Better Times Than These (6 page)

I
n less than an hour, the transport was out of the choppy bay, swaying softly on the Pacific swells, bringing on the first wave of seasickness. Many affected by it went below to their bunks, and those who had to wait their turn at the bunks went inside to the enlisted men’s lounges or the ship’s library, believing this would abate the queasiness. Naturally, it made it worse. Soon nearly twenty percent of the men were ill, and a long line had formed outside sick bay, where corpsmen were dispensing Dramamine tablets.

At the height of it all, the voice of Captain Kennemer blared over the ship’s loudspeaker, beginning,
“Now hear this,”
and then ticking off the order in which chow would be served. This was received with a flood of horrible profanity from those who were ill, and prompted a further announcement by Kennemer, after a short wait while he sought advice from the Navy officers who had been standing by. Conspicuously missing from this second announcement was the “Now hear this,” which Kennemer dropped after noticing titters from the Navy men.

“Ah
—
ah—it has come to our attention that some people are feeling the effects of seasickness. These people should get the seasick pills from the dispensary immediately and they should refrain from eating chow. The Navy advises us that seasickness is common for the first few hours on the ship but that it will go away in a short period of time.

“The Navy also advises us that anyone who is feeling sick should go out on the deck and not stay below. The Navy also requests that anyone having to throw up please do so in the garbage pails provided on the decks and in the living quarters and they ask that no one throw up over the rail so as not to get the sides of the ship dirty. Thank you.”

“That sonofabitch,” said Pfc. Madman Muntz, who had been casting about for a quarter of an hour for a good place to heave.

“So that’s what the brown shit is on the side of this tub,” he said, addressing an enormous black soldier squatting against the superstructure and obviously trying hard not to think of water or ships or anything associated with them.

“What’s wrong with you, Carruthers? You don’t like the ocean?” Muntz said mockingly.

Carruthers only looked up and around weakly.

“Ah, it’ll go away; everybody gets it first time out,” said Muntz, profoundly grateful that he was at least in good enough shape to sound authoritative about it.

By then some of those who were not sick were starting to sit down in the mess hall, a huge damp room with long rows of tables end to end. Filipino mess stewards, dressed in white jackets, served the men their food, balancing trays with half a dozen plastic plates on them as though they had been born to walk like marionettes across the swaying floor. To Army men, unaccustomed to being served seated, it seemed a rare treat that they were being catered to this way—almost like a football team before the game, steak and baked potatoes, an offering to the brave. It never occurred to them that the Navy simply didn’t trust soldiers walking around with trays full of food on rolling ships at sea. Furthermore, while none of them had actually anticipated steak and baked potatoes, neither were they expecting the kind of meal they received, and their momentary gratitude quickly changed to anger and then despair as the plates were set down.

“Lookit this shit—what the hell is it?” DiGeorgio said, springing back from a heap of gray goo with orange bits of carrots suspended near its surface.

“Who the hell knows what it is?” said Spudhead Miter, poking at the substance with a spoon.

“It’s swill,” Crump said sadly.

The men picked through the chow as best they could. The only thing most of them could eat was the lukewarm canned pear that had been plopped into a section of their divided plates. It was a disappointing glimpse into their prospects for the next several weeks.

Most of them had never been on an ocean voyage before, and the truth was, they found it a little bit exciting—although they would never have admitted this to one another.

Kahn, who had not been affected by the seasickness, had just finished a reasonably civilized meal in the officers’ mess. The same Filipino stewards had laid out generous helpings of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, green peas and tossed salad, served on white china—or at least, white crockery—plates on large round tables with white tablecloths. There was ice cream for dessert and iced tea to drink, or milk if you requested it.

Captain Thurlo, Bravo Company’s Commander, had taken to his bunk at the first signs of the seasickness, and when Kahn looked in on him earlier, Thurlo was in such a state that he did not make sense. The little that could be gotten out of him was that he wanted Kahn, as Executive Officer, to run things until he got better, so Kahn had called a meeting of platoon leaders and told Sergeant Trunk to have the sergeants there too, at nineteen hundred hours in his cabin, to make sure things were going smoothly.

In the meantime, he decided to take a look around the ship, and staggered off in the sway like a drunken man, hoping that as time went by he would develop a better pair of sea legs. The bow was dipping and rising into a golden Pacific sunset, magnificently illuminated by a bank of low-hanging gray clouds just above the horizon. It made Kahn wish plaintively that he had joined the Navy.

The coastline had long since disappeared from sight, and the swells had a grayish hue from the angle of the sun. Kahn was wondering, looking at them, just what he would find if he could explore the bottom of the ocean they were passing over right now. He figured the ship must be somewhere near the edge of the continental shelf, which could account for these big rollers they were experiencing—millions of tons of water traveling thousands of miles to pile up against a six-hundred-foot undersea slope.

Beyond this, the ocean floor dropped down more than a mile, to the hazy world of the
abyssal
zone, which he had always called
abysmal,
although actually it was not abysmal, because it had a bottom of sorts, but then beyond this the ocean sometimes dropped off again, to terrific
deeps
which, if they were not literally abysmal, were at least the closest thing on earth to it, and were certainly dismal, down seven or eight miles beneath the surface, where no ray of sunshine could ever penetrate—a place so hostile to life that nothing except the most bizarre and primitive organisms could ever exist there.

