Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  Holden fought to keep down a burble of hot stomach fluid that was rising in his throat like mercury. Even in the midst of fifty heavily armed men he felt very much alone. Not scared, but alone. At least, not scared in any way he had known before. Maybe he was too frightened to be scared. Maybe he wasn’t scared at all—who knew? Who cared? The line of trees danced and shimmered in the sun, and her face appeared as it had been doing, on and off, all morning. He had come all the way out here to take his medicine, but she followed him anyway—her face. Her body . . .

  It was not always unpleasant. Sometimes when he pictured her he remembered the good times they had had, and he would forget that she had decided to go with Widenfield. But sooner or later that fact returned. He saw her hanging on to Widenfield, having breakfast with him, lying beside the fire with him. The one thing he never allowed himself to imagine was her actually screwing him. Frequently he would see her face—hair spread out, tossing her head from side to side, eyes open to tiny slits, her tongue flickering out of her mouth; big breasts heaving, her nipples stiff and wonderful, passionate sounds coming from her mouth, her legs curled up around . . . HIM!—not Widenfield, but him—and that was the way he always remembered it. Him and not Widenfield. If only he could get to her right now, he thought, to tell her . . . he knew he could put it right! He had written so many letters, but sent none of them . . .

  Maybe Kahn was right. Maybe he should just write her off as tough shit and think about other things—like joining the Far East Phosphate Company—and stop worrying about love and marriage and getting locked into an office job and a house in Scarsdale—solemn thoughts anyway, when you were twenty-four years old. He scanned the fanned-out sweating men ahead, and suddenly it occurred to him that if an army could be conscripted of no one but jilted men, there wouldn’t be a force on earth that could beat them, because they would be the meanest sonsofbitches in the world.

  It started up ahead—a ferocious tearing sound all around, and ripping, whizzing noises in the air. As he dropped to his knees looking for a place to hide, Holden caught a glimpse of a man falling ahead. A bullet had caught him in front and spun him completely around. He seemed to hang in the air for a moment before crashing down. His eyes were shut, and his mouth was a great black hole, but no sound had come from it—at least, no sound that could be heard. His rifle preceded him to the ground, and his elbows were drawn in to his sides and elevated high in the air as though he had been caught in the middle of a chin-up.

  Holden slithered over to a hummock, which turned out to be an anthill, and hid there wondering what to do next. All worries of love and rejection had vanished. His world was suddenly reduced to minuscule proportions no broader than the distance between nose and dirt. Around him a zillion insects scampered here and there, the peace of their day disturbed by the transactions of men at war. So far as he could tell, nobody on either side of him was doing anything more than he was. The air above his head was filled with deadly projectiles, and there was nothing to do but hang on, which he did for what seemed like a long time but was actually only a minute or so. During that period he was in a good position to observe the frantic comings and goings of the ant colony, of which he was now practically a part—as were the others, pressed to the ground with the ants and other crawling things. They had become—Holden thought mirthlessly—a company of ant-men, who by definition had very low horizons.

  “Horse Two, Horse Two, what is your location?”

  Holden suddenly realized that the violent tugging at his sleeve was the RTO, who had jammed the handset into his face. It carried the voice of Kahn.

  “Horse One, this is Horse Two,” Holden said back into the device.

  “Horse Two, what is your location? Over.” Kahn sounded very businesslike.

  “Uh. I’m, ah, behind an anthill.” He knew that sounded dumb as soon as the words left his mouth.

  “Horse Two, can you see me? Over,” Kahn said, ignoring the remark.

  “Negative, Horse One. I am pinned down here—I can’t tell where from yet—I think it’s coming from the tree line.”

  “Well, it’s coming from all around us up here,” Kahn replied gruffly. “Can you move two squads to my right toward the tree line and lay down some fire?—We have to get the hell out of here.” Holden thought Kahn sounded remarkably calm for someone in his predicament. He sounded almost as if he were falling asleep, which was frustrating for Holden and almost made him mad.

