“I got hit,” I said. I couldn’t see him too clearly.
“Yeah, I know.” He was looking at my chest. He lifted me and looked at my back. Then he laid me back down and started looking at my groin. I just kept looking into his face. Guys were still moving around. I tried to lift my head, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was too scared to move.
Breathing was hard. I was panting. I wondered if I had been hit in the chest. I couldn’t tell.
“Watch the ridge line! Watch the ridge line!” Gearhart’s voice.
Everything began to fade except the sound of the sixty. My eyes were closed and I opened them. Jamal moved my leg.
“Ooh!” There was pain. It wasn’t too bad, but why couldn’t I move? Why couldn’t I breathe?
Now there were people over me. Things were getting clearer. I looked up and saw Peewee. His helmet was on the back of his head, his rifle under his arm. He looked down at me. I tried to say something to him, but nothing came out.
Choppers overhead. They were laying down a line of fire. They came down, then back up again. Two other guys were near me. I closed my eyes, and one of them pushed them back open and looked at them. Then he let them close. I opened them again. They were talking to Jamal. One of them was wiping my arm. I tried to turn to see what he was doing, and the other one pushed me back down.
More faces over me; I was being lifted. I was on a litter. My throat was dry.
“How you doing, soldier boy?” A clean-looking dude with a southern accent.
“Okay,” I said.
“You gonna stay that way, too,” he said.
He patted me on the shoulder. I was on the chopper. The chopper was different now. The straps on the side were huge, the handles were further out from the wall. There was more noise, even, than before.
Smells. Smells of dirt, of sweat, of funk. The smell of blood that I remembered from Jenkins. Bodies gathered around me. The chopper jolted up. There were guys kneeling near me, their backs toward me. I could see their backs.
“I still got a pulse!”
“You ain’t got no pulse, man.”
“I got a pulse … no, maybe not.”
There were boots and mud in my face as a guy shifted position. They were moving up and down next to me. I tried lifting my head to see what they were doing. My head swam. I looked between the guys working on somebody next to me. It was Brew. A guy was bent over him, giving him mouth to mouth.
I turned away. There was something over me, it was shining. I thought I was going to pass out. Brew’s arm came from between the two guys working on him. I took his hand. It was limp. I squeezed it and I thought that he squeezed back.
“Keep pressure on the wound!”
“It’s not helping! It’s too open!”
“Just keep the pressure.”
“Too many places, we got to try to keep putting it in.”
“Okay! Okay! You keep looking! How’s the other one?”
The boots scraped against my shoulder as they shifted position.
“Looks like shock, maybe a concussion.”
“He breathing?”
A face over mine, lifting my neck, a mouth over mine blowing air into me. I was a balloon, the air pushed into my chest. I gasped.
“He’s breathing!” “Watch him!”
“See if the legs are swelling.”
As they started probing my legs, I turned to see Brew again. There were tubes. A medic had what looked like the thing you use to take baby bottles out of hot water. He kept moving it toward Brew’s stomach.
The breathing was terrible. Brew’s breathing, sucking air. I looked at his face. He wasn’t moving. His mouth was closed. Where was the breathing coming from?
The helicopter’s engines whined. The medic bent over Brew.
“I got nothing, man! I got nothing.”
“Okay! That’s it!”
The medic turned to me quickly. He started wiping my face. The corners of my mouth.
“How you doing, big guy?”
I nodded.
“You play basketball?”
Beyond the medic’s shoulder I could see them covering Brew.
The medic was checking the bag above me. I tried to move so I could see what they were doing with Brew. The medic saw me. He moved into my line of vision.
“You gonna be okay,” he said. “You just got a little concussion, a little steel, a little dirt, the whole thing.”
I heard the zipper. I didn’t have to see it. I heard the zipper. The medic took my hand. He squeezed it. Then he took the other one and squeezed that one. Then he started on my legs.
“Perry! Perry!”
The voice came to me from a long way away. “Come on, Perry, wake up, man!”
I opened my eyes. A tall, dark-skinned brother with shades was standing over me. My mouth was dry. I tried to look around. There was a banner on the wall. It read “That Others May Live.”
“Where am I?”
“In good hands, my man,” the guy said. “You got to pee now.”
“Pee?”
“Yeah, that’s the routine. You wake up, and we got to bring the thing around so you can get rid of some of the fluids, dig it? Just relax, and I’ll take care of it for you.”
I started to say something about peeing for myself but then I saw that both of my arms were bandaged. The guy pulled back the sheets and held me while I tried to urinate. At first I couldn’t, then I managed a little.
“What happened?”
“When you remember from?”
“I was just inside the wood line …” I said.
“I don’t know about that part,” the brother said. “All I know is that you lucky in a way, and you ain’t lucky in a way. You lucky cause you ain’t hurt that bad. Then you ain’t lucky because you ain’t hurt bad enough to go back to the World.”
“Where d I get hit?”
“You had titi shrapnel in your side, in your left leg, and a few splinters in your groin. No big thing. You had a bullet wound on your wrist but that just did barely chip your wrist. And you had a concussion. If anything will get you back to the World, it’s the concussion. Get what I mean?”
