Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  A mood of dark satisfaction swept the encampment as news of Brill’s massacre got around, not unlike the agitation that runs through schoolboy groups when two of their number engage in a fistfight. Practically all the men who had not participated in the ambush formed up around the prisoners to gawk at them, laughing and gesturing as if they had gathered at a pier to witness the display of prizewinning fish. The man, a scrawny specimen, appeared frightened as he was nudged along at rifle point, but the girls seemed placid by comparison, and perhaps even a little curious in the presence of so many youthful men.

  Brill could hardly contain himself. In nearly two months Bravo Company had succeeded in killing fewer than a dozen VC and had never taken one alive, and now on a single operation he had annihilated a main-force enemy squad and captured three prisoners, one of them with obviously valuable information. He was determined to find out just what this information was.

  He would do this, First Lieutenant Victor Brill, and not some jerk-off back at Monkey Mountain. He wasn’t just going to phone it in to any Spec./4 radio operator, either. He would wait till he had it all wrapped up in a neat little action report and give it to the colonel himself. But first, he was going to have to get the information out of these people, one way or another.

  Inside the tent, the pressure lantern hissed furiously like a self-contained little storm. The interpreter, a boyish-looking Vietnamese, was seated at the edge of a cot, eyeing the toothless scarecrow prisoner. Brill sat at the field desk, carving up a stick of wood with the Randall knife. For nearly a minute no one had spoken.

  “Ask him what his unit is again,” Brill said.

  The interpreter spoke, more sharply this time, and received the same reply.

  “He still say he come from Nag Ho hamlet. He say VC come last night and make him go with them.”

  “Tell him he’s lying,” Brill said masterfully. The interpreter translated.

  On the field desk a map of the valley was spread out, the position of the ambush marked in red grease pencil. Brill extended a cigarette, and the prisoner accepted it with a gummy grin. Brill let him take a few drags before continuing. He hadn’t interrogated a prisoner in this kind of situation before, and his idea of how it might be done was drawn mostly from movies he had seen. He remembered Japs and Germans offering cigarettes to poker-faced, battle-wise American soldiers, who, of course, revealed nothing more than name, rank and serial number. But he figured the method was probably as good as any.

  “Ask him where the VC are,” Brill said.

  The interpreter spoke with the prisoner.

  “He say VC in the mountains. He say VC come into his house yesterday and take him along.”

  “Ask him exactly where in the mountains,” Brill said impatiently. “Tell him to show me on this map.”

  The prisoner and interpreter conversed for a moment. “He say he not know where they are, Lieutenant. He say he not VC . . .”

  “Fuck that!” Brill roared. He jumped up and slammed the knife into the top of the desk. The prisoner seemed impressed by this display, and his eyes darted back and forth between Brill and the interpreter.

  Brill leaned across the desk so that his nose was only inches from the prisoner’s.

  “Where?” he howled.

  Breathing in the prisoner’s face, Brill reached down and worked the Randall knife out of the desk. The man’s eyes followed pleadingly as Brill brought the blade upward toward his bare stomach so that the point just touched the man’s navel.

  Slowly the prisoner shifted his gaze to the terrain map on the desk, looking as though he had been asked to comprehend an immensely complicated mathematical problem.

  “Tell him again,” Brill said. “I want to know where his unit is located.” As the interpreter spoke, Brill gently inserted the blade into the hollow of the navel until he felt it touch the knubby skin inside. The prisoner tensed and made a choked-off animal-like sound, more of fear than of pain. They stood there that way for nearly a minute. Finally the man spoke.

  “He say they in the mountains,” the interpreter said.

  “I know they’re in the mountains!” Brill hissed, still glaring into the prisoner’s face. “Does he suppose I think they’re bivouacked in the goddamn rice paddies?” He jabbed the point of the knife a little harder and twisted. The prisoner flinched, and a thin trickle of blood appeared at the lip of the navel and ran down into his pants. The prisoner said something very terse, but a smile came across the interpreter’s face.

  “Ah,” he said, “he say they in mountain by Hung Lap hamlet. Have camp there.”

  “Good,” Brill said. “Now we’re getting somewhere . . .”

  The navel torture went on for nearly an hour. Each time Brill asked a question he gave the knife a little flick, and the prisoner got more and more specific in his answers until Brill had ascertained that he was a low-ranking sergeant in a VC company that had been terrorizing the valley for years and that the company was equipped with mortars and heavy machine guns, and took its orders from a North Vietnamese cadre, and other interesting things.

  Brill would have liked nothing better than to saddle up and go after them, but he knew Patch would never approve of it. It would have been the perfect operation, from start to finish, provided this bastard wasn’t lying—but what kind of a man would lie when his navel was being cut out?

  It had started to rain, a downpour that trickled off into a sprinkle and promised to annoy them through the night. Brill was finishing his interrogation of the prisoner when he heard his name called from outside the tent.

  “Yeah?” Brill said, and a drenched soldier entered and stood before him in the dim lantern light.

  “Ah, Lieutenant, I, uh, was just down at your platoon, and, ah, I think you . . . might want to go down there, sir.” The soldier looked embarrassed and took off his helmet. He saw the prisoner, but did not look at him.

