War Year

  “If that’s all you’ve got.” He left for a minute and came back with two blue-and-gray capsules and a tiny cup of water.

  “You don’t wanna drink too much, now, not if yer goin’ into surgery.” He would say that. I was thirsty as a bitch.

  By the clock, it was thirty-five minutes before Chavez and McGill came back to get me. They picked up the stretcher and one of them asked, “You ever ridden on an ambulance, fren’?”

  “Never have.” Ouch. My leg hurt every time either one of them took a step.

  “Well, this will just be a short ride, but we’ll put on the siren for you.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’ mention it.”

  They put me in the ambulance—it looked just like any other olive-drab army panel truck—and actually burned rubber on the dirt road, taking off. They switched on the siren. It might have been fun if I’d been in any condition to enjoy it.

  There was a big bump—which hurt like hell—and we were on the airstrip, howling toward a C-130 that was all ready to go, engines roaring. They loaded me on and strapped my stretcher in place, and the plane was moving before the rear door had closed all the way.

  I looked around. All the other people on the plane were sitting on the other side, perfectly well. There wasn’t another wounded person on board—and for all the attention they paid to me, I could be just another piece of equipment. Thinking about it later, I guess that was all right. What did I want them to do? Stare?

  TEN

  The plane landed, not too gently, and there was an ambulance waiting for me. The ride in this one was just as fast and bumpy, but they didn’t use the siren.

  A couple of little Vietnamese unloaded my stretcher and jogged me down a covered sidewalk. The way they grunted and carried on, I was afraid they were going to drop me.

  There was another building with bright fluorescent lights, this time aboveground. They put me on a table and a doctor came over (holding a clipboard, of course).

  “John W. Farmer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me in your own words what happened.”

  “We were walking down a trail… and the guy in front of me… stepped on a mine.”

  “How do you know it was a mine?”

  “Well, it sounded like one, you know, a little… pop before it went off. A ‘Bouncing Betty’”

  “Did it kill the man who stepped on it?”

  All of a sudden I could see Prof lying on the trail with his guts rolling out, throat split open, after all the shit we went through together… and it could just as well have been me. I couldn’t make myself answer.

  “He is dead, then, right?” I nodded.

  He asked me other questions about my unit, rank, and so on. While he was quizzing me an honest-to-God woman came over and cut away my dressings. She was about as old as my mother. Her touch was very gentle, but it still hurt when she peeled the dressings off.

  She hooked my arm up to a bottle that said “Penicillin 10 million units USP”—I guess that was a super-shot of penicillin. Must have been at least a quart.

  Then one of the Vietnamese rolled me away, stretcher, table, bottle, and all. We went down the sidewalk about a block, and through double doors marked POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE. I wondered whether the Vietnamese could read English.

  He rolled me up to a white table under a huge X-ray machine. A medic in a green tunic was talking on the phone.

  “Right. He just got here. Okay… bye.” He hung up.

  “Well, Mr. John W. Farmer. Ready to get zapped by the Monster Machine?”

  “Ready as ever, I guess.”

  “Hmm, that bottle’s going to complicate things a bit.” It was hanging on a rack attached to the rolling table. “We’ll see what we can do, though.” He motioned to the Vietnamese, and the two of them lifted me onto the cold enamel under the machine. “Now, we’ll do the hard one first. Keep your arm stretched out so you don’t pull the needle out, and roll over on your left side. Kick your good leg out to the left. Good. Hold it.” He moved the machine around until the nose, a yellow plastic cone, was pointed at the biggest wound. It would have been an uncomfortable position even if I wasn’t shot full of holes. He turned to the Vietnamese. “Di di! Di di mao!”

  I don’t know much Vietnamese, but I know that “di di” means “get outa here” and “di di mao” means “get the fuck outa here.” The boy left in a hurry.

  “Now hold real still until I tell you. Good.” He went off into another room and flicked a switch. The machine hummed for a few seconds. “Okay,” he said, and came out of the room. Then he took pictures in two other, slightly more comfortable, positions.