  “Ah, roger, Horse One, wait one.” Holden extended the handset back to the RTO, who was flattened down beside him. He hadn’t stuck his head up since the first shots were fired, and since he was an officer his job was to do exactly that.

  Cautiously he peeked above the anthill and looked around, but could see nothing except grass. Pulling his knees under him, he rose behind the anthill as far as he could, then sprang upward like a jumping jack, took two quick looks around and threw himself to the earth again, motioning for the radio.

  He caught a glimpse of Kahn’s men lying maybe fifty yards ahead, deep inside the end of the horseshoe-shaped clearing. He had seen no enemy, but they were obviously firing from the line of trees, which extended in front and on both sides of the spot where Kahn was, and Holden figured that if they weren’t in it all the way back here, he could probably get to within twenty yards of Kahn . . . maybe closer . . . without being spotted.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “No ‘I think sos’!” Kahn barked. “You’ll have to do it. Try to move straight to the tree line and then come forward about thirty meters. Really pour it on them—and shake it up; I’ve got to pull back quick.”

  Holden crawled off to the left, where he remembered a couple of squads had disappeared when the shooting started. He came on three men lying in a little indentation beside the unassembled components of a mortar. Lying on his belly, Holden addressed them from about five yards away: “I need you people. Get the rest of your squad and follow me. We have to move up.”

  “Sir,” came a muffled response, “that’s way too close. We couldn’t do no more good there with mortars than we could here.”

  “I don’t care about mortars; I need a fire team,” Holden said loudly.

  The three men looked at each other darkly. “Sir,” one of them said, “we’re the mortar squad; what are we gonna do with the mortars? We can’t take ’em with us.”

  “Screw it—leave ’em here,” Holden said. He was beginning to feel panicky. A bullet kicked up dust behind him.

  The man who had spoken looked at him as though he had just been told to take a flying leap off a high place. “Lieutenant, we can’t leave ’em here—these are the mortars . . .”

  Holden glared at the man, suddenly realizing he was right and trying to figure out what to do next. The RTO solved the problem by handing him the handset.

  “Jesus God, where are you?” Kahn screamed. “We’re being penetrated up here!”

  “With the mortar squad,” Holden shouted back. His face felt flushed and tingled. Again he had said the wrong thing. A longer explanation was required.

  “For chrissake, we can’t . . .” There was a lull as Kahn’s voice trailed off. The sound of a heavy machine gun came from the trees and there were several explosions. Holden rose on his elbows and tried to see what was going on, but his view was limited to the tops of the grass and the white, sickly sky. Ant-men, he thought.

  Kahn came back on the radio. “Okay, forget it—we’ve got to pull back right now. Get everybody you can to pour it on that tree line ahead of us—and keep it a little high—but everything they’ve got—and forget about mortars—got it?”

  “Roger,” Holden said, and took off on his belly to give The Word.

  In less than a minute they came pouring back, some crawling, some flat on their stomachs, some loping apelike. The covering fire Holden had instigated was doing its job. Panting, bug-eyed, dragging his rifle behind him, Kahn collapsed behind the indentation in the ground and lay on his back, trying to catch his breath.r />
  “Air strike coming,” he said between gasps. “Let’s get our asses back across the damned river.” He looked at Holden’s grime-covered face and grinned. “How ya like the Real Army, Princeton?”

  “I’d rather be digging phosphate,” Holden croaked.

  The mortar squad, the officer of Topographical Services and assorted other elements were sent to ford the river and set up a defensive position on the other side. The plan was that the rest would shoot like crazy and then the jets would swoop down and blast the line of trees and they could retire. It was the standard school solution—except that the North Vietnamese had thoughtfully sent some people around to flank the riverbank ahead of them. Kahn realized what had happened the instant he heard firing from behind and was already working on a new plan when a terrified red-haired private with a blood-soaked ankle collapsed into the Headquarters party with news that the enemy had not only flanked them, but were on the other side of the river, and in force. The River Blindness again, Kahn thought, and then the jets began to scream overhead.

