Both of my parents deny the veracity of this story. I’ve queried my father about it numerous times and he always says, “Never happened.”
This story might be one of the first lies my brother told me. But it might also be true.
Maybe most important was the fact that my older brother believed he had a father who took such extreme risks with his own life and the safety of his family. The police chase might have happened only in my brother’s twelve-year-old head. The father he knew was a veteran of the Vietnam War and a pretty tense and keyed-up thirty-three-year-old man. My father loved and owned fast cars. My brother must have felt that he was a passenger in one of those cars, always moving at unsafe speeds.
6
Bethesda
Somewhere between Elizabeth and Princeton I looked at my speedometer and realized that I was going 120 miles per hour. In my mind I’d been back in the desert driving a Humvee. We were spraying fire everywhere, me driving with my left hand, my M16 in my right, the barrel out the window and me letting loose on burst. I didn’t care who or what I hit.
Now I let the engine drop speed slowly. On the shoulder ahead of me a guy changed a tire on his beater truck. My first thought was VBED, vehicle-borne explosive device. Then I saw the wife and child holding hands at the rear of the vehicle. They waved. The man wore dirty ConEd overalls. In black and white it could have been a scene out of Dorothea Lange or in a novel it would have been Steinbeck.
People driving shitty cars in art and books: someone should write a dissertation.
My right hand gripped the gearshift as though it were the pistol grip on my rifle. No, as though it were the pistol grip on my life. But I had no ammunition here on the road to Bethesda, and the targets remained unclear. I poured water over my head and blasted the radio. I took the speedometer back up to ninety. I thought of the young kids missing limbs at Bethesda. What would I say?
I ARRIVED AT the Naval Hospital at three in the afternoon. The lobby was enormous and tile-floored, dotted with large planters housing massive, boring plants: the echoes from boot heels driven hard into the ground moved through the space in the timbre of death. Like most other military buildings it was well signed, but all the signage bore acronyms, so that if you didn’t know what CFSSB stood for, even if you were looking for someone inside that particular labyrinth, you were totally lost.
As on any military installation people in uniform, mostly fit and youthful, hurried from one destination to another as though the world were on fire. And of course, it was. From the uniforms each wore you could tell very little other than rank. One colonel might be a bean counter in the motor pool, and another might be a Special Forces genius who’d been killing for America since the age of twenty-two, but you’d have trouble telling them apart. Only the eyes gave a clear portrait: the bean counter witnessed the world with bemused detachment, aware of how lucky he was to have worn the uniform for so long and to have missed combat; the genius killer watched the world with a weary gaze, constantly tuned to the threat wave, looking for danger real or imagined. Men and women in unfortunate naval khaki uniforms entered and exited the building, as well a few marines in short-sleeved dress blue uniforms. It was one of the easiest uniforms in the world to get laid in. It still made me proud.
AND UNFORTUNATELY FOR me hospital acronyms were some of both the most complicated and the least-known in the Marine Corps. No marine planned ever to enter a hospital. I noticed across the lobby an office with maroon-and-gold signage, which lead me to the correct assumption that this was the liaison office for injured marines and their families.
A staff sergeant greeted me, “Can I help you, boss?”
He wore a shrapnel-enhanced smirk and in his eyes swam the deep constant pain of having killed and watched others die.
“I’m here to meet up with the DAV,” I said.
“Swofford?”
“Yes.” It had been years since I’d spoken to a marine staff sergeant in uniform. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but still he made me nervous. This guy had been jacked up overseas, he was probably ten years younger than I, but he looked hard and he looked mean, and I knew he had lived some years. When I was a corporal in the Corps I looked up to staff sergeants as if they were gods.
“Fucking Jarhead,” he said. He half smiled. But I wasn’t sure if he wanted to shake my hand or punch me in the face.
I was wearing a suit. I must have looked like a real civilian piece of shit to him.
“Yo, PFC Colon, weren’t you with 2/7?” the sergeant yelled over his shoulder.
“Hells yes,” a young voice called. “Who wants to know?”