He left.
The right hand was bandaged, and the left hand — which I thought was bandaged — just had an IV stuck in it. Some guys in bathrobes saw me awake and came over.
“How you doing?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Yeah, just take it easy,” one guy said; he had sergeant’s stripes on his bathrobe. “Where you coming from?”
“I don’t know, the valley west of Tam Ky, I think.”
“They catching hell up there. They say charlie riding hogs up around Quang Tri.”
“Hogs?”
“Tanks, man.”
“Really?”
“Where the hell are the tanks coming from?”
“From the north through Cambodia, is the word,” he said. “Things are definitely getting heavy.”
I thought about the rumors of peace by the end of the holidays. I made myself hope that peace was still on the way.
The medical facility was like heaven. We got to eat good, we went to movies, the day room was cool. Best of all, the doctor said that none of my wounds were bad.
“You had a bad bruise of your breastbone.” The guy’s name tag read “Haveson.” He smiled as he talked, like he enjoyed being a doctor. “Could have been hit by something or could have been just the blast. You were lucky.”
Lucky.
They had a recording of a bugle that played in the morning. Everybody was shined and sharp. I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t until I saw the personnel around the hospital. They even had GIs tending to flowers around some of the barracks and some doing the same kinds of details they would have been doing back in Devens or any stateside base. In the mess hall they had Vietnamese doing KP.
The ward was full of guys. Some were bandaged nearly from head to feet. Some had big lumps of bandage and tape where limbs used to be.
One guy was
on a kind of spit. He had been burned really bad, and they came in and turned him every two hours.
Another guy, his name was Joe Derby, asked me to read to him. He wore dark glasses. There were scars, bad scars on his body. He had some books and asked me to read anything I found interesting. The books were cool. I had read one of them, Platero and I, in high school. The other books were by T. S. Eliot and Steinbeck.
“Your folks send you these books?” I asked.
“My mom,” he said. “I think she has ambition for me.”
“What happened to you?”
“We were in a convoy going to Dak To from Kon-tum. A couple of trucks up front got hit with mines. They set them off from the side of the road. We stopped and then we got hit with even, thing at the same time. I was trying to get behind a truck when it was hit by a mortar.”
“Oh.”
“I remember going up, but I don’t remember coming down.”
“Where you from?”
“Las Vegas.”
I didn’t ask him about his eyes. I didn’t want to know. I read to him from the Jiminez, a small story about what a village looked like on a Sunday morning when everyone had gone to a bullfight. It was a simple story, and it gave you a sense of the author being at peace with the world. Once, when I looked up, I saw that he was crying. I kept on reading.
I wrote Mama a letter. I tried to make it funny I told her that I had been hit in the leg and the wrist and now I was laying up getting fat. I told her that getting fat was my biggest problem.
I thought of writing her a real letter, but I didn’t have anything on my mind that I wanted her to know. I didn’t want to say how afraid of dying I had been. I didn’t want to say that I had a feeling that I wouldn’t get back home.
Brew. I thought about Brew a lot I felt so sorry for him. I remembered laying on the chopper next to him. I remembered feeling his hand. I wondered if he had felt mine. I thought about his praying and had to push him from my mind.
They moved me from one room in the hospital to a recovery ward. In the new ward there were a lot of guys playing cards, playing dominoes. A spec four asked me if I wanted to play poker. I shook my head no.
“He a boonies rat,” a guy said. “You know they ain’t right for two or three weeks.”
“Yeah?” The spec four looked me up and down. “Maybe he can play later.”
On the way to the PX an officer stopped me and asked me why I was out of uniform. The uniform he wore had creases ironed into the shirt. Everything about him was polish and crease. He wanted to know what outfit I was with, and — when he found out I was in the hospital — how long I had been there. He was challenging me, daring me to say something wrong. When he told me I could go on to the PX, I turned around and started back to the hospital. He said he thought I was going to the PX. I told him I had lost my appetite.
“Hey, good-looking!”
I was half asleep. I saw the name tag first, it read “Duncan.” It was the nurse I had come to Nam with.
“How you doing?”
“I’m doing okay,” she said, sitting on the side of the bed. “How you doing?”
“Okay,” I answered. My mouth was dry, and I took some water from the table near the bed.
“I saw your chart,” she said. “I was looking in on another guy when I saw you sleeping and thought I recognized you. You been out in the boonies much?”
“Long enough to think this is heaven,” I said.
“Sometimes I feel like I would rather be out there myself,” she said. “I guess that’s stupid, right?”
“Hey, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I’m just a little slow or something.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “You get hurt and it makes you confused. I’ve seen it a lot of times.” “You been here long?”
“Just transferred in when things started picking up during the Tet,” she said.
“How’s it going for you? Judy? Right?”
“Right. It’s going okay, I guess. Different than I thought it was going to be.”
“Different?”
“Well, when I first talked to you in Anchorage and we were headed this way, I imagined myself rushing around and fixing up neat little bullet holes and giving out peppermints. That’s not the way it is. You see that.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, I have to see some other guys. You take care of yourself, Perry. Perry, what’s your first name?” “Richie.”