  Kahn was talking over the radio with a forward air controller cruising somewhere overhead when he saw the North Vietnamese moving toward them out of the tree line.

  Everyone else saw them at about the same time, and there was a rising crackle of rifle fire. About twenty yards ahead, a man stood up and hurled a grenade at the advancing force. In mid-throw he was hit by one or more bullets and flew backward through the air as though he had been struck in the face with a bat. Everyone in the Headquarters party saw this. Judging the instantaneous strike of the bullet, it was probable that the shot had not actually been aimed at the man, but that by some stroke of bad luck he had simply risen up into it. In either case, he was now sprawled on the ground—whether wounded or dead no one knew.

  Meanwhile, the two machine guns attached to the Crazy Horse Patrol had come to life and temporarily stalled the enemy attack. Kahn was craning over the top of the indentation when he saw a soldier rushing toward the spot where the hapless grenadier had fallen.

  It was Carruthers, the giant Negro from Savannah—recognizable by his huge form; out of some unfathomable impulse he had gone to aid the wounded, or dead, man. He got to within five yards of him when he was sent reeling sideways by a burst of automatic-weapons fire. “Lookit that dumb nigger,” Bateson, the RTO, said. “He’s gonna get his ass wasted.” Still on his feet, Carruthers resumed course and was struck a second time and knocked flat on his butt. He sat staring for a moment before staggering to his feet and continuing toward the fallen man. A third burst of fire caught him in the chest, virtually lifting the huge body off the ground, and this time he did not get up. “Aw, shit,” said Bateson. He said it for all of them.

  “Red smoke,” Kahn said into the handset, and received some kind of acknowledgment from the air controller above. The plume of red smoke was already rising above the trees, but things had changed since he had ordered it fired.

  “Hang on a minute, Skyking,” he said. He craned out toward the spot where the North Vietnamese had vanished into some tall grass, just ahead of where Carruthers and the man who threw the grenade had gone down. Kahn could see nothing. For an instant he thought about the old, dilapidated row of houses in Savannah where Carruthers had grown up. He had known those old houses down on Broad Street, only a block or so from his father’s junkyard, all of them long gone now, replaced by empty lots—and Carruthers; he wondered if he had ever seen him playing around there. Sometimes he used to go down to the salvage yard and wait for his father and sometimes watch the Negro children playing in the street, but he was not allowed to play with them . . . “Dumb nigger” was what Bateson had said . . . “Aw, shit” was right . . .

  “He can’t stay up there all day, Horse One,” the air controller said. “Gotta go home, chop-chop.”

  “Like hell he will!” Kahn thundered. “I’ve got a real situation down here and I need support—you hang on.”

  “Negative, Horse One,” the pilot of the control plane said. “My boy’s gotta feed his bird or down he goes—crash and burn.”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” Kahn roared. “You get me another one up here on the double, then. I’m fighting for my ass down here.”

  “Listen, buster”—the voice from the sky was cool and deliberate—“this is Lieutenant Colonel Stonebreaker. I assume you are captain somebody, so just keep your shirt on; I’m doing everything I can.”

  Kahn was looking out toward where the bunch of North Vietnamese had disappeared into the grass. He caught a glimpse of half a dozen more of them running in a crouch around to his left. Others spotted them too, and there was a flurry of rifle fire.

  “I don’t care who you are,” Kahn snapped coolly into the handset. “If you don’t get me a plane up there I’m not going to have any shirt left to keep on. Do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Horse One,” the airman replied. Someone handed Kahn the handset from the other radio. “It’s the Old Man, sir,” the someone said.

  “I’ve got some gunships and a Medevac on the way and we’re rounding up an assault force. Can you hang on?” Patch said.

  “I’m not sure,” Kahn replied. “All I can tell now is that we’re straddled on three flanks and maybe four, and I’ve got Charlies damned near close enough to spit at. Only thing they haven’t done yet is mortar us, and I expect that’s next.”

