A most pleasant woman’s voice, the first one I’ve heard speaking English since the previous autumn, tells me she is Lieutenant Weeks, that all is well now, and all I have to do is heal. How about details? They will come from the major when he makes his rounds. Major arrives. Asks me about pain. I ask him about my feet. Do I still have them both? Of course, he says, but the orthopedic people will tell me about that. He’s interested in my eyes. He unwraps bandages. Removes pad from my left eye. Tells me open it. I can’t. He pulls up the lid. Can I see anything? I can’t. He repeats the process with the right eye. Can I see anything? Another negative.
I am blind.
When you are nineteen and that realization hits, it’s good to have that jolly, jolly morphine in your bloodstream. The major is telling me that both of my eyes were burned and the eyeballs penetrated by small fragments. Most of these have been extracted. Some are yet to be removed. Both eyes are infected. The first priority is to stop the infection. The major thinks this will be accomplished and that probably I will be able to see again, at least some, and at least with the right eye.
I had become aware a long time ago, I think when I was trying to make the Konawa High School football team, that the things you worry about tend not to happen and the troubles you haven’t considered bring the unpleasant surprises. (I thought I’d be a benchwarmer because I was skinny. It was because I was slow.) When released from the gentle bliss of sedatives, I had been worried about my foot. I had been in combat long enough to know it was probably gone. While I hadn’t been able to see since I was wounded it hadn’t seemed to occur to me to worry about vision. That would correct itself. I devoted my thoughts to how one got along with the artificial replacement. For example, did one have to buy a special shoe? I had presumed that once my face healed and the bandages came off my eyes would be good as new.
Now a different focus was required. My optimism was partially overcome by the enlisted man’s natural skepticism of any information received from an officer. The major is lying, of course, cheering me until I’m healing and better able to handle the bad news. He actually thinks I’ll be blind. But I will see again, no matter what he says. Maybe not very well, but some. At least enough to see the sky, storms forming, the patterns of lightning, the incredibly beautiful cumulus formations building, and building and building on summer afternoons until the stratospheric winds blow the shingles from their roofs. And I’ll see the stars again on those winter nights when the moon is down and the constellations glitter. I will see enough sky to have it remind me, as it had since childhood, of how God loves us enough to give us all this grand beauty.
The major comes five days a week, asks me questions, removes the left bandage, asks what I see, and the answer is always nothing, followed by a second nothing for the right eye. With each visit the eyes are bathed in a solution and the bandages returned. Every three hours a nurse or an orderly arrives and gives me a very large shot of some liquid. Penicillin, I’m told. New experimental stuff some Brit invented. After a couple of weeks I run out of unused shoulder and arm veins for the needle and the nurse does her needlework on my back and buttocks. Reality is modifying my optimism. Blindness won’t be all that bad. I’ll have some sort of pension. I will find a seeing-eye dog, I think, and have a white cane. I have a fine sense of direction. My hearing is now fairly well restored. I am good at memorizing. I can learn Braille.
The major comes again, unveils left eye. Anything? No. Unveils right eye. I don’t wait for the question. I see him!! At least I see something. Light and shadow, the shape of a face. Then my eye begins watering furiously. Jubilation. I am not blind.
A new phase of life begins. A few days later I can make out shapes fairly well with that good eye. Within a week I am seeing light with the left one. Now the focus of my thinking shifts to itching. The nurse assures me this is a sign of healing. Another doctor shows up, the part of the cast involving my right leg is sawed off, and the knee inspected. The doctor doesn’t like what he sees and I am scheduled for another trip to surgery.
This doctor is a mere captain, not a lifer but a civilian in for the war who looks upon me as an interested participant in what’s happening. He tells me that when the mine exploded under my left foot most of the damage was done there. But it also blew off the sole of the left boot and slammed it through three layers of pants and two layers of underwear into my right knee, dislocating same and making a rip about fifteen inches long down to the bone. Cloth, rubber, dirt, and etc., had to be dug out to close this wound, not enough skin and flesh was left to cover it properly, and healing wasn’t going well. Therefore some skin was going to be borrowed off my buttocks. It would be used for a skin graft covering the knee and a smaller gap where the flesh had been blown off the heel of my left foot.
