Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  Bateson handed Kahn the other handset.

  “Horse One—Do I understand correctly that you are requesting napalm on your own position?” There was a ring of disbelief in Patch’s voice—or was it disapproval?

  “Negative—but very close,” Kahn said. “We are in very close contact.” Negative—what a stupid word, he thought. Why couldn’t you just say “no”?

  “Are you being overrun?”

  “Not yet,” Kahn said. He was still digging with his feet, thankful that the ground was not very hard.

  “Wait one,” Patch said tersely.

  Wait One! WAIT ONE!—what the hell was that supposed to mean? If they didn’t hurry up and . . .

  Patch came back: “The general says to tell you ‘good luck.’ ”

  The concussion of the bomb was not an earsplitting blast but an awesome volcanic tumult of roaring heat, and the gigantic orange fireball seethed and roiled upward and outward. The air became furnacelike, and for a moment Kahn thought his hands and face were on fire. In fact, they did turn reddish, and his breath was partially sucked from his mouth. The bomb must have landed a good seventy-five yards from where Kahn’s Headquarters party was, and perhaps twenty-five yards from the outer edge of the perimeter, but it expanded toward them with an awful growling sound, and for a horrifying moment they all thought they were going to be consumed. Then it receded and died down, leaving small gobs of flaming jelly everywhere—some landing on men, some burning harmlessly on the ground. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds, but no one there would ever forget it as long as he lived.

  As the fire died down, an uncanny silence enveloped the battlefield. Well and wounded alike were too stupefied to do anything but thank their lucky stars they had survived it. Then through the smoke and haze they heard the sounds of rotors—followed shortly by the screaming hiss of rockets and brilliant explosions all around the line of trees where the North Vietnamese had dug in. Kahn and Holden pulled together such men as were available to begin pouring fire in that direction, and for the next few minutes the field shook with the sounds of heavy battle. At some point, a helicopter pilot radioed down that he was chasing several dozen North Vietnamese fleeing toward Candy Cane Ridge, and the air controller reported that a dozen or so more had taken off in the opposite direction. Despite this information, and the fact that even from the ground it looked as if the enemy had broken contact, the Crazy Horse Patrol kept up heavy fire until Kahn got them organized and set the mortars to laying fire along the apparent routes of retreat. The assault force Patch had thrown together was diverted to these areas also, to pursue and kill as many enemy as they could.

  Although they would not find this out until later, an entire operation with a name of its own was born that afternoon, based on their firefight at the Crystal River. It would involve not only the Brigade, but the entire Division and elements from other divisions, in a two-month running battle that would be heralded in Army press releases as the “turning point of the war.” Hundreds of enemy would die, medals would be handed out, promotions secured, headlines made—all set into motion by their chance encounter with the North Vietnamese soldier who had felt an urge to relieve himself in a stream.

  But this was all to come, and there was other work to be done. Sometime during the cleanup and evacuation of the wounded and dead and the other tasks attendant to the removal of the patrol from Happy Valley, Colonel Patch informed Kahn via the field radio that he was putting him in for a Silver Star.

  Near dusk, they were deposited back on The Tit—bone-tired, but grateful to be home and out of the fighting. Kahn was too exhausted to do much more than fall into his cot and pass out, but something he had seen from the helicopter as they were landing had to be cleared up first.

  He trudged up the hill to the CP and dropped his gear on the floor, except for his rifle, which he laid on his bunk, and was going to look for Brill when Brill entered the tent and sat down on the ammo crate.

  “Hey, you guys really had some action out there, huh?” Brill said. He seemed very animated.

  “Uh-huh,” Kahn said wearily, “but never mind that. What the hell went on here?”

  “Oh,” Brill said, “I, ah, guess you saw the bodies, huh?” He waited expectantly for Kahn to respond, but Kahn merely sat looking at him, so Brill continued.

  “We had a time ourselves—after you left. I guess you haven’t heard, but we bagged ourselves a main-force squad yesterday . . .” He began telling Kahn about the ambush, and the interrogation of the prisoner, until Kahn cut him short.

