The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I’ll do worse than that,’ Coombes muttered in English.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. They’d been tracking for almost six hours and had another six or seven hours of daylight left. Hightower had given them until noon tomorrow to find Valesquez, or whatever was left of him, and bring him back. Be patient; be like the forest. Tomorrow noon. What was so magical about that hour? Coombes unbuckled the watch and, with a casual movement, flipped it into the river. Instantly, he felt lighter, and he rubbed the band’s impression on his wrist like a prisoner when the cuffs are taken off. He waved to the others to come across.

  Larry Heinemann

  PACO’S STORY

  Larry Heinemann’s novel Paco’s Story, published in 1986, describes the attempts of a Vietnam veteran to settle down ‘back in the world’ after the end of the war. In a small town in the Midwest, where he has found a job washing dishes, Paco realizes that for the people around him he is a curiosity, a relic from a war they have already forgotten about.

  Paco, however, cannot forget, and in the following extract recalls his days in hospital as the only survivor of a nightmarish massacre.

  PACO REMEMBERS ALL right, and vividly.

  There was the big red cross on the white field on the bottom of the medevac chopper when it came to get him, and nearly the instant he was aboard the chopper rose with a swoop, making speed and altitude swiftly. Paco’s stomach fluttered and he felt mighty dizzy, and he thought he was going to throw up. He remembers the healthy, browned faces of the medics, and their gossip about the filthy debris in Paco’s wounds – the maggots in the running sores (almost the feeling of an enticing caress), the soft, spongy scabs on burst blisters, and the crusts of dirt. He remembers the peculiar sensation (this through several quarter-grain doses of morphine) when the boldest of the medics – an earnest-looking guy with a firm, light touch and cool fingers – started picking at strips of cloth and splinters of wood, bits of blackened, brittle skin as long and curled as razor-clam shells (the pink, raw skin burning) – the medics thinking it was like picking chips of old paint from a thick coat of new paint, still tacky. All the while, the other medics soothed Paco, petting him, saying, ‘Gonna be okay, hey! You gonna be cool in another ten minutes. Okay! Can’t fuck up a tough motherfucker like you, now can they?’ And they kept saying okay to him, as though it was part of their work. And they’d ask him, ‘Who are you, Jack? What’s your name? What happened there?’ shouting over the whining, rushing engine noises. And all that time Paco kept one thought in his head as distinct as a colourful dream – I must not die – each word reverberating as though said out loud, the crisp pronunciation tingling the sore flesh of his mouth – I must not die – like the litany of an invocation, as though he felt his body shrink each instant he did not say it. And he remembers being overwhelmed with tears (though half the medics expected a wan, plucky smile), his swollen mouth watering and his eyes and nose burning with tears, again and again – because he was alive; because he had made it (thanks to God’s luck, James) – the moisture cold on his face in the brisk rotor wash of the chopper blades. He remembers flying at a solid thousand feet, making a beeline for the western perimeter at Phuc Luc (so they could turn straight to the hospital dust-off pad without having to circle about the wards to come into the wind) – the young chopper pilot turning his head now and again, asking how the wounded guy was, and the medics telling him, ‘Just keep hauling ass, Jack!’ And the pilot swerved this way and that among the huge monsoon thunderheads to avoid their fierce weather, flying full-bore flat-out, James, just as fast as that machine would fly.

  Paco stretched his neck and looked out the wide chopper doorway, and it was noon, remember, and there before him was a brilliant panorama of thunderheads in every direction – fleece-white and gunmetal-grey, and black as thick as night. They rose thousands of feet into the air, billowing up majestically, the same as Spanish dancers rising out of a deep curtsy, sweeping open their arms (an overpowering image of God’s power shown to us in a small way, James). The slow-motion billows towered up and up above Paco and the others; some sailed serenely on; others rained hard, pounding downpours of monsoon storms, soaking the ground to mush. All the many storms drifted like sleepwalkers climbing a broad balcony stairway, Paco thought as he looked out the chopper – the lilting rain cascaded down like the lacy trains of airy ballgowns, trailing behind the dreamlike sleepers. And then it seemed to him that the thunderheads looked like plain, stern young women with long, loosened hair, standing here and there and yonder on a smooth stone quay, waiting for a dream death ship, say; each woman with her small clean hands folded lightly across a hard, swollen belly; each standing well away from the others, while pigeons pecked about underfoot, swarming for crumbs, and a hot, breathtaking sun beat down over all.

