Better Times Than These (2 page)

It was nearly noon when the fog lifted. Almost magically, it simply vanished from the dock and moved off about a mile into the water, lingering as a whitish wall as far as anyone could see in either direction. When this happened, and the men could finally see the ship, everyone got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, a feeling which was not exactly fear, though that had something to do with it, but more of excitement, partly because most of them had never before seen a ship this close and partly because they knew it was going to take them across ten thousand miles of ocean and deposit them to fight a war which for the last year they had been trained for, hollered at about and generally saturated with; and yet most of them still did not have the slightest understanding of what it was all about.

In nineteen hundred sixty-six the dark specter of war was moving across America, vexing the spirit that had conquered the tyrants of Europe and Asia. In plush offices and hushed marble corridors of official Washington, older men, many of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger, spoke boldly of defeating Communism and establishing freedom and independence for the peoples of Vietnam. The men boarding the transport were among the first wave of an entire Army that was to follow by the end of the year, and yet to them, all these things mattered little. They knew their departure from the dock would signify that it had begun, and their concerns now were mostly with themselves. Each in his own way realized that this voyage was merely a fortuitous delay of an inevitable adventure from which none of them would return unchanged and some would not return at all.

Word came down shortly after the fog lifted that Bravo Company was to get into formation to go aboard. The men were told this by the noncoms, who had been told by the platoon leaders, who had been told by the Company Commander and the Executive Officer, who had been told by someone else up the line to have the men pick up their gear and get it to hell into some kind of order and sling their weapons and put their helmets over their bald-shaven heads and get ready to move out; but of course they didn’t actually move out for another hour and a half.

Private Homer Crump, peeling one of the tangerines his mother had sent him from Mississippi, offered a section to his squadmate Private Louis DiGeorgio, of Bayonne, New Jersey.

“Fuckin’ shit, Crump, all you do is eat. Whataya gonna do when we get there—climb up a tree and eat bananas?” DiGeorgio snorted, sticking the whole section into his mouth and squashing it between his tongue and his teeth.

Crump worked the skin from the rest of the tangerine with his big bony fingers; looking a little hurt, he eyed DiGeorgio carefully.

“You always makin’ fun of me, ain’t you, Dee-Gergio? You et the tangerine, didn’t you? Then you make fun of it. You bolo on the rifle range and I help you get a rating and you make fun of that too. How come you don’t never like nothin’, Dee-Gergio?” Crump said, stuffing the skin of the fruit into his fatigue blouse pocket.

“Cause yer gonna get yer ass shot off over there and all ats gonna be left is a buncha stinkin’ fruits, that’s why, Crump. Whatdayathink we’re goin’ to here—a fuckin’ picnic? Ya want ’em ta pack us a box lunch or sompen? Ol’ Charlie starts shootin’, what’ll you do? You’ll be runnin’ around handin’ out fuckin’ tangerines to people steda shooting ya blooker, I bet! Yer probably be throwin’ ’em steda grenades.” He looked up and down at Crump’s lanky frame. “That’s why, Crump, cause ya don’t know what the fuck’s goin’ on,” DiGeorgio said, shaking his head slowly as though he were speaking to a certifiable idiot.

“Awright, les go” came the cry down the line, and the men picked up their duffels and rifles and threw them over their shoulders. “Route step, harch,” a voice roared, and Bravo Company moved away from the buses they had learned to loathe since basic training, but which had suddenly become their last remaining link with the world they knew. A few of the men, among them the ones who earlier had stared out toward the ocean, looked back at the ugly, uncomfortable vehicles much in the same way as a prisoner on his way to the electric chair might glance back at his cell.

As Bravo Company moved closer to the ship, the sources of the noise and commotion they had heard through the fog became apparent. The dock was like a crazyhouse. Dozens of men were rushing about moving boxes and crates. One of the cranes the men had heard was lowering huge green metal CONEX containers into the ship’s hold. This was the brigade Basic Load, the supplies to keep it going in the field for a month in case it couldn’t be resupplied. Another crane was lowering a canvas-covered howitzer. Men on deck with bullhorns shouted instructions down to the crane operators. Rifle companies formed up to go aboard. A dozen men, handcuffed together, these without rifles, filed up the boarding ramp, escorted by MPs in bright black helmets. These men, Bravo Company would learn later, were rounded-up AWOLs, who would spend their monthlong voyage in the brig.

Cattle, thought Second Lieutenant Victor Brill, who had spent much of his twenty-three years in and out of military schools for progressively worsening behavior and who was therefore well qualified to form this opinion. After the endless hours of penalty tours and drill he had marched as the result of some transgression or other, Brill knew, or at least thought he knew, what it felt like to be cattle.

He had seen them all his life—from his grandfather’s ranch in California to the big pens near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and at a variety of places in between.

Cattle were stupid. They were not like things actually alive which had feelings and thoughts and could rage against people who abused them and made them do things they did not want to do. No sir.

About the only thing cattle did was breathe and eat and then be eaten themselves.

He had never seen cattle get mad—even when he’d hit them between the eyes with a ball-peen hammer to get them moving. Brill pictured the cattle in the pastures his grandfather kept, waiting to be put into chutes for the slaughterhouse. No matter how hot it was, or how mean you treated them, the cattle just stood there and took it. And God knew why, but they always wanted to bunch up, usually in a tiny corner of the pasture. It could be a hundred and one goddamned degrees, but there they were, bunched up, fucking lying all over each other in the hot sun, flopping their tails, waiting for somebody to come along with a prod and get their dumb asses moving into the chutes. It reminded Brill of how they’d yelled at him in Infantry at Fort Benning School.

