Better Times Than These (20 page)

At a crossroads past the mine site the convoy turned sharply westward, and the terrain began to change. They were headed directly into the emerald mountains, but the sun had dipped behind them and the emerald color had given way to stark, black silhouettes against a brilliant yellow sky. They were moving across a vast plain where uncultivated rice fields were overgrown by a tall brown saw grass that stretched as far as they could see in the fading light. Out of this, the twisted skeletons of burned and rusting vehicles began to appear on both sides of the road. As they approached the mountains, more and more of these loomed out of the saw grass. Automobiles, jeeps, trucks, personnel carriers, an occasional tank, some dismembered beyond recognition. A few were unmistakably American, others appeared to be French and the older, battered ones looked as if they might have been Japanese. Bravo Company stared at them wordlessly in the gray twilight, realizing they must be crossing what had been and was now a great battlefield.

Junk, Kahn thought. All junk. Scrap iron at two dollars eighty cents a pound. Rubber at forty cents, tin at two seventy-five, copper from wiring at five dollars, ball bearings, rods, ties, shafts, axles, glass—all of it salvageable, here for the taking.

“What about this place?” he asked the driver as they bounced along in the cab of the truck.

The soldier’s eyes were glued straight ahead and he gripped the wheel tightly. “Well, sir, the gooks call it the Plain of Elephants or something, but what we’re on now, we call this the Blood Alley Road. There’s about six more miles before we get to the pass.”

Kahn suddenly remembered the conversation he’d had with his father’s business partner, Mr. Bernard, a few weeks before they left, the night before his leave had ended. It had been the Fourth of July, and his father and mother and some friends were having a cookout in the backyard of their little house on the edge of the country-club golf course. Mr. Bernard had cornered him as Kahn walked down the steps to rejoin the party. His breath smelled of beer and shrimp, and he peered crookedly over horn-rimmed spectacles. He appeared to Kahn like a half-capsized owl.

“Say, Billy,” he had said, “I don’t know what your father has said to you about this, but I want you to know that when you’re out of the service, you should think seriously about coming into the company. The junk business is a pretty good way to make a living. Your father and I, we’ve done pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

Kahn had nodded politely but said nothing, and stared down at the little picnic table where his parents and the others were watching the fireworks and eating seafood—less than fifty yards from the manicured golf course on which neither his father, nor any of them, for that matter, was allowed to play because they had had the luck, good or bad, to be born Jews.

“I know it might sound odd to a young man like yourself,” Bernard had said, “but this war could be a good thing for us—all of us—in some ways, providing we do the right things. During a war, the military is nothing but waste. That’s how we got started in this game, your father and I, twenty years ago after the last war.

“We know there’ll be enormous amounts of surplus when this is over—heavy construction equipment, stoves, motors, clothing—stuff the military no longer wants. Some people call it salvage, but it’s junk. Your father and I are not ashamed to call it junk. Nevertheless, there’s a great deal of money to be made . . .”

Kahn continued to listen politely, but was more interested in watching the fireworks display which was now exploding in a kaleidoscope of noise and color all across the muggy Georgia night. It reminded him more of a mortar barrage than of fireworks. A red star cluster—that was nothing but fireworks, really; only the wrappers were different—one for fun, the other not so much fun. His profundity amused him. He had stopped listening to Mr. Bernard completely. Instead, Kahn was thinking about his father and wondering how many times he might have wanted to play a few holes on that golf course instead of driving all the way to the public course on the other side of town. Once, he had asked his father about it and had been told simply, “We don’t play there”—not that “We can’t,” but that “We don’t.” Kahn knew his father must have wanted to, though, because it was right there, every day, in his own backyard.

“I want you to think about this, Billy,” Mr. Bernard was saying. “While you’re over there, you will see many things. You will be in a very good position to keep your eyes out for certain opportunities. The war won’t last forever . . .”

The truck jolted over a huge pothole. “You know, sir . . .” the driver said. The driver’s eyes were narrowed. His hands and face were filthy.

“. . . there ain’t been a convoy across here in four months they don’t try to mine or ambush somewheres along the way. The gooks don’t even use this road no more. They say they ain’t used it since the French was here.”

Kahn looked out over the enormous junkyard/graveyard, where the unseen traces of human wreckage—bits of bone, teeth, blood and so on—were lumped in with the other junk. What was a human body worth these days? Ninety-eight cents, if you could break it down and process its precious metals and deposits? Maybe more, he thought.

Ahead, the jungle sloped down toward the plain from halfway up the mountainside. In time, he decided, if the fighting ceased, it would probably creep out of the hills and overtake the Plain of Elephants. The roots would embed themselves in the earth, hold soil, rot and then be reborn again until layer after layer of dirt and compost would cover the Blood Alley Road where so many battles had been fought. Later, in thousands of years, other processes would occur. Perhaps the ocean would rise and deposit sediments, or the forces of erosion would slowly bring the mountains down, pressing it all deeper and deeper into the earth’s crust, and the bones and iron would disintegrate under the weight until nothing remained but their fossilized impressions. Then eventually, in the far-distant future of the world, a geological sleuth might uncover all of this—and wonder for a while what in hell had gone on here. In the end he would probably figure it out and write about it in a book, and then they would learn what had happened. In the far-distant future of the world.