  He poked his head out the door and said something in Vietnamese I didn’t understand. The boy came back in, they put me on the cart, and he wheeled me another couple of blocks.

  We went into another building marked NO ADMITTANCE. It was air-conditioned, deliciously cool inside. We went down a hall and into a gray room. The only other patient was a Vietnamese with his arm in a bloody sling, screaming. A medic was sitting at a desk, ignoring him.

  The boy wheeled me into position next to the screaming Vietnamese (who was a soldier, or at least wore battle fatigues). The medic filled a needle from a little bottle and came over to me. “You just get X-rayed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, this little shot’ll make you feel better. You are John W. Farmer, aren’t you?” He poked the needle into my arm.

  “Right.” Twenty Questions again.

  “Yeah. Well, I’m gonna shave yer leg, so the doc won’t hafta look at all that hair.” He soaped up an old shaving brush and lathered my leg. The Vietnamese soldier kept screaming.

  “Look, shouldn’t you be doin’ something for that guy?”

  “Nah. He’s shot so fulla dope he can’t be feelin’ any pain. He’s an enemy, though, NVA trooper they caught up by Kontum. Guess he thinks we’re gonna torture ’im.” Then I saw that he was strapped down, the buckles all out of his reach.

  It’s funny, I never could get up much hate for the enemy. Like I say, this is Johnson’s fuckin’ war, let him fight it. But I can’t say I felt too bad about that guy, screaming bloody murder over a bullet in the arm. In fact, I’d rather have seen him lying on a jungle trail with his throat ripped out and giblets dribbling all over the ground. He couldn’t have been the guy who buried the mine, not if they caught him in Kontum—but he’d do until the real thing came along.

  The medic finished shaving me and I started to get a little woozy. Thought that shot was supposed to make me feel better. At least my ears were ringing so loud I could hardly hear the guy screaming, if he still was. For some reason, I couldn’t focus on anything more than a few feet away.

  The medic rolled me down to the other end of the room and through a door and into a room that seemed much darker and cooler. I remember an old guy with white hair and big bushy white eyebrows, wearing a green surgical mask, leaning over me, then everything shrunk away and I was out cold.

  I woke up struggling against the straps that held me in bed, shouting and crying. A pretty little nurse held my hand and dabbed at my face with a piece of cotton.

  “It’s all over, soldier. You’re gonna be just fine.”

  Nobody ever called me “soldier” before. But the way she said it, it was nice. She must have given me a shot—the world sprang into focus and I was wide awake. The first thing I saw was a big red NO SMOKING sign.

  I looked up at her and asked, “Got a cigarette?”

  “See what I can find.” I watched her walk away. The white uniform was tight enough to give her a nice swivel. That was something I hadn’t seen for a few months. Not that I’d stopped thinking about it.

  She rummaged around in a desk drawer and came up with a stale pack of Kents. She brought them over with an ash tray and a pack of matches. First civilian matches I’d seen in a long time—they had a tomato sauce ad on the front and a recipe inside. I lit up, about the best cigarette I??
?d ever had.

  She had gone back to her desk. “Say, is it all right if I undo these straps?”

  “Sure. Just don’t try to run around the block.” She smiled. Jesus Christ.

  I unbuckled the straps and looked under the sheet. All I was wearing was one big roll of bandage from ankle to crotch. There was a dark brown bloodstain on my thigh, over the largest wound. The whole thing ached, but I can’t say that it bothered me too much.

  “GI… ay, GI.”

  There was a Vietnamese strapped in the bed next to me. I didn’t recognize him at first, because he was wearing blue pajamas. Then I saw the cast on his arm and knew he must be the NVA who was carrying on so much earlier. He made smoking motions, quick little jerks with an imaginary cigarette.

  I lit one up and passed it to him—not the easiest trick in the world, with both of us all tangled up in tubes and bottles.

  “Cam on ong,” he said. “Toi la ban.”

  I didn’t catch most of that, but “come on” means thanks. Didn’t know how to say “you’re welcome” or anything, so I just nodded and leaned back in bed and smoked, watching the chick shuffle papers around her desk.