  “Oh, yeah? What for?” Brill said icily.

  “Well, sir, it’s them nurses. The ones they captured today . . . Ah, I ain’t sure, ’cause I was just by there to see a buddy and it was dark and all, but I think somebody might be, uh . . . fooling with them or something . . .”

  Brill was standing in front of the prisoner, but had dropped the knife to his side. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, sir, like I say . . . I was just down there to see a buddy and I didn’t see nothing, except that there was some talk and I heard some sounds, ah, woman sounds . . . coming from in one of the foxholes. But I think you better get down there, sir, that’s all I came up here to say.”

  “What’s your name, soldier?” Brill said.

  “Poats, sir—Weapons Platoon,” he said apologetically.

  “I’ll tell you what, Poats: if I were you I wouldn’t worry about what’s going on in Second Platoon. I’m running this company now and I know what the hell is going on in it, and everything’s under control. Whatever you saw or heard down there is Second Platoon’s business and not yours.”

  “Yessir, ah . . . I’m sorry, sir, I just thought you might want to go down there and ah . . .” Poats stopped and began fidgeting with the helmet in his hands. “Sir, I’ll be getting on back to the mortars now,” he said, and disappeared into the darkness and rain.

  Brill put the knife down on the table and told the interpreter to take the prisoner outside and tie him up. He’d found out what he wanted to know. After they had gone, he lit a cigarette and settled back on Kahn’s cot, one arm folded behind his head. The lantern hissed and sputtered out, but he made no effort to relight it. As he lay in the darkness he tried to imagine what kind of fun his guys were having with the two nurses. To hell with it, he thought. They’re entitled. They did well for him today—his men, his friends!

  So what if people like Kahn, and that asshole Inge, and those two new queers, Range and Peck—and that snotty new Exec, Holden—so what if they treated him like shit? He’d tried to be friendly. He’d tried talking to them. But he wasn’t going to kiss ass for an
ything.

  Brill knew how that kind of thing went. When he was in military school they had ignored him too. They’d all go out weekends, and the ones with cars all said, “We don’t have no room, Brill.” And like shit they hadn’t! He’d seen them—two, three people in the cars—and when his old man finally gave him money to buy his own car himself, it had been the same. They all said, “Well, I told so-and-so I’d go out with them,” and finally he’d started hanging around with freshmen who weren’t old enough to drive and didn’t give a damn who they went with—but even they didn’t pay him any attention, and as soon as they got their licenses they abandoned him too, and the last couple of years he’d spent his time with townies who went to the public school sometimes and hung around the pool hall and got into fights, and he’d even gotten into a few himself.

  Yeah, screw them—screw ’em all, Brill thought. There were guys like Ed Groutman and Harley, and Maranto—they were his friends. He could sit around with them and tell stories and they didn’t act like they didn’t want him around. So tonight, by God, he’d given them a present . . . some present, too . . . And tomorrow assholes like Patch and the others would all know what kind of officer Victor Brill was. They might even give him a medal. Ha! fuck medals—he didn’t want any. He just wanted them to know . . .

  Outside he heard a noise: a shrill, high-pitched cry too far away for him to tell the source or reason. Brill closed his eyes and returned to what was probably going on down there. Those two girls. Those two murdering zip cunts. Just thinking about it made him excited, and he opened his fly and began to stroke himself.

  “What do you want us to do with these two?” Sergeant Groutman had asked.

  And hadn’t he told them: “They look pretty dangerous to me, Ed—they’d kill you as soon as look at you, all you boys.”

  And everyone had laughed, and Groutman said, “Mind if we ‘interrogate’ ’em, Lieutenant?” and Brill said, “You guys do what you want,” and walked away smiling, as if he had given a dog a bone.

  31

  Crystalline droplets of morning dew sparkled on the grass and flowers in Happy Valley as the sun appeared fresh and blood red above the Sugar Plum Mountains. The Crazy Horse Patrol had been stirring around for half an hour, and there was a smell of coffee in the air and the sounds of people splashing at the edges of the pond they had camped beside. The sense of serenity had lasted through the night, and as they sorted and adjusted things in preparation for the day’s work, their mood was that of adventurers rather than manhunters.

  Two hours later they had covered more than four miles of ground, and it had been easy going, with frequent breaks for the officer of Topographical Services to make notations. They were preparing to move on from one of these rest periods when someone saw the house.

  It was hidden in dense foliage and partly covered with giant creeping vines. The sides and thatched roof were a weathered chocolate, and it seemed strange and out of place in the noonday sun. They moved on it cautiously, rifles at the ready, and inevitably the tenseness began to seep back. There were things to worry about again, all related directly to the house and what it stood for.

  Quickly they discovered two things: first, it was not merely a single house, but part of a tiny village of half a dozen buried deep in the thicket; second, the village had been deserted for a long time. There were few clues as to why it was here or what had become of its occupants.

