Free Better Times Than These by Winston Groom Page B

dining room, and even they had not been told the nature of it but only that they should present themselves with a pencil and pad and be seated by 1400 hours.
    The room fell silent when Colonel Patch entered, a thin cigar smoldering between his teeth.
    “Gentlemen,” he said, holding up a sheaf of papers that had already been passed out to each officer, “our work has been cut out for us.”
    At a back table by the dining-hall door, Billy Kahn and his platoon leaders—Sharkey of First, Brill of Second, Donovan of Third and Inge of Weapons—were shuffling through the document, which was titled
    I NTELLIGENCE S UMMARY
R EPUBLIC OF V IETNAM
THE IA DRANG VALLEY CAMPAIGN
A CTIONS IN II C ORPS , A PRIL -J UNE , 1966
    and on which each page was stamped SECRET in bold red print.
    “The shit’s hit the fan,” Sharkey whispered, saying what Kahn and most of the rest were privately thinking, because everybody knew you could get your ass handed to you in the Ia Drang in a hurry. They had known it all the way back at Fort Bragg as the first trickle of men returned from the vanguard of the first wave.
    “This is the place—it’s the goddamned place!” Sharkey was saying under his breath, jabbing a stubby finger at the title sheet. “Ohhh, we’re up against it now.”
    Going through Kahn’s head was something one of the newly returned men—a fat, moustachioed helicopter pilot—had said one night in the officers’ club at Bragg:
    “Ia Drang—yep, that’s a bad, badass place.
    “We went in there one afternoon and I never seen such shit thrown at us, from both sides of the mountains and below. You get the River Blindness out there—that’s what you get in the Ia Drang Valley.”
    When they inquired what the River Blindness was, the fat lieutenant had leaned forward somberly and said almost in a whisper across a table full of beer bottles, “It’s when you go down to the river and get your eyes shot out,” and then had broken into a crazy savage chuckle, in which he was quickly—if nervously—joined by the other lieutenants who had been listening eagerly to his stories.
    Wonderful, Kahn thought darkly—the damned River Blindness.
    “You will remember,” Patch was saying, twisting his blond moustache, “that in this operation we will be the pursuers, not the pursued.
    “What we will pursue, gentlemen, is asses—North Vietnamese asses and Vietcong asses. These are the same asses the Seventh Cavalry has pursued for exactly one hundred years.
    “All of these asses,” Patch continued, “—Indian asses, Cuban asses, Mexican asses, Japanese asses and Korean asses—have one thing in common, gentlemen: whenever they have been pursued by the Seventh Cavalry, these asses begin to shit, and the Seventh Cavalry has followed the smell and kicked the last remaining ounce of shit out of them.
    “And that is what you men are going to do in the Ia Drang Valley,” he said, tapping on a copy of the sheaf of papers with a pointer.
    “The theory of warfare here, as I have told you before, is just the same as it was when the Seventh Cavalry was fighting Indians—and the Seventh Cavalry was designed to fight Indians.” Patch puffed on the cigar.
    “Uh-oh, here it comes,” Sharkey said, rolling his big eyes toward the ceiling.
    “And as all of you know by now, the Seventh Cavalry, with one minor exception, kicked ass on the Indians for nearly fifty years. The results of that effort now live on reservations.
    “The only difference is that the bastards you will encounter in the Ia Drang Valley will not be Indians.” The Battalion Commander was beaming.
    “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Sharkey murmured dejectedly.
    “I want you men to take this document back to your cabins and read it carefully. Pay particular attention to the action reports and conclusions, because we’re going to discuss each part every day from now on. Your own asses might be saved by somebody else’s experience.”
    “Hey, lookit this shit.”