The only teenager other than Binny and me had a Bible in his lap. It had a million bookmarks in it. When it was his turn, he said, “Jesus said . . .” I noticed Dr. Cohen frowning. Excessive religiosity can be associated with psychosis.
“How’re the voices?” Dr. Thompkins asked a man named George.
“They’re still telling me to do very bad things.” Again, there was a lot of talk about what George could do to help himself.
The tall woman who had a crackled face and a rattly voice laughed a throaty smoker’s laugh when it was her turn. “Come on, Doc. Let’s all go have a drink.”
To his question, a man named Brad said, “I’m okay. I’ve just gotta get back to my wife.”
“What are you here for?” Brad turned to me.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to my school in Kobe.”
Dr. Cohen said, “Sara and I met last night. We’ll be meeting tomorrow morning, Sara. Until then, I want you to just go to group and let the others help you settle in. They all know what to do.” He looked straight at me in such a soft way that I felt cared for.
The orderlies told a man named Jim to come sit with us, but he just perched on his chair for an instant before he flitted off again, like he was chasing butterflies.
“And how are you, Sam?” Dr. Cohen said to the man next to me.
“I’m just glad to be outta Nam.”
“You’ll probably be transited tomorrow.”
“Where’ll I be stationed?”
“You’ll go to Bethesda first.”
“Oh Doc, can’t I just go home?” And he began to weep.
I felt completely bewildered. I’d never been anywhere like this before. And yet, everyone assumed I was where I should be.
In the late afternoon, they let me go to my room. My parents visited and sat on chairs by my bed. My father read to me from Walden. I watched his familiar, bent fingers play at the foxed pages of the book. I couldn’t listen too well, but his voice made me feel calmer than I had in a long time.
It was the next morning. I was tired, but things seemed clearer. The floor didn’t slant. The people weren’t nearly as blurred. The air outside the window was clear, clear as nothingness and clear as brightness. Pristine, crisp, each cloud distinct. I wrote a little in my journal.
After Dirk told me to get dressed, the men and I went to what they called “the Mess” and ate in our bathrobes. I was beginning to figure things out. We weren’t allowed to wear our clothes in case we tried to run away. Earlier Dirk had been scolding a man who had run away during the night and had been picked up barefoot, in his pajamas, in someone’s backyard on the base. “You’re a pain in the rear. That really pissed me off,” Dirk said. People talked plain here.
After breakfast, we had to clean our rooms until they were in Air Force order. Then there was group therapy. After group, Dr. Cohen came up to me and took me to one of the little rooms off the entry hall to the ward. He asked me how I was doing and how I felt about being on the ward.
“It’s awful,” I said.
“It’s really tough to be torn out of your school, and to suddenly be in Tachi, in this strange hospital, I bet.”
His tone was so empathic that I felt less like hissing, and my body calmed.
He said, “When you got here, you really weren’t quite like yourself. Today you seem like you’re doing a lot better. We gave you some medicine to help, and I think it’s helping. I’m glad you’re back. Your parents and I were really worried about you.”
He went on, “Your and my job now is to figure out what happened so that we can work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“When can I go back to school?” I asked.
“I promise to get you back as soon as we can.” He sounded like he could be trusted.
“Why don’t you tell me something about how school’s been going and what things were like in the week or so before you came here. That may help us get started on this job of figuring out what happened.”
I began to tell him about school, about the dorm and about the play, and he was so interested that I just kept talking—telling him about how hard I’d been working, how I loved haiku and . . .
He smiled and then he asked me how it had been to leave my parents to go off to boarding school. I was just sixteen and we’d been a pretty close family, he’d heard.
“Oh, it was fine,” I said, wanting to convince him nothing fazed me.
He just said, “You know, any feeling you have is okay.” Soon, we finished. When he said, “We’ll talk again tomorrow,” I felt happy.
After lunch we got a tiny rest, then we had to do our jobs. They had assigned me the task of neatening up the community room, which made me mad because it was such a girly kind of work. I was sure they’d never assign it to one of the men. Then, in the late afternoon, we had group again.
