Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  No, it was not a trip Holden looked forward to. There was always the off chance they would be ambushed or run over a mine—incidents that were occurring with alarming frequency as more and more transports and airplanes arrived to pour out thousands of soldiers for the war. Even from his position of relative security at Monkey Mountain, he had heard the stories: the squad that never returned; the dead soldiers with their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths. He had seen them bring in dead men to the airstrip stuffed in body bags.

  It had taken only a few days for him to understand that this was actually a war, a real war, which he had not been able to comprehend before—even after the long hours of training, the lectures, the mock VC villages they had attacked in the pine hills of North Carolina, the night patrols with blackened faces and blank cartridges, the escape-and-evasion course, the live-fire exercise with real machine-gun bullets whining overhead. All of it seemed puny and worthless here, because when you drove up Highway One you didn’t know from one moment to the next if you would be blown sky high.

  Holden was disturbed he hadn’t heard from Becky, even though he’d gotten letters from his parents and from his sister, Cory, and from his uncle the stockbroker, who’d offered him a position when he returned. Every day it bugged him, and at night it bugged him worse.

  They had met that Sunday after the dance, inside by the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, drinking hot buttered rum and talking about everything but the war and their respective involvements in it. She drove him to the airport at sundown and he kissed her there—gently, politely, at first, and when she responded he felt himself getting excited. At the boarding gate he kissed her again for a long time, ignoring the people filing by, Holden in his uniform, she in a red sweater and tan slacks.

  Four weeks later, just before Christmas, she came to see him and they went to the shore for the weekend. There was a fresh blanket of snow on the flat Carolina roads and the hardened, wind-swept tobacco fields that disappeared only when they reached the dunes of the Outer Banks. All the way down he’d avoided bringing up accommodations, but when they got to the deserted little motel it was unavoidable, so he asked if she wanted separate rooms.

  “Of course not; that would be silly,” she said. He protested clumsily that money wasn’t a problem, but she put her hand on his face and said, “That’s not what I meant, silly.”

  There were other visits in the months afterward. Sometimes he went to New York, sometimes she came down. They took excursions into the Southern countryside—along the Blue Ridge Mountains, down to the ocean or occasionally just to quiet back-road inns. Their lovemaking was spectacular, and in time it became that to Holden—lovemaking.

  He lived for those weekends—times when everything seemed to go right. The days in between were dreary, tedious hours of paperwork and phone calls, checking and double-checking to make sure General Butterworth’s preparations were being carried out, and he phoned her at least once a week.

  It was late spring before he found out he wasn’t the only man she was seeing.

  He’d called early one night, and Becky’s roommate said she’d gone for coffee with Professor Widenfield. He tried later—at eleven, when the dorm closed—and she was still out, and again at midnight, and at two and finally at five-thirty in the morning. She had evidently gone out for the night.

  Two weeks later he asked her about it.

  They had the use of a handsomely furnished cabin in the mountains that belonged to the family of a classmate at Princeton. Spring had taken hold earlier that month, and the woods were glorious with flowers and tender shoots. They went for a walk in the sun along the old Appalachian Trail, stopping at lookout points and picnicking on a granite outcropping high above a clear, meandering river. The valley below was alive with sprouting grain and corn in various shades of green, and they ate fat ham sandwiches, cheese and pâté de foie gras and drank a bottle of Saint-Émilion, and when they got back to the cabin it was chilly enough to build a fire. After two brandies they went to bed.

  “Do you feel like lying down?” she’d said demurely. There had been that look in her eye.

  For nearly an hour they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, and afterward, when they’d napped for a while, Becky got up and began dressing for supper. They’d heard about a little place down the road.

  It was nearly dark outside, but he could see her plainly in the fading light and glow of the log fire. She had put on a skirt and was adjusting her brassiere—an operation that intrigued and excited him because it lent an air of mystery to her marvelous, full breasts, though she’d been naked, next to him, only moments before. She was brushing her hair in the mirror and Holden was lying in bed when he finally asked her.

  “Sure, I see other people sometimes.” She smiled. “You don’t want me to be a dorm flower, do you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘see’?” he said.

  “I just see them—that’s all. What do you think I’m doing, bedding down the town?”

  “You never came in that night I called. Do you always see people all night long?” He was trying not to be sarcastic.

  “That was one night. I just went with Richard for a few drinks and we stayed up late—talking.”

  “You stayed up all damned night talking, is that what you’re saying?” he demanded.

  “Look, I like him—he’s been very nice to me. He’s a very brilliant person, and he thinks I’m an exceptional student. I’m helping him organize some things.”

  “What things?—One of those damned protests, huh? What good is that supposed to do? Don’t you know that every time you do that it just hurts this country and it hurts me? Did you ever consider that?”

  God, he thought, I don’t want to get into this. All these months they had avoided talking about the war and her opposition to it, and now it was coming out in a way that had nothing to do with what he really wanted to know. Of course she was involved in the protests, but she was high-spirited and needed to get involved in things. It had nothing to do with them—and she knew that too—or at least, he believed she knew it.