  Well below the chopper the jungle looked spongy soft, as though Paco could have reached down into it – like reaching into the rich suds of a green bubble bath – and scooped up a frothy handful; Paco was sure it would be the most fragrant foam. Here and there the brilliant sunlight caught patches of water – rice paddies and irrigation ditches, ordinary hoochyard puddles and snatches of some river or other through the jungle canopy, and bomb craters as big as house lots – the reflections caught his eye like a fierce light through the chinks in a wood fence, more stunning and fantastic than muzzle flashes. Paco saw the broad swaths of water-filled craters, the truck convoys making headway among the woods and curves and storms – dust rising above the dry sections of roadway – the old tank laagers where the tank treads had dug furrows in the thick, squishy turf.

  Paco and the medics floated through that bizarre, horrific gloom in the broad light of day, with the air smelling of damp electricity. The rain slanted one way (the spray sucked into the rotor wash), indistinct and misted; the scorching midday sun slanted another, the colours and shadows crisp and vivid, as radiant and sharp as a bright and interesting face seen in a clean mirror.

  The dust-off flew, pounding, over the perimeter at Phuc Luc above the sweltering bunker line bristling with guns, then banked downwind, eastward, making for the sandbagged hospital compound (you could see the huge red crosses on the many compound rooftops) – the air in the chopper suddenly hot and bright above the bare ground and tin roofs. Nearly everyone in the chopper’s path looked up from his work to watch it cruise overhead – every man understanding full well that the one survivor of the Alpha Company holocaust massacre was aboard, half wrapped in a body bag and still alive (Can you beat that!), otherwise the pilot would not still be flying so hard. The chopper came swiftly, steeply in, making directly for that bit of tarmac at the end of the duckboard walkway outside the awning of the hospital triage. It settled quickly and firmly on the chopper pad. The triage medics, the zonked-out Graves Registration slick-sleeve privates, and other passersby and hangers-on hustled out to help – to gawk, too, no doubt; to touch luck, we might think, James – and brought Paco into the stuffy shade of the triage tent and laid him on one of those waist-high litter racks for the duty officer to inspect – everyone talking at once, taking pictures.

  A triage is the place in the back of a hospital where the litter bearers line up the wounded brought in from the field; first come first served, you understand. A doctor examines them, culling through the wounds, comparing and considering, then picks who’s first in the operating room, who’s second, who’s last – and who gets written off. In extreme emergencies the worst hopeless cases are drugged, usually with healthy doses of morphine, shunted off to the Moribund Ward, and allowed to die among themselves with only one another for comfort. And once you are taken into the Moribund Ward, James, you are as good as dead – no matter how long it takes. But Paco, by then famous as the nameless wounded man from Alpha Company’s massacre, got every consideration.

  The doctor, a pasty-faced major with a fresh pair of operating greens bloused sloppily into his jungle boots, swaggered into the open-air triage, wiping his hands on a mildly bloody apron like a fishmong
er’s wife. He took one look at Paco and saw immediately that he was unfit to take into the operating room. He knew also that they would be swamped with equally serious wounded, and plenty of them, from the bloodbath firefight at Fire Base Francesca as soon as a chopper could make it through the withering ground fire and RPGs, and that they – the doctors and nurses and medics – might well work through the night. Indeed, James, that was pretty much what happened. The doctor unzipped Paco’s body bag – the sharp raw stench of Paco’s wounds, Paco’s bowels, rising fully in his face. He turned the bloody zippered flaps of the bag this way and that, reaching in to lift a scrap of cloth to inspect the festering wounds and the bone fragments that stuck through the skin. ‘Christ Jesus on a bloody fuckin’ crutch,’ he said under his breath, ‘how long was this guy left like this? – what’s his name?’

  ‘Almost two days,’ said the medic with the good hands. ‘This is that Alpha Company guy and he ain’t said who he is yet, sir.’

  (It must have been one motherfucker of a firefight, the medics and nurses said among themselves as they looked on, and ended the night steeped in blood.)

