I come to, covered with blood and gore. My rifle stock’s broken in two. I try to get up but I pass out again. When I come to a second time, I’m bleary-eyed, my ears are ringing, and my nose and mouth are full of blood. I sit and look up. The two krauts are on the ground in front of me. The shell hit between them and dug a huge hole there, at least one-five-five. I start checking myself out. Most of the gore is from the krauts. I feel a soggy soft spot in my groin, but it doesn’t hurt.
I try to stand and I can’t. My head buzzes and I fall over. My leg won’t work. I crawl up to the two krauts and they’re both dead. I don’t know how long I was out but it was enough time for them to die; long enough for flies to find them. The sun is up full and it’s a sunny day. It’s the first sun we’ve had in two weeks. There’s no artillery. The world looks new. There’s no sound of fighting from Reuth. It all seems so quiet, I think I might be deaf. I try to say something to hear myself, but there’s something wrong with my jaw. I hear myself moaning as the blackness flows over me. It’s more like going to sleep when you’re really tired. As I pass out, I know that at least I’m not deaf; I heard myself moan.
The next time I come to, I begin crawling toward the woods. I should just stay there and wait till somebody comes but I’m not thinking. I want to get off the road, out of the open, and into a shady place. I want to get away from the krauts. I hold my hand over the soggy spot and I can feel my intestines bulging against my hand when I move. I don’t have any bandage to put over it so I keep my hand there. It isn’t bleeding much. My head is getting clear. I’m thinking things out, trying to save my ass.
I crawl down the field to where Richards is still stretched out. I crawl up to him and there’s no blood at all. I have just a minute when I think he might be ‘dogging it’, letting the war go by him, the way I am. His eyes are open and his mouth. He’s dead. I see the piece of shrapnel sticking out the side of his neck. It’s a long thin piece and it’s sticking out like a pen in a pen holder. The skin of his neck is bent in to fit around the rough edge of the cast metal. I’m seeing very clearly in the morning sunlight. I pull out the piece of shrapnel with my good hand. It comes out easily and there’s a short gush of blood. Richards’ neck bends so his face is against the ground. His eyes stay open.
That’s when I begin cracking up seriously. I hear myself muttering ‘Richards is dead’ over and over like a prayer; it hurts and I can’t stop myself. I lie there beside Richards and can’t move.
Next thing I remember, De John the medic is over me. He’s asking what’s the matter, where it hurts, but I keep muttering and crying. My jaw hurts up into my ears. Harrington is dead and I’m crying about Richards. Even while I’m crying I know it doesn’t make sense, but I can’t stop. De John tapes in my gut and puts on sulfa but doesn’t give me wound tablets. He looks at my face and pulls another bandage out of his kit. He starts wrapping up the bottom of my face and jaw down to the neck. I can see in his eyes that it’s bad and I’m glad. I’m glad for anything that’ll keep me out of combat. I know I’m even trying to section eight it now. I’m keeping on about Richards when it doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m trying to hold onto whatever advantage I’ve got. I don’t have any pride or honor or anything left. I just have a need to go on living.
They get a litter to me, carry me back, and then there’s a ride on top of a jeep and into the field hospital. They put me down on a bloody cement floor. I see the dead ones piled in the corner, covered with blankets, boots sticking out. I look for Harrington, but all of them have two boots.
Now I begin to get the idea that I’m not hurt enough, they’re going to send me back. A T-5 medic squats beside me. He asks me my outfit, name. It hurts too much to talk. I shake my head. He pulls out my dog tags and checks. He looks under the bandages. I feel myself sinking. I’m ready to cry again, to beg them not to send me back. This T-5 is being cheery and telling me it’s not too bad and I’ll be up and around in no time. I’m hating him. He makes out a ticket and wires it to my field jacket. That must mean something. I begin to relax. I’m a package now to be handled by other people. I don’t have a rifle, I don’t have a helmet. I’m not a soldier anymore. I’m a sick person. Somebody else comes over, rolls up my sleeve, and gives me a shot. I feel myself slipping away.