“Jarhead is here,” he said.
In the Corps I had gotten used to being called fuckface and retard and shit-for-brains. But for many years now people had called me Tony or Anthony, or Swofford, or Swoff. I had not yet acclimated to being called by the title of my first book.
“You can call me Swofford,” I said. We finally shook hands.
Colon came from behind the cubicle. He had the youthful gleam and game on his face of a Dominican from New York, a kid who had probably seen as much crazy shit in the neighborhood as he ever had in the Corps, other than the IEDs and car bombs. He was in a wheelchair.
“Swofford,” Colon said. “Fucking Jarhead. We all read that fucking book. Man, and the movie. That is some lucky shit. Me, not so lucky. Fucking sniper, spinal cord. Paraplegic. Can’t even jack off. But fuck it, I coulda been killed dead.”
“When did you get hit?” I asked.
“August oh-five. I think it was a Chechen. The fucker shot me like no Koran-drunk hajji ever could.”
“That rash of sniper casualties. And then they stopped,” I said.
“We either killed the fucker or he went back to Chechnya when his visa expired!” Colon laughed.
That was the thing that always blew my mind about injured marines. Here was Colon, a fiercely handsome young man of nineteen or twenty who would never get laid again—to fuck is the only thing any nineteen-year-old marine thinks about—and his attitude was so overwhelmingly positive and so filled with humor and delight at the madness of it all. I’d seen the same attitude while hanging around Camp Pendleton a few years earlier, and it was hard for me not to break down in front of this overwhelmingly positive outlook. Didn’t he want to know why, didn’t he want to rage against the world? Someday he would, when the Corps’s goodwill ran out and it canceled his sweet desk job, or when he showed up at the VA one bright day with a broken wheelchair and they handed him a wrench to fix it himself. It would happen. But for now let Colon have his humor and his youth, I thought.
“Hey, Swofford,” the staff sergeant said. “Have you heard of these Warrior dinners the big shots in DC throw every Friday night for outpatients? It’s like, they got a band and some minor celebs. I saw Bob Dole a few weeks ago. And Chelsea Clinton one weekend. And TV types from New York, and they put on this big dinner for guys in long-term care, take about a hundred of them a week out for a night on the town, steak and shrimp and a shit-ton of beer. And their families can come. You want to attend tonight? We got an extra slot for a non-injured. No shit.”
“I’d love to go, Staff Sergeant.”
I’d heard of these dinners. A local restaurant had been putting them on since the first injured had begun to arrive in a slow stream, and now that they arrived from overseas in a river of carnage, the popularity of the dinners had soared.
“So you want to go see some injured marines?” the sergeant asked.
Colon said, “There is some fucked-up motherfuckers up there, Swofford. This ain’t no hundred-day war. This ain’t no friendly fire. This ain’t no boo-hoo-I-didn’t-get-to-shoot-back-at-the-bad-guys bullshit.”
He popped wheelies in his chair and he looked right through me. I knew he was challenging me and my easy little war, and I’d let him have it because he was right. My war was not shit and his was. I wrote a fucking book out of my little war and from his big war he got his dick blown off. You do the mother
fucking math.
“This is the real fucking deal, I mean, double amps, faces blown off, brains splattered to the Funky Cold Medina and back. You think I got it bad? I ain’t got shit bad on some of those fucked-up motherfuckers. You want to see some fucked-up jarheads, go on and see the show.”
I’d forgotten how much marines curse. Motherfucker was the equivalent of oh really or no kidding, or you could use the word to talk about the cosmos and life and death. Two guys could sit on watch for four hours in the middle of the night and the only word that would pass between them would be motherfucker, but that word meant: Here come some suspicious bastards; I don’t think she’s fucking around on me; I go home in three days; Do you think the Rig Veda is correct when it says, “Breath of the gods, embryo of the universe, this god wanders wherever he pleases”?
“What is the mood up there?” I asked.