  “Becky, I’m sorry, okay?—I didn’t mean to go into that. I just need to know if you’re involved with anyone else.”

  “I’m not involved with anyone,” she said.

  “Not even me?”

  “Well, of course you—you know that.”

  He blurted it out: “Are you sleeping with anyone else? I mean, have you slept with . . . with Widenfield?”

  She put down the comb and looked at herself in the mirror for a while. Finally, she threw back her head, still not looking at him, and said it.

  “We have slept together a few times. I told you before, it’s nothing big.”

  “Damn,” he said. “Damn it to hell!”

  “Darling, it’s you I care about—really it is,” she said quickly. “Can’t you see that? Why do you think I’m here? Why would I come here if I didn’t care about you? I would be with him if that was the way it was.” She pulled a gray sweater over her head.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said after a while. “I don’t understand how you can sleep with anyone else—especially that bastard—after what we’ve had.”

  “He’s not a bastard—and don’t call him that. I told you, he’s a good friend and he’s been kind to me.”

  “You mean you fuck anybody who’s kind to you?” he said bitterly.

  “I do what I damned well please, Frank Holden. That’s what I do—and if you don’t like it, well . . . it’s too bad.” She walked briskly into the other room and stood in front of the fire.

  “Screw it, then,” he said loudly. He got up and began to dress, feeling self-conscious in his nakedness.

  It wasn’t a good night. They talked small talk and ate the thick, charcoaled steaks and French fries at the country grill, but much of the evening they avoided each other’s eyes. Back at the cabin, they sat apart in front of the fire and they did not make love when they went to bed. Just before he fell aslee
p, Holden began to wish he’d never brought the business up.

  The next morning Becky woke up first and was in the kitchen in her bathrobe making eggs and sausage for breakfast. She stuck the plates into the oven to warm and came back to bed and snuggled under the blankets, kissing him gently on the chest.

  “Baby, baby,” she said tenderly, stroking his hair and face. “I’m so sorry if I’ve hurt you—you have to believe that.” Tears came to her big green eyes, the first he’d ever seen, and he held her close for a long time.

  It took most of the morning to unload the transport. On one side, the LCIs were taking off the men, while on the other, larger craft were off-loading heavier gear. Bravo Company and most of Four/Seven were ashore by 10 A.M. and were standing or sitting on the beach waiting for orders to climb onto the big open trucks they called “cattle cars” that were lined up as far as anyone could see along the dusty gravel road that ran toward the mountains.

  They were inside a fenced-in compound, much like the one on Okinawa, except that this one was rimmed by barbed wire instead of chain-link fence.

  Behind the low dunes, two cities existed which they had not been able to see from the ship.

  One consisted of tents and tin-roofed buildings, also enclosed by barbed wire. It was laid out in a neat and orderly way, and the sand between the buildings and tents had been raked, and across the raked sand soldiers moved busily on duckboards from one tent or building to the next.

  Beyond the barbed-wire perimeter was a second city consisting of shacks built from every imaginable material. It ringed the first city like some giant seething reptile, and its inhabitants were thousands of men, women and children dressed mostly in black, loose-fitting garments. It was impossible to tell what they were doing, because they appeared to be doing many things at once. An unpleasant stench that seemed to be a combination of decomposed food and human waste assailed the men on the beach, but they could not tell at this point which of the two cities it came from.

  Lieutenant Brill was annoyed by the waiting.

  If there was one thing he could not stand, that was it—and it seemed to be all he had done since he got into the Army. Waiting in line, waiting for orders, waiting for the transport to arrive, waiting now to get where they were going. Hurry up and wait.

  On the other side of the barbed-wire barricade, a cluster of children in various stages of dress and undress had gathered, and Brill walked over to them. They were jabbering away at him and some of the other men, holding their hands out for food, cigarettes and whatever else they could talk people out of. Their jabbering was unintelligible, except for a few words like “Ahmercan”; “numba ten,” which, they learned later, was no compliment, since it represented the low point on a 1-10 rating scale; “You give me C ration?” and “You VC?” A small naked boy kept repeating over and over again, “Fuck you, fuck you.”

  The sun was shining mercilessly on the men and they were drenched with sweat. No breakfast had been served aboard the transport, and the rations and ammunition still had not been off-loaded, and by now everyone was hungry.

  Since there was no food to give the children, Bravo Company simply stared at them across the wire. Brill had not seen monkeys since he was ten years old, when his father had taken him to the Saint Louis zoo and let him feed them peanuts. But that was what they reminded Brill of, and he wondered what their parents must look like, to have produced offspring that looked like monkeys.

  As Brill was meditating on this, Spudhead Miter walked past him toward the wire, with two Hershey Almonds in his hand. He peeled back the paper and broke the bars into small pieces and began tossing them gently underhand to the tiny monkey-men on the other side. The jabbering subsided as they scrambled for the tidbits, but when there was no more left, they broke into a wild, furious cacophony that annoyed Brill even more. If they had actually been monkeys, he might have understood it, but these people were supposed to be humans, no matter what they looked like. When he could stand it no longer, Brill walked to the fence himself and addressed them.