“Goddamn it, Lieutenant, don’t let those men bunch up—one mortar round would get every one a you.” Thrashing through those Georgia thickets with a flock of dumbass recruits who kept bunching up against each other; that was when he’d begun to see them as cattle.

As the last of the AWOLs filed aboard, Brill narrowed his sky-blue eyes, smiling thinly, and turning to Sergeant Trunk, the Company First Sergeant, he said, “Cattle.”

Trunk, knowing what Brill meant, but knowing it for entirely different reasons of his own, replied, “Yessir, that’s cattle okay; that’s cattle.”

It was then that the men heard the music.

At first they couldn’t really hear anything they could distinguish as a tune, because of all the racket from the dock and the ship, but after a few minutes they began to pick out the notes in between the racket, and almost simultaneously they recognized it, the forlorn trumpet and drums, burbling above the hubbub. It was their song, “Garryowen”—the battle tune of the Seventh Cavalry, which most of them had sung both drunk and sober for the past year, in the cigarette-stinking, beer-swilling ratholes they had called clubs; the song they had been made to learn, along with their General Orders, when they first joined the Regiment.

The Troop, they had been told, was the only troop to have joined—as if they had had a choice at some point—with a history as glorious as any in the United States Army: the Fourth Troop, now Fourth Battalion, Seventh Cavalry.

“The only difference,” Colonel Patch had told them in an uproarious speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, “is that the Army has seen fit to dispense with horses, so we shall now descend on the enemy from the air like a swarm of copulating gnats.”

Nevertheless, he’d said, this was the same outfit Colonel Custer had taken to the Little Big Horn River a hundred years before, playing this same song, and had been butchered there by five thousand savages, and which had later fought at Wounded Knee, Santiago, Dublan, Luzon, Inchon. All these men, Patch said, choking a bit, had sung the song “Garryowen” . . . most of them dead now, as the men of Bravo Company would also be, one way or another, one hundred years hence.

“Whatayawanta do, live forever?” First Sergeant Trunk liked to say, when the men complained that their feet were killing them.

At some point, most of the men had found themselves hearing at least the tune in their heads, if not the words, and they should have known they would have to hear it again for the ten-thousandth time as they too were finally herded up the gangplank onto the transport. A few of them, but only a few, were thinking they were tired of being treated like cattle, but they did not say this out loud.

2

A
chilly drizzle had been falling on New York City since late afternoon, washing away the spittle and debris and slickening over the chewing-gum wads on the sidewalks. In front of Delmonico’s Hotel on Park Avenue, limousines and taxis were disgorging their cargoes of young men in white tie and long-gowned girls and austere, high-coiffed matrons escorted by prosperous-looking, silver-haired men decked out in formal regalia. A cab bounced to a halt and Lieutenant Frank Holden, wearing his dress blue military uniform, dashed under the marquee and joined the throng scuttling through the brass-trimmed doors. Except for its color, the doorman’s uniform looked very much like his own, and he felt a wry, cynical satisfaction that the formal attire of the United States Army and the costume of the doorman at Delmonico’s both looked as if they had come from the wardrobe of
The Student Prince.

The lobby was a bedlam of gabbling faces, discarded raincoats and folding umbrellas. A few people stared at Holden’s dress blues, and he couldn’t decide whether it was because they simply didn’t know what the uniform was, or because they did, and felt uncomfortable about it. He hadn’t spent much time in New York since going on active duty, but he was more or less aware of a growing resentment here against the war that had not yet crystallized in other parts of America.

Without stopping to check his cap, Holden brushed through the crowd into the huge ballroom, decorated in red and white crepe streamers and flowers. An orchestra was playing “Moon River,” and Holden lingered near the door for a moment among the fashionable, almost fashionable, semifashionable and a few unfashionable New York people who had come to drink and dance and talk and see and be seen at Cory’s debut. There was the smell of champagne and chafing dishes and roses and nothing at all to remind anyone of the war, except perhaps himself.

He saw her in a corner, surrounded by half a dozen older men and women he didn’t recognize. Instead of going straight over, he headed for the bar, feeling slightly uneasy over wearing the uniform instead of tails. He ordered a Scotch and soda, standing beside a cluster of scraggly-looking undergraduates talking about Amherst. A couple of them gawked at him as though he had just landed from Mars. One whispered something to the others, who sniggered and turned the other way. He wasn’t sure it was about him, but he suspected it was, and it made him feel more uncomfortable in a situation in which he should have felt completely at home.

Cory was laughing with the older couples, her long auburn hair piled high on her head, her suntanned face as lovely as ever. He decided to wait until she was dancing, then sneak up behind her and cut in. She loved that kind of little surprise from him, and he figured it would ease her disappointment that he had come in uniform.

“Oh, Frank, don’t be tacky.
Nobody
ever wears a uniform to these things,” she’d protested when he’d mentioned it in a phone conversation the week before. “Mother will go through the ceiling. You know she wants to show you off; don’t embarrass her.

“You’re just kidding, aren’t you?” she had asked, when he hadn’t said anything.

“Of course I’m not kidding,” he teased. “Why should I have to go out and rent tails when I’ve got this grand uniform? You’ll love it, anyway—it’s got gold braid on the tunic, and the pants are light blue with a gold stripe down the sides, and—”

“Stop it, Frank. It isn’t funny,” she’d said quietly.

He’d said nothing, realizing for the first time she was actually embarrassed that he might come in his uniform to her party. Still, he didn’t see why he ought to be ashamed to wear the uniform of the United States Army in public. After all, Holdens had been wearing it in some way or other for more than two hundred years, and his father had been one of the most decorated officers in Europe, and after all, he’d paid one hundred sixty-five dollars for it . . .

“You know you have tails up here,” she’d said. “You won’t have to rent them. You look so handsome in tails. Please, Frank, don’t kid me like this . . .”