by Aaron Gwyn
He fell to the snow with both hands cupped to his ears and his elbows pressed together. His knees had risen to his chest, and he lay there as the air went hot and pieces of earth rained around him. His head was buzzing and he couldn’t hear anything but the blood rushing inside his skull, and before he opened his eyes he began to check his limbs to see if they were there. Smell of gun smoke. The sharp smell of shredded pine. He rose onto his hands and knees. The sun that shone through the dust and smoke was an orange morning sun, and he saw Wheels and Ox lying very close to one another, almost touching. He called to them but he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice, and when he looked to his left, he saw Pike.
The sergeant lay on his back beside the overturned mortar, eyes blinking and a bright arterial mist spraying from the cut on his jugular, a thin serum leaking from his ears. He’d lifted a hand toward the sky and seemed to be grasping for something which only he saw. He closed the hand into a fist and turned it slightly, the motion of someone unlocking a door. Russell crawled to the sergeant and pressed his palm against the man’s neck. He reached into a pocket and pulled out his bandana, then folded it over the wound to make a compress. Pike’s eyelids were fluttering, and Russell shouted for the men to bring their trauma packs, but his words were sucked away into a great humming void.
He pulled the sergeant to the edge of the clearing and was joined by Ox and Wheels. Together they began to drag Pike deeper into the trees, leaving behind them a trough of snow and frozen earth and the bright dribble of blood. Another mortar detonated up the slope about a hundred meters and then another even farther. Russell stopped and applied pressure to the sergeant’s neck. He looked up at the faces of the two men across from him.
Ox leaned toward him and began mouthing words, but Russell stopped him, gestured to his ears, and shook his head. The large man studied him a moment, then reached and touched his hand to a torn place on the outer thigh of Russell’s fatigues. Russell glanced down to examine his leg where shrapnel had torn through the fabric. He couldn’t feel his injury through the adrenaline, but the wound didn’t seem deep. He took hold of the drag handles on Sergeant Pike’s body armor and motioned for Wheels and Ox to take his feet. They picked the man up and started down the hillside, finding their way among the pine trees and oaks, the sun bright on their faces and the sergeant’s pupils widening.
They fought their way onto the valley floor. They bore Pike on a foldable litter they carried, but there was no hurry in this regard now, for the sergeant was dead. They’d shot through most of their ammunition, and Russell’s back felt strange and his rifle had malfunctioned. He’d fired through twenty-eight rounds, and when the bolt slammed back and he slapped in a fresh magazine, he couldn’t get the weapon to go into battery: the bolt release lever was locked in place and wouldn’t budge. He tried to pull the magazine out, but it was locked in place as well. They laid the sergeant’s body on the ground and tried to form some kind of a perimeter. Russell scoped the terrain farther out onto the valley floor, looking for cover. The rattle of an AK came from the higher hills. Russell went prone in the dirt, laid his rifle in front of him, and pressed the bolt release hard as he could. The paddle was frozen solid.
There was a wadi about fifty meters out, but he didn’t know if they could get to it. He looked over to Wheels and Wheels looked back. The man glanced toward the hills from which they were taking fire. Then he glanced back to Russell. His eyes were calm, the pupils motionless. Russell had seen this before during firefights: the surge of adrenaline seemed to act as a sedative. He slung his rifle, got to his knees, and motioned toward the dead sergeant. Then he moved over and took up the litter’s front handles. A rifle shot passed overhead—the sharp crack of it several feet from his ear—and he hunkered into himself. Ox and Wheels came up behind and grabbed hold of the litter, and they set off at an ambling shuffle with bullets caroming off to either side.