The psych ward at Tachikawa was a revolutionary new program in the military. Not long before my sojourn there, there had been race riots on the ward, and Dr. Thompkins, Dr. Cohen, a junior psychiatrist, a career military nurse, Dirk, the psych tech, and a few others, had come in and created a warm therapeutic community that quickly welcomed and integrated evacuees, and set a standard of talking about feelings rather than acting them out.
By the evening group, the men were beginning to emerge from the fog. Vaguely, I realized the other patients were almost all soldiers on their way back from Vietnam; Tachikawa Air Base was one of the main evacuation way stations. A few were enlisted men from bases in Japan, Okinawa, or Korea, but the majority on the ward were Vietnam med-evacs with PTSD, overwhelming grief, suicidal depression, and/or flagrant psychoses. In group, their stories began to come out. Many of them were angry. They swore and yelled at the doctors.
One man jumped up when a plane went overhead.
Another one, who had been sitting with his face in his hand, finally spoke in response to Dr. Cohen’s coaxing. He said, “I just can’t take it,” and his body started shuddering and sobs began to wrench out of him. Through the sobs, he said, “My buddy. We lost him to the VC in a fucking swamp.” And then he screeched like a wild animal.
Dr. Cohen went over to him and put his arm around him and he collapsed against his chest, sobbing.
I felt my eyes begin to prick with tears.
Several of the men seemed haunted, unreachable across some horrible mystery. They’d crossed a frontier that was only theirs. And they saw sights belonging only to them, the unchosen. I was on one side of a chasm and they were on the other. They’d been forced across. I could only watch them. Their minds were inaccessible.
But I took it in—all their terror and sadness. I began to listen to helicopters as they did.
In the evening the staff set up a projector in the community room and we sat on the folding chairs and watched a Humphrey Bogart movie.
The next morning, Dr. Cohen said, “How did you feel about what happened in group yesterday afternoon?”
“Sad,” I said, and I couldn’t help beginning to swell.
“Stan’s been through something really tough. . . . And what about you? How are you feeling about being here?”
I started to say, “I’m doing fine,” and to put my best foot forward as I would have at an embassy dinner party, but that didn’t fit here, so I said, “Bummed out.”
He said, “You know, Sara, feelings are not right or wrong. They just are. And you have a right to every single feeling you have.”
Time didn’t stop, but this was the single most revolutionary thing anyone had said to me in my life—or perhaps ever would.
“And I’ll bet you are bummed out. This must seem like a pretty weird place. All these men have been through some tough times. . . . You’ve been through a lot in your life too. You’ve had a lot of experiences, and I’ll bet you’ve had a lot of feelings to go with them.
“Caring, loving, missing: none of these are anything to be ashamed of,” Dr. Cohen said. “In fact, they show you’re a full hu
man being. . . . Anger, disappointment, sadness, they’re all part of being human. Loving and missing people—and even being angry at the people you love most—is completely natural,” he said. Years from now Dr. Cohen’s words would resurface when I read Terry Tempest Williams’s words, “Suffering shows what we’re attached to.”
Suddenly I was crying, and then I was crying harder. I was missing my mother and my father, and Sara, and Holland, and I was feeling all alone in a hallway. . . . All of it came rushing out of me in a flood. Sara the marine dissolved and my whole bucket of pent-up sadness just tipped out.
Dr. Cohen just sat calmly and said to tell him what thoughts had caused the tears. And when I did, he didn’t think I’d failed, he thought it was fine.
One day while I was sitting on the bed writing in my journal, one of the young men came in and stood just inside the door to my room, his back against the wall. He was agitated, twitching all over, and looking at me with possessed dark eyes. He started to move now, to wander around my bed, saying nothing, eyes serious and black and full of intent.
Just as fear began to ripple inside me, Dirk came by the room and called the man out of my room.
The next day, Dr. Cohen told me, “I heard about Tank going into your room. If he or anyone else goes into your room, you come get us. Shout if you need to.”