  Whatever kept the leg from hurting wore off real fast. “Ma’am?”

  “What would you like?” She smiled again. God damn.

  “Can you give me something for the pain?”

  She looked at her watch, and at a clipboard on the wall. “Not for another half-hour, I’m afraid. You could have a couple of Darvon, but I don’t think they’d help much.”

  “Anything’s better than nothing.” Actually, I just wanted to see her walk again.

  I took the Darvon and chain-smoked for a half-hour. Then she came over again and gave me a shot. It stopped hurting before she even had the needle out, and I was asleep in a minute or two.

  I dreamed that the NVA next to me was chasing me down a jungle trail, throwing lit cigarettes at me. My pack was full of blasting caps.

  Somebody shook me awake; it turned out to be the medic who had shaved my leg earlier. “Wanna sleep yer life away, Farmer? It’s breakfast time.”

  “Oh, man, go away.” The leg was throbbing.

  “Here, lemme crank you up.” He turned a crank at the foot of the bed and the top half rose to put me halfway into a sitting position. “You’ll feel better once y’get some chow inside.”

  The bed next to me was empty. “Where’d my buddy go?”

  “Him? Oh, they took ’im to the POW ward last night. Here comes the chuck wagon.”

  A big Negro with a white uniform pushed a stainless-steel food cart down the aisle. “How ’bout some bacon an’ eggs?”

  “I have a choice?”

  “Sure—you can have bacon an’ eggs or a bottle o’ sugar water, through another tube stuck in yer arm.”

  “Let me have the bacon without the eggs, then.”

  “Come on, man, just give ’em a try. You don’t have to eat ’em.” He fitted a tray to the bed, loaded up a plate, and set it down in front of me, with a glass of orange juice and a glass of milk. “Want coffee?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Suit y’self.” He rolled the cart away, clattering like a junkyard on wheels.

  Army scrambled eggs are enough to make a well man puke. I scraped them to the side of the plate and ate the bacon. The orange juice tasted like sour water, but the milk was good and cold. The medic saw I was finished and took away my tray.

  I lit up a cigarette. “Got anything to read around here?” If the nurse had still been around, I would’ve been happy to just sit and look at her—but the medic was no prize.

  “Coupla papers.” He brought over a Stars and Stripes and an Army Times. I read every word in the first one, trying to get my mind off the leg, and got halfway through the second one. Then in came another medic, pushing a cart like the one I went to surgery on.

  “John W. Farmer?” I don’t know who else he thought it would be; there wasn’t anybody else around but the other medic. I told him I was John W. Farmer, last time I looked. “Takin’ you to Ward 8.”

  He wheeled me out of that nice air-conditioned room into a ward full of disgustingly well people. At least nobody else there had a tube stuck in his arm. Some of them were sitting on beds, playing cards. It was so hot I could hardly breathe.

  I got a couple of Darvon from the nurse on duty, and some writing paper and a pen. I tried to write letters to my folks and to Wendy, but the paper got so sweaty the pen wouldn’t work half the time. I cussed and fumed, and the nurse gave me a couple of pencils.

  Those were hard letters to write, trying to tell what happened without scaring the folks to death. So I lied a little bit here and there. I stuffed the letters into envelopes, addressed them, and wrote “free” up in the corner (that was the only advantage I’d found to being in Vietnam—didn’t have to pay postage).

  I slept until sundown and woke up with a start to the sound of a machine gun firing. There was a TV in the ward, and the patients were watching Combat.

  Half a dozen GI’s had to take a farm building full of Germans, I mean really full, twenty or thirty of them, talking English with funny accents. Machine guns poking out of every window. Did they call in for artillery and wait? No—the ol’ sarge in charge took a grenade and crawled across the open farmyard, bullets thick as flies, and tossed the grenade in through a window. Killed ’em all. Guess they don’t make grenades like they used to. Don’t make bulletproof GI’s anymore, either.

  ELEVEN

  I went to surgery again two days later (they had to wait until the smaller wounds were healing before they could close the big one), and stayed in Ward 8 until I could get around in a wheelchair. Then they moved me to another ward.