They made it to the wadi and down the embankment to the hardpan bed. Russell tried to determine if it was the same trench they’d traveled along the night before, but he wasn’t sure. Ox went to cover their backtrack, and Wheels knelt above the corpse of the sergeant as though he’d resuscitate him. Russell could see plumes of smoke rising from the mountains to the east. Mortars were falling once again on the firebase. He fetched another bandana from his pocket and spread it on his lap, sat and began disassembling his rifle, pressing the takedown pins and pulling them out the other side of the receiver with his thumbnails. He laid the upper across his thighs, took his knife and began prying at the magazine, trying to work it free of the well. When this didn’t work, he fit the upper and lower receivers together and pressed the pins back into place. Sweat was running into his eyes. He smacked the magazine with the heel of his palm and then he took the rifle by the stock and forward grip and slammed the magazine against the ground. He sat there a moment. The pain in his back was a dull red knot. He glanced at the frozen ground on either side of his legs, dug a fist-sized piece of sandstone from the snow, and, laying the rifle across his thighs, struck the bolt-release paddle. The sandstone cracked in half, but the paddle gave way and the bolt snapped forward and chambered a round. He pointed the rifle at the sky and fired. Then he fired twice more. He pressed the magazine release and the clip fell into his lap. He examined it to see whether there was anything he could see that might have caused it to stick, but nothing looked damaged. He snapped the magazine into place, fired two more rounds, then moved to the lip of the gulch and stared out through his scope toward the mountains, the mortars, the bright winter sun.
They expected to be all day bearing back the sergeant’s body, but at noon a Black Hawk appeared over the ridge to the north, and fifteen minutes later they’d loaded Pike onto the craft. A medic knelt over him, searching for his pulse. Then the helicopter lifted into the sky, snow blowing up on either side of it in great fountains of white.
There were two air force PJs on the helo—one large, one small. Russell sat on the rumbling seat with the terrain blurring past the Plexiglas window—very clear, someone must have cleaned it with Lemon Pledge—and then the smaller PJ reached to touch the torn place on Russell’s fatigues. This man’s nametape read DIAZ, and he pulled back the fabric to study the wound, then produced a pair of scissors and sheared away the pants leg to Russell’s thigh. He was pressing gauze against the quarter-sized gash when he looked up and his brow furrowed. He put a hand to Russell’s vest, and Russell looked down to see that blood had soaked the brown fabric. Something had gotten through the ballistic panel on the left side, but Russell had just watched five men die, one of whom he’d killed, and his entire body had a numb, floating feeling. The PJ set about removing Russell’s body armor, removing his undershirt and jacket. Russell closed his eyes.
When they landed at the firebase, there was a small crowd awaiting them, members of the surgical team standing to one side. A row of wounded soldiers lay along the sandbag wall, Sara and the other nurses attending them. The chopper put down, and two medical techs came up with a litter. It took Russell a moment to realize they were coming for him. Sara was watching. She nodded to Russell and massaged the skin just below her throat. Russell looked at her and waved. His hearing had partly returned and he told the med techs he could walk on his own, but they didn’t seem to care what he could do, and finally one of the surgeons approached.
“Soldier,” he said, “they do it for a living.”
Russell stared at the man. Then he turned to seat himself on the thin canvas stretcher. He felt the doctor swipe something cold across the skin below his shoulder, and when he looked to see what it was, the man sank a needle into his deltoid and pushed the plunger.
Then he was in the medical tent. He could tell that his back hurt, but he couldn’t feel it beneath the drugs. Could tell it hurt but couldn’t feel. He’d have something he wanted to say and then he’d try to form the words and they’d evaporate from the tip of his tongue. Something seemed to have caught up with him. He kept closing and opening his ey
es. The scene unfolded before him like bodies caught in a strobe: the doctors across the room, the doctors up close. There were men on tables screaming. Men wheeled past on gurneys.
Then a surgeon was speaking to him. Time seemed to have passed. They’d removed shrapnel from his torso and thigh, debrided the wounds but for some reason hadn’t stitched him. He both seemed to recall the procedure but couldn’t remember a thing about it.
“You have a mild concussion,” the surgeon was saying. “Mild TBI. On the scale we use, about a thirteen.”
“What did you give me?” asked Russell.
“Fentanyl,” said the surgeon. His tone suggested they’d already been over this. Maybe several times.
Russell closed his eyes. Opened and closed them. He kept sucking his bottom lip inside his mouth to wet it. The man said something else about concussions. It seemed to be a question.
