P. O. W.

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  The Bru chieftain’s grandson had been hiding under the snake’s cage all afternoon. His grandfather had overheard the Vietnamese talking about putting the small American in with the snake, and the chief had devised this plan with the stakes and Montagnard antisnake potion. The boy lay on his back and listened to his grandfather chant him directions from the porch of his longhouse. The gongs reassured the small boy that Ae Die, their village god, would bring him much happiness for the brave deed he was doing for the American. The Bru ceremony would last all night long, and the boy knew he would have to remain awake to remove the sticks when his grandfather and the other elders warned him that the Vietnamese were coming to check up on the prisoner.

  Garibaldi listened to the Montagnard music and the singing that was so basic and yet somehow so reassuring. He hadn’t heard a word from Spencer since it had gotten dark and called softly over to him. “Spence? You OK?”

  “Sir, you won’t believe it….” Spencer’s voice was filled with his old self-confidence.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you in the morning…. Right now I want to get some rest.” Spencer rested his chin against his legs and closed his eyes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Da Nang

  Private First Class—soon to be Specialist Fourth Class—David Woods left the back of the truck and waved his thanks to the driver. He had hitchhiked from the First Cavalry base camp at An Khe to the naval hospital in Da Nang to see his teammate Reggie Sinclair. Lieutenant Reed had given Woods a three-day in-country leave to make the trip after their successful mission in the A Shau to retrieve the seismic-intrusion detectors.

  “Be waiting out in front of the hospital by noon!” Sergeant Shaw called back to where Woods was standing. “I ain’t going to wait for you and end up having to drive back down to An Khe in the dark!”

  “I’ll be here! Thanks, Sarge!” Woods left the roadside and entered the hospital compound through the main gate. Dual machine gun bunkers guarded the entrance in a symbolic gesture for security. The hospital was protected from attack by the large red crosses painted on each of the buildings and the fact that North Vietnamese and Vietcong prisoners of war were treated there exactly the same as an American would be. The idea was great for the humanitarians back in the States, but it lost its appeal to a young Marine or soldier who lost his legs and would wake up from surgery to find an NVA soldier in the bed next to him. It didn’t happen very often, but it had happened and had caused a lot of trouble when the Marine tried crawling out of his bed to choke the NVA to death.

  Woods checked with the information desk to find out which ward Sinclair was in. He followed the arrows around the quadrangle and then through a maze of wards until he admitted that he was lost. He stopped a friendly-looking nurse and asked for new directions. She showed him the hallway he needed to take and left him with a warm smile.

  The sound of the heavy engines from a CH-47 Chinook helicopter drew Woods to a side entrance of the hospital. There were nurses and green-clothed doctors running back and forth along the narrow corridor David was walking down, and he felt that he was getting in their way. A small screen door exited off the narrow hall, and Woods pushed it open and stepped outside to wait until the rush of corpsmen and stretcher bearers had passed.

  Woods turned around under the tin-roofed veranda and stood in mute shock at the sight before him. The end of the veranda opposite from where he stood had a large set of double doors that opened out onto the medical helipad. The CH-47 filled the pad, with the rear entrance to the craft facing toward the doors. The steel bed of the chopper was piled with the bodies of dead and dying Marines. Navy corpsmen were pulling the bodies to the edge of the chopper and then lifting them onto stretchers, where a doctor pointed which way to take them—to the morgue or into the veranda, where a crew of corpsmen waited with sharp knives and scissors to cut the web gear and clothes off the wounded. David watched the medical teamwork, not realizing that he was standing openmouthed. It was obvious from the way that the dead and wounded had been packed into the single CH-47 that there hadn’t been much time to load them, and that helicopters weren’t getting through to where the wounded and dead were—and that the battle was still raging. One of the corpsmen yelled for David to help, and he automatically ran over to the chopper and scrambled on board. He could feel his traction-soled jungle boots slip on the blood-covered steel floor, and he fell to his knees. David’s face was inches away from the open eyes of a dead leatherneck.

