When I came to, I was in a brightly lit hospital ward. My “scarf bandage” had been replaced by a complex set of bandages that completely swathed my head. An IV set was stuck into the back of my right wrist and I stared at the tiny beads of liquid dropping into the tube for a minute as I tried to gather my wits. The headache was still there but numbed by some kind of painkiller. Those white lights hurt my eyes, so I closed them and tried to drift back off to sleep.
“You back with us, Doctor?” a female voice asked, and then I felt a soft hand pick up my other wrist to get a pulse.
“No,” I said, apropos of nothing.
She giggled and then told me to open my eyes.
“Hurts to do that,” I replied, but then I did what she asked. She was young, impossibly young, I thought, but she was wearing the uniform of a registered nurse.
“No surprise there, Doctor Andersen,” she said. “You have a linear skull fracture going across the top of your cranium.”
“Hairline fracture?” I asked.
“No, Doctor. Not huge, but not hairline, either. The surgeons cleaned it up, put some staples in, and sutured the scalp.”
“I thought the brain couldn’t feel pain,” I said, somewhat stupidly. My brain hadn’t been injured. Or had it?
“Correct, but the skull absolutely can. You’ll have a groove across the top of your skull once it heals. Now: they’ve asked me to check motor functions. Can you move your extremities?”
We went through a hands, fingers, and feet check. Everything moved when commanded to do so. Then I tried to move my head. My head informed me that was a bad idea. She saw me wince.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to put you in a neck brace. There’s nothing wrong with your neck but that bullet or whatever it was did a number on your skull-bone. Did a sniper get you?”
“Actually, I think a Jap battleship got me. Down in Surigao Strait.”
The blank look on her face told me that the hospital staff didn’t know much about what had been going on for the past forty-eight hours. Then a familiar female voice spoke up from behind the nurse. “Told you about that kryptonite, but would you listen? No, you would not.”
I looked over the nurse’s shoulder to find Helen Carpenter smiling down at me. I didn’t remember anything about kryptonite, but I was very glad to see her. She tapped the young nurse on the shoulder and then traded places with her.
I closed my eyes again, even though I wanted to keep them open. Whatever was coming down that IV was really working now. “I need to get back to the squadron,” I said, finally. “Chief Higgins can manage my wound and the bandages.”
She squeezed my other hand, the one without an IV line. “Your squadron days are over, there, Superman,” she said quietly. “We’re one day out of Leyte and on our way to Guam. Your hooligans will be all right.”
That got my eyes open, although my eyelids felt like they were made of lead. “We’re what?” I asked.
“You’re on the hospital ship Refuge. She’s taking wounded from the Leyte invasion and some from the carrier Princeton. We’ll stop at Guam, and then we’re bound for Pearl.”
“But I can’t just leave,” I said.
She touched the top of my head with the tip of one finger. Lightning ensued. “Yes, you can. And will. I do believe your war is over, Doctor Lincoln Andersen. It’s not like you didn’t contribute.”
My war was over? My brain tried to grapple with that idea. I vaguely saw her reach up to the IV bottle, and then I got my wish. My eyes closed like a trap and everything got better.
THIRTY-TWO
She came to see me a day later. My head had been feeling better until they had to change the bandage. Part of that change involved peeling the final layer of gauze off the miniature Grand Canyon running across my scalp. Apparently, I’d reacted badly, so I’d been given another round of whatever came in those IV bottles with the green stripe down the side. I knew what that stuff was, but for the life of me, I could not dredge up the clinical name.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked.
“Weary,” I said. “Which, considering I’ve just been lying here, doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
She nodded. “I talked to the senior neurosurgeon this morning about your case,” she said. “There might be more damage than they first thought. Something about hydrostatic shock, caused by a piece of metal moving across the top of your brain at twice the speed of sound. Can you raise your right arm?”
“Yes,” I said, and then lifted my right forearm into the air.
“Now,” she said. “Make a fist.”
I made a fist, except I didn’t. My fingers curled in but then stopped well short of a real fist.
“What the hell,” I muttered. For the first time I felt a tinge of fear about my head wound. I think she saw my reaction.
“Look,” she said. “I’ve got an interesting job aboard this ship. I’m called the Patient Coordinator. That title means I go through the wards and evaluate each patient as to the consequences of his injury. Not the current medical situation, but what their wounds mean in terms of returning to service. Or not.”
She let that sink in for a moment, then continued. “The docs have the last say, of course, but my job is to make recommendations as to what I’m seeing when those scary white-coats are not standing around some badly hurt GI.”
“I thought you’d be the head nurse,” I said. “Like at Munda.”
She smiled. “I’m a full commander now in the Navy Nurse Corps. I’m actually senior to the head nurse in the great scheme of things. But that’s not important.”
“What is?” I asked.
“They know who you are,” she said. “The senior medical officer of this hospital and his heads of department.”