“I’ve had three concussions,” said Russell. “I had two in one semester playing high school ball. I had another not too long ago.” He made a plosive noise with his lips and lifted one hand to mime a detonation.
“There are different kinds,” the surgeon told him. “Are you having trouble hearing?”
“Not now,” Russell said.
The doctor nodded. He had gray hair in a buzz cut and wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a penlight from his jacket.
“Follow my finger,” he said.
He held his index finger six inches from Russell’s nose, and shining his light into Russell’s eyes, moved the finger up, down, and then from left to right, like a priest administering rites. He seemed satisfied. He nodded again and patted Russell’s shoulder.
“You’ve strained the muscles in your lumbar spine, but I don’t believe it’s in the vertebrae or discs. Can’t know without an MRI, but I’d be very surprised. You’re not having any numbness and you’re not having referred pain. Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt, but it seems to be muscular. You might need a CT at some point. We’ll get those wounds stitched up.”
“What did you give me?” Russell asked.
“Fentanyl,” said the surgeon, smiling.
Russell closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was sure only a few seconds had passed, but the light in the room had slanted into evening and Sara stood beside him wearing surgical scrubs. There was a stainless-steel tray beside his bed, and Sara laid something on it, some kind of instrument, and began repositioning the lamps so they focused along his rib cage and leg. She set about cleaning the wounds, opening two packs of Betadine swabs, working along the cuts in a circular motion. She used all six of the swabs and then gave him a shot of penicillin, explaining everything to him as she went. She gave him a tetanus booster and then she took another syringe from the tray, held it up to her eyes, and pressed the plunger. Fluid sprayed from the needle’s tip.
“All ready?” she asked.
Russell nodded. He didn’t know quite what he was agreeing to and he was still too high to care. He could feel his lips again, but the lamps glowed with a warm narcotic light, and he watched her put the needle into the skin beside the inch-long wound on his thigh—red in the lamplight and gaping from debridement, like a bright toothless mouth. Sara injected about a third of the fluid into one side of the gash and then she retracted the needle, put it in the skin on the other side, and injected the rest.
She reached over and sat the syringe on the tray and looked at him.
“We’ll give you a few minutes to numb up,” she said.
“What was it?”
“Just your local,” she told him. “Lidocaine.”
Russell nodded. He lay for a moment.
“They blew up Sergeant Pike,” he said.
“I know,” Sara whispered.
“He had blood coming from his ears.”
She cleared her throat. Said she needed him to relax.
He looked away and blinked the wet from his eyes. He said there wasn’t anything he could do.
When he turned and looked back at her, she was staring at him. She reached and laid a hand on his cheek.
“We’ll get you good and numb,” she said.
Sara started with the wound on his thigh, removing the suture from its pack, taking it in the jaws of the needle driver. Russell drew his chin to his chest and watched Sara with a detached, academic interest. He’d learned to administer stitches from a Ranger medic at FOB Marez, cross-training in case he ever had to do it in the field, but that opportunity had never arisen. Sara pushed the needle through the flap of skin on one side of the wound, then the flap on the other. She glanced at his face as she drew the thread taut.
“How we doing?” she asked.
Russell couldn’t feel a thing through the local, just a kind of pressure. He told her he was doing fine.
She nodded, made another stitch, tied off and snipped it, then started on the next. She worked quickly, effortlessly: through, through, and pull. Through, through, and pull. Under, through the loop, tighten up, snip. She was very good it at. She told him she used to practice on quilt squares.
When she was finished, she dressed the site with antibiotic salve, then reached to angle her light toward the wound on his side. She glanced over at the tray, said she’d need to get more lidocaine, took off her gloves, and exited the curtained enclosure.
Russell lay there. The fentanyl had started to fade. The sensation had returned to his face, and he could no longer feel his heartbeat in his skull. He closed his eyes and inhaled a deep breath. There was Sergeant Pike, standing in the clearing with the morning sun coppering his face. Head tilted to one side, his good ear inclined toward the sky, listening. Then he was lying in the snow like a discarded doll. One moment standing, the next moment prone. Russell opened his eyes and exhaled. He lifted a hand and massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger. As if he could rub it all away.