  “Man… help me…” The voice of a wounded Marine drew David’s attention away from the dead. He shoved the open-eyed Marine over to one side and tugged gently at the wounded man. A low groan came from the Marine, and David stopped pulling, thinking that he was hurting him.

  “Don’t stop now… get me the fuck out of this meat wagon!” The Marine tried smiling, but his slashed upper lip hung from his nose by a small fragment of skin.

  Woods lifted the man onto a stretcher, and two corpsmen carried him back under the veranda. David stepped back away from the chopper and let the white-suited corpsmen finish. He wondered why the medics wore white; it only made the bright red blood show up better. Woods’s eyes locked onto a corner of the helicopter’s lowered tailgate where a stream of blood oozed between the cracks where the gate hinged to the body of the chopper. He didn’t know what made him look down, but he did. A single human finger lay on the sand in a pool of collective blood from the Marines. David didn’t have a problem knowing which finger on a human hand it was, because there was a high school graduation ring still attached to it.

  David blinked and told his mind to think of nothing, absolutely nothing. It was his personal way of maintaining his sanity. He had learned to do that when his dog had been killed by a car when he was seven years old, and it had always worked for him ever since.

  The veranda was packed with medical personnel. At first glance, it looked as if no one knew what he was doing, but it was a perfectly functioning team. A two-inch water pipe had been installed around the veranda by the Navy Seabees, and every two feet there was a faucet with a twenty-five-foot garden-sized hose attached to it. A corpsman used the hose to wash down the naked bodies of the wounded. The process seemed barbaric and backward for medical techniques in the sixties, but it was the fastest way to wash the mud and filth from the wounded so that surgeons and nurses could evaluate the wounds.

  Woods felt his back dig into the screen and wood wall. He watched the pink water flow to the drains and swirl in the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation down into the ground underneath South Vietnam.

  “Soldier! What are you doing in here?” A white-haired nurse paused in her tasks and frowned up at Woods. “This is off limits to you!”

  “Sorry, ma’am…” David felt behind him for the door and stumbled through it. He walked down the hallway until he reached an intersection and stopped; he could feel a cool breeze coming off the South China Sea against his wet face and realized that he had been sweating profusely. His jacket and the top four inches of his waistband were saturated.

  A nurse standing behind a counter looked up and saw the look on the young soldier’s face and knew instantly that he was in some sort of shock. She left the desk and approached him slowly. “Can I help you, soldier?” Her voice was soothing, and David’s head turned toward her, but his eyes still weren’t focusing; it was as if he were blind.

  “He stumbled into the post-op receiving area…. We’ve just received a load of wounded coming in from a big battle up at Khe Sanh. It was the first aircraft that could get in there in the last three days of fighting…. It was a mess.” A corpsman wearing a blood-splattered apron stood behind Woods and explained what had happened.

  “Thanks, Corpsman…. I’ll take care of him.” The nurse put her arm over Woods’s shoulder and guided him down the hall. “Come on… I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  The open-air veranda of the hospital that faced the sea was filled with doctors and nurses on break. A small cafeteria operate
d out of one corner. The nurse carried two cups of black coffee to the table where David sat and waited.

  “Here…” She set a cup down in front of him.

  “Thanks.” He was regrouping his emotions and spoke in a clipped voice.

  “War is hell.” Her voice was soft. She wasn’t mocking the soldier.

  “I know.” Woods tilted his head to one side and grinned.

  “And your name is?”

  “David Woods.”

  “David… beloved of God… I think that is the correct English interpretation for it.” She sipped from her hot cup.

  “And you?”

  “Natasha MacReal… nurse… one week in-country… and ready to leave!” She nodded her head as if to accent the last word.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.… The post-op receiving area by the helipad is not the place to be when they bring in the wounded. You were very unlucky to have stumbled in there….” She smiled. “If it will help, I’ve seen doctors lose their breakfasts the first time they worked it.”