The next thing I’m being jiggled and moved from the litter onto a black operating table. A doctor smiles down at me with clean hands, a clean white coat and splatters of blood on his glasses. He looks at my tag, then starts to scissor off my clothes down to where I’m hit at the top of my leg, in the groin. He cuts off the bandage and I can feel him pressing with his hands. Somebody else is cutting and pulling off my boots and the rest of my clothes. I feel like a little boy. Nobody’s undressed me since I was four years old. The doctor turns to me and smiles. He’s tired. It’s been a red-letter day for surgeons.
‘We’re going to put you to sleep now and clean this up a bit. Don’t be scared, it’ll be all right.’
Hell, I’m not scared; I want to be put to sleep. I want the whole medical corps to come and try themselves out on me. I want them to keep me in hospitals to practice on for five years, or however long it takes to get the crazy war over. I’ll do anything to keep people from knowing what I know. I’ll do anything to keep out of combat; if it means getting cut up by doctors in hospitals, that’s great with me.
When I come to, I’m on another litter, a padded one, and I’m covered with a blanket. My face is practically smothered in bandages, my whole hand and wrist are bandaged. I reach down with my good hand and feel that I’m bandaged from my belly button down, but my cock and balls are still there, squeezed out between the bandages. There’s a tube coming out of the end of my cock. I lie back and relax. They’re not going to be able to give me a rifle for a while anyway.
I feel like I’m on a moving stairway, an escalator. Even the smell of ether is good to me, a smell of security, of calm and of peace. I look around and realize I’m not in the field hospital anymore. There are rows of us and we’re in a big room. I lift my head to look around and I can’t believe what I see. There’s a woman in a uniform and she’s coming over to me. I haven’t seen a real woman in months. I’d forgotten how good they look. Think of it, I’m going to be able to go home where there are women and I’m not going to have a dishonorable discharge. I’ll probably even get a pension and people who don’t know will think I’m a hero. I’ll be able to fuck all the women I want. The lady stops and squats beside my litter.
‘Are you all right there, soldier?’
I see the lieutenant’s bar on her cap. I can’t open my jaw and I talk through my teeth.
‘Yes, sir. Where am I?’
‘You’re at division headquarters and we’re waiting for an ambulance to take you back.’
‘Where will I go back to?’
‘Probably to the hospital in Metz.’
I lie back. They haven’t found me out yet. If I can get as far as Metz, they’ll never get me in combat again.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
As she says this, she’s looking at the tag pinned to me. It’s longer and more official-looking; I’m special delivery now. I wonder if it’s still the same day. It seems like weeks since we left the forest and went down that slanted field toward Reuth. For just a minute I think of the war still going on. Who’s head of the squad now? I could’ve made staff if I’d stayed on. Did they finally take Reuth? I stop thinking about it. I’m rear echelon now; let the boys at the front do the fighting. The lady lieutenant is finished reading my delivery ticket.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. It says here you have a stomach wound. You can’t have any liquids. I saw your face and I thought that was all of it. I’m sorry.’
This must be the first time I’ve ever had a lieutenant sorry for me. I pull my bandaged hand out from under the blankets to drum up a little more sympathy, but she’s already on to somebody else. If she can’t serve me coffee, she doesn’t want anything to do with me.
I lay
my head back and try to remember the reality. I want to remember how lousy a soldier I really am. I don’t mind fooling everybody else but I don’t want to fool myself. It’s been a hard lesson to learn. I can already see how easy it’s going to be for me to make myself out the big hero. I’ve got to take what I know about myself now and plan my life around that. I pass out while I’m thinking about it.
The hospital at Metz is a real hospital. I mean it isn’t a school converted into a hospital or a barracks made into a hospital; it was a hospital in the first place.
I have my first operation two days after I get there. It’s the operation on my stomach. Actually it isn’t my stomach. It’s an instant rupture I’ve got down there. They give me the piece of shrapnel afterwards. It looks about like one of the pennies we used to mash on the tracks of the trains at the terminal on Sixty-ninth Street. The doctor says I’m lucky I wagged when I could’ve wigged because it just missed cutting the sperm cord. He says the shrapnel looks like American one-five-five. Maybe he thinks I’m a kraut who snuck in here to get some free treatment.
