“Lord,” said Holden, “that’s worse than the Academy.”
He gave Holden a rundown on the other officers. He told him what he knew about Peck and Range, leaving out the still persistent rumors that they were queer. He filled him in on Lieutenant Inge and the reserved, studious way he ran the mortar platoon. He told him as much as he could about the noncoms, and that he had decided to make Sergeant Dreyfuss the new First Sergeant. Outside, the artillery continued to gnash and tear at the neighboring hillside. Finally he got around to Lieutenant Brill, and since it was fresh in his mind, Kahn told Holden about the incident with the ear.
Three days before, Brill had returned from patrol with an ear. He had strung it around his neck with a piece of commo wire: a brownish, shriveling, disgusting human ear. Kahn had noticed it while Brill was making his report to him, and when he asked what it was, Brill cheerfully reported that he had taken it from a man “who didn’t need it anymore.”
Kahn hit the ceiling.
“Damn it!” he’d said. “You know the standing orders about mutilations—and here you are, an officer, wearing that thing in front of your platoon.”
Brill sullenly protested that it wasn’t anything but a fucking gook anyway—and one that had sniped at them at that; but Kahn cut him short.
“Look,” Kahn said, “you know we don’t go for that kind of shit out here. Get rid of it.” Afterward, he’d told Trunk to put out the word again that there were to be no mutilations. It was just like Brill, he thought, to pull some kind of maniac thing like that.
Holden did not seem surprised. He recalled a case back at Monkey Mountain of a man who was court-martialed when he was found with a tentful of anatomical parts, pickled in various containers. Word had gotten out that the man was “building himself a gook.”
“The thing about Brill,” Kahn said, “is nobody pays much attention to him. I guess I’m as guilty as the rest.”
“He sounds kind of crazy to me,” Holden offered.
“I guess maybe all of us are,” Kahn said.
They talked a little while longer about other things, and Kahn promised Holden he would take him on a thorough tour of the area the next day.
The artillery fire had ceased, and the overhead lantern flickered for a few seconds and went out. Holden put on his helmet and stood up. “Think I’ll turn in and start out fresh in the morning—with my thumb up my ass.”
“Better than a sharp stick,” Kahn said knowingly. They both laughed.
In the week that followed, the mood of the men did not improve.
Insolence, sometimes bordering on insubordination, fist fighting and a general malaise marked the company spirit. The two new lieutenants, Range and Peck, complained on different occasions that they were unable to get their platoons to move into preassigned positions and, worse, had heard vague, unsettling rumors against their lives, none of which could be proved.
The discontent was so general that Kahn was completely baffled as to how to deal with it. Punishing a man or a couple of men was one thing, but the problem became infinitely more complex when it involved practically the whole Company. It wasn’t so much a concerted stand against the officers or their orders; it was more a kind of mobocracy in which the officers were still loosely in control. How much of it had to do directly with Trunk’s death was hard to tell. There was the rain, too, and the boredom spliced in with the nerve-scraping, screaming heebie-jeebies of the daily patrols and the tasteless food and having to piss and defecate into open holes in the ground and the absence of women and other things.
But Trunk’s death had made it all the worse, and the brutality inflicted on the Vietnamese in the valley was henceforth done in his name.
Of course, not everyone felt this way, and at least one man was deeply troubled by it.
Ever since the letters from Julie and his father, Spudhead had been walking a pretty shaky plank between sanity and the horrors, but now he felt himself sliding slowly off. First there were physical symptoms: headaches, dizziness, the stomach sickness—he almost always felt like throwing up—but beyond that something else was wrong . . . wrong, wrong, wrong . . . and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was except that, basically, he felt sad.
