He smiled. The doctor smiled back. He put the chart back on the end of the cot.
“Let’s take that temperature, shall we?”
“Whatever you say, Doc. You’re the doctor.”
Kafak laughed at that, and the doctor frowned. He took Kafak’s temperature. The look on his face scared Kafak, but the doctor erased it quickly. Then he said, “You’re up a couple of degrees from yesterday, son. Are you still deaf in that ear?”
“Not deaf, exactly, Doc. Just like underwater. It’s all right, though. Cuz now I only hear half the fucking Kraut bombs, you know?”
Kafak giggled at that, too.
The doctor said, “I think you’re suffering from delirium, son. Or maybe it’s just a bad sense of humor.” He smiled. “Either way, you’re going back to Naples.”
Kafak’s turn to frown at that.
“What?” he said.
“You’re off the beach. Until you get better, anyway.”
“I can’t leave, Doc,” Kafak said. “Didn’t you know there’s still Germans here?”
The doctor smiled. “Yeah, but your friends’ll have to fight them for a while. Just until you get back.”
“I can’t leave my friends, Doc.”
The doctor pointed to his lapel.
“See these bars, son? That means I outrank you. I’m ordering you to Naples. Have a good trip, and get better quick. I’ll look for you when you get back.”
Kafak was carried to an LCT. He lay there, sleeping on and off, until the craft had been filled with the day’s transports back to Naples. It was full up. It finally took off, lurching through the waves. Kafak puked from the waves adding to his unsettled stomach. He tried to vomit into his helmet, but he missed more than he made, what with the tossing of the craft.
“Sorry, fellas,” he said to the guys around him.
Most of them didn’t hear. They were puking, too.
In Naples, Kafak was transported to the Forty-Fifth General Hospital located near the Bagnoli racetrack. The weather in Naples was better than at Anzio. It was a little warmer, and there was a lot less rain. Anyway, he was inside a tent. They laid him down on a cot. He looked around. All the cots surrounding him were full as well. A couple of guys had wounds. One guy had lost a leg up to his knee. Kafak figured it was trench foot, but he didn’t know. It could have been an explosion or something, too. A couple other guys looked OK, so they must be recovering from their illnesses or wounds.
“Who you guys with?” Kafak asked them.
They told him their units. Some came from Anzio, but he had never met them there. Some of them came from the line up north, near Cassino.
“How’s the action there?” Kafak asked them.
“Fucked up. How was your Anzio?”
“It’s a fucking beach. Sunshine and goddamned lollipops. Why, what have you fucking heard?”
Everyone laughed hard at that. Some other guys chimed in. Pretty soon they were all talking shit and laughing loudly. A nurse came in. Kafak saw her. An honest-to-god female nurse. She must have been about fifty or more and built like a Panzer, but Kafak thought she was fucking beautiful. She spoke in a harsh tone.
She said, “You boys will need to quiet down. You’re disturbing our other patients.”
Kafak said, “Sorry, beautiful.”
The nurse scowled and shook her head. The other guys laughed, and that was the last thing Kafak remembered.
10
When Kafak woke again he found he had been shaved, cleaned up, and put into fresh pajamas. He felt fine. He was hungry as hell. He looked around and saw the sides of the tent had been rolled up. Sunshine burned bright outside. A nice warmth with a sweet breeze flowed through the opened tent. It felt wonderful. Everything felt wonderful. Kafak could hardly believe there was a war going on. That he had been in mud and blood and gunfire just a few hours ago.
A nurse came by with some breakfast. Kafak sat up. He felt famished and couldn’t wait to dig into the food. Bacon and eggs and coffee and juice and toast. And all of it hot. He couldn’t believe it. Maybe this was heaven, he thought. Maybe he had died and now he was in heaven.
The nurse smiled at him.
“Hungry, aren’t you?” she said, noting him wolfing down his food.
He chewed, nodding. Then he swallowed and paused in his attack long enough to look at her. She was younger than the nurse he’d seen last night. And much, much prettier. Kafak smiled. He felt stupid, figuring she got that dumb look all the time, but he couldn’t help himself. She was the first really pretty girl he’d seen in nearly three months. He’d all but forgotten such things existed in this world, outside of pictures and conversation.
He said, “I’m real hungry, all right.”
“How do you feel, Private?”
“I feel great.”
“Well, that’s good. You sure look a lot better.”
“Who shaved me, by the way?”
“That was me, actually.”
“Well, I appreciate it.”
“Oh, that was doctor’s orders, Private. We wanted you to look good in case we had to send you up to Saint Peter.”
She laughed; Kafak grinned.
“Ha-ha,” he said. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“Actually, it was, Private. We thought we’d lost you there for a while. But you look like you pulled through OK.”
“I just went to sleep, and now I feel fine.”
She looked at him. An odd expression on her pretty face.
“What day do you suppose it is, Private?”
“What?” Kafak said. “Today?”
“Yes. Today.”
“It’s the day after yesterday,” Kafak said.
He shrugged.
The nurse shook her head.
“You’ve been out for three days, Private. You fell asleep the other night, and we didn’t figure you were going to wake up again. We did everything we could to keep you with us. And it looks like it worked out just fine.”