  There was no evidence of farming, so the former residents must have been hunters—yet it was unusual for hunters to construct such elaborate houses. Moreover, their departure must have been very hasty, because of the sundry things left behind. Articles of clothing and other household items were hanging on the walls or left lying about as though they had been in use moments before the previous tenants departed. Various utensils surrounded the blackened ashes of cooking fires, and pots and pans were ringed with some long-ossified substance of food as though the inhabitants had simply dropped everything they were doing in a mad dash to get away.

  Foliage had all but swallowed some of the ghost-town huts, but they brushed this aside and searched in a workmanlike way until it was established that there was nothing there to harm them, and afterward began automatically congregating in the clearing at the center of the village around a small pond covered with smelly green slime. The officer from Topographical Services had been moving around busily, pacing off distances, measuring angles and writing on his map, when Kahn walked up to him.

  “About done?”

  “Just about,” he said, and showed Kahn the map, on which he had penciled in the words “Gingerbread Village.”

  “Still at it, huh?”

  The warrant officer nodded and smiled.

  “What do you make of this?” Kahn asked, pointing to an arrow under which had been written “The Ghost Town Trail.”

  “I walked down it a little ways. I’m not sure if it was made by animals or people; seems to lead toward the river.”

  “The Crystal River,” Kahn said wryly.

  “Yeah, Crystal River,” said the officer of Topographical Services. “I’d be curious to see where it goes.”

  They had not been on the Ghost Town Trail for long when the blood bees found them.

  The midday sun was whiter and seemed hotter than the day before, and the sky had turned a hazy blue-gray. Yet the air remained still and cool beneath the treetops above the trail. They still had not encountered any dense jungle and could see forty or fifty yards on both sides and ahead, where the forest floor was green with ferns and low-lying flora. The blood bees appeared from nowhere.

  All at once there was a thin humming in the air and a sense of flying things, and within minutes everyone in the column had been bitten several times. In a curtain of profanity they began rolling down their sleeves and swatting wildly around their faces. The bees were small, perhaps half the size of a normal bee, but they descended on human skin like mosquitoes, sucking blood until they were either squashed or brushed away. They seemed to come from everywhere, millions of them, buzzing, hovering and darting all across the forest floor. It was maddening—but no one had promised it was going to be easy.

  It took an hour to reach the Crystal River, and the blood bees remained with them along the way. The point squad stopped short when they heard the gurgling of the stream ahead and then crept slowly up to the bank while the rest held up in their tracks along the trail. Kahn sent for Holden to join him and go up for a look.

  They hadn’t walked ten steps when a burst of gunfire crushed such hopes as remained that the war had somehow overlooked their newfound paradise.

  The point squad had been standing quietly in some thick plants near the riverbank when the North Vietnamese soldier appeared on the other side. He hadn’t even bothered to look around, but simply emerged from the bushes and strolled to the water’s edge. He was weaponless but unmistakably enemy, pith helmet and all, and his trousers were neat and clean as though they might even have been recently pressed. He dropped them and squatted into the stream to defecate.

  Crump spotted him first, and then the others did, but they were all too startled to do anything. Recovering, Crump laid down his blooker and snatched a rifle from the man nearest him.

  “Hate to do this to anybody in that position, but he oughtn’t be fouling the river,” Crump whispered as he flicked off the safety.

  The first shot struck the man in his back, and the other hit him in the neck. He teetered precariously for a second or two before toppling into his own mess, thrashing around like a speared fish, then floating gently downstream toward them—the penultimate “target of opportunity.”

  Kahn and Holden arrived in time to see the body float by. By now the point squad had spread out warily in the bushes, anticipating more trouble.

  “Caught him with his pants down, Lieutenant,” Crump said matter-of-factly. He pointed the muzzle of his blooker gun toward where the man had fallen.

  Kahn gazed at the spot for a few seconds, dimly aware that he was in
charge. “Well, we can’t stay the hell here now,” he said to Holden. “Let’s wheel it upstream and cross there . . . and, uh, you’d better get Battalion on the horn and tell them we’ve made contact and they should stand by.” He looked again at the spot where the man had taken his final constitutional. “Whoever they are, they know we’re here—thanks to the efforts of Private Crump,” he said grimly, but without disapproval.

  They waded across the river and moved stealthily through a grove of banana trees, and found themselves at the edge of a large horseshoe-shaped clearing overgrown in elephant grass. Except for the man by the river they had seen no signs of the enemy, but it would have been high folly to assume he had been alone. A bank of grayish clouds was gathering above the Candy Cane Ridge, and the air had become sluggish, but not oppressive. The blood bees, though fewer now, still buzzed and stung. It was nothing to compare with the surprises of the Ia Drang or the Valley of The Tit, but neither was it as comfortable as yesterday, or even today, before they had entered the abandoned Gingerbread Village. That was where it had all started to change, almost as if their presence there had violently disturbed some evil thing.

  Holden was near the rear of the formation, close to a radio and to the officer from Topographical Services, as they crossed the open space. Ahead, the lead elements moved nakedly through the waist-high grass, shoulders hunched over and slightly bent, as if they wanted to go into a crouch but were embarrassed to do so without so much as a shot’s being fired. A short, pale-complexioned soldier at Holden’s side was moving his head from side to side as if he were watching a tennis match. His eyes blinked rhythmically, as though they were gulping for air.