Better Times Than These (9 page)

They had spaghetti and meatballs with mushrooms and a bottle of red wine by candlelight, and talked about the university and the football team, which might win the conference championship if it got past Notre Dame, and the freshman poetry class where they’d met . . . but after a while Julie grew quiet and began to stare out at the empty motel pool. He sensed what was wrong, because they had been through this before, but he knew she wouldn’t let it out unless he brought it up, so he did.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she said, “but I’m . . . I’m so afraid . . . I love you so much,” she said, looking down into the half-eaten plate of spaghetti as though she were ashamed of herself for saying it.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, taking her hand again. “It’ll only be for a year, you know; then I’m out, for good. I’ll go back and finish school, and we—”

“Oh, damn it,” Julie said, and burst into tears.

“It’s all right, baby,” he said. “It’s all right, hear?”

“Can’t your father do anything?” She tried to compose herself.

“What do you mean—about what?”

“I mean about getting you out of it. He’s a Congressman; he must—”

“Julie, nobody knows about that down here—and I don’t want them to, okay?”

“But you could get hurt, don’t you know that? You could . . . Oh, damn it,” she said, and the tears began again. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked after a while.

“No,” he said.

It was a bald-faced lie.

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean you haven’t told anybody who your father is? They don’t even know? Why, they could put you back in the headquarters or something, where it’s safer . . .”

“I just don’t want anybody to know, darling—nobody. Do you understand?

“Look, you met my old man. You know how he is. Do you know he even locks the refrigerator when I go home?”

“Locks the . . . What do you mean?” she said, drying her eyes with the napkin.

“I mean he locks it up at night so I can’t get in it and eat anything or drink beer—and he locks the door to the house when he goes to bed and he won’t let me have a key.”

“A lock on the refrigerator . . . but why?” She started to laugh.

“Well, he thinks I eat too much—says I get enough at dinner; so he put this goddamned lock on the icebox—he locks it before he goes to bed.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said, bursting into laughter. “A lock on the refrigerator—I’ve never heard . . .”

“It’s true,” he said, laughing too, and for the next several minutes they sat there laughing crazily about a lock on a refrigerator four hundred miles away.

At 1
A.M.
he had taken her back to Mrs. Jordan’s, just before she locked the doors (proper girls don’t stay out past 1
A.M.
—that was the rule she had laid down). But he was feeling good, and the wine they had had for dinner hit him hard because he wasn’t used to it.

When he arrived at the barracks, there was some sort of party going on out in the parking lot. A dozen or so men were sitting on parked cars or on the ground, drinking beer from several cases iced down in their cardboard cartons. In the middle of this group stood Lieutenants Sharkey and Donovan, both in khakis but stripped to their waists. Sharkey was telling a story, and he interrupted it only long enough to motion Spudhead to the beer cache.

“. . . So old Donovan here,” Sharkey said, “runs into the goddamn Eighty-second Airborne club, you see—where nobody knows who he is . . . and the goddamn assholes are lying all over the tables drunker’n goats, right?” There was a chorus of anticipatory laughter. Spudhead opened a beer.

“. . . And as soon as Donovan hits the door he yells loud as he can,
‘When I drink, everybody drinks!’
and every asshole in the place runs up to the bar and starts ordering drinks, right?”

Spudhead sat down next to Crump and DiGeorgio, who were enjoying themselves immensely.

“. . . And Donovan, he orders a drink for himself right off, and drinks it down in a gulp, see, and when he’s through, he stands back and yells,
‘When I pay, everybody pays!’
and he throws a buck on the floor and runs out the door—and they’re
still looking for him!”
Sharkey was bent over almost double laughing, and there were tears in his eyes. He grabbed Donovan by the shoulder and clanked beer cans with him, and both officers drank deeply, and laughed until they fell down.

This went on for another hour. First Sharkey, then Donovan would recount some escapade, about boxing at West Point or football at Notre Dame, about seducing girls on golf courses or living-room couches while their parents slept a few feet away. From Crump and DiGeorgio, Spudhead had learned that the two officers had roared into the barracks several hours earlier and rousted out everyone still there. They had formed them up in the Company street and marched them to the parking lot, where the beer was waiting.

At last the beer and the stories petered out and the officers went on their way. Crump, DiGeorgio and Spudhead made their way with the others back to the barracks, Crump and DiGeorgio singing, Spudhead lingering a little behind. Finally Spudhead sat down on a curb and put his head in his hands. It was a few minutes before Crump and DiGeorgio came back and discovered him there, crying softly.

“Hey, what’s this?—hey,” Crump said. “Hey, what’s wrong, man, you drunk?”

“He’s fuckin’ stinkin’—lookit him,” DiGeorgio said, laughing madly.

“Whataya fuckin’ crying about,” Crump asked. “Yer girl fuck you over?”

“Nah, nah, just let me be a while . . .” Spudhead wiped his eyes, looking beyond the dim street lights to the darkened parade ground where they’d spent so many hours in close-order drills and bayonet practice and calisthenics and picking up every scrap of paper and cigarette butt on police detail . . .

“Hey, say what’s wrong, man,” Crump said, squatting down in front of Spudhead. “We buddies, ain’t we?”

“It’s nothing, Crump . . . It’s just . . .” He stopped. “I love her so much, and . . .”

“And what—what in hell is it?” DiGeorgio said.

“Oh, damn, I don’t know,” Spudhead said. “It’s . . . I don’t have any more money . . . I wanted to take her to breakfast, you know, and buy her lunch before she has to go back tomorrow, and . . . I bought that goddamned harmonica, and the dinner cost twelve bucks, and . . .”

“Well, hell, man,” Crump said, “why didn’t you say so? We got some money left, haven’t we, Dee-Gergio? We got maybe twenty, thirty bucks between us—that’ll get you through sure.”