  “Hey—that’s enough—see—all gone—no more—okay?” he said harshly.

  “Okay, okay,” they repeated, saying it over and over again until Brill began to get the impression he was being mocked.

  “All right—get out of here,” he scowled. “Go on—beat it!” He gestured down the rutted track toward the shack town.

  “Okay, okay, okay—Ahmercan, numba ten,” they cried frantically, still holding out their hands, obviously with no intentions of leaving.

  Brill stooped for a flat gray seashell at his feet and drew back with it in a threatening gesture. “GET OUT OF HERE, GODDAMN IT,” he roared.

  The monkey-men shrank back and their jabbering ceased. They stared at Brill with the shell still cocked in his hand and slowly began to retreat from the barbed wire, some of the older ones smiling apprehensively and the littler ones cringing in fright. They stopped about twenty feet away, still silent, bunched close together, and looked at Brill.

  Bravo Company had stopped talking also and was observing the scene with interest. None of them liked Brill particularly, but they were nervous on this hot Asian morning and the gibberish of the children made them more uncomfortable. The beach was bad, but they knew that what lay beyond it was probably going to be worse, and the general attitude was that they just wanted to be left alone.

  Brill glared menacingly at the monkey-men, but they stood their ground across a sort of no-man’s-land between themselves and the barbed wire and the men on the inside. The stalemate continued until Brill began to feel foolish, as he realized this could go on and on.

  He began to walk down the length of barbed wire, to get closer and force them to retreat even farther, and then the small naked one provided him an opportunity he secretly wanted. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” the tiny creature began again, and immediately Brill fired the seashell through the wire and began yelling and cursing them, hoping it would make them run.

  It did not. Instead, several of the older boys picked up some small stones and shells from the sandy road and began heaving them back across the wire. Brill scooped up shell bits and retaliated, still cursing furiously. When some of the monkey-men’s missiles began to strike incidentally near men from Bravo Company, they leaped up ferociously and began also to curse the children. In a few seconds a full-fledged rock fight broke out, with men running up from other places on the beach picking up handfuls of things to throw. As the little band of monkey-men began to retire under the barrage, Trunk, followed closely by Kahn—who had been working on getting some water out to the beach for the men—ran up to see what the commotion was.

  “All right, shitheads—knock it off!” Trunk bellowed, and the throwing ceased almost immediately. Then Trunk saw Brill, who had been unrecognizable in the midst of the battle, and who had also stopped throwing when Trunk and Kahn arrived.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant Brill, but just what’s going on here?” Trunk said. He turned to the men. “Whatdaya shitheads think you’re doing—huh?”

  “Never mind what they were doing, Sergeant Trunk—these men were helping me after those little bastards started rocking us.”

  “Lieutenant Brill, let me see you over here for a minute,” Kahn said. “Sergeant Trunk, quiet these men down—and get them away from that wire.”

  Trunk watched as Brill and Kahn walked down toward the beach; then he turned back on the men.

  “Get your dumb asses back there to where those packs are and sit the hell down—MOVE IT,” he bellowed.

  He grabbed the person nearest to him, who happened to be Madman Muntz, by the scruff of the neck and spun him around. “Can you tell me what the hell went on here?” Trunk said threateningly.

  “Them little gooks was throwing stones at us so we started to throw them back,” Muntz said weakly. “They started to throw them at Lieutenant Brill, anyway, and they was hitting us too,” he said.

  “Well let me tell you something, soldier,” Trunk said. “You don’t th
row no stones at kids—ever; do you hear that?—ever. The United States Army don’t throw rocks at children.”

  “Aw, Sarge, they was probably VC kids anyway,” Muntz said defensively. “They coulda had grenades or something.” The others agreed. “Yeah, Sarge, you heard about the kids throwing grenades over here, haven’t you? Spate’s brother got killed by a kid throwing a grenade—didn’t he, Spate?”

  “Shut your ass up,” Trunk said. He scowled at the men, who began to drift off slowly toward the beach. A few of them glanced over their shoulders at the now distant band of monkey-men, who were moving down the road toward another area of the compound. Others broke up into small groups and spent the rest of the hour convincing themselves that they had come very close to being grenaded.

  For nearly an hour, Holden and Major Dalkey, the senior general’s aide, had been trying to reach Brigade base camp to find out what they were supposed to do. Their instructions had been simply to go down and bring the convoy back, on the assumption they would get started early enough to arrive at Monkey Mountain before dark. But it was well into afternoon, and if they left now, nightfall would catch them somewhere along the road. Patch had removed his dark glasses and was pacing up and down the little Communications tent while Major Dalkey outlined the alternatives for him: they could either wait to leave until tomorrow—leave now and convoy straight through—or leave now and get as far as they could, then set up for the night somewhere along the way and continue at sunup.

  “You see, Colonel,” Dalkey said drily, “the country sort of changes hands after dark.”

  In a way, Patch wanted to make the decision himself. He was in charge of these men—all of them—until he turned them over to General Butterworth, and he felt a certain obligation to make choices such as this.