Watching the huge swells, Kahn mused over what effects the ship might have down in those deeps as it passed over them, if such effects could be recorded. It was an interesting proposition, but given the depth and density of the water and its meager propensity for carrying sound and shock waves, he concluded that the waves would spread out progressively from their source and be totally absorbed before they ever reached the bottom of the deeps. This phenomenon he jokingly named the “Dismal Deeps Effect,” and he decided to tuck it away in his memory in case his geology career ever led him into oceanography, which was unlikely—but even if it didn’t, it was still an interesting postulation, given his newfound conviction that even with the most sophisticated seismic devices known to man, the passing of the transport over such a chasm would probably have no effect whatsoever.

7

I
n the bow of the ship, Major Richard Arlo Dunn, Signal Corps, was fiddling with his transoceanic radio, trying to locate a certain California station he knew was carrying the Dodgers baseball game. Once he thought he had it, faintly, but then some earthly interference injected itself, and he continued vainly to twist the dial and turn the radio on top of the big ventilator where he had set it down.

This was Dunn’s third crossing. The first, in nineteen forty-three, had taken him to New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands, where he received a field commission from buck sergeant to second lieutenant. The second, in nineteen fifty-one, took him to Korea as a captain in the Signal Corps.

This would be his final tour.

He had not succeeded in making the promotion list three consecutive times and was due to be separated within the year. But it really did not matter to Dunn; his life had already fallen apart years earlier, at Mannheim. He wondered now, softly, as he turned the dials, what life would have been like had he gone to work in his father’s little radio shop, or to college—where he might have won a football scholarship . . . But then the war had come, and afterward, with the commission, the Army had seemed like a good career . . . and then he had gotten married—but something had gone wrong with that too . . .

He gave up on the radio and squinted out toward the fiery sun, which was precisely tangent to the horizon, almost as if it had been brought down in the lens of a sextant. The ocean waves marched by like giant tombstones—at least, that was the way he saw them—and the tombstones reminded him of that day three weeks ago in his little house at Fort Bragg and his German wife, Maria. It had been the Fourth of July, and he had been drinking gin since noon.

Maria made the first one for him, a gin and tonic, but after that he was on his own. He had given up adding a twist of lime after the second, and by the third, the ratio of gin to tonic grew to two to one, and when he finally ran out of tonic he settled for what he called his “very dry martini.”

“Is there anything from the mail?” Maria asked, standing in the bedroom doorway in her slip.

“I haven’t opened it yet,” he said, picking up the half-dozen letters from an end table.

The heat was unbearable. That was why he drank, he decided. Even in their little air-conditioned house on post, the heat closed in on Dunn in a fierce, evil way, driving him first to thirst, then to drink, and then to more drink until the heat and the thirst and the drink finally blended into a warm, soggy mush in his mind. The heat and the drinking—it had been that way for weeks, but the heat really didn’t matter until he came home because there were so many other things he hated about his work.

“Please don’t drink any more, darling. You know we have to be at the club. Why don’t you start dressing?” she said.

“I’d rather open the mail.”

She came up behind him and rubbed the back of his head. “Richard, please, we must not be late. Why don’t you take a nice shower now?”

“I don’t feel like it right now. I’ll take one . . . in a minute. I want to read the mail.”

“I must finish getting dressed,” she said, drawing her hand tenderly across his shoulder as she pulled away. He looked through the Venetian blinds across Ste.-Mère-Église Drive to the field of low scrub brush shimmering in the North Carolina heat. Fourth of July, he thought—the last Fourth of July they would spend together in this house. The Army would permit her to live here while he was gone, but when he returned, if he returned, they would have to move, and he would be “Mister” Dunn, not Major Dunn, or even Captain Dunn. Not even Sergeant Dunn or Private Dunn. Mister Dunn. He wondered if she would understand.

She was so young, and she’d married him in better times, when he was an up-and-coming officer; when it had all been ahead of him. He should have been a colonel by now—maybe a full colonel—but then there had been Mannheim and the board of inquiry . . . Oh, what the hell, he thought. He picked up the stack of mail and began sorting it.

He went through the bills first—God, that was one thing she’d learned from six years in America: charge accounts. There was Robinson’s and Sears and Oinebachs’ . . .

“Oinebachs’—Maria, have you charged something at Oinebachs’?”

“That pretty flowered dress—the one I wore last week—you liked it so much,” she said, “that was Oinebachs’—I told you, don’t you remember?” she called from the bedroom.

“Oh,” he mumbled. It came back to him—the dress she’d worn the night he’d made a fool of himself at the officers’ club. The night he’d gotten drunk and told everyone again what had happened—anyone who’d listen. He had started with the ones at the table . . .

“Darling, please come and dress now,” she said. He could see her brushing her short blond hair at the mirror. She was so young, so full, so beautiful, so much stronger than he was . . .