“Who I am?” I asked. “I’m nobody, ever since that Chisolm fella put me in my place after the attack on Munda. After I operated on him and my beloved Doctor Garr. I haven’t touched a scalpel since then. And to tell the truth, after the way Chisolm treated me, I haven’t much missed it.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “You are a natural-born surgeon. I know—I’ve seen you in action. Now: you need to listen to me, and trust me. We’re three days out of Pearl—and Tripler Hospital. You need to lay low, whether you’re getting better or not. Some of the old guard—and our present CO is one of those—would like to hang you out to dry. But only if you rise up and demand to become a surgeon again. A Navy surgeon.”
I didn’t know what to say. I actually hadn’t thought much about what I’d do after getting back to Pearl and, more importantly, if she was right about my war being over. She saw my confusion.
“Here’s what you do,” she said. “Go passive. Don’t say anything about the future. I’ll get you to Tripler with a recommendation that you are physically unfit for further wartime service. They’ll go along with my recommendation; I can promise you that. That means discharge from the Navy, by the way.”
“But—” I protested.
“No ‘buts,’” she said. “The Japs are being pushed back to their home islands by the day. We’re going to win this thing, one way or another. You have to start thinking about what you’re going to do, no, what you’re going to be—when this war ends.”
“Be?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Be. You gonna be a surgeon? Do you want to be a surgeon?”
“Well,” I said. “That is the question, isn’t it? I’ve been a surgeon and a pretty good one. My reward for that was to be sent back to my sidelined hooligans, with the clear understanding that I was not ever to operate on anybody.”
She shook her head. “You’re missing the point, my dear Superman. You managed to touch the flypaper of the Navy’s medical bureaucracy, and it wasn’t a gentle touch. What will that matter once the war ends? If you go to war with the Navy Medical Corps, they’ll destroy you. So, don’t go to war with them. Be quiet. Be agreeable. Be just a little physically impaired. Wounded, physically and perhaps a little bit mentally. When they hear t
hat, they’ll forget all about you, and then you can go home and resume your medical career.”
“As what?” I said. “As a fourth-year resident at Duke?”
“Show your mentors at Duke those logs,” she said. “Trust me, when they see what you did out there in the Solomons and beyond, your ‘residency’ will be one of the shortest in history.”
She saw that I wasn’t entirely convinced.
“Dammit, Lincoln Andersen. You’re angry at how you’ve been treated, and I don’t blame you. You gave it your best effort and you saved lives. The best revenge against a medical bureaucracy that doesn’t like you is to become a full-fledged surgeon with a ticket from Duke Medical. Am I right?”
“I know you are,” I said. “I guess that’s not what’s really bothering me.”
She took my hand. “I know. Brain injury. Can’t make a fist. Can’t hold a scalpel. All you can do is to push that brain of yours to rebuild and regroup. Brains do that, but only when they’re pushed.”
“Where will you go when this is all over?”
She gave a small laugh. “This ship will go back to Guam and then some islands called Palau in another month. I’ll go with her. The Japanese consider Okinawa to be a home island. We’ve been told to expect a lot of ‘customers.’”
I nodded, and then remembered that I should limit my nodding. That line of fire across my scalp helped me to remember. “I never got to ask you—where are you from, originally?”
“Omaha, Nebraska,” she said. “Farm bred, corn fed, and proud of it.”
I smiled then. I could still smile, which was nice when all these gentle people came around to tend to my frailties. “Ever been to Durham, North Carolina?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“When this is all over, come to Durham. It’s a nice town. Tobacco town. Got some good hospitals there, too.”
She gave me a long, pensive look. “Deal,” she said. Then rounds began and my doorway was filled with white coats. Funny, I thought. In all my wartime adventures, I’d never worn a white coat. Maybe that’s why they were mad at me. She squeezed my hand and left.
THIRTY-THREE
One year later I was sitting by myself in the Surgery Program director’s conference room at Duke Medical. It was a beautiful fall day outside, especially with the trees beginning to turn. The Pacific war against Japan had ended almost two months ago and the entire country seemed to be catching its breath and wondering what was going to happen next. I know I was.
I’d come back to Durham just before Christmas, ’44, to the great relief of my parents. My stay at the Army medical center in Pearl called Tripler Hospital had been mercifully brief. Helen’s recommendation that I be discharged from the Navy Medical Corps as physically unfit for frontline medical service had had the desired effect. I’d been given a thorough medical exam by the neurosurgical department, which concluded that my injuries would eventually heal and that there did not appear to be any cognitive damage. They established that by bringing in a senior surgeon who asked me a zillion questions about surgical procedures. When we were done, he sat back and said that I was cleared to continue as a surgeon as far as he was concerned. I didn’t tell him who, or, more importantly, what I was in terms of surgical certification. He assumed and I just let him. I made sure to take a copy of his medical report with me back to the States.
The trip back was laborious and somewhat tiring. A troopship to San Francisco. A transcontinental train ride to New York, and then another train down to North Carolina. My father met me in New York and rode with me for the trip home. The Navy’s casualty-reporting system had informed them that I’d been wounded, so he was greatly relieved when I appeared to be relatively okay. The suture line across the top of my scalp had turned the hair white, so I now had a dramatic tiara, but physically I was better off than most of the troops I’d seen aboard the troopship. The thought had crossed my somewhat bruised mind to offer medical help aboard the ship, but Helen’s warning about laying low prevailed. The ship had been escorted by two destroyer escorts against the possibility of Jap subs lurking on the Pearl-to-San Francisco route. To see them pitching and rolling comfortably abeam brought back memories of the Montrose. I was pretty sure we were finally out of Betty range.