  “Gunships’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes. I think we can get you reinforcements in half an hour or so. Do what you can.”

  Kahn acknowledged the transmission and put the handset back. Another fierce burst of firing broke out in the direction where the line of North Vietnamese disappeared into the grass, and there was periodic firing all around. It didn’t look good, but they were a tough bunch of boys, these boys of his.

  For the next five minutes they sweated it out. The occasional firing continued, but by and large both forces simply lay hugging ground, warily, each waiting for the other to make a move. It came soon enough when the North Vietnamese decided to close the ring.

  Kahn couldn’t get his mind off Carruthers’ gallant impulse to reach the injured grenade thrower. Out of what reasoning had he decided to do it? Hit three times—three times—and kept on going . . . was it out of love for the man? Or that he didn’t think he was going to get hurt? Or just reckless bravado? . . . He scanned the field beyond the spot where Carruthers had fallen. Nothing stirred, not even the faintest wind. No, it was none of those. It was something else Carruthers must have felt, something Kahn himself felt at times, had felt first during the counterattack in the Boo Hoo Forest and was feeling now, too. It was a crazy kind of insanity that swells in the brain—and must have swelled in Carruthers’ brain, now freshly spilled on the dirt ahead—a short-circuiting of the instinctive kernel of self-preservation by an impulse which convinces an otherwise sane man that he is already dead, so nothing matters anymore and he can operate in a fear-free little world of his own. It was not a bad feeling, this feeling, for it eclipsed the awful fear, and some men were so glad to be rid of it that they would do foolhardy things just to prove it wasn’t there anymore.

  Naturally, no one would explain this to Carruthers’ mother when they gave the medal to her. The citation would read: “For an act of valor in that he, blah, blah, blah . . .” or some such as that. Kahn would have to write it himself, and some clerk-typist back at Headquarters would put the finishing touches on it, standardize the language, condense it into a paragraph or two, requisition the medal and forward the whole business through channels in sextuplicate so that there would be a copy for everybody’s file—Battalion’s, Brigade’s, Division’s, Department of the Army’s back in Washington, Carruthers’ own 201 file and finally one for his mother down in Savannah, and that would be the end of that—a neat little salutation for the dumb nigger so his mother and brothers and sisters would have something to show people when they came around to convey their respects.

  Three successive explosions announced the enemy assault, and th
e air cracked and sang with skimming bullets. It was an act of madness to raise one’s head more than a few inches from the ground, but Kahn chanced a look. Just then he saw three North Vietnamese in bluish-green uniforms get up and start running toward the outer line of their defensive perimeter. Each carried something in his hand—a large brownish object—and Kahn watched them for four or five seconds, bobbing his head up and down to present a less favorable target; reason told him this gesture was futile, but it made him feel safer to do it. The first of the North Vietnamese men was hit by a bullet and spun down into the grass. The two others hurled their objects toward the line, and a single explosion followed. Off to the right other North Vietnamese were running too, some forward and some down toward the river. Everyone was shooting like a madman.

  “Green Smoke! Green Smoke! Do you roger?” Kahn shouted into the handset.

  “I roger, Horse One,” the air controller said. “Target is Green Smoke.”

  “White Smoke is me,” Kahn said loudly. “I say again, White Smoke is me!”

  “Roger that,” the controller droned. “White Smoke is you.”

  Moments later he was back on the line, sounding perplexed.

  “Horse One, this is Skyking—do you read?”

  “Go ahead, Skyking.” Kahn had been trying to dig a hole with his feet and the butt of his rifle so as to hunker down a little more. Lord, let this work, he thought.

  “Your smoke is all mixed together, Horse One. Can you give me visual from your location? Over.”

  “I know it’s mixed, goddamn it!” Kahn growled. “They’re all in here with us. Just try to keep him to the outside edge of the white.”

  There was a pause on the other end.

  “Wilco, Horse One,” the controller said. “I hope you know what you’re doing. He’s going to be coming in pretty fast . . .”