Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  “Right,” Kahn said, slowing down but not stopping.

  “The colonel sent me to tell you to go see him in his tent on the double when you came in.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” Kahn said, continuing toward the hospital.

  “Sir,” said the private, following along, “he said to tell you, ‘on the double.’ ”

  “I heard you the first time,” Kahn said crisply.

  Kahn waded into the milling mob around the hospital and the morgue, and the first person he recognized was Inge—mud-covered, red-eyed, holding a gauze compress over a large gash in his hand.

  “What in hell happened, Inge?” Kahn said. He recognized a few other faces, drawn and filthy, seated on the ground or leaning against the hospital wall. A dozen or more poncho-covered bodies were lying neatly outside the entrance to the morgue, waiting to be stripped, washed down and pronounced dead when one of the doctors found time.

  Inge did not reply. Like DiGeorgio, he simply stared vacantly past Kahn, off into the distance, miles and miles and miles.

  “Inge!” Kahn cried. “How bad is it?”

  Several news correspondents, who had gotten wind of the action and flown in earlier, stopped their other interviews when they heard Kahn’s voice and closed in around him. Captain Sonnebend, who had been escorting them, hurried over too.

  “Inge,” Kahn pleaded. “For God’s sake, can’t you tell me?”

  “Who are you, Lieutenant?” one of the correspondents asked. “Are you with this company?”

  “No, he’s not; he used to be,” Sonnebend said abruptly, stepping in close. He put a hand on Kahn’s arm. “Kahn, I want you to leave the area now. I want it clear for the reporters and authorized personnel.”

  Kahn tore his arm away. “Get away from me, you creep!” he shouted. He turned back to Inge and seized him by the lapels. “God! Say something, Inge, will you please?”

  Digger McCrary had come out of his morgue, and when he saw what was going on he took Kahn gently by the arm and led him away into the cluttered little office where he did his paperwork.

  “What in hell happened, Mac—will you tell me, for crissakes!” Kahn exclaimed. “Is Holden dead?”

  “Sit down a minute,” McCrary said. “You want a beer or something?”

  “Hell, no! I want to know what’s going on.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I’ve tagged forty-three bodies and the hospital’s got a couple of more they’ve just put aside to die. And there’re still some missing. Inge led the rest of them out.”

  “Jesus God, Jesus God,” Kahn groaned, burying his head in his hands.

  “It was the worst I’ve ever seen for one company. They ambushed a relief column that Major Dunn took down there, too. He never made it past Surgery. We got him over here about an hour ago.”

  “And Holden too, right?” Kahn said angrily.

  “We got him out on the first load. By the way, there was something in his effects . . .” McCrary produced a mud-stained, wrinkled sheet of stationery.

  “It was in his pocket all wadded up like he’d maybe thrown it away and then picked it up again.”

  Kahn read over the first lines of the letter.

  “It’s hard to know what to do with something like this,” McCrary said. “Ordinarily we’d just send it along, but . . . ah, do you know the girl?”

  “He was having some trouble with her,” Kahn said softly.

  “Maybe he would have wanted her to get it, then.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think straight right now, Digger. Why don’t you let me keep this? I’ll see the right thing gets done with it.”

  McCrary nodded. “No sweat,” he said. “And listen, Billy, I’m real sorry about your company.”

  “What company? There isn’t any more company,” Kahn said.

  Kahn stormed into Patch’s tent like a man flying into a brawl. The Battalion Commander was sitting ramrod straight, wearing the dark sunglasses, his hands folded on the desk in front of him. A cigar smoldered in the ashtray.

  “Did the Colonel wish to see me?” Kahn said, addressing him in the old, formal Army style.

  “I certainly do,” Patch said coldly. “The results of your court-martial were received here this morning.” Kahn said nothing and stared at the face behind the dark glasses.

  “I also understand,” Patch said, “that you tried to get me dragged into the goddamn mess somehow.” Kahn remained at attention and did not reply.