  “It wasn’t seeing the wounded.…” David looked down inside of his coffee cup and couldn’t see the bottom. He knew that he couldn’t because of the dark coffee filling the Styrofoam cup, but he got angry because he wanted to; he wanted to control something that he knew he couldn’t. He thought of the single finger lying in the bloody sand and wondered what high school the Marine had gone to. “I should have looked.” His voice was a raspy whisper.

  “Looked at what?” Natasha offered a puzzled smile.

  “Oh… nothing… something personal.” Woods pushed the wicker chair back and stood up. “Hey! It was nice talking to you, but I’ve got to find my buddy before they come to get me.”

  “Is he here in the hospital?”

  “Yes… Reggie Sinclair.”

  “Reggie!” Natasha clapped her hands. “He’s the one who’s trying to ship two Eurasian kids back home!”

  “Yeah. Do you know which ward he’s in?”

  “Sure! C’mon…” She led the way across the open-air patio to a doorway. “I think everyone here is in love with those kids.”

  David Woods looked up at the hot sun without blinking and sighed so deeply that his soul quivered. He was hurting inside; he felt like he was changing into something he knew he wouldn’t like when the process was done. He mumbled under his breath the thought that flashed into his mind as he followed the nurse: “I should have looked.…” Instantly his rational mind reacted to the morbid thought, and he added, “You sick fucking bastard.”

  Natasha turned her head slightly and looked back at Woods out of the corner of her eye.

  Sinclair was sitting up in his bed when Woods entered the ward. Little Jean-Paul and Trung were helping the duty nurse with some of her chores. An Army colonel wearing clean, pressed short-sleeved khakis sat on the edge of Sinclair’s bed.

  Sinclair looked up and saw his teammate. “David! Come here and meet my dad.” Reggie waved for him to hurry over.

  Trung looked up from the magazines she was stacking and ran to fling herself into Woods’s arms.

  “Whoa! You’re getting fat eating hamburgers and french fries.” David laughed and sat the tiny girl back down on the floor. He took a second to recall how frail she had looked just a few weeks earlier. Even her older brother, Jean-Paul, had put on a little weight and looked healthier. The hospital staff was spoiling them. A person would never have suspected that just a few days earlier both of the Eurasian kids had been living off garbage and what they could beg on the streets. A lot of love and good food had made a big difference. Woods suspected it was the love that had helped the most.

  Reggie’s voice broke into David’s thought. “Dad, this is David Woods. He’s the guy I told you about who saved my ass on patrol.”

  The Army colonel held out his hand. “It’s a real pleasure meeting you. My wife and I want to thank you for saving our son’s life.”

  Woods smiled and shook his head from side to side. “Is that what he’s told you?”

  “Come off it, David!” Sinclair tried reaching over and cuffing his friend, but Woods leaned back out of range.

  “He sure did!” As the colonel looked over at his son, love for the young soldier radiated out of his eyes. “Reggie told me that you carried him under fire to the helicopter when you could have just left him and saved yourself.”

  The colonel had no way of knowing the impact of what he had said. The last five words in his sentence cut through Woods like a laser. David’s face turned white. Reggie saw what was happening and moved over to where he could reach up and touch his friend.

  “Dave… Dad doesn’t know about… Spence.” Reggie’s voice was apologetic.

  “About who?” The colonel could see that he had touched a sore spot.

  Woods blinked back his emotion and looked directly into the colonel’s eyes. “Spencer Barnett was part of our team. When we got ambushed, he stayed back as a rear guard…” Woods turned his head away from the officer and continued.

  “Spence told me to get on the chopper and help Reggie. I-left-him-there-and-he-got-captured-by-the-NVA.” The only way the last sentence could come out of him was rapidfire, like a verbal machine gun.

  “Oh… now I think I understand.” Colonel Sinclair could see the guilt written on Woods’s face. “Let’s go over it again, but this time in detail.”