At first he mistook his sadness for the regular depression that troubled everyone. But finally it came to him that what he was actually feeling was sorrow. Sorrow for his dead companymates—and sorrow for the Vietnamese who were being killed, and sorrow for Julie, who was worried about him. He remembered the ponchos lined up on the Blood Alley Road where the personnel carrier had been mined. He was sorry for the men who had been inside it. He was sorry for the Running Man they had killed outside the village, and for Sergeant Trunk and Lieutenant Donovan and the soldier whose head had been cut off and stuck on the stump up on The Fake, and for the blackened “crispy critters” . . . and for Lieutenant Sharkey and Moose, the mortarman, and for the people in the An Lap hamlet whose houses had been burned. It was very different from the regular depression, which was temporary and was sometimes even replaced by a strong euphoria which made him feel very fierce and powerful and self-righteous.
But the sorrow was different.
It did not come and go. It came and stayed and got worse. Sometimes he could put it out of his thoughts by thinking other things. But it was still there, somewhere. It was not the war itself that made him sorry—he still believed in it, even after Julie’s letter; it had to do with his being in the war. But he still couldn’t quite figure it out. He knew he wasn’t very smart—but he wasn’t dumb either. And it didn’t take any great brains to see that there was an enemy who was trying to kill him and who was against his country.
To complicate things more, fear began to creep into his life. Not the animal terror he had felt in the Boo Hoo Forest and on The Fake, but plain, simple fear which, like the sorrow, did not come and go but stayed in varying degrees all the time. He had a singular vision of himself dead. He was being carried off in a poncho, his muddy boots dangling out of one end. Rain would drip down on his face, which was tranquil and unmutilated. He could not tell what had killed him, because he could not see inside the poncho, except for the face and feet, and they were unmarked. He had this vision at least several times a day. Each time he would squint deeper into his mind to try to find out what had killed him, but he never could. Some other soldiers were standing around while the poncho was carried past, but every time he tried to ask them what had killed him, the poncho would disappear from his view like a character walking offstage—and then, slowly, the whole vision would fade out and he would be forced to conjure it up all over again.
It got so bad Spudhead stopped talking to people. Even his close friend Madman Muntz told him he was an asshole. Finally he decided he was going to have to talk to somebody or he would go crazy—if he wasn’t already. There were a lot of things to think about these days. And a lot of hours to think them!
The probe came just before midnight, two weeks to the day after Trunk’s death. In the intervening time, five men had been lost, and the atmosphere of malevolence remained over Bravo Company like the smell of rotting cabbages.
It was a light probe—although they could not know this and at first treated it like a full-scale assault; but it achieved its purpose of checking out the Company defenses so that a full and detailed map could be made, and when the enemy digested this information he must have been surprised to learn that the positions marked were almost identical to those gleaned from a similar probe eight months earlier, a few days before the Airborne company was overrun.
Kahn had spent the day in the field, with Holden shadowing him around. It surprised Kahn how quickly Holden was picking up on things, and he was already beginning to turn over some duties to him.
And the nights, which before had been scary and depressing and lonely, he now almost looked forward to. Once they had gotten the Company settled in, the two of them would sit in Kahn’s Command Post tent and cook their supper and talk about things far removed from th
e war and the Valley of The Tit. Kahn learned, for instance, about Holden’s family background, and his sister, Cory, and his tennis game and, of course, about Becky, and even though Holden frequently said their relationship was finished, Kahn suspected he had not seen the last of it. Kahn told Holden about himself too. About the geology and Savannah and the South, which seemed to fascinate Holden. Several times he said that when all this was over he would like to come South and the two of them could maybe take off on a trip to Atlanta and New Orleans and other places—and also, if Kahn ever wanted to come to New York . . .
Tonight they had been feeling better than usual, because of the phosphate discovery and an unexpected bottle of bourbon.
That morning Kahn and Holden had been flying over the far end of the valley, looking for one of the patrols that had gone out the day before, and as they passed over a series of jagged craters made months before during a B-52 strike, Kahn punched his intercom button and asked Lieutenant Spivey, the pilot, to circle around again, lower.
They made a pass, and then Kahn asked Spivey if he would mind setting her down in the paddy.
