Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  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

  “You’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.

  But Holden hadn’t made up his mind yet about Kahn. He was a little put off by what he took for cockiness. He had learned Kahn was from the South and he suspected he was a Jew, and while the first enhanced his interest, the second diminished it just a bit—but that wasn’t what troubled him. It seemed that behind Kahn’s apparent cockiness there was a great deal of uncertainty, and it bugged Holden a little because it was a weakness of his own.

  “Last week, for instance,” the Graves Registration lieutenant continued, “we had to go into the Ia Drang after three guys from the Twenty-fifth Division who’d been there sixteen days. Boy, was that a mess . . .

  “They were at the bottom of a little ridge that had been taken by us and then taken back by the gooks and then taken back by us again. These guys got it when the gooks took it back the first time, and the gooks just shoveled some dirt over them after a while so they wouldn’t sme
ll . . .

  “Well, let me tell you, when they’ve been under for a while—I mean, that shallow—they fill up with gas and they just come up to the surface—a hand or a leg will just pop out, you know? That’s how we found them, but it took nearly four hours to find the last one . . .”

  From the distant mountains came a deep grumbling of artillery, and a thin tremor ran through the plank floor of the tent. Kahn looked up from his beer.

  “You gotta get used to that,” the Graves Registration lieutenant said. “Goes on all night.”

  Holden went to get them more beer. While he waited at the bar, he took out Becky’s letter and looked at it again. He had a sudden urge to put it to his nose to see if he could recognize her smell, but instead simply ran his fingers over her signature several times. After the convoy arrived, he had hunted down the mail clerk and persuaded him to open the mail tent. The letter was there, but it took him a long time to find it . . .

  “Oh, here you are, sir,” the mail clerk said. “It must have come in yesterday.”

  Holden thanked him, and as he was leaving, the mail clerk said, “I know how it is, sir; I got a girl at home too.” Holden made a mental note to do something nice for the mail clerk. Because of his job, the mail clerk was the most popular man in the Brigade.

  He went off alone to read it.

  The sun was low behind the mountains, and Holden found a knoll at the edge of the compound where he sat down and opened the letter carefully. The first thing he took out was a Time magazine photograph in which Becky, beautifully defiant, was featured with five or six others in front of an academic-looking building. In the background, a crowd of students held up antiwar signs.

  “Hi,love,” the letter said. “This is my latest photograph.”

  The accompanying clipping described a demonstration in Boston to protest military-type research being performed in various departments of the consortium of universities. Quoted prominently was a Dr. Richard Widenfield, who was described in the article as “the emerging leader of the growing antiwar movement.”

  He stared at the clipping a long time before reading the rest of the letter, anger and fear and jealousy and hatred welling up inside him. Widenfield again. It was always Widenfield somewhere, waiting in the wings. He resented him, resented him because he was there, and because he was older, damned near old enough to be her father—and because he had had her; but mostly, right now, because Widenfield was there and he was here and there was nothing he could do about it except maybe get himself shot up and sent home.

  At the table, the Graves Registration lieutenant was still holding forth:

  “Did you know it takes four men to carry one remains? You’d think it would only take two, but it takes four—especially because of the jungle and underbrush.”

  The Graves Registration lieutenant’s face was white and long, the kind of face that never tans, and his thin blond hair was receding at the temples. Kahn asked him what happened if they got shot at while they were doing their work.

  “You drop him right there and hit the dirt,” the Graves Registration lieutenant replied cheerily. He seemed pleased he’d been asked the question.

  “Now, that isn’t the school solution, but I don’t want any of my men killed. And he’s already dead—what does it matter to him?”

  Holden suddenly wanted to read the letter again; to study it closely; weigh it against the implications of the photograph and clipping; search it for any sign she might be involved with Widenfield again. Why had she sent it? The uncertainty was maddening. Even though they’d tried one weekend before he left, they hadn’t really resolved it to his satisfaction.

  It had been the Fourth of July, two weeks before he shipped out, and he had invited Becky to his parents’ summer home near Southampton, Long Island. They sneaked away early from a big fireworks beach party and walked down a dark, sandy lane until they found their car. She touched him and kissed him, and during the ride back she had slowly taken off her clothes and begun taking off his, and they had driven the last five miles completely naked, laughing drunkenly and hysterically through several historic villages where Holden was mildly concerned that if a local policeman should stop them for something they would be thrown into jail forever.

  They pulled the car close behind the guest cottage where Becky was staying and dashed madly for the bedroom, where they spent the next hour doing practically every imaginable erotic act. They did things Holden had never dreamed he would do, could never have pictured himself doing and would have felt extremely uncomfortable doing—except with her.