  “I have to tell you,” Patch went on, “that I have never had such a disgraceful episode occur under my command. Because of the circumstances, I am going to transfer you out of this unit. It will be better for everyone concerned.”

  Kahn was still at attention, but his fists were clenched. Whatever fear he had once had of Patch had completely vanished. “Does the Colonel’s concern extend to a Board of Inquiry?” he said icily.

  The Battalion Commander did not flinch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

  “What the lieutenant means is, is the Colonel concerned that the lieutenant might testify against him at a Board of Inquiry?”

  “What Board of Inquiry?” Patch bristled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about a goddamn company of men that got wiped out because you’re so fucking dumb you wouldn’t move them, Colonel!” Kahn exploded. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Patch drew himself up like an adder. “There will be no Boards of Inquiry about anything, Lieutenant!” he thundered. “And you’d better the hell keep a respectful attitude or I’ll have you court-martialed again!”

  “There will be, Colonel, if I tell the Division Commander I begged you for three goddamn weeks to let me take them off that hill—they were sitting ducks up there. You knew it!”

  Something seemed to deflate in Patch. He was still stiffly ensconced behind the desk, eyes hidden by the glasses, but he was working his lips and tongue and teeth together as though he had just been fed a very bitter pill. He stared at Kahn quite a long time before answering, and when he did, he spoke in the tone of a man seeing something precious slip away.

  “It’s easy for you to try to blame me,” he said, “but I’ll tell you something, Kahn. When I went out there this morning and saw it, I came back here and I wept, right here at this desk, for two hours . . .”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Kahn said acidly. Patch let the remark pass, and went on.

  “I had to hold that hill. There was no way around it. Besides, they were reinforced. Something went wrong—they should have been able to hold off a whole army from there—”

  “Yeah, like hell—” Kahn started to interrupt, but Patch cut him off.

  “All right, go ahead and stir up a Board of Inquiry if you think you can. But I’ll beat it. Everything I did was with the approval of the General Staff—and they aren’t about to announce to anyone that they were wrong. Go ahead—and I’ll walk out of there, and where will that leave you?”

  “No worse than I am right now,” Kahn said angrily.

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Patch said. “There have been cases of first lieutenants who have found themselves walking point man in the shooting gallery for the rest of their tours.” He let that sink in for a moment.

  “Colonel,” Kahn said, “you are really one of the sorriest bastards I have ever known.”

  Patch picked up the cigar and took a puff. Outside, a truck growled in the mud, and the driver’s curses wafted into the tent.

  “I’ll ignore that last comment, Lieutenant, because I think I have learned something from this little conversation. There are some people, and I have met them from time to time throughout my career—and that includes a few at the Academy—who simply are not suited to the military. I believe you are one of them, Kahn. The Army isn’t your cup of tea—and you’re not the Army’s either. So I’m going to suggest something to you. You were working on some kind of advanced college degree before, weren’t you? I was reading your
Two-oh-one file earlier.”

  Kahn did not answer.

  “You’ve got about four months left here, and you were in the field mostly, up till now, right? . . . so I suppose we could fairly say you’ve pretty much served your time . . .”

  The oaths of the bogged-down truck driver filled the tent as Patch reached across the desk for a note pad and a pen.

  “The Army understands these things, Kahn. You’re familiar with the ‘Early Out’ program—you must be. If you wish to apply to go back to finish your degree . . . well, you aren’t eligible for another two months . . . but I have good connections in Saigon. I could scrape you under the wire and you could be out of here tomorrow, maybe even today—maybe even this afternoon.” Patch leaned across the desk, pen in hand.

  The truck driver had gotten himself unstuck and roared off in a flood of profanity, leaving a thick, ugly silence in the Battalion Commander’s tent. Kahn’s brain throbbed and pounded and seemed locked tightly away from the discussion.

  “Well, that’s it,” Patch said, standing and putting on his helmet. “I’ll drop this note off at S-One on my way over to the briefing. They will draw up the forms. There’s no need to tell me what you decide; just go over there and tell them. You should make up your mind this afternoon, though.”