“Aw, for the love of God,” the big slack-jawed Irishman said, “I’m supposed to be taking supplies out here, not landing all over the place.”
“You can leave her running,” Kahn said. “It won’t take me two minutes—I want to look at something in one of those craters.” Spivey shrugged and dropped down into the rice field. Kahn hopped out and was back minutes later with two handfuls of rocks and dirt.
“What was that all about?” asked Holden, as Spivey hauled air again.
“Phosphate,” Kahn declared.
“No kidding?” Spivey broke in.
“I think so,” Kahn said, “I want to look at these samples.”
“What is it?” Holden said in a perplexed voice.
“They use it in mineral fertilizers,” Spivey interjected. “It’s hard to come by, at least in the U.S.”
“You know phosphate?” Kahn asked.
“Got an uncle who’s a mining engineer. I used to work for him before this came up,” Spivey said.
They had made contact with the patrol, and afterward Spivey delivered them back to The Tit. It had not rained since early that morning, and the three of them sat outside on some logs and ate lunch, and as they drank coffee, Kahn delivered his opinion of the phosphate find.
“No way to tell without drilling and that sort of thing; but just looking at the stratification in that crater and these samples, I’d be willing to bet this whole valley floor is made of phosphate. Maybe other valleys around here too.”
“Maybe you can get the Army to ship it home in your trunk,” Holden said. “Or sell it at the PX.”
“Listen,” Kahn said, “the war ain’t going to last forever, right? And when it’s over there’ll still be a great big field of phosphate ore ready to come out of the ground.”
“Yeah, but who owns it?” Spivey said.
“There seems to be a big dispute about that now,” Holden chimed in cheerfully.
Kahn ignored him. “Probably nobody,” he said. “I mean, the damned Vietnamese own it, I guess, but they don’t know it’s there. Suppose you went down to Saigon and said, ‘Somewhere in your country there is a big vein of phosphate and I would like the rights to mine it and give you such-and-such of the profits.’ How could they lose? They don’t know where it is and they’d never find it on their own. We could set up a fertilizer plant right here, with local labor. Mix the stuff with nitrate and peddle it all over Asia. It could maybe double a rice crop in a year or so.”
“How do you know you’ll be dealing with Saigon?” Holden said darkly. “You might have to go to Hanoi, you know.”
“Fat chance,” Kahn said. “You guys interested?”
“Huh?” Spivey said.
“In what?” Holden asked.
“The Far East Phosphate Company,” Kahn replied awesomely.
“Look,” he said. “Spivey—you’ve got mining experience, right? And Holden, your family is into banking . . .”
“Brokerage,” Holden reminded him.
“Same thing,” Kahn said. “It’s going to take money, and it’s going to take experience and time too. But can you imagine what this country’s going to be like when the war’s over? This could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance . . .” As he spoke, the words of Mr. Bernard suddenly flashed in Kahn’s mind. “You will be in a good position . . . You may see certain opportunities . . .”
They discussed it for another half-hour, becoming more enthusiastic, until Spivey had to leave.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, and walked over to his helicopter, on the side of which was emblazoned the slogan YOU CRY—WE FLY. He removed from beneath the seat an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s Sour Mash Whiskey. Each of them took a slug to seal the deal, and Spivey left the bottle with them when he took off.
That night in the tent, Kahn and Holden sat around drinking the whiskey, and Holden confided to Kahn that Becky was still very much on his mind. “I guess it’s the real reason I raised hell to get off Staff. I thought it would be better out here. Get it off my mind . . .”
The tent flap flew open and Sergeant Dreyfuss, bare-chested, poked in his head.
“Lieutenant, listening post says they think they saw movement. They want to blow off a flare.”
Kahn got to his feet. “Yeah—okay; roust out a crew. Where was it?”
“In the draw just to the right of the Second Squad machine-gun pit.”
“What’d they see?”
“Not sure—just something moving, they think. Probably ain’t nothin’.”
