, and most of the men were watching these and thinking brief, solemn thoughts when Crump noticed the two smoke puffs on the ridge.

  Finally they were here. Everything that had happened along the way—the food, the seasickness, the fights, the storm and the rest—all seemed to vanish into the recesses of their minds. Later in their years, children and grandchildren would learn about these things. Each one who returned would have his stories to tell, in cities and towns all over America, the way he had seen it. But these were not things to be worried about now.

  The land that stretched before them, peaceful as it looked from here, was what occupied their thoughts.

  It took a few seconds for Crump to connect the smoke puffs in his brain, and while he was doing it, two other puffs appeared. They looked very tiny, and the white smoke from the first puffs drifted gently skyward over the crest of the fairy-book mountains before the deep reports reached out to the transport like distant thunder. Bravo Company suddenly stopped talking, as though a fearful voice had spoken from the bowels of the earth and told them to be quiet. Everyone turned toward where the sound had come from, except Crump, who was pointing toward the ridge and the puffs of smoke.

  “Up there, see—right below that dip,” he said. Other puffs were now appearing, and the rumbling continued.

  “Jesus,” DiGeorgio said. By now the top of the ridge was obscured in white smoke.

  Patch was standing at the rail with Kennemer, near Bravo Company, when the sound reached the ship. He watched the little show on the ridge with a detached, superior air, and when DiGeorgio mustered the courage to inquire if the artillery was “ours or theirs,” Patch was delighted to answer.

  “Damned right it’s ours, young man—that’s one-oh-fives—and you should thank your lucky stars the enemy doesn’t have one-oh-fives, because there’d be hell to pay for it.” When the others saw Patch talking to DiGeorgio, they drifted around to hear what he had to say, and Patch, now that he had attracted an audience, was in a talkative mood.

  What had evidently happened, he told them, was that somebody thought they had spotted some VC on the ridge and called in artillery to harass them. It was unlikely there was a firefight going on up there, because the artillery had only fired a brief salvo. This, he said, went on all day and night, so that anytime VC moved they could depend on having a batch of 105 rounds lobbed on their asses. “It is your job,” Patch said, “to chase these bastards out into the open so the one-oh-fives can blow them away.”

  The men listened to this eagerly, and Patch was pleased the artillery had provided him an instructive forum. As he was trying to think of other informative things to say, another rumbling of the guns came across the water and every
one became silent again.

  “Sir, do you think we’ll see any VC today?” DiGeorgio asked tentatively. It was naturally the question on everyone’s mind.

  “Young man,” Patch said, drawing himself up, “we may see VC and we may not see VC. If we do not see them today, we will see them tomorrow, or the next day . . .

  “This is not Honolulu. You did not come here for a rest. There will be no naked dancing girls to greet you here.

  “From the time you set foot on that beach until the time you leave it, you may depend on one thing,” the Battalion Commander declared:

  “We will see VC.”

  Lieutenant Frank Holden was at the dock looking at the transport through field glasses. The Transportation Corps people had told him the unloading would take most of the day, and he was hoping it wouldn’t be longer so that they could get away before dark. The artillery firing was much closer to him than the ship, but it scarcely fazed him because he had lived with it night and day for the last month, while they were establishing the Brigade fire base in the shadow of Monkey Mountain. Today, General Butterworth had sent him and a senior aide down to accompany the convoy of Four/Seven to its new home, and Holden was not looking forward to the trip.

  All during the month at Monkey Mountain there had been a lot to do, and it was hot, dusty work, but mostly they had stayed inside the compound and had not seen VC or been mortared, although the artillery constantly pounded the hills around them. Once he had accompanied the general in a helicopter over some jungle near the edge of the Ia Drang and they had been shot at, or at least thought they had, but it wasn’t the same as traveling over unsecured ground, as he would be shortly, when the convoy left.

  The chopper that flew them down at dawn had followed the road they would take back—the Vietnamese preposterously called it a highway. From here it would be one hundred twenty-five miles westward, crossing flat paddy fields along the coast, then up into the highlands, winding through heavily forested hills and mountain passes, then into jungle so deep and tangled the road disappeared into it from the air.