  He walked out of the tent leaving Kahn still at attention, facing the empty desk and crushed cigar, and he stood there that way. For a long, long time.

  The storage tent was dark and sweltering as Kahn sat on a cot sorting through his footlocker. He had already turned in his issue gear, and what remained was his—though there wasn’t very much; far less, in fact, than he had come over with. There were some pottery bowls he had picked up from a vendor somewhere along the way—his mother would like them; and some snapshots that someone had given him. He would take those too. One of them in particular he liked: a picture of himself and Holden taken sometime before Holden joined the Company. They had been laughing about something, but he had long since forgotten what it was.

  Rummaging down to the bottom of the locker, he retrieved one of his two pairs of khakis which had lain undisturbed all through the fighting in the Ia Drang and The Fake and the court-martial. They were still neatly folded, but the months of dampness and heat had caused them to mold slightly—and worse, they had somehow been permeated by the shitsmoke from the latrines. But they were all he had, so they would have to do, and he shook them out and laid them on the cot.

  A large, potato-shaped face appeared in the tent opening and searched the darkness.

  “Lieutenant Kahn, sir, are you in here?”

  “Over here,” Kahn said, and Spudhead Miter groped his way inside.

  “Lieutenant—ah, somebody said you were leaving. I . . . uh . . . wanted to talk to you.”

  Kahn had already taken off his boots and was unbuttoning his shirt. “What’s up?” he said.

  “I . . . just wanted to say that, ah, I’m sorry if I caused any . . . trouble . . . for you, Lieutenant.”

  “Forget it, Miter. It didn’t cause me anything that wouldn’t have happened sooner or later anyway. In a way I’m glad you did. I’m getting out of here now.”

  “Well, sir, I just want you to know that I . . . you—you and Lieutenant Donovan—were the best officers I’ve ever had, and I’m going to write my father . . . he’s on the, ah, Armed Services Committee . . . and see if he can help you . . .”

  “That’s nice of you, Miter, but let’s just let it go, huh? I’ll be Stateside and out of the Army in a few days. I’d rather not stir anything up.”

  Spudhead thought about it.

  “Well, maybe you’re right, sir. I wouldn’t want to mess up your going home. But I’ll be glad to write about the, ah . . . court-martial anyway . . .”

  “There’s nothing to write about. Whatever they said I did, I did. There is one thing, though . . .”

  He slipped off the fatigue blouse while Spudhead stood waiting for the rest. But in the end, he did not say it. There might have been a letter to someone, he had thought, asking them to look into forty-some-odd dead men who had been left sitting on the same hill for two months waiting to be massacred. Somebody ought to be asking why—and this was the perfect chance; but . . .

  . . . he couldn’t do it, because the second he had accepted the chance to go home, he had entered into a kind of unspoken bargain with Patch, though he hadn’t quite realized it at the time. But that was what he had done, and he sure as hell saw it now, and a man couldn’t go back on that sort of deal, even if it meant letting the whole thing pass forever . . . Besides, it couldn’t bring them back. And maybe Patch had been right. He just wanted to get the hell away from here.

  “Forget it,” Kahn said. “Listen, I appreciate you coming here, Miter, I really do. Don’t worry about it. I, er . . . have to get ready to go now, okay?”

  “You sure, sir? I mean, I’d be glad to write him—if you want.”

  Kahn looked through the brightness of the tent flap. He could hear the roar of helicopters and see groups of men from another battalion, wearing full battle dress, forming up on the landing strip.

  “I’ll tell you what, Miter,” Kahn said. “Why don’t you just give me your father’s address? Don’t you write him or anything. Just let me have it. Maybe I’ll stop in and see him, or call, when I get back.”

  “Sure, sir,” Spudhead said. He scribbled it down on a piece of paper and handed it to Kahn, who put it into his wallet. “Well, I just wanted to say goodbye,” Spudhead said, and he turned to go.

  “Wait a second,” Kahn said, extending his hand. “Thanks again—and good luck.”

  “They said something about making me a clerk, sir,” Spudhead said.