  “We can get back to that. What about those bodies?” Kahn fixed his gaze directly into Brill’s eyes.

  “I was coming to that,” Brill said. “Like I say, the gook sang us a nice song, and then I got a couple of guys to tie him up for the night and I went on to sleep.

  “Sometime during the night,” Brill said, “the prisoner managed to get loose, but he waited till morning to make his move, probably because he felt they were less alert then. It happened about zero nine hundred,” Brill said.

  “The girls were with Second Platoon, and suddenly the goddamn gook pops up out of nowhere and grabs somebody’s M-sixteen and he doesn’t say a word, he just blasts the girls and runs off into the brush. Time my guys got it together the bastard’s disappeared. I sent out a patrol, but they didn’t find a trace except that he dropped the M-sixteen about twenty-five meters outside the perimeter.”

  Kahn eyed Brill suspiciously. What he had just heard sounded incomprehensible—but not impossible. What he had been through this afternoon would sound incomprehensible too if he had had to explain it to someone who hadn’t been there.

  “Why would he do that?” Kahn asked.

  “Do what—kill them? I don’t know. I guess—”

  “No,” Kahn said quietly. “Why would he drop the rifle?”

  Brill seemed confused, and he stumbled around for an explanation. “I guess, er, maybe he didn’t want to carry it because it weighted him down or something. Who knows why these fuckers do things?”

  “All right, then, why would he shoot them?” Kahn said. “He didn’t shoot anyone else, right?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that one out myself,” Brill said nervously. “The only reason I can think of is he didn’t want them to go back to MI, or maybe he was afraid they knew he’d spilled his guts and they might get loose and tell his buddies or something.”

  “Why are they way down there outside the perimeter?” Kahn asked.

  “Well, ah, I didn’t want to just leave them lying there—they’re gonna start to smell pretty soon and I thought it was better to get them away . . . and, ah, there’s something else . . .” He paused and shifted nervously on the crate.

  “Some of the men last night, ah, they started messing around with them a little, you know. I think it started out harmless enough, but they got to messing with them, and I, ah, think the, um, less that’s said about this the better, you know.”

  “Battalion know about this yet?” Kahn asked.

  “Not yet; I was waiting to talk to you about it first. I thought . . . I mean, if they are going to get their bowels in an uproar, we might try to smooth it over a little . . .”

  “In other words, you waited so I would have to do it, huh?”

  “Oh, hell, no—I just thought you’d like to get the story first so you would know what went on before the . . . ah, shit hits the fan—if it does . . . I mean, I bet this whole thing just blows over if we don’t make too much of it.”

  “Too much of what?” Kahn said.

  “Well, the whole business—I mean, it’s too bad it all happened, but there are a lot of guys involved . . .”

  “Let me tell you this,” Kahn said. He felt a sudden surge of anger and cold fear through the tiredness. “Whatever happened with those girls—and I’m not even sure if I want to know—I hope you’re telling the truth about it, because if you’re not, and Battalion gets wind of it, we’re all going to swing.”

  Brill n
odded his head in agreement.

  During the next forty-eight hours, Kahn’s sense of right, wrong and duty—to himself, his men and the Army—were taxed beyond anything he had known to that point in his life. Having just faced death in its pure, primitive form, he was now forced to grapple with its more sinister implications, and in so doing, he found himself enmeshed, deeper by the hour, in a web of half-truths, prevarications and lies revolving around the events of the previous night and the machinations of Lieutenant Brill.

  As the monsoon gloom closed over the Valley of The Tit, he had tried to quiz Brill further about the killings of the girls, but Brill stuck to his vague story and suggested to Kahn that they simply bury them and forget about it. Before anything further could be said on the subject, they were mortared.