Colon was popping wheelies and doing 360s in his wheelchair, and he said, “Most of the guys got a pretty good attitude. If a guy didn’t lose his dick, you know, that’s good. When a guy wakes up, you know this, Swofford, the first thing he does is reach down to see if he’s still got a cock on him, and then he looks at the doctor or the nurse and says, ‘Is it gonna work?’ Or if he no longer has hands, he just looks, cranes his neck to see the bulge.”
I did know this: that at one level the carnage breaks down to the dudes who lost their dicks and the dudes who didn’t.
“Penis, big fucking erect penis, Mom,” as Tom Cruise playing Ron Kovic said.
I’d need a year on the ward to figure out all the other layers of love and hatred and confusion and ecstasy.
“How long will most of the guys be here?” I asked.
“Of course, that’s up to the docs. A month for some, six for others. And then some guys they’ll send over to that fucking hellhole Walter Reed and fit with a bionic arm or leg. A guy might not even want pussy after jacking off with a bionic hand for a few months. Bionic hand won’t tell you to take out the garbage, bionic hand won’t tell you it’s got a headache.”
Colon sad this loudly and it elicited howls from all corners of the office. I’m sure they’d heard it before. And I had no doubt it would remain funny for many years.
“And you see with me, Swofford, I got some new territory to explore with the ladies. ’Cause, like, I never went down before; we just don’t do that that shit where I’m from. But if I want a woman now I got to rethink my strategy. You ever see that movie Coming Home? So the crippled Vietnam vet Jon Voight goes down on Jane Fonda like crazy. I think it’s the best movie orgasm of the 1970s. Honestly, I don’t think Hanoi Jane could’ve faked that.”
The sergeant said, “Colon Googled ‘cunnilingus in films’ and got back about five thousand hits. He’s renting all of those movies and learning technique.”
Colon continued to pop wheelies. “What I’ma do is write this manual, right? It’s gonna be called The Finer Points of Going Down. Maybe the Naval Academy will publish it for me and it will become a textbook.”
More laughs from behind the cubicles.
I’d heard differing opinions about the quality of the health care the injured were receiving. Without any medical training and without talking to the troops, there wasn’t a lot I’d learn, but I thought I could hang back and observe; to observe and deduct had been most of my job in the Corps, and it was now, too, so I’d do it here and see what I could come up with. Word was that Bethesda was running a cleaner operation than Walter Reed, but I didn’t know if that was bullshit marine pride getting in the way of an honest appraisal of the treatment.
A NAVAL OFFICER from the Bethesda media team arrived to escort me to the injured marine floor. I made plans with the marines to meet up with them later at the dinner in DC.
As we walked onto the ward my first impulse was to bolt. I hadn’t been to a hospital since my brother died. I knew the smells and the sounds, the antiseptics and the low whirl of machines that give and take life—I knew the collective heartbeat of a hospital floor holding so many lives in fine balance. I did not belong here. I would wreck the balance.
I wanted to be back in Manhattan in my clean little life, in my Chelsea apartment with clean white museum walls and art pieces hanging from those walls; I wanted to drink Burgundy wine from my cellar; I wanted to cook in my professional kitchen; I wanted to eat at my eight-thousand-dollar table while wearing my two-thousand-dollar cowboy boots; I wanted to take a woman other than my girlfriend out to a five-hundred-dollar dinner and take her home, and upstairs while staring at the Empire State Building I wanted to fuck her and forget that a place called Bethesda Naval Hospital existed exactly 230 miles away from that clean Manhattan life.
But that was not the plan of the day. The naval officer showed me into a room where a mother bent over her young marine son. He’d arrived two days before. They were not sure the kid would live. A week earlier he’d taken a sniper round to the forehead. The swelling was down. He blinked when his mother spoke to him. But he could blink for only a few hours a day. I remember that the family was from Ohio. Someone from the naval media team asked me to sign a copy of Jarhead for the kid. I wrote it out to Tommy or Timmy or whatever his name was, knowing he’d never read it. His mother took the book from me and smiled and said she’d read it to him.