  “Great. You’ll be out of here yourself in a few months, then,” Kahn said. “So long.”

  After Spudhead left, Kahn put on the sour khakis and walked out to the airstrip. The helicopter that would take him away for the last time was warming up in a whining, dusty cloud. The crew chief even took his AWOL bag for him and stowed it in a safe place on the floor.

  Whatever Patch’s connections were in Saigon, they must have been very high up and important, because Kahn’s departure was arranged so quickly and thoroughly he was gone that very day.

  He breezed through the debarkation depot in less than an hour, then was taken by special bus to the air base at Long Binh, and the jet he was ushered aboard was not just any jet but one apparently reserved for generals, State Department and business executives and their wives.

  It was a little past midnight when the big 707 roared off the runway and climbed sharply into the tropic sky. From his seat in the front section, First Lieutenant Billy Kahn took his last look at the Land of the River Blindness. The glow of a full moon illuminated shimmering rivers and flat rice fields in the short distance from the air base to the shore of the South China Sea—beyond which he would be safely and totally away from it all. As the plane gained altitude, he could also make out the flickering and flashing of flares and artillery across the darkened land. But he was out of it now—or would be, at least, in a few minutes’ time.

  It was cold in the cabin, since the air-conditioning system had not yet adjusted to the steep ascent, and Kahn furtively slipped his hands beneath him to keep them warm, hoping the person seated next to him, a middle-aged, bespectacled man who was shuffling through a briefcase on his lap, wouldn’t notice. Far ahead the ocean appeared, vast and calm in the moonlight.

  The man with the briefcase rose without comment and moved to a seat nearer the back of the cabin, and Kahn stretched his legs across the vacated seat and leaned back. He had a sudden, strange impression that his neighboring passengers had been looking at him; possibly, he thought, they were wondering why a lowly lieutenant was flying in such fancy company. There was one, elderly and important-looking, sitting opposite him in the other aisle. Once Kahn caught him glancing across at him as though he were some unbelievable freak. After a while, he too relocated to the rear, and Kahn was very much r
elieved to see him go.

  The jet airliner was flying peacefully over the ocean, high above and beyond the turmoil that had consumed his life these past months. It still seemed cold in the cabin, and he considered asking the stewardess if she would turn up the heat. But nobody else seemed to mind, so why should he? Strange, he thought; he was the only one left in this section, except for a woman in front of him. Perhaps it was warmer in the rear . . .

  It wasn’t that, of course; the reason came to him quickly enough: it was him they were moving from. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but his khakis, which had lain for months in the shitsmoke and rot, stank!—the more so to people like these, who were used to the villas and hotels of Saigon.

  There was some shaving lotion in his AWOL bag, and he considered going into the lavatory and dousing himself with it. But that would only make it worse, he decided. He wished he had a blanket, it was so cold. He was starting to shiver a little. Cold like the cold in the jungle at night when you don’t expect it . . . cold as in a damp, cold vault . . . cold like dead men . . . like Holden, Crump, Sharkey, Muntz, Major Dunn . . . all of them, fiercely cold . . . and he was going home.

  He might have done that one thing for them . . . might have gone to the general and demanded a Board of Inquiry . . . might have simply told Spudhead to write his father . . . might have, might have . . . it was always “might have.” . . .

  Somewhere in his brain the debt bird flapped its wings. What now? he thought. There must be something else . . . being in a war, living through it, was not enough!

  The woman in front had put down her magazine and was fiddling with her handbag. Kahn leaned forward a little between the seats. She was going to leave! Oh, please don’t . . . he hoped. Please stay . . . but she slipped quickly past him, and then he was alone.

  He reached up and turned out the light and slouched down in the seat. He had to go to the bathroom too, but was embarrassed to get up.

  Somehow, he had let them down. His men. His friends. His! He felt awfully, terribly helpless. There must be something . . . at least write a letter to their parents . . . or call them . . . or go to the funerals. It was not over yet. They were still his men—alive or dead, it didn’t matter.