“Richie, you take care of yourself.”
She kissed me and left. A couple of guys made comments about her kissing me. One asked me if I was getting over with her. I shrugged him off without answering. He mumbled something about guys from the boonies being strange.
Maybe they were right. I had felt awkward talking to Judy. I was glad to see her, but I couldn’t talk to her. The words didn’t have the right proportion somehow. There was this feeling that everything I was going to say was either too loud or too strange for a world in which people did normal things.
I thought about Judy. She had seemed so upbeat on the plane. She had come over to me and started talking. Now she seemed tired, sad. I hoped she would be okay.
I cried for Brew. Sometimes, even when I wasn’t thinking about him, or at least when I didn’t know I was thinking of him, I would find myself crying. And when the tears came, I thought about Brew and the sound the zipper made in the chopper.
Days went by. Stars and Stripes had a story about the Pueblo, and some guys were talking about the possibility of the U.S. getting involved with Korea again.
The chaplain and a colonel came in and talked to a bunch of us. The chaplain said that everything we did we did for the highest reasons that men knew.
“You are defending freedom,” he said. “You are defending the freedom of Americans and of the South Vietnamese. Your acts of heroism and courage are celebrations of life, and all America thanks you.”
Then the colonel gave out Purple Hearts to the guys who didn’t already have them. I decided to send my medal for being wounded in action to Kenny.
I wrote to Kenny again. I told him that I had read about the garbage strike in New York. I told him that when I got back to the World we would do a lot of things together. Maybe we would go downtown, to the museums. Kenny liked museums. I think, in a way, he felt safe in them. I told him we would go to games at Madison Square Garden, maybe even take Mama if she wanted to go.
I thought about what Peewee had said. That I had better think about killing the Congs before they killed me. That had better be my reason, he had said, until I got back to the World. Maybe it was right. But it meant being some other person than I was when I got to Nam. Maybe that was what I had to be. Somebody else.
When the doctors had finished looking at the wounds, I knew what they would say. They said I looked okay. The shrapnel — small slivers of metal — hadn’t hit anything vital. They were pretty sure they had dug out all the pieces. The doctor made a joke about missing a piece that I could tell my grandchildren about. The wrist had healed nicely. The doctor showed me the chip in the bone in the first X ray. Then he showed me a second X ray, it was cloudy, and I didn’t make anything of it. He said it showed that the bone was growing back.
They had to come. My orders to rejoin my unit. When the clerk brought them, he made me sign for them. He left, and I threw them on the bed and went to breakfast. When I got back they were still there.
I read all the orders on the page, not just mine. Baines. Jones, Edward. Jones, Nance. Naylor. Perry.
No. I said no to myself. I wouldn’t go back. I would go AWOL. I packed my things.
I went to the john and puked my guts out. I was scared. I felt almost the way I had in the chopper.
I couldn’t breathe, my hands were sweating. What would I do? I had heard of guys running away to
Sweden. How the hell did you get to Sweden from Nam? Was there still a Sweden to run to?
The orders said that I was to report back to my outfit, where I would report to my c
ommanding officer.
I went to say good-bye to Joe Derby and some of the other guys. The guy on the spit was gone. I hoped he made it.
“Get back to the World, Perry,” Derby said.
“I’m pushing for it, man.”
Everything was going too fast. I couldn’t handle it. No way.
The plane was full of marines, fresh from Camp Lejeune. They were tough, full of themselves. They seemed so young. They kidded back and forth among themselves. They had weapons. Some of them looked at me, and some asked me questions. Had I been in country long? Had I seen any action? They were itching to get into combat.
I had been in the country four months. I hadn’t seen a lot of action, but enough. Lord knows it was enough.
Chapter 17
We were camped at an old landing strip just north of Tam Ky and less than a thousand meters from Highway 1. I was glad to be near the highway. To the west, rice paddies stretched for what seemed miles. The dikes were twisted, uneven. I wondered how many battles had been fought along them. There were guys, mostly ARVN troops, sitting in tight little circles under the trees. I looked around for Americans, and finally found some. I asked them if they knew where Alpha Company was.
“Up the hill a piece,” a tired-looking guy said.
I walked up the hill slowly. I could see small clusters of soldiers sitting around. It was less than a company. Maybe a squad or two at the most.
I was afraid again. I had felt it coming when I got my orders. I had felt it on the chopper. Now it sat like a heavy ball in my guts.
The dirt on the hill was soft beneath my feet. Trees once splintered had begun to grow again along the path up. I stepped on the bootprints that were there. The Vietnamese voices below me, ARVN troops, followed me up the hill.
Peewee was standing near a tree, peeing. God bless Peewee.
“Hey, buddy, you see any soldiers around here?” “Man, you as sneaky as the damn Congs,” Peewee said, looking up. “I didn’t even hear you coming.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not too cool,” Peewee said. He was rearranging his clothes as he talked.
“What’s up?”
“First things first,” he said. “How the fuck you doing?”
“No big deal,” I said. “A couple of scratches.”