I thought, Jesus, please read the kid something with a little bit of hope, not my bleak book.
What are you going to give a mother from Ohio to read over the deathbed of her nineteen-year-old son?
I walked out of the room with my minders. My brain hurt. I was short of breath and thirsty. The minders got called away for a moment and they asked me to stand by.
Ahead of me in the hall I saw a man in his fifties leaning against the wall just outside a patient room. He wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with MARINE DAD. The guy was big, he’d once been an ox of a football player, somewhere in the Middle West, I guessed. I approached him.
“Excuse me, sir, can I ask you a few questions?”
“Who are you, son?” I read former marine officer right away, Vietnam, ’68 to ’70. I saw it in his eyes.
“I’m a former marine and a writer. I wrote a book about the first Gulf War. I’m here to listen to some stories, find out about the quality of the treatment. Who are you here visiting?”
“My boy,” he said, and he pointed at his sweatshirt and looked at me as though I were stupid.
He continued, “He’s in surgery right now. Below the knee on one leg, above the knee on the other, once it all shakes out. Goddamn it, son, I was in ’Nam, I saw a lot of men die, but I’ve just spent three weeks up here, and I never saw men injured so heinously. The boys are ripped to shreds. Go room to room and you’ll see. And look at all the mothers. I’m one of the only fathers up here because the fathers are back at home earning money or they’ve never been around. I’m lucky, after my time in the Corps I was an executive at a bank. I retired a year ago. I’ve got two pensions. I can afford to cool my heels here and look after my son. I can do this for the rest of my life. But look at the mothers. Some of them are married, but you know the story, many of these boys come from broken homes, poor homes, single mothers. These women, they thought they were going to refashion themselves after fifty, live new and dazzling adventures. But they’re going to be feeding and bathing their sons for the rest of their lives.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder and asked me to look after any marine I could. A woman approached. She was clutching copies of a newspaper article to her chest.
“This is the article they ran on Sam yesterday in the paper. It’s so touching. They captured him. He couldn’t speak but he blinked his eyes and they captured his soul.”
The woman began to cry and the Marine Dad comforted her.
“May I give you one of these about my son?” she asked me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I glanced at the article, a front-page story with color photo from Wednesday’s paper, this woman at her son’s bedside, the son immobile, neck brace, oxygen mask, legs
in traction, the boy barely visible beneath his bouquet of medical matériel.
“Who are you with?” she asked.
Just then my minders arrived and introduced me to the woman. She asked for a signed book and I gave her one. She told me that a week or so before Wolfowitz had been on the ward but she was much more excited to meet me.
The woman told me that the care her son received was top-notch and that the support staff had been wonderful. I glanced at the photo of her son on the cover of the newspaper.
“He’s a sweet boy,” she said.
The Marine Dad walked away.
The woman looked at me and said, “I’m happy for him his son has a small wound.”
When losing most of both of your legs was a small wound I would never be able to truly understand the depth of the despair these marines and their families were suffering. During my war I’d spent a short time at the entry point of this calamity, at the end where the bombs blew and rifles and RPGs shattered bodies, where Warthogs sometimes fired on friendly troops, and I had totally forgotten about this end, the sick end, the destroyed end of it, the utter ruin of families.
“May I hug you?” the woman asked.
“Yes, of course.” I felt awkward but I couldn’t say no, could I?
And she hugged me tight: she gripped me for life, for a memory of who her son had been: young, clean-shaven, strong. She would never again hug her son while he stood upright. She wept into my shoulder. The lioness had lost her family. The moon darkened. Ice caps melted. How could we go on?
She locked on to my eyes in a mildly wild and erotic way, her face full of tears. She was attractive in that high school librarian way, orderly and considered. Handsome, that’s what she was, and sturdy, and she possessed the orderly smell of all good mothers. Her son would be fine. He would never walk and he might not talk, but he would have his mother and somehow they would both know this and be well.
This could not have been true but it is what I told myself then and it is the same lie that other Americans have been telling themselves for a decade, and we believe this because we have to.
Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Page 14