“Except you shaved me. Just in case.”
“We didn’t want to take any chances,” she said, and laughed again.
She moved off, and soon a doctor arrived.
“How you feeling, son?” he asked.
“I feel fine, Doc. You can send me back any time.”
“You in a hurry to get shot at again, Private?”
“I miss my pals. You know how it is.”
“They’ll still be there when you get back. We want to keep you with us a few more days, make sure you’re fully recovered from that infection. You hear me all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
The doctor pressed a hand over Kafak’s left ear. Applied firm pressure. Then he said, “Can you still hear me all right?”
“Clear as a bell,” Kafak said.
“Good, that’s good. We were worried you might lose your hearing in that ear. We would’ve had to send you home.”
“Well, I screwed up that test, then, didn’t I?”
The doctor laughed.
“You’d have missed your friends, though, right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind missing them from back in the States, I guess.”
“No, son, I guess you wouldn’t.”
The doctor moved on to the next patient.
Easter came and went. They gave all the men candy, and the nurses put on a little skit. There was a High Mass held outdoors on a hill that Kafak attended. He took Communion, then wondered if he should have. He might have killed people, after all. He stopped himself thinking about all that. It would do him no good right now. He buried all that away to think about it later. After the war. When he was back home. That way, if he never made it back home, he would never have to think about stuff like that.
One nurse told him, “If you’d have gotten here a few weeks earlier than you did, you’d have seen quite the explosion. Mount Vesuvius erupted. First time since 1906. The guys got to see the show nearly every day there for a while.”
“I heard some guys talking abou
t that,” Kafak said. “It sounded beautiful.”
“It was. We could see it even this far away.”
“I guess it wasn’t so great for the people who lost their homes, though.”
“Yeah, not so great for them.”
“Lots of people losing their homes nowadays,” Kafak said.
“Don’t think about that now, Private. You’re in Naples now. Relax and get your rest. When you go back, you’ll be glad you did.”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “I don’t mind if I never sleep in mud again.”
“Well, the weather’s getting better. Spring is here.”
“Hope it’s getting better on Anzio, too.”
“You think it’s different there than here?” the nurse asked, smiling.
“Everything’s different on Anzio,” Kafak said.
A couple days later, the doctor was visiting with Kafak and told him, “You’re nearly fully recovered, son. I figure there’s no danger of that infection returning now. Not to say you can’t get a new one, so you be careful.”
“Tell it to the Krauts, Doc.”
“Sure will, Private.”
“Say, Doc. Something I been wondering.”
“What’s that, Private?”
“I know there’s a lot of guys been moved off the line on account of trench foot. But I don’t see that many guys here with the stuff. What happened to them all?”
“Oh, we keep them in a separate tent, separate location. The stench is not good for anyone, especially not other troopers trying to recover from their own wounds or illnesses.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t believe the smell, son,” the doctor said.
“I’ve smelled it,” Kafak said.
“Have you?”
“A guy in our hole. He got evacuated here, to Naples.”
“Oh, I see.”
The doctor waited. As if, Kafak thought, Kafak might ask about the guy he knew who had been taken off the beach with trench foot. Kafak didn’t ask, though. He didn’t want to know anything more about what had happened.
Instead Kafak said, “So, is that the hospital for trench foot?” He pointed to another huge hospital tent not very far off from where he lay in his own cot.
The doctor shook his head.
“That’s not trench foot over there,” he said. “That’s something else.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
The doctor looked at him, raised a brow. Finished writing the latest information for Kafak on the chart. Then he said, “That tent is filled with VD patients.”
“VD?” Kafak said. He sounded amazed. He felt amazed. The tent was huge, filled to overflowing with GIs. “What the fuck?” he said.
“You’ve got that right,” the doctor said. He sounded grim. “Enough men over there suffering from venereal disease to fill out an entire division. And all lost to the army due to a highly preventable situation.”
“Yeah, but they’re gonna be OK,” Kafak said. “They’ll be back up to the front soon’s they’re cured, right?”
“Some of them, certainly. Others, well, they might never be cured.”
“Never?” Kafak said. He couldn’t believe it. It was only VD, after all. Hurt like hell, right, but it was treatable. He thought so, anyway, despite what the army’s scare films showed.
“Some of those men will never be healed, will die from their disease,” the doctor said, “because they waited too long to seek treatment. They hid the disease. Because they knew whatever time they lost to VD is tacked on to the end of their enlistment, would keep them in the service longer. So they hid it, hoping to treat it themselves or hoping it would just go away. It doesn’t just go away, though.”
“Except none of that matters anymore.”
“Right,” the doctor said. “Because now you’re in it for the duration. But these guys caught it before that was the case. And even now, you can lose rank for it.”
Kafak had heard about that. One of their platoon sergeants had been demoted because he’d been discovered to have VD.
“Some of these guys’ve kept it secret a long time, seems like.”
“Exactly. And that’s why some of them are going to die of it now.”
“Why don’t you just fill ’em all up with this penicillin stuff, Doc?”
“Well, for one thing, there’s not enough to go around. Wounded men get preference for the use of penicillin.”