This ward had a tradition that no patient would be sent off to surgery without his fellows gathering at his bedside to hold a wake. The commissioned medical staff forbid this custom as insulting to them and contrary to good medical practice. However virtually everyone in the ward was a combat infantryman (the two exceptions were a tanker and an artillery forward observer) and the wakes went on anyway after the nurses had left. At these wakes, ambulatory patients would gather around the bed of the fellow due to go under the knife, discuss his character, and regale him with awful stories of ineptitude in military operating rooms (wrong organs tinkered with, arm removed instead of leg, and so forth). They would also establish “dibs” on his various possessions in the event he didn’t come back alive and compose a letter to his family describing his sins and shortcomings. The only nurse who didn’t consider this tradition barbarous was an old-timer captain. She thought it an antidote against self-pity—the worst danger in any ward full of badly damaged young males.
April came and hurried the healing along. The cast of characters in the ward became friends. The poker game that began after breakfast each morning on the next bed engulfed me in a fog of tobacco smoke. Except for chain smoking once to work my fever up to hospital levels I was a nonsmoker. I bitched and whined about the secondhand smoke, was persuaded that it wouldn’t bother me if I smoked myself, was provided free Luckies, and quickly got myself addicted. I was welcomed into the game (a one-franc limit affair) and became even more quickly addicted to seven-card stud. (I am proud to report that I financed my stay in the Third General by that game—the Army payroll people having lost track of me—and had almost a hundred bucks accumulated before they sent me home.)
Eventually the body cast came off, replaced by a left boot cast and a soft cast on my right knee. I have two memories of that day. The first was the escape of my remodeled left foot into fresh air and daylight. Months and months of endless walking had produced a layer of callus on the bottom of my foot about as tough as a horse’s hoof. Weeks in the cast had caused this to detach. The surgical tech fished out this remarkable artifact and held it close enough to my good eye so I could admire it. It also drew a crowd of ambulatory patients, interested in a size ten-and-a-half foot that was as pink and puckered as a newborn babe’s butt and missing much of the meat on the side of the heel. This had been sort of rebuilt by the surgeon and covered with a skin graft. I couldn’t really focus on that distant foot as yet but my friends rated it a good job. They didn’t notice, and neither did I until I bought my first pair of civilian shoes, that the Army surgeon had rebuilt it to Army specifications. That gave it a loftier arch than my normal foot and problems for shoe salesmen.
The second memory is of the loudest scream ever heard in that hospital ward. Free at last from the body cast and the safety it provided, I allowed the still wet and heavy-as-lead boot cast to slip off the bed. It fell, bending a knee that hadn’t been bent since the explosion dislocated it months before. Hurt? You bet!
But now I was mobile—the operator of a wheelchair. I would roll it outside, sit in the soft spring sunlight of Provence, and dream my dreams. One phase of life was finished for me. Boyhood was behind me. What lay ahead? I didn’t have a clue. If I was blind an
d partially crippled the government would probably provide something. I don’t remember worrying about it. The left eye still registered nothing but light and shadow but the right one was clearing. Maybe I would have one good eye. What more did you need? One happy day I looked down at the new edition of Stars and Stripes the orderly had dropped on my lap and saw METZ FALLS. True, the type was huge, but I had deciphered it myself. (Forty years later in Paris my editor at Rivages asked what cities I’d like to visit on a book-signing tour. I said Metz, told him about the day I knew I’d be able to read again, and he sent me to a bookstore there.)
The next step forward came with crutches.
If the wheelchair opened the ward door, crutches opened the world. Late spring now and my right leg is in good shape except for a sometimes unreliable knee. After breakfast, Alex, Dino, and I would don our blue bathrobes and head down the hill to Aix, sit on the benches under the plane trees that lined the boulevard, watch the French go by, and talk about the meaning of it all.