I couldn’t care whose side I’m on. I don’t even care who wins anymore. I’m out of it. I lie there in bed all day just enjoying the quiet, the normalness of things. My insides are gradually settling down. I’m happier than I can ever remember. When I wake up in the morning, before the nurse comes around to wake everybody up and wash them, before the orange juice, I lie there with my eyes closed, listening, thinking about how I’m out of it. I’m out of everything, not just the war. I’m captured; the world’s prisoner. I’m not fighting anymore. It’s a great feeling, everything seems so unimportant.
Every morning they throw a pack of cigarettes on my bed. Free cigarettes. ‘Another carton of cigarettes for the boys overseas.’ I start smoking. Hell, I’m not trying to be the world’s strongest man anymore. I’m just trying to get through without making too much of a disgrace of myself. I lie there on the white bed, moving nothing but my good hand; a clean, clean hand, washed every day by clean hands. I put the white cigarette in my mouth and blow smoke through my bandages. I’m not really smoking, I’m blowing smoke and watching it. I practice blowing smoke rings. Uncle Caesar used to do it for me so I know all the moves. The air in the room is still and after a few days I get so I can blow perfect rings. I’m saving inhaling for another time. It still hurts to take a deep breath, and coughing is a misery.
I blow away twenty cigarettes worth of smoke rings every day. I allow myself one cigarette each half hour. There’s a clock on the wall and I hold onto every minute I can. Time never seemed so sweet. I don’t think I every actually lived in the present before. Now, I’m forgetting everything that happened and not thinking more than half an hour ahead. Each of those half hours has more in it than most days in my life.
There are other guys in the ward, but they’re mostly other gut wounds and are more serious than I am. All of them are on intravenous. I only have the peeing tube hooked to me, so I’m practically a free man.
They change the bandage on my hand every three or four days and the big operation is looked at every other day. They put clean bandages on my face but it’s two weeks before they do anything except clean it. One day a doctor wheels me into a room and unwraps the face bandages. He takes little scissors and scissors away some pieces. He tapes it up and says I’m going to need plastic surgery. They don’t have any facilities to do it in this hospital. He tells me the jaw is dislocated and shattered in the joint. They’ll have to work on that first.
I don’t care. I’m beginning to like operations. The nurses keep telling me how brave I am. Bullshit! Nobody’s ever going to fool me there. They can keep me in the hospital and cut me up a little at a time; only no pain, please. Take my lovely, muscular body and hack away. But no shocks, no sudden pain, no dirt, no attacks, no patrols; I can’t take it.
I’m just able to sit up again when they tell me I’m being shipped back to the States. I’m being shipped to Fort Dix because it’s the military hospital nearest my home. Christ, I’m beginning to feel like a civilian already. A few pieces of metal cut into me and everything changed. I don’t even think about the squad, the platoon, none of it anymore. I read the Stars and Stripes every day to see how the old war’s going. The Russians are sweeping across Russia, Poland, Germany. Everybody’s squeezing the Nazis. Then, Hitler puts a bullet through his head. It’s like reading a novel; it doesn’t seem real to me. It’s as if everything went from super real to mushroom soup in one morning. I’m not complaining. I can’t even get myself to worry much about being a coward either. I’ll make new tracks. I’ll find something to do so nobody will ever know. Maybe I’ll open a pizza parlor or a hoagie shop. ‘ALFONSO’S’, great name for that kind of place.
It’s hard for me not to put on the tough guy thing with the nurses and the doctors. They want me to, I can tell. That heroic shit is hard to stop.
By this time, the whole side of my mouth is twisting to one side. It’s getting hard to open my mouth at all. The doctors decide I’m an emergency case and put me in an airplane. I’ve never been in an airplane before; I’m wishing Birdy could be with me. He’d love it.
I’m in America almost without knowing it. A hospital is a hospital. I’m rolled off the plane in a stretcher and into an ambulance. We go through New York with the siren blowing. I’m playing poker with another guy in the bottom bunk as we go. The nurses at Dix are different, older and very sympathetic. Everybody seems guilty. They’re practically crying over us. I’m feeling about seven years old now; great feeling. I’m turning into a great baby. Maybe I’ll win a prize in the war baby beauty contest.