“Yeah. Better safe than sorry—tell ’em to keep their eyes peeled.” Dreyfuss disappeared, and Kahn poured himself a cup of coffee. “Those bastards are getting like the Vietnamese. They keep seeing things—it’s the third time this week.” He sat back down and lit a cigarette, drew a lungful of smoke and coughed violently. “These damned things are going to kill me yet. I’m up to three packs a day.”
Holden was fiddling with a compass on the field desk, turning it this way and that, watching the needle spin.
“It’s the pits about your girl, Frank,” Kahn said. “She sounded pretty sharp till this guy Widenfield got hold of her. Why the hell they fall for the older guys I don’t know—but they do. You know, I had a girl once myself—or at least, I thought I did—just before we shipped out. She was a . . . ah . . . aw, hell—that’s another story. You want some coffee?”
“Billy,” Holden said. He put the compass aside. “If you’re serious about this phosphate thing . . . you know, I would like to try it. It sounds crazy as hell, but at this point—”
The crack of the mortar interrupted him, and they both turned toward the tent opening. The flare cast an eerie glow over the hillside, floating gently into the paddy fields, where it extinguished itself in the muck.
“Seeing ghosts again,” Kahn said crossly. He ground out the cigarette on the dirt floor. “We still gotta get off this damned hill . . .”
“You think so?”
“I know so. There’s three or four thousand people in that valley—all rice farmers—except maybe for one night a year. Then they stop being rice farmers and start being VC. Ol’ Papa-san and Mamma-san and Baby-san all got a rifle or grenade buried somewhere, and when they get the word they dig ’em up and come out of the woodwork and whammo, no more Bravo Company. Sun comes up next day and they’re rice farmers again—till the next time.”
“Doesn’t sound too encouraging for the Far East Phosphate Company,” Holden said.
“I guess not,” Kahn said.
Rifle fire shattered the stillness, and seconds later a spate of excited unintelligible words were shouted out in the night. There was more rifle fire, but it was impossible to tell who was shooting at what. Kahn leaped up and ran outside, Holden close behind him. People were running everywhere and cursing in the darkness. Quick little yellow flashes were coming from half a dozen places on the forward
slope. An explosion burst on the right side of the perimeter. Dreyfuss came panting up to Kahn, weaponless and still naked except for his underwear. “We’re being hit, sir,” he said.
“I can see that, Sergeant,” Kahn said irritably. “What have you done about it?”
“First Platoon’s got the right, and . . . ah . . . I can’t really tell what’s going on yet . . . They—”
“Get on down there and find out,” Kahn barked. Two grenades burst far downhill. The tiny yellow flashes continued in periodic staccato.
“What can I do?” Holden said loudly. He was standing in sort of a half-crouch.
“Hang tight—let’s see what we’ve got.” Kahn grabbed a frantic-looking soldier running past him. “Go up and tell Lieutenant Range I want two of his squads to take up positions down there—on the left. Take off.” The man disappeared uphill.
“Mortars! Where the hell are the mortars?” Kahn bellowed upslope.
“Waiting for data,” a voice called down out of the blackness.
“Fuck that!” Kahn roared. “Line of sight. Walk ’em up.” He turned to Holden.
“Go raise Battalion—they’re probably already on the horn. Tell them what’s happening and stand by. Goddamn it!” he spat. “I knew we should have got our asses off this hill.”
Holden took off for the radio tent. The first mortar rounds went off with their peculiar clanking sound. As he passed the mortar pits, he could barely make out half-naked men working feverishly over the tubes, sweating and cursing. The amount of profanity required to operate a mortar astonished him.
In his first real combat, Holden was satisfyingly relieved—if not pleasantly surprised—not to be frozen stiff with fear. From time to time, he had worried about it—that when it got down to the real nitty-gritty he wouldn’t be able to stand the gaff and would disgrace in one humiliating moment two hundred years of Holden military honor. But he was doing all right, even though he was scared. And as he trotted along, he realized he was going to be able to function and perhaps perform a useful service.
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