  Only a few rounds came in, but it was enough to send the encampment into chaos and cause a general alert until the wee, early hours, after which Kahn returned to his tent, exhausted, and fell asleep, wondering when the attack would come. He was still sleeping at 0800 the next morning when Colonel Patch arrived, and would have slept longer if Hepplewhite, the Clerk, had not poked his head into the tent and told him the Old Man was walking up the hill. Kahn hastily threw on his fatigue blouse and was lacing his boots when the colonel entered the tent.

  “A little late to be getting up, isn’t it, Billy?” But there was a smile on Patch’s face when he said it. “I’ll be outside when you’re finished.”

  Kahn joined him on a knoll overlooking the northern perimeter of the positions. Below, the colonel’s aide waited patiently beside the helicopter. “I’m sorry, sir; I didn’t realize you were coming out. I would have—”

  Patch waved him off. “No need to apologize. I was just on my way over to LZ Horse and decided to drop in to see how you were. Those mortars didn’t do much damage last night, did they?”

  “No, sir, they didn’t,” Kahn said. “Only six rounds—but I figure they were just registering. Colonel, we’re going to be hit up here very soon, I’m afraid. All the signs—”

  “I doubt it,” Patch interrupted. “There’s not a shred of evidence that a large enough VC force exists in this area to pull off any attack like that. Besides, the way you performed yesterday you shouldn’t have to worry about anything. You don’t know this, but when the general heard me say I was putting you in for a Silver Star, he said he would endorse it. Now, how about that?”

  Kahn was still groggy from sleep, but a Silver Star was a Silver Star, and for the moment his interest changed.

  “Well, Colonel, I . . . I’m grateful, but I don’t think I deserve it.”

  “Nonsense,” Patch said. “You did a very impressive thing out there, calling for napalm damned near on your own positions. You don’t know this either, but what your patrol ran into was part of an NVA division. They were using the valley for their R and R. The Two Corps Commander has put two battalions in there after them, and they’re fixing to throw in a whole brigade from down at Phan Rang.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t know that,” Kahn said.

  When he looked at the colonel again, Kahn saw that his expression had changed.

  “By the way,” Patch said matter-of-factly, “what are all those bodies doing down there?” He nodded downhill.

  A sharp, gloomy impulse shivered up and down Kahn’s spine as he suddenly remembered the interrupted conversation with Brill. “I’m really not, ah, sure, Colonel, but from what I gather, those two were prisoners, and there was a third prisoner who got loose night before last and got hold of a weapon and shot them.”

  A perplexed look crossed Patch’s face. “Well, how in hell did that happen?” he said. “I don’t remember any POW reports from here.”

  “Like I said, I’m not really sure. I haven’t had time to look into it,” Kahn said. His mind was spinning with impulses now: to tell the colonel what troubled him about Brill’s explanation; to keep quiet about it and see what the colonel did; to lay it off as Brill’s problem . . .

  “That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard,” Patch said. “You people ought to be more careful out here.” The colonel looked back down the hill again, the puzzled expression still on his face. From where the two of them were standing, it was just possible to make out the dark shapes of the two bodies lying outside the barbed wire in the brush.

  Patch seemed about to speak again when Kahn seized the moment to change the subject.

  “Colonel, I hate to keep bringing this up, but I honestly believe we should be relocating off this hill now. With the mortars last night, we—”

  Patch spun around sharply.

  “Look,” he said, “I told you all along you are going to have to hold this hill. My plan, the general’s plan and the Two Corps Commander’s plan is to make the presence of this Battalion be felt very vividly among the people in these valleys around here—and the way to do that is to stay put and not jump around all over the place, and to run patrols as much as possible. Anyway, look out there. There isn’t another hill in sight as tactically or strategically located as this one. I reconnoitered it myself. Every day the people in this valley pass along that road right down there on their way to the market, and the simple fact that you are here gives them a sense of well-being. That’s part of the mission here, you know.

  “Now,” Patch said, “when the hell are you going to move this perimeter down so you can cover it properly with your mortars? I don’t know why you haven’t done it yet, but now I’m telling you to do it—and you can get started today.”

