Better Times Than These

by Winston Groom

  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

  On 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 an
swer 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

  In 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.

  “Stand by a bunk,” Trunk roared, and again there was a great milling around as everyone pressed to find a bed. When it became apparent that there were not nearly enough bunks to go around, the noise and the cursing grew louder as men who were left out scrambled up one aisle and down the next, hoping to find a niche of their own.

  Trunk let this continue for a few minutes before he quieted them down again so he could say what he had known secretly since they had left the sand hills of North Carolina: that in fact there weren’t going to be enough bunks for each man to have his own, because Division wanted the whole Brigade to arrive at once, and since there wasn’t another transport available, these twenty-one hundred men were going to have to go over on a ship built to carry only fifteen hundred of them.

  “All right, shitheads, now you see what the problem is,” Trunk said, measuring his words slowly.

  “Don’t fret, girls,” Trunk said sweetly, his picket teeth gleaming in a Cheshire Cat grin, “everybody’s gonna get to sleep on this here little sail—you’re just gonna have to do it different times.” He explained how the rotation of sleeping shifts would work—one third of the men would have to be up on deck at all times. There was a predictable chorus of groans.

  “Knock it off, shitheads,” Trunk bellowed. “You’ll get used to it. Now, anybody without a bunk find one to share and stop bitchin’ like a bunch of goddamned women. This is just a little pleasure cruise, compared with what you’re in for when we get over there.”

  Slowly, the ones without bunks carried their gear to a bunk that was already occupied. This exercise took somewhat longer than it might have as the left-out men searched the faces of those already with a bunk for any sign of receptiveness and the ones who had already claimed bunks tried their best, without actually saying or doing anything outright, to look as unreceptive as they could.

  By 3 P.M., the sun had burned off the remaining haze. The day had turned brilliant California blue, and a perky breeze had sprung up off the ocean. Most of the men were lounging outside on the cargo deck when the first tremor from the big engines shivered through the steel frame of the ship.

  DiGeorgio and Crump were leaning against the rail talking to Pfc. Spudhead Miter when they saw the cloud of dirty smoke belch from the forward stack. Moments later a similar cloud flew out of the stack behind it, blowing a gigantic smoke ring skyward.

  “Here we go,” Crump said, peeling a tangerine and looking helplessly down at the Navy dockhands casting off the thick braided mooring lines. “Here we go.”

  DiGeorgio’s beady little eyes danced wildly, looking up and down at Crump’s skinny frame slouched against the rail.

  “Goddamned right we do, you dumb ape. Whatja expect, they’d change their minds the last fuckin’ minute? You thought Trunk’s gonna come running out here and say, ‘Okay, shitheads, this here’s just a drill’? Jesus, Crump, you’re brilliant—fuckin’ brilliant!”

  “Why don’t you shut your mouth up, Dee-Gergio?” Crump said, hawking up a wad of phlegm and blowing it out with his tongue so that it arched in mortarlike trajectory into the boiling water in the fast-widening gap between ship and pier.

  Spudhead Miter’s big potato-shaped head followed Crump’s expectoration until it hit the water, and he gazed down for a while at the spot where the spittle had landed. None of them spoke as the ship shuddered under the strain of 28,000 horsepower, but each felt his own strong sensation. Finally Spudhead jammed his hands into his pockets and said with authority, “We’re really in the dogfuck now.”

  5

  First Lieutenant Billy Kahn, Bravo Company’s Executive Officer, was stowing away the last of eight precious bottles of Cutty Sark he had smuggled into his duffel bag in North Carolina after learning that the Navy didn’t allow whiskey drinki
ng on its ships at sea. When the engine tremor reached his cabin, Kahn stopped for a moment and for no reason he could think of glanced at his watch—it was 3:10 P.M.—then finished tucking the bottle gently in with the rest, cushioning it among a dozen or so pairs of olive-drab underwear so that it wouldn’t break if the ship started to rock or pound. When he finished, he stepped over to the small porthole next to the bunks to watch the ship pulling away from the pier, and wondered why the Navy wouldn’t let people drink on their goddamned old scow. So what if the men got drunked up a few times? So what if they got into a few fights? What was it going to hurt? What’d they expect—their damned ship was going to be torn up by drunks?

  Just then the cabin door was flung open and a fireplug-shaped figure with a nose that resembled a summer squash mashed between two wide-opened Jerry Colonna eyes stomped in.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” the figure bawled, slinging its fatigue cap with a gold second lieutenant’s bar onto a pile of gear already lying on the bottom bunk. The epithets continued to fill the air like a fog.

  “What’s your problem, Sharkey?” Kahn said nonchalantly, his back still toward the figure, which was now standing squarely in the center of the cabin, meaty hands jammed on its hips.

  “Guess what,” the figure demanded violently.

  “What?”

  “Kennemer’s going around with a list from the Old Man. It’s the duty.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Guess what.”

  “Damn, Sharkey, I don’t know. What?”

  “Guess what I am for the next month.”

  “How the hell should I know? Tell me.”

  “The goddamned Laundry Officer.”

  “You’re what?” Kahn said, the beginnings of a snicker welling up from his stomach and spreading along his high cheekbones into a grin.

  “Laundry—fuckin’ Laundry! Two thousand goddamn grunts gotta have their laundry done and Patch’s put my ass in charge of it.”