“No, no, thanks, I don’t—”

“Forchrissakes, Spudhead, don’t be an asshole—we’ll just lend it to ya till payday,” DiGeorgio said.

“O Goddamn-shit-fuck! . . . Oh, I’m sorry, you guys . . . I don’t want to . . . I don’t know . . . I just don’t want to go now . . . I want to stay here and get married and go back to school and . . . Fuck the Army . . . FUCK THE ARMY!—I don’t care a shit about the Army—and fuck this war, and—”

“Hey, cool it, man, you gonna wake everybody in the Company up,” DiGeorgio said.

“Look here,” Crump said, “nobody wants to go over to that thing, but what the hell else we gonna do, huh? We in the damned United States Army, man—we in it now.” He stuffed two ten-dollar bills into Spudhead’s shirt pocket.

“Come on, now, Spudhead, let’s go to bed ’fore we get ol’ Trunk up chewin’ our asses,” Crump said.

They helped him to his feet, taking him by the elbows and putting their arms around his shoulders.

“Come on, now, Spudhead, that’s a boy,” Crump said. “Everything’s gonna look better in the morning.”

“Yeah, Spudhead, we gotta war we gonna fight—we need our sleep if we gonna kill gooks,” DiGeorgio said.

The transport shift buzzer startled Spudhead out of a half-sleep, and he foggily swung his feet onto the bare metal floor. The harmonica was still in his hand, and he opened his duffel bag and carefully stowed it away. All around him people were stirring, preparing to take their turns up on deck. He thought of Julie and of his father and mother, and wondered what they were doing and if they were thinking of him. He felt a little nauseated, but it wasn’t from seasickness; he had felt that way ever since he learned they were going over. He hurried to lace on his boots and get topside. The sea air had been good for the nausea, and this afternoon he might see more dolphins, or a whale.

10

I
n separate auditoriums aboard the transport, two briefings were taking place.

They had been gone five days, and by now most of the men had become more or less acclimated to life at sea. The first wave of seasickness had disappeared by this time, and only those hardest hit, like Captain Thurlo, were still in misery; the rest, while they did not feel particularly good when the ship plowed through an unanticipated series of heavy swells, were able at least to function. The days had broken down to a boring but predictable regimen: in the mornings, they would eat chow—which rather than improving had become appreciably worse; there was an hour of calisthenics and laps around the deck; then each company gathered together for instruction: drilling in small-arms assembly, how to avoid getting tropical infections, how to behave toward the South Vietnamese people and how to use the PRC—“prick”—25 radio, over and again until even the dullards and sluggards knew that further repetition was senseless because they had heard it all before.

Whenever these classes ended, the line for the ship’s store began forming. As each company was dismissed, at least a third of its number sprinted for the line, or where they thought it was, since they never knew until they saw it how long it would be. Sometimes it was several city blocks long, coiling around the deck like a giant python—hundreds of men in single file, waiting their turn at the tiny counter where they could buy chewing gum and camera film and toilet goods and other little items to make life more bearable. Most precious among these were the candy bars and cigarettes—the cigarettes because men could not live without them, and the candy bars because they could not live with the Navy chow.

The enlisted men were restricted as to how much they could buy at the ship’s store at a given time, while officers and senior noncoms had no such quota. As it developed, this quota usually lasted for about two days, after which each man would have to return to the line for more. Since the ship’s store was usually open only for half an hour in the early morning and at noon, most of the men in the line did not actually get to buy anything, but they waited there anyway—partly because the sailors who ran the store would sometimes keep it open longer than usual, and partly because they didn’t have anything better to do.

This day, however, was different, because whereas before their afternoons had been free, today’s briefing had been called in the ship’s movie theater—or, more precisely, three assemblies had been called, so as to accommodate all of the men. A briefing was also scheduled for officers in the dining room, and even they had not been told the nature of it but only that they should present themselves with a pencil and pad and be seated by 1400 hours.

The room fell silent when Colonel Patch entered, a thin cigar smoldering between his teeth.

“Gentlemen,” he said, holding up a sheaf of papers that had already been passed out to each officer, “our work has been cut out for us.”

At a back table by the dining-hall door, Billy Kahn and his platoon leaders—Sharkey of First, Brill of Second, Donovan of Third and Inge of Weapons—were shuffling through the document, which was titled

I
NTELLIGENCE
S
UMMARY
R
EPUBLIC OF
V
IETNAM
THE IA DRANG VALLEY CAMPAIGN
A
CTIONS IN
II C
ORPS
, A
PRIL
-J
UNE
, 1966

and on which each page was stamped SECRET in bold red print.

“The shit’s hit the fan,” Sharkey whispered, saying what Kahn and most of the rest were privately thinking, because everybody knew you could get your ass handed to you in the Ia Drang in a hurry. They had known it all the way back at Fort Bragg as the first trickle of men returned from the vanguard of the first wave.

“This is the place—it’s the goddamned
place!”
Sharkey was saying under his breath, jabbing a stubby finger at the title sheet. “Ohhh, we’re up against it now.”

Going through Kahn’s head was something one of the newly returned men—a fat, moustachioed helicopter pilot—had said one night in the officers’ club at Bragg:

“Ia Drang—yep, that’s a bad, badass place.

“We went in there one afternoon and I never seen such shit thrown at us, from both sides of the mountains and below. You get the River Blindness out there—that’s what you get in the Ia Drang Valley.”

When they inquired what the River Blindness was, the fat lieutenant had leaned forward somberly and said almost in a whisper across a table full of beer bottles, “It’s when you go down to the river and get your
eyes
shot out,” and then had broken into a crazy savage chuckle, in which he was quickly—if nervously—joined by the other lieutenants who had been listening eagerly to his stories.