  She was a good, dirty woman.

  Afterward, he made them tall glasses of daiquiris, which they took back to bed, lying on top of the sheets. Through the French doors they were bathed in light from the silver moon that hung over the dunes and the flat potato fields which stretched from the ocean to the edge of the lawn.

  It had come up again when he had asked if she was coming to North Carolina the next weekend.

  “Oh, baby, I can’t—Richard’s called a meeting in New York to plan what we’re going to do in the fall. They’re counting on me—I just have to be there,” she said.

  Holden got up and put on his pants and went into the small living room. She came in after a while, wearing a terry-cloth robe, and sat on the sofa across from him, her legs tucked beneath her.

  “Frank,” she said finally, “we’re going to have to do something about this.”

  “You bet we are!” He said it as though he had a mouth full of ashes.

  “I’m not doing this against you—any more than you’re doing what you’re doing against me,” she said. “We both have to do what we think is right.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said. “If you want to make a fool of yourself with this protesting business, it’s okay by me. But I don’t like it worth a damn that you’re fooling around with Widenfield. I mean, how do you think it makes me feel?”

  “Look,” Becky said sharply, “he’s a very important person in the movement—maybe the most important. Every day there are people—you’d be surprised who they are: politicians, and writers and actors—who phone up or write to ask him how they can help. You really would be surprised . . .”

  “I’ll bet. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m saying. I’m saying I don’t like him trying to get into your pants, that’s what I’m saying.”

  She went to the bar to get a drink.

  “You know that Richard and I felt a lot for each other at one time—I’ve told you about that. And he knows about you and he understands and he isn’t always running you down like you do him. As a matter of fact, he asks about you sometimes—in a nice way. He wants to stop this war before you have to go over there and get yourself hurt,” she said.

  “You’re still sleeping with him, aren’t you?” he demanded.

  “That’s really not any of your business, Frank Holden.” There was anger in her eyes—the first he’d seen since their time in the mountains.

  “If you want to believe it, then do. I might as well say this, too: My sex life is my business. If you want me to say my sex life is going to stop while you go over there, I’m not going to. I don’t know. I like sex too. With you it’s been different, you know that; but you might just as well know right now I’m not making any promises. I’m going to be completely honest about it. I’ve said I love you and that’s all that ought to matter.

  “Listen,” she said after a silence, “I’m going to take a walk on the beach.”

  He didn’t wait for her to dress. He stormed out to the car and took off down the road at high speed, back toward the big fireworks beach party, where he intended to get very, very drunk and, if possible, get laid.

  “You wouldn’t believe the paperwork it takes to process a remains,” the Grave Registration lieutenant said. “That’s probably the worst part of the whole thing . . . The smell of the dead isn’t as bad as most people think . . .” He looked as if he were getting a little drunk
, and Kahn thought his tone was slightly apologetic.

  “It’s just a job,” the Graves Registration lieutenant said. “Somebody’s got to do it . . .

  “The thing about it is, you gotta take it seriously—it’s all a matter of respect.” His long face grew suddenly serious.

  “You know, when we went out there to get those guys from the Twenty-fifth Division, a wiseass I’ve got working for me installed a sign over my morgue that said ‘Three two eight GR Company—We always get our man.’ Jesus! You never heard grief like I got when we came back. The G-Three saw it and came down and chewed my ass for half an hour. He says, ‘What do you think this is, McCrary, a joke? Would you find it more amusing to spend a couple of weeks as point man out there?’ It took some fast talk to convince him I didn’t have anything to do with that damned sign.” The Graves Registration lieutenant went to the bar for another round of beer.

  “I’d hate to have his job, wouldn’t you?” Kahn said to Holden, who was looking despondent.

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure I’d want yours either,” Holden said.

  His mind was still far away, wondering what she was doing tonight, or this morning, by her time, and if she was thinking about him, if she was with Widenfield, twelve thousand miles away—the difference between night and day. He wanted desperately to talk to her now, to tell her he loved her, to hear her say it to him, even though he might not believe it—not that she told him lies, but he felt she was keeping something from him.

  But he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Because he was up to his neck in this now. There was no quitting, and no turning back and no place to hide. Secretly, although he would never openly admit it to himself, he wished Widenfield had been successful and that the war had ended and that he hadn’t had to come here.

  “You know the bad thing about this job?” the Graves Registration lieutenant said. He took a long swallow of beer and peered at them through watery eyes.