His concerned eyes made me melt.
“Now, how are you doing today?”
“Okay, except I’m mad about missing the play at school. . . .” I found myself then telling him about Man and the Masses, and Annie, and even Will.
“Sounds like you’re angry about missing out on things at CA. There are a lot of things you love about it.”
I had never had anyone listen to me so carefully before. My father listened closely, but it was different.
With Dr. Cohen, I learned to name the emotions. It was like learning an alphabet of feelings. Every day, I felt amazement. To let go of the marine was easier each day. “You mean it’s okay to be disgusted? To feel dismal? To feel frustrated enough to kick a wall?” Each feeling, Dr. Cohen taught me, had a worthy and valid name—like the different birds in the woods. My father had empathized with my feelings, and my mother had intuited them, but Dr. Cohen gave them words. In his little office, I examined them like a blind girl catching sea gulls and robins in her hands.
Each morning, noon, and evening, the nurses came around with our pills. I was taking Stelazine and Artane—what I’d later know were major tranquilizers used to treat schizophrenia.
Dr. Cohen had said he was trying these medicines with me, but—“We’re puzzled about you,” he said. “It doesn’t quite add up.”
On the ward I had become very aware of a particular soldier named Ken. Gaunt-cheeked and stick-bodied, he walked like a zombie in a white t-shirt and Air Force bathrobe—with hollow, haunted eyes, eyes that had seen horrors. He wandered, and then he plopped down to sleep on the linoleum. Lying there, he was concave. A lens, his whole being an eye, he was a window into war.
The orderlies found him under beds, in corners, anywhere he could curl and hide, get away from the rank smell, the screeching of bombs, the shrieking, the scrambled green-black, brown-crimson scenes.
He saw something the rest of us couldn’t see. It was too private. Nothing should ever be that private.
In Vietnam, where I would live for a summer during college, while my father was posted there, I would watch the beautiful women on the Saigon streets. They had a hardness to them, something impenetrable and determined. Hardened-up desperation, terror petrified into its opposite: ferocity. In Ken, terror had turned to limpness. The human spirit can go either way.
One afternoon, Ken was curled asleep on a pile of dirty sheets. I was sitting nearby. He looked serene there and then Dirk and a nurse named Alvin started poking him to get him to move. Afterward, he stood, like always, at the edge of the room, saying and doing nothing, just staring ahead of him as though nothing was happening in the room around him, like he was a ghost. “Ken is catatonic,” Dirk told me. “We need to keep him active.” I wanted to give Ken a hug; he looked so frail and lost. And, even though it was for a purpose, I hated it that they were so mean to him.
One mid-morning, Dirk said to Alvin, “Ken’s still in there.” This meant he was in the dormitory room at the back of the common room where he and all the rest of the young men slept. I watched Dirk and Alvin go into the room, and I went to the doorway to peer in. There were ten beds on each side of the room. They were all made up, the strip of white sheet folded down over the grey-blue blanket. Everyone else was out of the room, but Ken was there, standing beside the bed near the door on the right aisle. Slender, with a tousle of sandy hair, he was like a waif trying to hide himself.
He stood utterly still, staring straight ahead. Dirk ripped apart Ken’s made bed and then said, in a loud angry voice, “Ken, make your bed.” Ken moved like he was sleepwalking, like he was walking inside a wave of water. Slowly, slowly, he picked up with his slender hand the sheet that Dirk had thrown on the floor, and tried to put it on the bed. It was like it was slippery, like a drapery, though, and he couldn’t get it to do anything. He got it pointed in an arrow toward the head of the bed, but then he let it drift off his hand, and collapsed. Dirk yelled again, “Make your bed, Ken!”
I shuddered and moved back into the common room.
I talked to Dr. Cohen about Ken.
“He saw some terrible things during the war and he wants to curl into a ball and shut out the world. Catatonia can be very serious. The best thing for him is to get him to feel and to act.”
“It’s so awful,” I said. Then I couldn’t keep it back any longer. I told Dr. Cohen I hated the war and I told him about the antiwar marches. “I hate what America is doing in the world.”
