Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  Patch digested this information grimly. Everyone who had been listening was now looking at him.

  “Okay,” he said, “we’re on the way. It’ll take about half an hour—maybe forty-five minutes, though. You hang on down there, hear? Over.”

  There was a pause, and the person at the other end was depressing the transmit bar so Patch could not get through. Then the radio crackled again.

  “Sir . . . my name is DiGeorgio . . .”

  “Roger, DiGeorgio—you hang on there, now. And one more thing: we’ll be coming up on your right flank. I guess you’ll tell those guys to watch who they shoot? Over.”

  “Roger, sir,” DiGeorgio said. Something else was said, but it got garbled in the transmission.

  “Goddamn it!” Patch spat, “we’ve got to pull some kind of relief together. What in hell have we got?”

  “Colonel,” said Flynn, “there are about half a dozen APCs in motor pool—down for something—but I’ll bet most of them’ll run. We might be able to scare up a tank, and there’s that platoon from C Company and a lot of straphangers waiting around for something. I could take them down there myself.”

  “Right—good,” Patch said. “Get the APCs and I’ll take care of the tank. Round up every cook and shitkicker you can find. You sure they can get down that road? We don’t want ’em to get stuck five miles away.”

  “I’m pretty sure, sir—I flew over it a few days ago.”

  “All right—but look, I can’t spare you to go, so we’ll have to find somebody else. Think of somebody—quick.”

  A look of relief disguised in disappointment filled Flynn’s face. “Ah, the only one I can think of is Lieutenant Styles in MPs,”

  “Colonel Patch,” said a voice from behind, “I can take that column down there.”

  Patch looked over his shoulder directly into the face of Major Dunn, who had been standing by his bank of radios most of the night.

  “Major,” Patch said curtly, “that is very admirable, but with the communications situation we have here—”

  “Colonel, there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do for the communications situation at this point. These men are perfectly competent technicians and they have everything under control. I’m just in the way here. I would appreciate it very much if you were to permit me to do this. I have friends there.”

  They looked at each other closely, the West Point colonel and the bootstrap major with the sad eyes and graying hair, and for an instant Patch saw a fierce determination in Dunn’s eyes which he had recognized before in certain officers of proven field merit.

  “Major, you’re in charge. Captain Flynn will go with you to motor pool.” He turned to Flynn. “Brief him on what to do, Tom—and try to scare up some NCOs.”

  Major Dunn’s relief column had been grinding down the rain-swept, pitted spur with nightmare slowness for half an hour, lights out since they had turned off the main road. Locked in the darkness of the steel personnel carriers was a nervous grab bag of jeep drivers, mechanics, KPs, new arrivals, men going to R&R—or returning from it—and others unfortunate enough to have been swept up in Captain Flynn’s dragnet.

  “I think I see it, sir,” the driver of the second vehicle called back into the cabin. Major Dunn crawled forward, and through the viewing slit could make out pale flashes against the lowered sky. The driver resumed his radio conversation with the big tank ahead. Dunn punched him on the shoulder. “Try to raise them again—maybe we’re close enough now.” The driver reached over and switched frequencies. A minute later he turned and shook his head.

  “Nothing, sir,” he shouted back. “I’ll see if the tank can get them—he’s got better radio . . . JEEZUS!” A searing flash of hot light burst through the slit, and the carrier jolted sideways and slammed to a stop. There was another awful explosion, and through the observation slit Dunn could see flames and smoke silhouetted against the blackness.

  “Jesus God,” the driver shrieked, “the tank . . .”

  “Back it up! Back it up!” an Armor lieutenant was screaming. “Tell them to back it up back there!”

  “What the hell’s this?” Dunn exclaimed. The vehicle had gone into reverse and was backing up as fast as it could go. “What are you doing?” He grabbed the lieutenant’s shoulder.

  “We’re backing up—They got the tank—Get the hell out of here!” the lieutenant cried.

  “You can’t do that!” Dunn said. “We’ll have to go around it.”

  “SOP,” the lieutenant said. “We get fire, we back up—C’mon, Red, move it!”