Alex was big, strong, extremely angry, and perfectly mobile. He had been a high school footballer at Louisville, Kentucky, went into the infantry, was sent as a replacement in a Forty-fifth Division rifle squad, and lasted about six weeks as a rifleman until he lost a close-range duel with a German in a Alsatian village, looking over a windowsill to get a shot and being hit in the mouth by a five-round burst from a machine pistol. Three of the 9 mm bullets had exited through the back of his neck, a fourth had been dug out of the neck muscle by the surgeon, and the fifth, and part of some of his teeth, were still there—too close to the spinal column to tinker with. The bullets had done havoc to Alex’s gums and tongue and his anger may have been principally the product of frustration—trying to teach himself to talk again. However, I suspect it went deeper than that.
Dino’s family ran a three-truck moving and storage company somewhere on the nether side of Patterson, New Jersey, and Dino was full of funny stories. Some involve the misadventures of his dad as a mover, and some the weird events of the previous December, when a German panzer army came smashing through the green 100th Division (in which Dino was a rifle squad leader), en route to Bastogne. The one I remember best was his account of trying to get what was left of his squad to safety. Coming down the safe side of about the third hill they’d been chased over by German armor, they saw four U.S. tank destroyers parked, with their crews sitting around a fire cooking bacon from ten-in-one boxes. Dino and the two riflemen remaining came puffing up, shouting warnings—which were greeted with scorn and derision. So Dino and his companions continued their flight up their hill, heard cannon fire, looked around to see German panzers rolling down the road below and the tank destroyer crews running frantically in the opposite direction. Although Dino lost his right leg from the hip down in a later phase of this encounter, he treasured his memory of the tank destroyer crewmen running for their lives.
Dino had an advantage in this pastime of observing French culture flowing past our boulevard bench. Missing most of his tongue, Alex could comment on what he was seeing only by indecipherable grunts, sighs, and groans. And I was working with a patch over my left eye and a peculiar problem with tear ducts involving the right. I could see fairly well while looking down, but a moment or two after I looked up, that eye would be flooded with tears. My companions dealt with this by counting down when something well worth seeing was approaching, so I could time my three seconds of clear vision for maximum benefit. Thus I saw many a pretty French maiden strolling past, and thus we passed the time waiting for healing to happen and a hospital ship to arrive to haul us home.
I spent March through July in the Third General and accumulated—though I wasn’t aware of it at the time—some of the sort of knowledge of human behavior in stressful circumstances that writers need. Some wise but unwritten rule barred any sign or sound of sympathy from that ward—as witnessed by the presurgery wake tradition. You never saw anyone flinch or turn away when a new arrival checked in with half his face shot away. When the sergeant two beds down came back from surgery noticeably missing the right arm he’d hoped could be saved, he was welcomed back with shouts of “Lefty” and told where to buy single-hand glove sets. The tank gunner with part of his nose and all of his ears burned off was called “Jug” by everyone. From each side of his neck protruded what seemed to be a jug handle but was actually a fleshy tube of skin, which had been pinched up from the flesh of his neck and stitched off. When healed, the lower end of these appendages was cut free, bent upward, and grafted on again, a couple of inches closer to the ear hole where, eventually, they would provide the skin and flesh for substitute ears. Jug received endless warnings. The surgeon intended to walk both of these appendages to the top of his head as anchors for a wig (his hair was burned off ). The surgeon had miscalculated, the loops would come up short, and new ear holes would have be drilled. And so forth. Jug seemed to enjoy this.
Under this determined callousness there lay an odd kind of love. I think of Corporal Delaney, whose bed was just across the aisle from mine—foot to foot. A shell fragment had gone through one of Delaney’s eyeballs and into his brain. It had left him paralyzed and speechless, unable to even squeak or groan, and able to move only his eyelids and his eyes. (Eyes up and down equaled yes. Eyes left and right equaled no. Eyes looking right equaled need something. Eyes looking left equaled discomfort.) Through that system one of the ambulatory patients who read to him discovered Delaney was a smoker and that he liked to watch our poker game. So Delaney was propped up so he could watch, and cigarettes were lit for him, with someone keeping an eye on it, extracting it from his lips to knock off the ashes and disposing of it when it had burned short.