“Well, that’s only right.”
“As they turn out more in the States and get it to us, we’ll use it more for the VD cases and so on. For now, we have to use it for wounds first, then other infections after that.”
“Did you use it on me?”
“You were nearly dead from your infection, Private. We had no choice.”
“Well. Thanks, then.”
“Don’t mention it.” The doctor paused and rubbed his chin, staring off at the tent filled with patients laid low by venereal disease. “The other problem with using penicillin on those guys,” he said, “is that it just doesn’t always work. This strain of VD these guys have caught in Naples is a particularly tough one. It’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen. We don’t really know what to do with it.”
“Wow. Tough town, Naples, huh?”
“It’s a fairly dangerous place, all right, even without Germans shooting at you here. So I’d suggest you stay away from the whorehouses when you get out of here, Private. Or at least take the proper precautions.”
“Will do, Doc. Say, that must be the same strain that Columbus’s guys got in the New World, brought it back to Europe. Looks like it’s still here.”
The doctor looked at Kafak.
“Just might be,” he said. “You know your history, Private. You a college man?”
Kafak looked suddenly sheepish.
“No, sir,” he said.
“They drafted you right out of high school, huh? You sure look like it, anyway.”
“Something like that,” Kafak said.
He dropped the subject. He was poor, from a poor family. Nobody in his family ever thought about college. It was not something someone like Kafak did. You grew up, you worked in an automobile factory if you were lucky. Steady job, good pay. If you weren’t lucky, maybe you went into business with your old man, a handyman, like his old man. Something like that. Kafak didn’t see much future beyond that when he was growing up back in Detroit. Now he didn’t see much future beyond the day after today. Guys talked about their futures all the time. It was a way to get past the present since the present often felt so terrible. Kafak didn’t bother with all that, though. He loved to listen to other guys’ plans; only he didn’t make so many of his own. He figured he’d wait the Germans out on that.
The next day Kafak was given a three-day pass to leave the hospital, see the sights of Naples. Kafak dressed in a uniform another guy in the hospital lent him. That guy was a supply guy in Naples and had caught the flu, bad. He was in a bed a couple over from Kafak’s. He didn’t need his dress uniform any time soon, so he let Kafak wear it. It was in perfect shape. All the guy’s uniforms were. He hadn’t seen any combat. The dress kit was a bit small since the guy was a good deal shorter than Kafak, but it worked well enough.
Kafak checked out with the corpsman in charge. He received the usual allotment of three condoms for leave, and the sergeant told him, “Make sure and use ’em. You don’t want to end up in that other tent.”
“Sure thing, Sarge.”
“You need more, you let me know.”
“You already gave me three,” Kafak said.
“There’s some pretty girls in this town,” the sergeant said. He winked.
Kafak toured the streets of Naples. He saw plenty of whorehouses but remembered what the doctor had told him about the venereal disease here, and so stayed away. He didn’t really trust the rubbers. He spent most of his day just wandering the cobblestones and back alleyways of the city. He knew he wouldn’t find her, but some part of his mind hoped he might r
un into the girl from the picture again. Maybe this time, he could actually get to know her a little bit more. He journeyed back to the neighborhood where he’d met her. He hung around there for hours. Of course, he never saw her. Toward midafternoon, he found a café and ducked into it. It wasn’t crowded. Maybe half a dozen guys there. Kafak ordered a beer. They didn’t have beer. He ordered a glass of wine. It came to him in a clay cup only a little chipped. He’d drunk about half of it when a couple of Negroes came in. Kafak had never seen Negro soldiers before. He’d seen plenty of Negroes back in Detroit. Thousands had come up for work in the factories when the South went bad during the Depression. Even earlier than that, Kafak knew. He knew that Detroit had owned a really strong Ku Klux Klan movement as far back as the twenties. They’d tried to recruit his father during the Depression, when things were bad for the entire Kafak family. His dad had sworn at them in German, sent them flying out of the house. Kafak still remembered the pair of KKK recruiters leaping off the porch, running. Kafak didn’t blame them. He knew his old man’s anger. Better than he cared to admit. After the way his father had reacted to them, Kafak had always believed there was something wrong with those Klan folks. Whatever it was his father didn’t like about the group, that was good enough for Kafak.
The two Negro soldiers ordered wine right off and sat at the bar. Kafak figured from their order that they had been here before. All the other soldiers that had been drinking there quick finished their drinks and left. They shot looks at the Negroes, but the two soldiers at the bar didn’t look their way. When everyone was gone, it was just Kafak and the Negroes. A couple of times some other white soldiers stuck their heads in, but they took one look at the bar and then turned around and found somewhere else to drink. It never occurred to Kafak to leave the bar. He didn’t know why it didn’t. It just didn’t.
Once a second lieutenant came in, and the two Negroes and Kafak hopped up to attention. The lieutenant looked at the two men at the bar. He told the owner of the place, “You shouldn’t serve coloreds here, mister. You won’t get any white men to come in here anymore.”
The owner, an elderly Italian man with wispy white hair and clothes that hung too big on his bony frame, shook his head.
One Man's War Page 11