  “Colonel,” Kahn started to protest, but Patch continued, “If they want a firefight, we’ll give it to them. I wouldn’t have put you on this hill if I didn’t know you could defend it. You might get started by putting your claymores out first; then move the wire down, and dig in good and tight.”

  Moments later Patch was gone, striding down toward his helicopter, which was already warming up, leaving Kahn with the sinking feeling that something was drastically, and irrevocably, out of control. He was returning to his tent to brush his teeth when Brill came up to him, dressed in full field gear.

  “Listen,” Brill said, “I’m taking off now, and I thought—”

  “Taking off where?” Kahn asked.

  “I have the patrol today,” Brill said, sounding surprised.

  “Says who?” Kahn demanded.

  “It’s my turn,” Brill replied. “I rotated them while you were gone like you said. It’s my platoon’s turn again.”

  Kahn studied him for a moment. “You and I,” he said, “have got to have a talk about those goddamn bodies out there. Nobody’s going anywhere until we do.”

  “That’s what I came to see you about,” Brill protested.

  “Okay, let’s have it, then,” Kahn said.

  “Well, what I want to do is, when we go out, we’ll take them along with us and leave them down on those trails where we captured them to begin with. The VC’ll come and police ’em up and it’ll get them off our hands.”

  “That isn’t what I mean, Brill. I want to hear what happened to them. Why in hell are they here in the first place?” Kahn fumed.

  “I told you last night,” Brill said indignantly. “We brought back three prisoners, the—”

  “I know what you told me last night,” Kahn said, “and that’s just what I told the Old Man. I don’t know if he bought it, but that’s what I told him because I didn’t have anything else to tell him, but now I want to know what the fuck happened!”

  “All right,” Brill said sullenly, “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Brill set forth much the same story he had given Kahn the night before, though more elaborately. He was especially graphic when it came to the condition of the girls after the men got through with them. “I don’t know if they were raped, or how it started, but they were a mess,” he said. He also insisted that the male prisoner had shot the other two in the way he had described before, adding, “If he hadn’t, we’d really be in a world of shit, because they would have had to g
o back to MI looking the way they were.”

  “Who were the guys?” Kahn demanded angrily.

  “I don’t have any idea,” Brill said. “Nobody’s talking; but I’ll tell you this—it must have been a whole lot of them. If we open this can of worms, the whole company’s in for it. We’re gonna be screwed right down to the last man. You know how those bastards in the rear are; they got nothing better to do—”

  “Damn it!” Kahn cried furiously, slamming his fatigue hat to the ground. “How could you let something like this happen? I’m going to have to do something. Where was your ass when all this was going on?”

  “I told you,” Brill said, “I was interrogating the gook.”

  Kahn reached down and retrieved his hat and stood shaking his head painfully, looking down at the cluster of Brill’s men waiting to go out on patrol. Among them he saw Crump’s lanky frame towering above the rest, the banana-cat cradled in his arms.

  “Listen,” Brill said, “what’s happened, happened—I say let’s don’t stir up a shitpile. Those bodies are going to start to smell pretty soon anyway and we’re going to have to do something about them. Like I say, I can take them out now and dump them and at least we’ll have them off our hands. How about it?”

  Kahn sighed deeply. The valley below them was shrouded in smoky morning mists, peaceful and green—yet the hand of death lay heavily across it. He had seen so much killing these past few months, what difference did a few more make, one way or the other? The policies differed from company to company, and from time to time: take prisoners, take no prisoners. War! War! War!—rape, pillage, burn—they had done all these things. “If he runs, he’s VC—if he’s dead, he’s VC. War! War! War!” The thought was monstrous, but he thought it just the same. The way Kahn’s mind was turning now, the question before him had little to do with killing or rape, but with what to do next: to go by The Book or not.

  In the end, he put it off again.

  “All right, go ahead,” he told Brill. “But this isn’t going to be the last of it. When you get back, you and I are going to find out who’s responsible—and they’re going to have to answer to me.”