He said, “I do too. I was drafted when I was in medical school. I chose to serve rather than go to jail, but I know a lot of servicemen agree with you.”
Suddenly I got it, a blasting truth: most of the servicemen didn’t want to be in Vietnam.
I hated OT, but it was something to do out of the ward. Sitting on stools around a table with a couple of the men, the teacher fetching us supplies and helping us, I made my father a leather key wallet from a kit of pre-cut leather pieces and gimp. I made my mother a copper-embossed picture of a pointing Labrador. Annie and the kids at CA seemed far away.
One day, despite my resistance, the techs insisted that I go bowling with the guys. It was mortifying because we had to wear our PJs and robes, so everyone at the bowling alley would know exactly which ward we were from. It was an exercise like a cognitive therapist might design in 2005 to help someone overcome an anxiety disorder. If you can survive this embarrassment, you can do anything.
The hall leading to the hospital exit was scrubbed clean, American clean. It was long, stretching ahead to a rectangle of light far away. As we walked, gurneys whizzed by us: men with bandages around their heads, men whimpering like baby kittens. We passed doors to the other wards—for treating men with shrapnel wounds, for treating head injuries, for stabilizing soldiers with massive internal injuries. Tachikawa was one of the main medical bases where fighters were steadied before shipping home.
There were six of us trailing along the pale, white-green hall. Our regulation blue-grey robes were our signature. Some of us had them tied at the waist, like me—trying to conceal the pajamas underneath—and others were disheveled and just let them hang off their shoulders and drape around any which way. I felt like a bedraggled hobo in my man-size robe.
Most of us walked with the shuffling, listless Ward 3 walk. We’d been thoroughly medicated, so there was a wanderingness to us, a dullness that turned us compliant and sleepy, some of us with idiot smiles on our faces. Bonded through knowledge of each other’s stories and wildest emotions, and with our matching robes (I finally had thirty twins), we were a clan.
There was Elmer, who must have been in his fifties. He was balding and had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. I
didn’t know what he was doing here. George was sandy-haired and had blue eyes that flashed out like pistol shot. He’d have been handsome if he had been normal, but he talked to himself all the time. Sometimes he raved and shouted and then they took him into the nurses’ office. They were trying to get him to do normal things—like they were trying to get the rest of us to do—but it seemed like a long shot for George. He seemed way gone, into another world full of beasts and sorcerors. And there was wild-eyed frantic Steve, bright blond and skinny like a string bean, for whom this trip was an advance because he had tried to run away so many times. Up until now he had had no access to shoes or even a robe, and had been watched like a hawk. Blair was with us too—young, dark, handsome, and angry. He spit out his words, held his shoulders straight back, and stood fiery, vigilant, and cocked, as if he was ready to blast the head off anything that even brushed past the corner of one eye. He was striding, instead of walking, down the hall. Jim was looking vacant-eyed and oh-too-happy, like this was an outing of his own devising, like he was back at home just trucking off to meet his girlfriend at the local movie house instead of in a holding tank here at Tachi, like his life had not been altered forever. And then there was Brad, pacing along beside me, truly looking forward to getting a breath of fresh air, hoping it would be the kind of fresh air he would breathe when he got back home. And then there was me—feeling foggy and mad about having to wear my dumb robe and go to a place and do an activity that only old, square people in Florida did.
The medics had assigned us each a buddy. Brad had been assigned to me, and me to him, maybe because we were both very young—though he was three years my senior and had a wife and had been to war—and they wanted us to feel springy hope. We walked along chatting about group, his eyes, with their background coloring of worry, glinting with play.
As we exited the door at the end of the long hall, the bright light of the real world shocked. Shading our eyes, we trundled across the wide, empty street of the base, and turned right up the far sidewalk. There were little one-story bungalows and offices set down on the flat, green lawns. The air was fresh and cool—I felt almost happy, through my medicated cloud. The orderlies shooed us along the next block and a half.
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