Delaney played an essential role. No matter the pain or loss another felt, his plight made complaining impossible. The rifleman hit in the groin by a shell fragment and left crippled and emasculated could look at him and thank God. Even Alex, struggling with his anger and trying to teach his butchered tongue to speak, signaled us to pray for Delaney.
Pray, I’m sure, some of us did—if not in any organized fashion—and one day we were rewarded by a sort of a miracle. The game was seven-card stud. One player had two pair showing, another had a possible straight, a third had aces paired with a flush possible. The pot had become the biggest of day with the final down card yet to come. Everybody was watching, including the fellow who should have been watching Delaney. First we heard a tiny squeak. Then something louder carrying a note of protest came from Delaney’s bed. Everyone jumps up. The cigarette has burned to Delaney’s lip.
Delaney was calling for help!
The cigarette was extracted, nurse summoned, doctor called; for the first time Delaney managed something with his facial expression, which we decided to call a grin. And then he produced another series of squeaks for us. Whatever the end result of this, it excited the neurologist. When I bade Delaney farewell at the end of June, he had regained a little hand motion and making sounds had become easy for him.
Since the subject has turned to prayer, this seems the appropriate place to mention the lack of it. If any sort of religious service was held at that hospital in the months I was there I can’t remember hearing of it. Once or twice when we were in reserve too far from the fighting to hear artillery fire we saw a chaplain—but never closer than that. I eventually located a priest at the hospital and asked him to hear my confession. He did, listening to a recitation of those violations of morality I might have committed had the opportunity permitted. I also told him of killing the German soldier on the road at Sessenheim. Somehow it didn’t seem necessary to mention those I might have killed with Shakeshaft’s borrowed hand grenade, nor the unseen victims of countless rounds of my mortar fire. He granted me absolution without comment—tired I’m sure of such accounts.
I always wondered who invented the absurd lie that proclaimed there were “no atheists in foxholes.” Where else could atheism better thrive than in the killing fields where homicide was honored? In the Third General Hospital at A
ix, the poker game was about as religious as things got.
Incidentally, if records are kept on such sports events, that poker game might hold the longevity crown. It was going on when I first gained consciousness in my body cast sometime in March and operated without interruption until the day when the senior nurse walked in and announced that President Roosevelt had died. She instructed all who were ambulatory to report up the hill for a memorial service. She looked in later, found us still engrossed in a hand, and repeated that order with emphasis. When she peeked in a third time with the game still going she impounded our cards.
About the time we obtained another deck and got the game revived under a more lenient nurse the good news came. Jubilation swept through the ward. A hospital ship was due to take home those well enough to make the trip.
Well enough? Anxiety replaced joy. Who would be on the shipping list. We got the word more or less one by one—from the enlisted medical corpsmen who got a peek at our charts. I was due one more trip to surgery for some work on my left ankle joint, which made me doubtful. But the joyful word came down that this would be left to stateside surgeons. Private First Class Anthony Grove Hillerman was going to make the list. Good-bye, Third General. Hello, home. (Wherever that was going to be.)
I had made good friends at Third General and I would miss them, but I wouldn’t miss what we called “Night Music.” A shout would jerk you suddenly awake. Tense, sweating, all those well-honed combat survival instincts demanding action, but now hearing only the usual breathing, snoring, coughing, and occasional moan produced by a room full of injured men. Then a shout again. “Get down! Get down!” Then “Go. Go. In trees. Over there.” Dino, the perpetual squad leader, screaming at his men, getting as many as he could out of mortar fire or something. Then Dino would be silent, but the sound of combat had spread like a ripple down the double row of beds—bringing troubled dreams to the surface. Startled yells, whimpering, someone summoning his mom in a hoarse whisper, someone praying. And you’d lie in that noisy darkness, knowing that as long as the body cast encased you, you were safe, happy to be rescued from your own nightmare, listening and thanking your loving God for rescuing you from the horror with your Zone of Interior wound.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 14