I have two days of X-rays with all kinds of doctors fingering my face flaps. Then they put me under anaesthetic and do the first operation. I still haven’t seen my face; it’s always bandaged up. I don’t really want to see it. I can see enough of what it looks like from the other people’s faces when they look at it. I know I’m not as bad as Scanlan. I’ll bet he was a nightmare for some plastic surgeon.
I’m still just relaxing and letting things happen. They call my parents and tell them I’m in the hospital. They come tooling up in the De Soto. I can’t say I’m sorry to see them, except my old lady keeps staring at the bandages on my face and crying. The old man looks tired, much older, and for the first time I realize I’m his kid and he does care. Only he can’t allow himself to show anything. He’s standing pale and scared there trying to be the Sicilian big shot. His face lights up when I tell him I made sergeant. It’s a dumb sad life most men live.
When they go home I turn back into my private world. My body is still my ticket. Come on, doctors, punch holes in it. Punch all the holes you want, it’s gotten me this far, all the way back to America. Punch away.
Now, I start hurting from that first operation. I’m put on intravenous for a week and then I’m fed with a tube. I feel like a baby pigeon being fed regurgitated food. I don’t care; take care of me, world. It’s two weeks before I can even drink thin soup. I can’t chew at all, even on the good side. The doctor tells me how they’ve put in a metal plate and pins to hold my jaw. They have to get the jaw straightened before they can start any plastic surgery. He tells me I’ll have a slight malocclusion anyway. I don’t know what that is so I ask one of the nurses. I have to ask her through my teeth. She says it means my jaw won’t come together quite right. I can live with that. The doctor also tells me he’s going to bring some skin from my ass and put it on my chin. Got a match? Yeah, my face and my ass. That’s when I find out, too, I won’t be able to grow a beard. I’ve got enough hair on my ass, more hair than most people have on their faces, but it won’t help. They’re taking very thin layers.
‘I’m just finished with the third operation when they tell me about you, Birdy. They say you’re down in Kentucky and they want me to go talk to you. Even your shit old lady comes over to our house and asks me to go down. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see anybody who knew me the way I used to be. I know I’m not me anymore a
nd I don’t want any more pretending than I have to. We were too close. Birdy; we were too much to each other. But I can’t say this to your old lady; she’s crying all over my mother. The crummy pigeon poisoner and baseball crook is crying. I tell her I’ll go.
‘I come down and talk to fatface Weiss, here, and then I start talking to you, Birdy, about how it was with us with the pigeons and all that shit. You’re some kind of freaky bird looking out the window, crouching on the floor, not paying any attention to me.
‘Hell, you’re not even listening now. We’re both impossibly screwed-up, Birdy. I think maybe we put off growing up a little too long.’
I stop talking. What’s the use? What’s the use of anything? Nobody really talks to anybody else anyway, even if they aren’t crazy. Everybody’s only strutting around, pecking and picking.
I close my eyes, put my elbows on my knees, and lean forward with my head in my hands. I still can’t put any pressure on the left side. I figure this is the last time I’ll see Birdy. I can’t take it anymore myself. Old Weiss’s going to figure it out and lock me in one of these bins soon.
I open my eyes and Birdy’s standing up against the bars. He has a big grin on his face and he’s looking straight at me; his eyes aren’t even wiggling.
‘Well, Al, you’re just as full of shit as ever.’
‘Holy Christ! Is that you, Birdy?!! Are you there?’
I can’t believe it! He’s leaning against the bars, his face sticking through. He’s so thin he could turn sidewise and walk on out of the place. While he was squatting or sitting, you couldn’t tell how thin he really is. He’s taller, too. He was always a runt but now he’s taller than I am. I stand up and go close.
‘It’s really you, Birdy. You’re OK?’
‘Well, Al, I’m not OK, but it’s me.’
It’s Birdy all right, but he sounds different.
‘How about all the bird shit, then? Don’t tell me you’ve been pretending all this time. If you’ve been sitting there listening and laughing, I’ll kill you barehanded!’