Better Times Than These

  “And get that thing out of here,” Patch said crossly. “It belongs in a zoo.” He stormed out of the tent, and as they watched him go down toward the chow hall they could catch an occasional loud expletive and see him shaking his fist at the Sergeant Major.

  The letters came the same week—the one from Julie and the one from Spudhead’s father—and they had a profound effect on Spudhead’s morale, which up until now had been no better, or worse, than anyone else’s.

  Hers came first. He squirreled it away in a pocket and took it back to the billet to read on his bunk while everyone else was at lunch. He opened it carefully so as to save the envelope, and removed the thin airmail sheets.

  It was a long letter, handwritten in her small, neat style, with a few underlinings here and there. The first two pages were about how much she loved and missed him and chatty talk about things she was doing. She had gone to the homecoming game with friends in her dormitory. He pictured her in the student section on a cool, bright afternoon, rust and gold autumn leaves falling gently outside the stadium, screaming cheers and chants and fierce, fast action on the field below.

  As he visualized the scene in the heat and dust of a quiet tropical afternoon, a feeling of helplessness overtook him. For an instant he wanted to scream, or curse, but he didn’t. He had had the same impulse before. Everyone had. But nobody actually did it unless it was absolutely necessary.

  He read on: two pages—three; stopped. Reread, foggily trying to comprehend what she was telling him. Something about a peace rally. Something about the wrongness of the war. She was trying to explain something. A group of girls had come to her room a few nights before with a petition against the war. She had refused to sign it on account of him. But it had set her to thinking. She hated it, the war, because it frightened her. But she hadn’t given it much thought, except for hating it, until now.

  There had been someone speaking on campus, a man named Widenfield, a professor from a New England women’s college. She had stopped to listen for a while. What he said had made sense. He had spoken of the arrogance of power. Of the fallibility of total American involvement in revolutionary situations. Not only was our history against it, but common sense was against it. “What interests,” he had demanded, “are Americans trying to protect? Do we have extensive economic ties with this country? Does the war affect our immediate security? Do we have close bonds of friendship? What right, then, does one man have, without the full and open consent of Congress, to commit the flower of American youth to a bloodthirsty, senseless war on the Asian continent?”

  Widenfield had been persuasive. He spoke in convincing tones. He did not rant and rave. When he touched the moral question, his approach was rooted more in logic than in emotion. War, all war, by its own nature was immoral. There were no good wars; only necessary ones. Some were more necessary than others. For a variety of reasons, he declared, this war ranked very low on the necessity scale.

  Julie was deeply affected by what she heard, and she had thought about it for several days. It had been necessary to make a decision. It was too important a thing to shunt away. Widenfield had called for commitments, personal commitments, which, he said, were the only means of stopping what was going on because the government was too clumsy, the bureaucratic machinery too rusty, to make an impression on the man in the White House, whose fault was arrogance, not maliciousness.

  The speech had been well received for a conservative, Midwestern university. Of course—and Julie could not know this—it was not the same speech the man gave when he visited more liberal, or radical, schools in the East or on the West Coast. But she had become a convert. It had not happened immediately, but had taken place over the course of a few days, the kernel of her decision growing rapidly in her mind. She knew the man was right, and she had made a thoughtful decision, which was very important to her because of Spudhead’s involvement. She did not want to denigrate what he was doing—she was clear about that. But she had to do what she knew was right, and hoped he would understand. She thought he ought to know.

  Spudhead’s reaction was different from what she might have expected. At first, there was no reaction at all, just a melancholy curiosity. She was talking about it; he was doing it. Simple as that. He really didn’t know why she had spent so much time trying to explain it all.

  For the next few days he toyed with the idea of Julie the Peace Freak. It did not outrage him. He couldn’t imagine her going berserk and laying siege to buildings, or marching by torchlight singing songs. He knew she was wrong, but he couldn’t say exactly why. He had been told to come here and fight for ideals that had been drummed into his head ever since he was old enough to think reasonable thoughts, and he had never had serious cause to question them. Americans fought good wars. They did not lose them. For peace and freedom. They fought noble wars. This was ingrained in him and as much a part of him as his nose. He tried to think up arguments to give her. The same arguments he had heard all his life—peace, freedom, liberty—who could argue against that? A month ago he might have been convincing; but he had seen too much in the tangled, twisted, bloodscreaming, hatefilled, fearstruck, death-stinking weeks in the jungle to even want to try. It was easier not to think about it at all.

  The letter from his father arrived three days later.

  “Dear Harold,” it began:

  Your mother and I hope everything is going well and that you are safely out of harm’s way by this time. In your last letter you described the details of the fighting in which your company took part very graphically. I realize it must have been a trying and difficult experience—especially seeing some of your friends hurt and killed. As you know, I was in a war myself, so I am well versed in the tragedies and high emotions connected with military combat. However, your mother is not, and as you know she is given to the normal female weaknesses when it comes to violent or disagreeable subject matter—and especially so when you are involved. I think it would be a good idea, therefore, that when you write to us both you would refrain from such scenes as you described in your last two letters because it upsets her greatly. Naturally you may say whatever you wish to me personally if you feel a need to get it out of your system. Just write me at the office so your mother won’t be involved . . .