The truck rocked along madly, and Kahn’s thoughts continued to return in bits and pieces to the night of the family picnic. After the conversation with Bernard they had all sat down again, and after the food was gone they had drunk more beer, and the women had gone inside, but the men had stayed on and talked, and Kahn had stayed with them, because there hadn’t been anywhere else to go. At one point, Mr. Bernard had peered at him across the table and said, loudly, “You know, Billy, I want you to know we are all proud of you for what you’re doing . . .”

Kahn remembered that his father had looked up at him from picking the last of a steamed crab, and smiled, and Bernard had gone on about how he and Kahn’s father had enlisted in the service in nineteen forty-two and how they had been in the Quartermaster Corps but nevertheless had seen some of the fighting in Europe and how it was such a fine thing that Kahn was going over now . . .

And he had begun to wonder then, actually for the first time,
Why?
Not that it made much difference, because the fact was he was going, but it had still set him to thinking. He had tried to imagine what it would be like, and found that he couldn’t. He found, in fact, that he had utterly no idea, either of what it would be like or of why he was going, and from time to time until they left, and also on the transport, he had still wondered and still come up with no answer he could make sense out of, and it bothered him still even now, in the cab of the truck, and his head began to ache, and he had a tingly sensation in his hands and feet as though his brain were trying to tell him something and he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was.

It did not come to him quickly.

It took another mile for him to realize that he no longer cared why he was
going
here, and that what he was feeling now was fear, and that for the past ten minutes he had been asking himself over and over in the deep recesses of his mind, Why am I here?—Why the hell am I here?

All of them were glad to see the dawn. Beyond the pass through the mountains, they had bivouacked for the night in a quiet green valley, although some of the trucks had had to pull off in the pass itself because their timetable had been upset by the mining of the personnel carrier. Patch considered this insecure and would have much preferred to circle up like a wagon train instead of being strung out along several miles of road, and he had radioed an Artillery battery in the area to put up flares during the night.

They had slept, or tried to sleep, in or under the trucks or on the ground beside them, but the flares kept them awake most of the night. The banana-cat was edgy because of its change of ownership, and Crump finally had to tie it to the wheel of a deuce-and-a-half so he could get some sleep. Once they observed a firefight in progress on some low hills at the end of the valley. Red tracers arched out from a machine gun, and they could hear the distant pop of small-arms fire and the dull thud of mortars. Rumors abounded about the circumstances of this engagement until word got back that a South Korean unit was operating somewhere in the valley.

In the predawn blackness, which seemed the darkest of all, they were roused and loaded again into the trucks, and at the first sign of light the convoy lurched toward the second line of mountains; then upward over them, across awesome, winding passes, and along thin gravel roads where the endless jungle rose above them in tangled shades of green; then onto a high, open plateau where everything was brown, with scrubby, broken trees; past strange huts of straw and thin timber shimmering in the noonday heat, and through filthy roadside villages of tin shacks so flimsy it was hard to see how they were still standing. In late afternoon they reached the Base Camp at Monkey Mountain.

17

“Y
ou’re supposed to bring them out head first,” the Graves Registration lieutenant was saying. “Everything has to be done a certain way.

“It’s easier, especially if you’re going uphill, because the weight of the body is mostly in the trunk—but that’s actually not the reason.”

He took another swig of beer . . .

“It’s something that started in the First World War, I think—it’s a matter of showing proper respect. The theory is, the men feel more comfortable if they see it done properly instead of just dragging them off like flour sacks.” Kahn liked the Graves Registration lieutenant—and he liked the other guy sitting at the table, whose name was Holden and who worked on the general’s staff. He had seen Holden around before back at Fort Bragg, and also during the convoy, but never actually talked to him until tonight, when they’d both happened about the same time into the tent set up as an officers’ club. Now here they were, he thought, sitting together on the night of his arrival, three first lieutenants: one who worked where the orders originated; himself, who was destined to carry the orders out; and another whose job it was to deal with the results of the carried-out orders.

At first Holden seemed aloof, and Kahn had tried to decide if it was because he was a general’s aide or because he had grown up that way. In the end, he decided it was both, for Holden’s speech, like his face, was patrician, and it was somewhat mannered; but the face was handsome—though not in the way Kahn thought his own was—and he was drawn to him in the way good-looking men are often drawn to each other because they share a bond of having it easy with women. After a while Holden seemed to become more natural, and Kahn was duly impressed when he learned Holden had gone to Princeton. From the point of view of a Florida State man, they did not let fools into Princeton.

“The trouble,” the Graves Registration lieutenant said, “is after they’ve been out there for a while.

“At Fort Lee we used dummies in the fieldwork, but it isn’t like that here. You don’t find remains just lying in an open field—they’re in all sorts of damned places.”

Holden also liked the Graves Registration lieutenant. He was a cheery sort of fellow who had an awful job and was making the best of it.