  “Screw SOP!” Dunn bellowed. “Get this goddamn thing going forward again. Do you know what’s going on up there?”

  “Sir, I am not going to put this vehicle in that kind of situation. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” the lieutenant said.

  Dunn grabbed the driver and screamed in his face, “I am ordering you to get this thing out of reverse and move out. I am a major—do you hear me, soldier?”

  The driver eased off the accelerator, and the APC came to a throbbing halt. He looked at the lieutenant of Armor.

  “What do I do now, sir?” he said.

  “Do what he says,” the lieutenant mumbled helplessly. “Major,” he said, “you must be out of your fucking mind.”

  Just as the APC lurched forward, a terrific explosion lifted it up on one side and shuddered through every inch of metal, dashing men to the floor in a terrified tangled pile.

  “Get back—back up!” the lieutenant screamed again, but the driver had already opened the top hatch and was standing ready to scramble out. “She’s dead, sir; we gotta get . . .” His words were lost in another explosion, worse than the first, which filled the inside of the cabin with thick awful smoke and heat and knocked Major Dunn hard against the side. He felt his hand break at the wrist, felt it crush and give way and the stab of pain, and when he looked into the cabin he could see nothing, nor hear a sound, but there were people in there, because he could glimpse them through the faint smoky light.

  Dunn got to his feet dizzily, stepped up on the seat and started crawling out through the hatch. Outside, there was firing from both sides of the road and ahead, and the APC behind them was engulfed in broiling flames. Several bodies were lying on the road, and he heard a lot of yelling. His head was spinning, but his thoughts were clear and condensed into a knot of disappointment. Dear God, he thought, everything I touch . . . everything I touch . . .

  He felt only a numbness when the bullet slammed into his chest—a numbness that spread quickly.

  The pain he waited for never came. Instead, things simply got dimmer. He had a sense of being on his back looking up at the sky, but it was very dark: so dark he couldn’t tell if it really was the sky, or perhaps he had closed his eyes—no, they were open, so maybe it was dark. Then, slowly, it began to brighten, and he was aware of a terrific noise, the noise of thousands of people—and the sky brightened into brilliant blue with a few wispy clouds high overhead. It was chilly, but not unpleasant for a clear November day in a football stadium.

  He had a sudden surge of energy, and elation as he remembered clearly . . . so clearly through the years . . . because he had never done anything, anything, so satisfying as that run . . . that bolting, ripping, slashing sixty-five-yard touchdown run, straight out of the backfield, through waves of would-be tacklers, until he was free with only the goal ahead. Everyone had been behind him. Oh, how the crowd had cheered! As he turned in the end zone, the siren blew and they were all running toward him and he had never felt such a wonderful, satisfying feeling—never again, in all these years—and when they were all over him, hugging and whooping, for an instant he’d closed his eyes and felt himself trembling—aware of nothing, aware of everything—not actually seeing, or hearing, just feeling . . . Old Dick Dunn . . . Old Number Thirty-seven . . . slipping back across the years into a dark and dreamless sleep . . .

  As the clean white rays of the aurora spread over the misty hills and fields of the Valley of The Tit,
the stillness of a perfect morning was broken by the sound of a single helicopter circling overhead. Slowly it descended, the pilot nervously squinting through the haze until the ground came into view. Even before it touched down, Patch could see where Holden had gone wrong.

  There were roughly three groups of bodies, all of them bunched closely together as if three separate things had been going on at once. From fifty feet and closing, they looked like peaceful sleepers. He had an urge to cry out, “Get up! On your feet!” but this passed quickly. Patch waited for the machine to shut off before stepping out with his aide. Nearby, several other helicopters were parked idly, blades drooping, pilots still inside. A tall, gaunt lieutenant began walking downhill from where he had been supervising a party of men who remained at their work, silently and methodically bending over each corpse and lifting it into a large bag.

  “Tom, this is terrible,” Patch said to the aide. His face was strained and white.

  “Yes, it is terrible, sir; it is.”