  Spudhead tried for a moment to recall the things he had written. It was the day after they returned from The Fake. He had tried to set it all down so that they would know, his father anyway, that he wasn’t sitting on his ass in the rear getting a suntan, but out there doing something important—the biggest thing he had ever done in his life; putting his life on the line—and he wanted somebody to know it.

  But now he pictured them sitting in the living room and reading the letter over cocktails—about the killing and the fighting up the mountainside; the napalmed bodies of the North Vietnamese—all of it must have seemed strange and gory.

  Why would he write such things? They must have wondered about it. He should have known better. He had spared much of it in the letters to Julie, because he didn’t want to upset her. What did that mean? That he didn’t think his own parents were worried? Or that he didn’t care? He read on:

  As a member of Congress and the Armed Services Committee, I have seen and heard things in recent months deeply disturbing to the future of America and our quest for peace and freedom. There are forces at work in this country—some of them in the Congress itself—that would destroy all America has stood for and built up for two decades.

  Some of these people are well meaning; others are probably subversive; but they have banded together in an attempt to force the government of the United States to abandon her commitment to her allies. I am sure you realize that should we pursue such a foolish course, the Communists would be in control of Asia in a matter of months and in time would be lurking at our very doorstep.

  The seeds of dissention have appeared most visibly in the universities and among certain misguided clerics, who believe that by sticking its head in the sand, the ostrich can avoid its fate
. . .

  The letter continued in this vein for a while. The war was part of a vast global struggle to contain a fanatical and evil-minded political movement and to protect helpless allies from being crushed against their will. But it was the last paragraph—a P.S., handwritten—that gripped Spudhead’s attention:

  Today, before I mailed this the President of the United States came to the Capitol to address a joint session of the Congress. As he was leaving he stopped at my seat and asked how you were. I was not aware that he even knew you were in the services or engaged in the fighting, but I told him what I knew from your last letter, and afterward he touched me on the arm and said I should be very proud. I want you to know son that I am. I realize that my political life has sometimes kept me from being as close as a father should be to his son. Perhaps when you return we can make it up. You are making great sacrifices for the ‘cause of’ peace, and I have the utmost confidence that you will continue to do your duty in an honorable and proper way and if by chance it is the Almightys’ will that something should happen to you, you may take with you the sure and certain knowledge that the sacrifices you have made are in the name of freedom and liberty, and that I love you very much as does your mother and that you have made me and your President very proud.

  Love,

  Dad.

  Spudhead carefully tucked the letter inside the envelope and slipped it into his duffel bag. He reached for his rifle and began wiping it down mechanically with an oily cloth, sitting on the edge of his cot. The tent was empty, and a hot, dusty wind was blowing off the rice fields.

  How about that—the President of the United States . . . And in quick little flashes he pictured the President pinning a medal on him while his father and mother and hundreds of others looked on . . . and just as quickly there came a vision of a row of empty black body bags—he had passed such a sight earlier that morning—waiting to be filled . . . and it shifted again, the vision, and he saw dead men, hundreds of them, lying quietly in a field, the hot sun beating down; waiting to be put into the body bags and zipped up into the darkness, never again to see, or to feel or screw or laugh . . . just a black void forever . . . down in the body bag:

  Down in the bod-ee bag,

  Down in the bod-ee bag,

  I’m gonna meet my little sweetheart girl

  Down in the bod-ee bag—

  Down in—the bod-deeee bag . . .

  Humming the tune silently, over and over, rubbing the oily cloth up and down the rifle barrel—maniacally, in cadence with the beat, as though it were a slide trombone . . . and then he put it to his mouth—muzzle first, as a mouthpiece—and saw the field of dead again; he tried to tell if he was among them, but he could not recognize anyone among these peaceful dead . . . and he felt dizzy and strange and somehow possessed by something he could not identify . . . and standing there in a corner of the field, surveying it quietly, was the President of the United States—with his father; sadly shaking their heads, but looking very proud—and he continued playing crazily, working the slide of the rifle like a trombone—backward and forward, Jack Teagarden style, the noiseless tune coming out of the black stock/bell, metal cool on his lips, raising the instrument into the air for the final notes, the oily cloth hanging down . . . We gonna dadadadadadada—down in the body bag, down in . . . and the field of baking dead, a peaceful audience, along with the President of the United States of America: who would here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . Down in the bod-ee bag . . . But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow . . . Down in the body bag . . . PEACE AND FREEDOM! . . . and dying for it . . . Down in . . . well, hell, they didn’t die for it, did they? They were killed for it, maybe—but they didn’t die for it . . . Down . . . down . . . down . . . down down . . . nosiree—they didn’t die for it—they just died . . . He suddenly remembered the dying face of Lieutenant Donovan, lying in the peaceful creeping vine—and like him—Him!—HIM—down in the shuddering emptiness . . . Down in the black, waiting, open nothingness, proudly zipped up by the President of the United States . . . who had convened a necessary war . . . not good, but necessary . . . in the name of peace and freedom, to murder gooks, by the hundreds, by the thousands—who didn’t even have body bags . . . Down in the . . . and get murdered back, too—wasn’t that a part of it? Wouldn’t be fair otherwise . . . not sporting . . . not . . . not anything . . . as he played madly on by himself in the hot, sticky tent, entertaining his first serious thoughts about trying to get the hell out of all this . . .