  A week or so later, I graduated from the wheelchair to a pair of crutches. I still preferred the wheelchair, but with the crutches I could go across the sand to the PX, and out to the EM club at night for a few beers.

  I pretty much settled into a routine. During the day I’d go down to the PX if I needed anything, then just lie in bed and read or write letters the rest of the day. Sometimes I’d wheel over to the next ward where they had a big percolator, and drink coffee. Every now and then I’d get into a checkers game or play some whist. It was a pretty soft life, except for the ache in my leg. I’d ask for Darvon during the day and save it, taking them all at night when I got in from the club. Otherwise, I couldn’t sleep.

  Then one morning they took out my stitches. I had about a hundred of them, and some were covered up with scar tissue—my leg was a bleeding mess when they were through. The doctor said that all of the wounds had healed well, and I’d be leaving in a few days for the Convalescent Center in Cam Ranh Bay, for rest and physical therapy.

  Turned out I had to leave the next day, along with a lot of others. The VC had attacked a bunch of people on their way to the voting booths in Tuy Haq, and the hospital was suddenly very overcrowded. Waiting for the bus that would take us to the airstrip, I saw helicopters unloading the casualties. Horrible—mostly women and children. There was a little baby crying with an eerie scream, high-pitched as a whistle; you could even hear it over the roar of the helicopter. When two medics ran by with the baby balanced in the middle of their stretcher, I saw that both his arms had been blown off at the shoulder.

  As many dead people as I’d seen, as many wounded GI’s and enemy soldiers… I’d rather bury a hundred rotting corpses than see that baby go by again.

  The plane was an Air Vietnam DC-3, much nicer than the C-130’s we usually rode on. I was the only person aboard with a crutch. (I could get along on only one by then, but there was one guy strapped to a stretcher, wearing a straitjacket. He spent the whole flight staring at the ceiling; he never moved once.)

  We landed in about half an hour and took a bus to the Sixth Convalescent Center. We filed into a big building where a sergeant took out medical records and gave us sheets and pillowcases. Ain’t easy to walk with a crutch, carrying an armload of linen and a flight bag.

&nbsp
; The bus waited while we were being processed and then took us to our billets. The driver called out names at each stop; I got off at the last one.

  In front of the billet was an incredible beach—from horizon to horizon just as straight as if it had been laid down with a ruler. White sand and water so blue it was almost black. Two guys were riding surfboards in the breakers.

  Inside the billet was like any army barracks, beds and lockers and not much else. I flopped my stuff down on the first bed I came to.

  It’s impossible to make a bed, standing on one leg with a crutch under your arm. I was just about to give up when a tall Negro came to my rescue.

  “Heah, man, let me.” It took him about twenty seconds to put the sheet on.

  “Thanks—woulda been foolin’ with that all night.”

  “Yeah. Say, you got a butt?”

  I handed him one and lit one up myself. “What’s it like around here? Beach sure looks nice.”

  “Shee-it. That all you gonna do, is look at it. Patients gotta get a pass to go swimmin’—but you don’ get no fuckin’ pass, ’cuz if you well enough to go swimmin’, you well enough to go back to the boonies.”

  Sounded like I was back in the army.

  “And that ain’t the half of it, man—we got two mebee three formation a day, details all fuckin’ day—PT in the mornin’, man, gotta run a mile ev’ry mornin’—”

  “No way nobody’s gonna make me run. Can’t half walk yet.”

  “Yeah, well, you safe long as you got that crutch. Fact, you just fall out in the mornin’, push a broom around awhile. Then you free, rest o’ the day.”

  Well, that didn’t sound too bad. I found out that it was too late for chow, but there was an EM club that opened at seven. I hobbled over there and waited for it to open.

  I managed to fill up on Slim Jims and beer. Watched TV until the place closed at eleven.

  Army television in Vietnam is pretty strange. They show reruns of Stateside shows, usually a year or so old. And the commercials are made by the army—telling you to keep your weapon clean, buy bonds, don’t inflate the Vietnamese economy, and so on.