  “But they made a gallant stand, didn’t they, Tom?”

  “They did that, sir. Yes, they did,” the aide said ashenly.

  Digger McCrary, the Graves Registration officer, approached Patch and saluted. “Sir,” he said, “we’ve counted them first—there’s forty-two. I only counted the ones on the hill. There’s one at the bottom where it drops off up there, and we counted him too, but I haven’t sent my men down there because I’m not sure what we may run into. We found a Morning Report that shows there were a hundred and fifteen men here as of yesterday. All those are dead—they made sure of that. Got most of the weapons, too. The Quartermaster people haven’t found any machine guns or mortars and only a few sixteens. They even made off with C rations and the phones and radios.”

  Patch grunted, and stared at the carnage.

  “They’re still picking up stragglers,” he said. “A lot of them managed to get down into the jungle and make their way through. Make your tally after we police everybody up—figure out if anybody’s missing from that. Have you found the Company Commander?”

  “Yessir, he’s up there,” McCrary said. “He was in one of the mortar pits. Tube isn’t there, but it looked like he had been firing it himself until they got him.”

  Patch nodded grimly.

  “Tom,” he said, “let’s have a look around.” They walked past the first group of bodies, which was spread along twenty yards of freshly dug trench in the middle sector of the perimeter.

  “You see that little rise over there?” Patch said. “Now, that can’t be enfiladed. Why in hell he never set in a gun there I don’t know. You see what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And look at this—when the shit hit the fan, they all started to bunch up. Look at the goddamn space here—you could drive a tank through it.”

  They walked in silence for a while, along the edge of the wire.

  “I’d sure like to know how many of the bastards they took with them,” Patch said. “We’re going to have to make a guess. I don’t see a single one, do you?”

  The aide shook his head. “Must have been in the hundreds from the look of things, sir. You can see all the blood trails down there.”

  “Yes, hundreds—at least. We ought to settle on a figure . . .”

  Suddenly, from the corner of his eye the colonel glimpsed something—a small animal, monkeylike, sitting on the side of a hole in which lay a single body. It sat absolutely motionless, as though it were guarding the lanky, still form, and fixed its eyes on the two approaching men.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Patch said. “Hey, little fellow—whoa, there—nobody’s going to hurt you,” he clucked.

  “That’s one of those banana-cats, sir,” the aide said.

  “Yes, yes I know,” the colonel said; “I’ve seen them before. Hey, there—look, it even has on a collar.”

  Patch stooped to his knees and snapped his fingers as though he were dealing with a dog. “Hey, come ’ere, little fellow,” he said gently, but the banana-cat remained motionless and bared its teeth as Patch drew nearer, looking fearful and very much alone.

  35

  There was a song that year, the quixotic, fateful year nineteen hundred sixty-seven, that began:

  It’s a long, long way from Cam Ranh Bay,

  To the airstrip at Pleiku . . .

  Where many a man has lost his life,

  From doing what he must do . . .

  Which song was widely sung—despite the fact that it never appeared on any charts, or was even recorded, to anyone’s knowledge—by pilots, convoy operators, tank crews, Infantry and artillerymen, especially after a few rounds of beer, and in time it was picked up in Signal Corps sections and Navy barracks and maintenance shops and ultimately in replacement depots, which were overflowing late that winter with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of soldiers and sailors and airmen all keenly geared for the fight that lay ahead. So it was not surprising that this song was hummed on a gray, misty morning by the aviator of a helicopter flying into Monkey Mountain with a load of mail and a lieutenant named Kahn who had hitched a ride the morning after his court-martial.

  “You hear about all that out here last night?” the pilot called back over the intercom.

  At seven thousand feet the air was cold and bumpy, and the endless mountains of the Annamese Cordillera harsh and forbidding. “They were talking about it in the Flight Section this morning,” Kahn said. “Nobody seemed to have any real poop, though.”

  The pilot kept his eyes glued ahead. “All I know is that they overran a company and an Artillery battery, and some ARVN too, I think. We were on standby the whole goddamn night.”

  “Hear what company it was?”