  The major looked over at Paco again and said, ‘Right.’ And then, because Paco was stinking filthy and peppered with minute flakes and slivers of shrapnel, he said, ‘Take this man into a side room here and scrub him up,’ dropped the flaps of the body bag, and wiped his hands on his apron – his nose smarting the same as everyone else’s – ‘Then we’ll take a look at him and start to work.’ So the triage medics shot Paco another quarter-grain of morphine, grabbed a couple bottles of Phisohex surgical soap and a handful of scrub brushes, jerked him and his litter up, and hustled him into a side cubicle.

  Paco remembers the stiff, greasy canvas drapes the medics pulled to, the hot light bulb with the jerry-rigged wires hanging in his face, the medics pouring sweat, the collapsed garbage bag of rotted field dressings in the corner – that oppressive and fetid, suffocating air. He remembers, too, oddly, the sweet and medicinal smell of the soap, and the sloppy, squishy sound of the lather.

  Paco was warm and numb from the morphine (as though tucked up snugly in stiff, thick blankets) when they smeared the first doses of surgical soap on his chest and arms, then commenced to scrub him raw. When the shot finally took full effect, Paco felt only a vague grinding sensation, that was all, as though someone were gouging the stringy meat and seeds from a ripe pumpkin with a blunt wooden spoon; it sounded as though they were scrubbing coarse cloth, bearing down with great vigour. He remembers lolling his head back on the small, flat pillow (a burlap sandbag stuffed with loose dressings), and finally, the welcome ease of sleep that came over him after nearly two days of his earnest and stoic, watchful anticipation of death. (It was something the same as the first moment you slipped off your 60–80–100-pound rucksack pack – that instantly dumb, numb, inexpressible relief when your shoulders, your lungs, your kidneys seemed to float upward, and your whole torso tingled and throbbed, ached and itched – like a foot and leg asleep. It felt like a hard task finally ended; not done well, mind you, James, simply done with.)

  Now scrubbing out the shrapnel with Phisohex and surgical scrub brushes was a common first-aid procedure – comfort of the wounded had nothing to do with it, and most never got the consideration of morphine, ‘Waste of good dope, Jack!’ – more common certainly than having some first-of-May, fucking-new-guy rookie triage medic sit there picking at a million slivers of shrapnel with a manicure scissors, a magnifying glass, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. So the medics, wearing surgical masks and gagging at the stench, peeled back the black rubber body bag bit by bit and cut off the remains of Paco’s clothes with surgical scissors as they went about the business of cleaning him up for his first surgery.