When Sara came back, she bent to study the wound below his rib cage, and she studied the one she’d just sutured on his thigh. There was a worried expression on her face. She shook her head.
“That was the last of the lidocaine,” she told him.
Russell lay there. He asked her what she meant.
“They used it all,” she said. “Not supposed to be able to do that, but they did. We don’t have any other locals, so I can’t give you anything for pain. Not with a concussion, I can’t. I was surprised they gave it to you in the first place. I don’t think they realized yet you’d been concussed.” She stopped and stared at him a moment. “Are you understanding me?”
Russell nodded. He was understanding parts.
“I’ve got to suture this other one,” she said. “I can’t just leave it open.”
Russell nodded. He could see the wound on his thigh without straining, but he couldn’t manage to twist his neck far enough to get a glimpse of the one on his side.
“It’s going to hurt,” she told him. “It’s going to hurt you really bad.”
Russell said that was all right, but that didn’t seem to be what Sara wanted to hear. Her face seemed to tighten. She pulled on another pair of latex gloves, opened another suture pack, and took up the needle driver. She asked once again if he was ready.
“Ready,” Russell said.
There was pressure and then pain, so sharp it nearly took his breath. Then the pain vanished for a moment, as if the fentanyl was chewing it. Then the opposite started to happen: the pain was eating the fentanyl and the fentanyl was consumed. Suddenly, he felt very sober, very alert. The pain was warm, then hot, and then his side was on fire. He clenched his teeth, clenched shut his eyes. The pain moved up his torso and reached his chest. Then it crept toward his throat and took up residence in his jaw. He’d heard that courage was holding on for one more second, but he thought if there were many more seconds of this, he’d crack his teeth. He had the feeling she was stitching herself to him, stitching the two of them together. He was going to ask for something to bite down on, but the pain wouldn’t allow him to work his mouth, and then it moved to his sinus cavit
y and finally behind his eyes. They burned red-hot. He opened them.
Sara’s face was a mask of concentration. She said to stay with her. She said it’d only take another minute. She seemed to have said this several times. It had taken several minutes. It would take several minutes more.
Something strange happened. He felt his entire body begin to lift, lift and then hover above the bed. It wasn’t the drugs and it wasn’t the concussion. He didn’t think that’s what it was, but he wasn’t exactly thinking. The pain seemed to lift him, buoy him up. It was in his side, his chest, and his chin, then behind his eyes, and now it had brought him out of himself, out and away from his body. It might have been the drugs. Might have been the concussion. Didn’t really matter what it was or wasn’t: he was definitely rising. At first, centimeters. Then actual inches. He’d left his body back behind him. He was floating free. Sara was driving the needle, drawing the thread, tying off, and snipping. She paused and looked at him. There wasn’t anything to say. He was floating and his eyes were inches away from hers. If they’d been any closer, her eyes would have blurred, both eyes merging into a single olive orb. His junior year of high school, he and his girlfriend would drive back from the ball game in his pickup, his hair still wet from the showers, muscles aching. He’d turn onto the gravel drive that went snaking up through the black oaks toward the ranch house, but they’d pull off onto the lease road, turn off the headlights, and navigate by the moon. Twin ruts in the milkweed and thistle, grass brushing the undercarriage. They’d park down beside the oil tanks overlooking a field of alfalfa, roll down the windows. In spring they rolled them down, stripped each other in seconds, that teenage impatience with buttons and snaps—can’t get the clothes off too fast. He’d remove the bulb from the cab’s dome light, open the passenger door so they could stretch out their legs. And after they’d made love there on the bench seat, he’d lie with her beneath him, nose to nose. He couldn’t recall them saying much. She’d stroke her nails very gently along his back, and he’d hold her face between his palms, watching her eyes. And then it would happen. His vision would tire, or they’d be near enough, and her eyes would creep closer and closer until it was one blue eye staring up at him. It was the closest he could get to the feeling that this wasn’t just a high school romance that would end as soon as Elaine left for college on her tennis scholarship—which it was; and she would. But to have that brief narrowing—it was enough to make him forget.