Memories were a real problem. I waded through a veritable sea of memories while convalescing at home. I still felt guilty for “abandoning” my hooligans. I sent a long letter to Bluto to explain what had happened. I don’t know if he ever got it, but I felt strongly that I owed him and the squadron some sort of apology for just disappearing like that. And yet, I’d seen all too many men just disappear from the squadron just like that, or worse. Patches of flaming gasoline on the waters at night. Exactly like that. We’d miss them, but we couldn’t dwell on them. Replacements would inevitably show up and then we’d turn to the business of getting them up to speed. That said, the pictures of badly wounded and burned MTB sailors floundering in the bloody waters off Savo Island, never to be found or seen again, were not easy to suppress.
My father didn’t ask me about my experiences “out there,” somehow knowing that I wouldn’t open up about them until I was ready. I’d gone in with the First Marines in August of 1942, and I’d been invalided home in late October 1944. It didn’t seem like two years. It seemed more like a flickering series of days: good days, terrible days, sad days. Horrible days. But then, as if to compensate, there were memories of screamers, nighttime raids with Alibaba and his many thieves, watching the Long Toms on Rendova pound the Japs over on New Georgia, seeing Marine pilots happily flaming Bettys over Tulagi and then doing victory rolls, and that brief moment when Helen Carpenter had realized that something might be possible between us … well.
A surgeon must have a very good memory. That’s good news and bad news in wartime. My father, God bless him, seemed to know this instinctively. My mother, on the other hand, immediately began plotting ways to introduce me to “suitable” young women in the social set in Durham and Raleigh. There was, apparently, an overabundance of them. That led to more ducking and weaving on my part, much to the vast amusement of my father. It wasn’t as if I was being loyal to my memory of Helen Carpenter, who, for all I know, was back in Omaha, looking up old boyfriends.
What Dad did do was to nudge me back to a career as a surgeon. I hemmed and I hawed but eventually had to admit to myself that I couldn’t keep living at home like some kind of leech. I knew deep down I had some decisions to make. He suggested a long weekend down on the coast where he had a beach house. It was a ramshackle affair, typical of beach houses that faced hurricanes on an annual basis. It was early November. He said we’d go fishing; the tourists were long gone and the fish were actually more plentiful. I’d tried as a youngster to embrace fishing, but it just seemed to take too long to pull in something that was available right down the block in the fish market. Fishing for fish wasn’t his objective, of course, and on the second night there, as we huddled in front of a wood stove pretending it wasn’t cold, he produced a bottle of some evil substance called Armagnac. Leave it to the French: I finally told him my story.
Eventually, I was talked out and a wee bit drunk. Screamers had nothing on Armagnac. His only comment when I finished was to say thanks for telling him all that. Good, now that’s over, and so I stumbled off to my bedroom, thoroughly boiled. The next morning, over coffee and a hangover, he had some interesting things to say.
“I read your logs,” he began. “The ones you sent home?”
I’d forgotten about the logs.
“If you still want to be a surgeon,” he said, “and I think that, deep down, you do, those logs may be your ticket back into the medical world’s good graces.”
“How so?”
“I think you should pay a visit to the med school. First, go through the residency admissions office and apply to resume your studies. They admitted you once before, and I assume you left in good standing. But they’ll have a problem trying to decide at what level you’d restart—first
year, third year?
“While they’re trying to sort that out, put a call in to the chief of surgery’s secretary, asking for an appointment with the boss. You want to resume your studies as a resident, but there’s some history about your two years out in the Pacific that might bear upon the school’s decision. She’ll tell you to go through the admissions office, that the chief doesn’t make those decisions.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s exactly what she’d say.”
“Yeah, but,” he said, “you reply that you’ve done that, and that admissions doesn’t know what to do. Ask if you can drop off some documentation for the chief’s perusal, so that he’ll have a heads-up when admissions comes to him for a what-do-we-do-with-this-guy question. She’d be right in redirecting you to admissions, but you’re offering to give her boss advance warning that an issue is coming. Most secretaries are protective of their bosses, and I’d predict she’ll tell you, fine, but I can’t guarantee he’ll look at it. He’s the chief, remember? He’s a busy guy. Etcetera, etcetera.
“Then, prepare a cover letter laying out your situation and that you were thrown into a sink-or-swim situation during the Solomons campaign, starting with the invasion of Guadalcanal. Include the first log. Also include all the places where you performed surgery beyond the level of a third-year resident. And, finally, declare that you’re not asking for carte-blanche credit for your wartime service, but only that you be allowed to demonstrate what you do know to the faculty as a means to decide where, and under what rules, you reenter the program. I think the moment he looks at that log he’ll be intrigued enough to call you in. Maybe even open a board to review your situation. After that, it’ll all be up to you and the faculty. Whaddaya think?”
Thinking was hard right then, but it seemed like the best, and perhaps the only way to get my foot back in the door at Duke Medical. I nodded.
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