  26

  Carruthers slumped into his chair at the Duc Twan Bar and reached across the table for his glass of warm native beer. There was hurt and bitterness set deeply in his great black face. He turned and glared at the girl sitting in the back of the room.

  Off in a corner, Madman Muntz and DiGeorgio were dancing with two Vietnamese bar girls, and Spudhead and Crump were seated at the table with Carruthers, trying to have a conversation above the blaring radio music. The girl was sitting on a stool at the end of the bar, alternately sipping her glass of the watered-down whiskey they called “Saigon tea” and running her fingers through her waist-long black hair. Occasionally she would glance over at Carruthers, then turn away haughtily, and he continued to glare, and his countenance seemed to turn blacker and blacker and corresponded with his mood.

  Crump leaned over the table. “Thought you was gonna dance with her, Carruthers.”

  Carruthers said nothing; he continued to glare.

  Nobody knew much about Carruthers, except that he was big, and black, and quiet and Southern, and that he was the one who had led them in song the afternoon they were relieved up on The Fake. And until then nobody had paid him much attention, but afterward there was some brief curiosity about him, during which time it was rumored that he had never worn shoes until the Army gave him a pair; that he practiced a weird voodoo cult and that he was a descendant of a fierce tribe of Negroes who, because of their intense blackness, were sometimes referred to as Blue Gum Niggers.

  “Hey, what’d she say, huh? She don’t wanta dance?” Crump had put down his beer and was leaning across the table.

  “She nofin bu a ho!” Carruthers said, lapsing into an all-but-incomprehensible dialect. There was something scary in Carruthers’ face. In his anger it seemed to suck into a black hole inside of which two red eyes burned, and the eyes seemed not like part of the face but like separate things that lived in the hole.

  “Well, what’d she say, man? Whatdaya mean she spit on you? Say, huh?”

  “Yeah, say what happened,” Spudhead chimed in.

  Carruthers’ huge left fist was balled up tightly and he was massaging it with his right hand, looking down angrily at the floor.

  “Ho,” he said. “I ough cuttah.”

  “Well, what in hell happened?” Crump said in frustration.

  “Axed er ta daince—you know she don daince wid blacks . . .” His voice trailed off.

  The girl had drawn herself up like royalty and was looking straight ahead, her delicate features glowing in the dim lantern light. She was far and away the prettiest girl in the bar, and maybe along the whole row of dives and brothels in the shantytown that had sprung up around the base camp at Monkey Mountain.

  It was a place of filth and squalor, peopled by camp followers and other displaced persons who found it easier to live off the Americans than to try to scrape out an existence in the war-torn countryside. They slept in tin-roofed shanties or beneath straw-topped lean-tos, and mostly they were women and children and a few old men, the younger men having already been killed or conscripted by one side or the other. Their sole belongings usually consisted of a brace of pots and pans, a straw sleeping mat and the clothes on their backs.

  In the daytime, the women squatted over open fires tending pots of rice or fish or water buffalo meat, chattering like magpies—or spent their time begging from the soldiers or scavenging food and other things from the land. A small cottage indust
ry had developed, utilizing waste materials left behind by the Army, of which the most notable aspect was the transformation by old men with pointed white beards of artillery-shell casings into brass ashtrays and other useful items, which were immediately sold back to the Americans at exorbitant prices.

  As prostitutes arrived in droves, entrepreneurs erected ramshackle bars, and every night these bars and the dirty streets outside them were filled with drunken, brawling soldiers from the Brigade; men willing to put up with filth and wretchedness just to get away from the Army for an hour or so.

  Bravo Company had not been allowed to patronize this encampment until a few days before, and then thanks only to a directive by General Butterworth himself, who had learned, quite by accident, that Patch, fearing God-only-knew-what-kind-of trouble, had restricted Four/Seven to Base Camp the moment they returned from the field.

  It happened when Chaplain Greaves got up to give his weekly report on morale at the daily briefing.

  As usual, morale was high, he said, offering statistics that so many men were attending church services—or so many had reported such and such problems, but the indications were good. The last item on his agenda was a report on the rate of venereal disease within the various battalions—a function the Army had at some point lumped among the duties of its chaplains because high VD rate was considered an indication of low morale. General Butterworth usually tolerated the Chaplain’s report without comment, but that day he rose to his feet.

  “Wait a minute, read that again,” the general said.

  The Chaplain repeated the figures. In three battalions the rate of VD was approximately thirty cases per one hundred men—relatively high—but in Four/Seven, the Chaplain proudly reported, the rate was barely five cases per one hundred.