  “Didn’t hear. But whoever they were, they had to go it alone. We were socked in from about eighteen hundred until this morning.”

  “Yeah,” the copilot added; “even the flare ships couldn’t get up—and they’ll fly in damned near anything.”

  “Who’re you with?” Kahn asked.

  “Two-thirteenth Aviation.”

  “Yeah? You know a guy named Spivey flew out to LZ Horse a lot?”

  “Spivey—sure. You heard what happened to him, I guess?”

  “Something happen?”

  “ ’Fraid so—you didn’t hear, then. A fucking brigadier up at Qui Nhon got him to fly down to Tuy Son to one of those little fishing villages to buy up some fresh lobster for his goddamned lunch. They zapped him when he was coming in—never had a chance. They must have been waiting. He took over a hundred holes in the fuselage.”

  For a few moments, the steady clatter of the rotors was all that could be heard. The pilot went on:

  “Happened about a week ago. Worst of it is that this fucking brigadier calls up the CO and says he wants to put all of them in for Silver Stars. He tells the Old Man to write it up with stuff like ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’ The Old Man just hangs up in his face.”

  Ahead a dark, grayish peak loomed out of the mist. Sprawled around its base like a strip-mining camp was the Brigade Headquarters at Monkey Mountain.

  “We fixed that bastard, though,” the copilot said. “Whole damned squadron sits down one night and composes a citation for him to sign—even got an artist to draw a picture for it. It starts out, ‘For Heroism: Concerning the Delivery of a Lobster . . .’ ”

  The aircraft descended sharply. As they drew nearer to the ground, it seemed the whole encampment was abuzz with some kind of activity, but Kahn was thinking of the motto Spivey had painted on the side of his helicopter, YOU CRY—WE FLY, which was what he remembered most clearly about him now, as he conducted his own private little funeral service in his mind. He wondered what the crazy, slack-jawed Irishman’s last thoughts might have been as they opened up on him. Kahn decided they had not been about phosphate. He had probably thought something like, Aw, for the love of God. He used to say it all the time.

  The helicopter settled onto the landing pad, and Kahn thanked the pilots and
got out. The air was sticky and hot, and the sun beating down mercilessly through a hole in the clouds. Everything seemed different—even the color of the landscape. High on its pole, the flag above the TOC twitched occasionally in a faint breeze.

  There was feverish coming and going around the field hospital at the far end of the runway. Carrying his AWOL bag, Kahn set out toward the Administration tent to check back in—and then he noticed a short, sorrowful figure, hatless and wearing mud-stained fatigues, standing rigidly beside the tarmac runway, wringing his hands and making a high, wailing noise. As he came nearer to him, Kahn recognized the face of Private Louis DiGeorgio.

  “DiGeorgio, hey, what happened?” Kahn said, trotting over to him. “Were we in that last night?”

  DiGeorgio nodded his head.

  “We got hit? What is it?”

  DiGeorgio nodded again; then he began to choke up. His breath came in quick little gasps, and he put his tightly clenched hands up to his mouth as though he wanted to jam them inside it. He began to sob pathetically.

  Kahn touched his shoulder. “Easy, now—it’s over. Where’s Lieutenant Holden? Is he here?” DiGeorgio bit on his lip and nodded in the direction of the hospital.

  “He’s hurt? Is he in the hospital?”

  DiGeorgio shook his head and pointed to a small cinder-block building set off in the rear and to the side of the hospital. A building Kahn knew well, because he used to go there sometimes and eat ice cream. Suddenly his face flushed and a sick dizziness came over him.

  “Dead!”

  DiGeorgio nodded again.

  “Who else?” he asked painfully.

  DiGeorgio didn’t answer. He had put his hands back over his mouth as if to stifle some terrible cry, and stood looking at Kahn with tearless, pleading eyes.

  The former Commander of Bravo Company took a deep breath and headed up toward the hospital and the morgue. Halfway there, he was intercepted by a private in fresh fatigues and shined boots.

  “Are you Lieutenant Kahn, sir?”