Better Times Than These (4 page)

Holden felt himself flush, and as the song ended he took Becky back to her table. He asked if she wanted a drink, and she said she’d have champagne.

She squeezed his hand slightly. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

Holden started straight for the undergraduates, who were now exchanging the cap among themselves, saluting madly and laughing hysterically at their game. They were still giggling when they saw him coming.

“You fellows having fun?” he said crisply. The laughter and gaiety around him had faded into a bland, unharmonious noise.

Two of them looked sheepish, and the third smirked. The one wearing the cap assumed the position of attention.

“No, no,
Herr Leutnant,
ve vas just doink zome drills,” he said, bringing the others to uncontrolled laughter.

“Okay, let’s have the hat,” Holden said, sternly, as though he were addressing a squad of privates.

“Vat hat,
Herr Leutnant?
Doss you half a hat, Fritz?” the wearer said, sending the rest into grand hysteria.

About a dozen people at the bar had turned, and Holden noticed that Widenfield was among the onlookers. He thought he saw a touch of a smile cross his face.

“Look, guys, this has gone far enough,” Holden said. “Now give me the hat.” He extended his hand toward the boy wearing it, a rangy kid about his own height and build.

“Hey, man,” the boy said, “don’t get bummed out—we were just kidding around.”

“It’s not funny anymore,” Holden said.

“Look man, be cool, nobody’s going to hurt your hat.”

Holden kept his hand out.

The boy glanced at the others. “Vellll . . . how iss ve to know,
Herr Leutnant,
zat you belongs to ze hat?” he said drunkenly.

“If you don’t hand it over you’re going to find out,” Holden said.

By now the crowd had grown around them and it had gotten very quiet. The orchestra was playing “Hello, Dolly!”

Slowly the boy removed the cap and studied it carefully. He looked as if he didn’t quite know which way to go, and for a moment he seemed on the verge of giving it back to Holden. Then he looked again at the others and a nasty smile crossed his lips.

“Vhy,
Herr Leutnant,
ziss does not even look like a hat at all! It looks like a bowl—a zoup bowl,” he said. “Und a zoup bowl needs zome zoup!” He tipped his drink slightly and dropped a tiny bit of liquid into the cap. “Now
Herr Leutnant,
ze zoup bowl will—”

Holden didn’t give him time to finish the sentence. He took one step forward and slapped the glass upward, along with the cap, so that the cap flew over the boy’s head and the drink doused his face. He hesitated a split second before throwing a punch, waiting to see what the boy would do, trying to keep an eye on the others, who were looking at each other but slowly closing in on him. He was vaguely aware of a few gasps from the bystanders.

“All right, you bastard, come on—just come on, goddamn it,” Holden hissed.

Suddenly a stocky, gray-haired man broke through the crowd into the tiny circle. “What’s going on here? What in hell do you people think you’re doing? . . . Frank! Good Lord, Frank, I didn’t even see you. What in hell is this?”

“It’s, ah, nothing, Dad,” Holden said. “It’s just a little misunderstanding.”

“All right, break this up—you boys be on your way—go ahead, now,” the elder Holden said sharply. The undergraduates began to walk off slowly, and the one Holden had hit with the glass looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Vat is das?” he said, but he kept on going.

Holden’s father turned to him, bewildered. “This is a hell of a thing to have happen at your sister’s party, Frank. What’s it all about?”

Holden watched the others fade into the crowd. His legs and hands were trembling, and he felt that all the blood had drained from his face—but mostly he felt very much alone.

“It seems,” he said unsteadily, “those gentlemen don’t have much respect for a man in uniform.”

3

O
n the lifeboat deck high above the ramp where Bravo Company was filing aboard, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Patch, Four/Seven’s Commanding Officer, adjusted his dark, round sunglasses and leaned out across the gray metal rail so that he could see his battalion go aboard. The Seventh Cavalry battle tune drifted up from the pier and gave him a feeling of immense pride. It reminded him of the last time he had found himself in these circumstances. A different pier and a different ship—but otherwise, things hadn’t changed much in fifteen years.

He had been one of them then—simply Lieutenant Patch, blond hair cropped short, no moustache—leading a green-grub rifle company aboard an identical gray transport to Korea. So he knew, really knew, what was going on in the heads of the men below; the uncertainty, queasiness, sphincter-pulsating fear, exhilaration, bewilderment and discomfort, jumbled into whatever else was on their minds. All these things Patch understood, because when he was a second lieutenant himself he’d been informed that all second lieutenants were “lower than whaleshit”—which is at the bottom of the ocean—and therefore about as close to being an enlisted man as you could get without actually being one. You ate with them, slept with them, joked with them, shared their youth, and everything else. Except for that tiny metal bar on your collar, there wasn’t really much difference.

Patch loved these men. His men.

Even when he was a lower-than-whaleshit second lieutenant he had envisioned himself as sort of a fatherly figure, and he liked it when the men came to him with personal problems. He knew what they really needed was someone to guide them through their troubles if they had troubles, and to keep them out of trouble if they didn’t.

He did not see the enlisted men as cattle. Patch didn’t like that assessment of enlisted men, because it took no consideration of the human feelings he knew they had. The problem with enlisted men was that they had to be very tightly controlled, so that they did what they were supposed to do and didn’t get into trouble—or at least, got into as little trouble as possible, under the circumstances.