  Paco awoke in what must have been the middle of the night in the stifling heat of a squalid little Quonset hut, the Recovery Ward, coming out of the anaesthetic with his legs and back itchy and prickly, feeling as though someone were chopping into them with a tailor’s scissors as big as a shears – skrit, skrit, skrit (the bosomy night nurse sitting at the nurses’ station scribbling notes on charts with a bit of pencil in a small circle of harsh light) – Paco thinking that when an arm or leg is amputated you often have the sensation, later, that the amputated part itches or feels hot or cold. He felt the bedsheets tighten and slacken against his chest; felt his own breathing. He heard the bugs banging on the coppery screen of the door under the porch light, the hiss coming in over a radio receiver somewhere (white noise, we called it), someone walking on the duckboard outside, the duckboard slapping into shallow puddles. All of that immediate and simultaneous with someone’s endless moaning, rhythmic and sustained – another of the wounded men in the ward letting go, breath by breath, of some deep and woeful hurt. Paco opened his eyes with a blink and whispered, ‘Hey,’ just to hear the sound of his own voice – the same as you might pinch yourself, James, to prove that you are substance, and awake and alive, after all. And the bosomy night nurse snapped her head around and looked across the way, quickly searching a roomful of vigorously healthy bodies suddenly extremely ill (instant amputations and cracked skulls, shredded organs and disembowelments, faces destroyed by close-in AK rifle fire – the slugs still embedded in the heads – the smell of heavy, foul sweat); the many IV bottles and the many drooping amber tubes; a huge pedestal fan whirring like crazy in the corner; the stainless-steel trays arranged just so in the nightstands; and the sparkles of light arching across the curved Quonset ceiling. The instant the woman turned her attention to the room, everything was chugging and ticking, hissing and thunking, rasping shrilly, and the men were jerking and gasping, but sleeping hard. They were so whacked out on painkillers they could not see and could not feel and could not smell anything except the sickly, rank medicinal odour of the bandages and the bloody slop of their own body rot, scabbing over – everything seemed a million miles below them, behind them, around back of them or up on the eight hundredth shelf and unfathomly, unreachably beyond them; as good as echoes. One man gritted his teeth and grimaced, rolling his eyes. Another man stretched and curled his toes, wrinkled his brow, squinched and blinked his eyes, as though he were counting the freight cars of a passing train. Another man pumped his legs as if he were pedalling a bike, and squirmed as though his bed were spread with rock salt, steam puffing out the holes in his oxygen mask in quick steady chugs. The night nurse saw Paco stretching and rustling around, pulling at the sheets gathered in his fists, trying to glimpse the end of his bed where his legs were, plastered and bandaged, as thick as bedposts. She dropped her paperwork and went immediately to him and sat lightly on the very edge of his bed. At first she reassured him, telling him where he was: ‘The post-op ward of the evac hospital, and you’ve had an operation, and you’ll have more, but you’re okay,’ she said, and gave him a drink of tepid water, holding the tall Styrofoam cup steady while he sipped deeply through the plastic straw; Paco always especially remembered her rich, feminine voice. ‘What is your name?’ she said. ‘Tell me your name, say your name.’ So he told her, though he discovered he could barely speak, and in that same instant he tried to take hold of her jungle trousers with the very tips of his fingers – his hands deeply cut, bruised, burned, heavily bandaged. He wanted to ask her who all these men were; if there was anyone from Alpha Company, anyone else from Fire Base Harriette? ‘No,’ she said clearly, anticipating him, ‘these are from Fire Base Francesca. You’re the only one from Harriette.’ And Paco eased back on the bed, lapsing into thought about that, absorbing it. She gave him another shot of morphine – the surgeon had left orders to give him plenty, but not too much, because if the kid croaked he’d hear about it from every son-of-a-bitch in the chain of command and his career would be up shit creek. Then the woman pulled the sheet back (the smell of clean meat there) – Paco remembered always the smell of her Ivory soap and her face shining in the low light, and how her blouse clung to her body as she moved. She peeled back the stiff bandages (Paco mesmerized by the cr
ackle of them, so many bandages) and then gave him a sponge bath with a soft hand towel rinsed in a shallow basin of water fetched from the ward’s water cooler. The nurse went about her work with that calm and soothing patience some women have who understand full well the need for physical kindness and its effect – a fondness for the warm touch of care that is just as often a caress – she daubing his body clean bit by bit with a cool cloth and warm hands. Soon after she commenced, Paco got an erection (not as uncommon as you might think, James; after all, we’d been in the field for nearly forty-five days and Paco hadn’t been with a woman for months before that). The nurse washed Paco’s belly and watched his cock stand fully erect (a dozen or so knotted stitches pinching; Paco mightily embarrassed – the woman a nurse, a stranger after all, an officer, for Christ’s sake!), but she discouraged the hard-on with a half-dozen hard flicks of her fingernail – the same as she would tap the morphine syringe to get rid of air bubbles, only harder. She washed his face and ears, combing back his hair with her hands and fingers. She redressed his wounds, pulled the sheet back to his chin, and soon he was fast asleep. Later that morning, before breakfast, the major (looking plainly exhausted) made the rounds of the wards – coming along first thing, in clean operating greens, to check on Paco and the other dozen wounded. The blousy night nurse stood with a hand on Paco’s bed rail and casually mentioned that she thought the guy from the Alpha Company massacre would make it fine (none of the hospital staff ever did call him by his name). And bit by bit, day by day, he did get better, though he shit blackish, pasty stool for weeks.

  Some smart-ass put the snips of shrapnel (hard metal shavings the colour of coconut flakes), the misshapen rifle slugs, the sharply jagged pieces of brass shell casings, the pieces of bones which they couldn’t fit – all that – into a petri dish and slipped it in with Paco’s other meagre belongings (fetched from his gear at Alpha Company) stashed under the nightstand. And weeks later, when Paco first saw the dish while he was sorting through his gear, it reminded him of those chintzy little souvenir saucers filled with pins and buttons and other trivial oddments that folks keep out of sheer sentimentality. Paco kept that petri dish, of course.