  Reggie looked at his father as if the colonel had gone nuts. The older man gave his son a trust-me-I-know-what-I’m-doing look. Reggie sighed and leaned back against his double pillows.

  “I don’t think I want to do that… sir.” Woods shook his head and bit his bottom lip gently. “Thanks anyway…”

  “Nurse?” Colonel Sinclair beckoned to the duty nurse. “Would you lend me one of your clipboards and some paper?”

  The nurse sent Jean-Paul over with the requested items. A lead pencil was shoved under the clip.

  “All right, David. Draw me a picture of the ambush site.” The colonel held out the clipboard. Woods hesitated for a long time, but the colonel kept the clipboard in front of him; slowly, Woods took it and began drawing. He felt the colonel’s arm slip over his shoulder, and a reassuring squeeze told him that it would be all right. Woods started drawing faster.

  “Now… put in everyone’s position….”

  David marked the spots on the map where he last saw each of the team members, including Fitzpatrick and the two Special Forces sergeants who had been hit by the Chinese claymore mine.

  “Fine… Now let’s go through it again, but this time show me on the map as you talk.”

  Reggie could see that Woods was getting into the briefing, and each time Woods would balk, his father would gently prompt him with a comment about the tactics of the recon team’s withdrawal.

  Woods finished and dropped the clipboard and pencil down on the hospital sheet.

  “So, David! Why all the guilt?” The blunt statement from the colonel shattered the soldier’s last defensive barrier.

  David Woods started crying hard. “Because I promised Spence that I wouldn’t leave him if he was alive…. We had made a deal that we wouldn’t leave each other on a battlefield alive so the NVA could capture us…. We promised each other that we would put a bullet through our heads rather than allow the NVA to fuck with us. And I left Spence! I broke my promise!”

  “Hold it!” Colonel Sinclair’s voice cut through Woods’s self-pity. “Was Barnett wounded?”

  Woods shook his head.

  “He wasn’t wounded? OK… What was he doing?”

  “He was the rear guard when Reg got hit.” The words came out between sobs.

  “David! Stop feeling guilty!” The colonel stood and adjusted his gigline. “From what you’ve shown me and from my own personal experiences as a Ranger during Korea, you guys performed a withdrawal from a well-executed ambush… perfectly. Your sergeant should be congratulated for training you so well. As far as leaving Barnett behind goes… that’s bullshit!” Colonel Sinclai
r tapped Woods’s chest hard with his finger. “Bullshit! Do you hear? You could have been the rear guard just as easily, and I would be talking to Barnett now instead of you. I’ll tell you what!” He took a deep breath. “I took a leave from the Pentagon to come over here and get the paperwork pushed through to bring Trung and Jean-Paul back to our home in the States. That has been taken care of, and I still have a couple of days left.” The colonel paused and touched his chin with his fingers in thought before continuing. “I know the staff officer down in Saigon who’s in charge of POW recovery. Let me call him on a secure voice radio and find out what they know about Spencer Barnett, and then we can go from there! How about that? Is that fair enough?”

  Woods’s eyes lit up. “Would you do that?”

  “Sure!” The colonel grinned. “But only if you promise me that you’ll dump the guilt trip.”

  Woods nodded his head in agreement. He could feel the guilt lifting from his heart. “One thing, sir.”

  “Name it.”

  “If your friend knows where Spence is… I want to be a member of the team that goes in after him.”

  Colonel Sinclair stared at Woods for a long time before answering. “Consider it done.”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  “Now, I’ve got to go!” What Colonel Sinclair did next caught Woods by surprise. The senior Army officer leaned over and hugged his son and then kissed the soldier on his mouth. “Love you, son.”

  “Love you too, Dad.” There was no embarrassment in Reggie’s voice.

  Colonel Sinclair stopped on his way out and picked up each of the children in his arms and repeated the hug and kiss. The other occupants of the ward watched the emotional farewell.