Now the little band on the pier was playing the tune for the third and final time before moving on to something else. Patch knew it was the last because of the way the trumpeter went very high on the chorus. Patch liked this, and he was humming along and tapping his foot when a froglike voice interrupted his reverie. “Good morning, Jason; I see you’ve got your ‘special detail’ working again.” Without his having to look first, words formed in Patch’s mouth and began coming out even before he’d completely turned around.

“Good morning, sir,” Patch said, looking down into the smiling blue eyes of General Butterworth, the Brigade Commander, who had come up behind him with his aide, a plastic-faced first lieutenant who always seemed to Patch like he had just been waxed for display in a museum.

“A nice idea, Jason—the music,” the General said.

“Thank you, sir. I thought it might take off the edge a little. I’m glad you like it.” He felt relieved, because he knew his little band wasn’t supposed to exist under Army regulations, which did not authorize bands for battalions, but only for brigades and divisions. But Patch had ordered one formed anyway because he liked the idea and thought it would add to the esprit de corps which, after all, was the most important thing a commander could give to his troops—esprit de corps. Regulations didn’t authorize a lot of things, and he’d be damned if he’d be one of those straitlaced do-it-by-The-Book bastards—not Jason Patch! The men he admired in the history of this man’s army, the Grants, Jacksons, Pattons and, yes, even the Custers—maybe the Custers most—were brash, decisive men. Fighters! Men who realized early on that regulations were made to be violated. Framework! Not ends in themselves—and if he’d learned anything at all at The Point and in the fifteen years since, Patch had learned the value of innovation.

It was anything that would make the men get off their asses and do whatever there was to do. Like in any business, those in charge had to motivate those who weren’t, and the answer to motivation, Patch believed, was innovation.

The music was a large part of this.

Who could resist it? For four hundred years “Garryowen” had inspired men marching into battle. It had stirred their juices in alehouses and saloons and beer joints on both sides of the ocean, taking its title from an ancient Irish village where it had been the battle song of the Fifth Royal Irish Lancers. Patch, who fancied himself a student of military history, had discovered this wandering through books at the post library just after he joined the Regiment.

Thomas Moore, he learned, had added words to the tune. Other words, some fit only for the beer halls, had been added by the men over the years. Custer had heard it during the Civil War and later decreed it would be the battle tune of the Seventh Cavalry.

And one of the first things Custer did when he became Commander in eighteen sixty-six was to form his own little band, “from the musicians of the Regiment”—despite the fact that a band was not authorized for regiments then any more than it was for battalions now. But that, by God, was Patch’s idea of innovation.

“Is it going smoothly, Jason?” General Butterworth asked. “Are there any hang-ups?”

“We’re right on it, sir,” Patch said, smoothing his blond moustache with a finger.

“Good, good—Second Battalion’s coming up next, and we’re still going off at oh eleven hundred if this goddamned fog breaks. Navy says it will, but they don’t want to get mixed up in the soup with a bunch of freighters coming down the bay, so you let me know if there are problems getting your people squared away,” The general’s face screwed into a wrinkled smile.

“I don’t think we’ll have any problems, sir,” Patch replied.

“Good—that’s good, Jason. Of course, you’ll keep me posted,” the general said.

The wax-faced aide nodded at Patch. “Colonel,” he said, then moved off at the general’s heels.

Shitass, Patch said silently, watching the young aide walk away. Just one more regulation-bound school-solution shitass.

Patch had seen his kind before—smug-looking. At The Point, they were the ones who studied day and night, the darlings of the instructors, parroting back exactly what the instructors told them, always giving “the school solution”—as though there weren’t ten, or twenty, or a hundred ways of doing something in the Army. The kind of officer Patch liked was a man who would hunker down by the ground and work out a problem by drawing in the sand with a stick.

Not this kid, though. Patch sneered at the stiffness of his gait as the aide walked away. He’s going to muddle through a career hiding behind regs and being a general’s aide and that kind of crap until he gets a star, and then they’re going to cram him behind a desk somewhere so he can screw things up for the Infantry.

Patch had seen his kind before: the anonymous signatures at the bottom of some stupid buck-back form, or a self-important voice at the other end of a phone, saying why this or that couldn’t be done or couldn’t be done this or that way.

Shitass, Patch said to himself again, turning away from the wax-faced general’s aide, whose name was C. Francis Holden and who, before he joined the Army, had been the number-one-ranking tennis player at Princeton University and who had absolutely no intention on earth of making the military his career and who, sensing Patch’s animosity toward him, was at that very moment thinking that Patch was an asshole.

4

I
n the enlisted men’s quarters on the troop deck, there was grand confusion. Bravo Company was led into a large gray-painted room that smelled of dampness and the sea, with row upon row of quadruple-decked bunks, where it was to live for the next twenty-five days. The room was so full of people it reminded Pfc. Crump of the crowds inside the freak tent at the little carnival shows that brought to Tupelo, Mississippi, such interesting exhibits as the hermaphrodite human and the woman with three tits.

Alpha Company was in the sleeping room already, and part of Charlie Company was backed up at the companionway door—five hundred jammed-up bodies waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. Since that had not happened, Bravo Company put down its gear and milled around with the rest until Sergeant Trunk shoved his way through the door and quieted everybody down.