by Nico Walker
We got a booth in the smoking section, and the waitress took our orders right away. I was talking-drunk, so I asked the bum about his situation and how he’d got to be a bum. He said his life had got fucked about the time he went to prison.
“What were you in prison for?”
“Murder.”
The pancakes arrived.
“A fool raped my sister. So I shot him dead.”
“That’s understandable.”
The bum was on parole, and his parole officer gave him a hard time because he didn’t have a job. But he couldn’t get a job because he was mentally ill.
“Leave your parole officer to me,” I said. “I’m in the Army. We’ve got a lot of juice these days. What’s his contact info?”
He gave me his parole officer’s name and telephone number. We parted ways outside the Denny’s. I assured him I’d have things straightened out for him soon.
* * *
—
MONDAY AFTERNOON Ms. Grey told us about the bad weekend she’d had. Life Flight had been called out to a barbecue party in the countryside. A young woman, the mother of young children, crashed a four-wheeler into a barbecue pavilion at a campground and hemorrhaged in her head and died on the scene in front of the whole barbecue party. Her head turned purple. A lot of bad swelling. Kids there and everything. Ms. Grey said things like this happened all the time.
We filled out our wish lists. I’d given it a lot of thought and had decided I’d like to be stationed at either Walter Reed Army Hospital or Aberdeen Proving Ground or Brooke Army Medical Center or, should those fall through, Fort Drum. Harold Ramis had said Fort Drum was a bad time. But it was near Elba, so it was near Emily, and if it was as bad as it was supposed to be I was a shoo-in.
I called the bum’s parole officer that evening. I wanted to leave a message, put the ball in his court as it were. I said who I was, and I said I was in the Army and I’d taken an interest in the welfare of one Mr. Charley Pride. I said Mr. Pride had some bad mental illnesses he was dealing with and he couldn’t rightfully be held accountable for his not having a job and I was prepared to go through the proper channels if the situation wasn’t resolved soon.
* * *
—
THERE WAS a lot of fucking around with mannequins. There were mannequins that were just trunks with heads. There were entire mannequins with arms and legs. There were mannequins with rubber lungs. There were mannequins with rubber bone sticking out of their legs. There were mannequins that could squirt fake blood. There were even little baby mannequins with cherubim faces. Any mannequin you could think of had been provided for the training of Warrior Medics, and we crawled around on the floor, going from mannequin to mannequin while the cadre read scenarios to us:
“Blood pressure dropped to seventy over twenty.”
(You pretended to start a line on the mannequin and push imaginary fluids.)
“Your patient is vomiting.”
(You rolled the mannequin over on its side and cleared out its make-believe airway before it make-believe aspirated on make-believe vomit and make-believe died.)
“Sucking chest wound.”
(An occlusive dressing was the thing for one of those.)
“Patient shows tracheal deviation.”
(A make-believe tension pneumothorax called for a make-believe needle chest decompression on the midclavicular line of the make-believe third intercostal space.)
“Severe facial burns around the mouth and nose.”
(A mannequin like that would need a make-believe cricothyroidotomy.)
Eventually we did stick one another’s real-life veins with 14ga needle-catheters, and we drew one another’s real-life blood with butterflies. I drew some of Harlow’s blood. She didn’t like needles; they made her tremble.
She said, “Please be gentle.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I tried to be good. But I was fucked up. Emily’d got a job as a shot girl, and I got wasted. I was kicking around a hallway on one of the floors of the Fake River Hyatt, and Kovak was helping me to not get arrested. I kept saying how it sounded slutty as fuck: shot girl. And Emily wasn’t picking up her phone. I said, Kovak, doesn’t it sound slutty as fuck? He said he didn’t know what to tell me. I said he was a useless motherfucker. I said, If yer just gonna say useless shit I’d rather you shut the fuck up.
Then I saw Harlow coming down the hall. She was with five prior service, all dudes. She asked me what I was doing. I said the Fake River was shit because they carded everywhere. She said, Really? She said she didn’t get carded. She asked if that was Kovak. I said yeah, that was Kovak. She said, Hi, Kovak. Kovak said hi. The prior service got impatient and they were dicks about it. I told the one that he was a rapist. He asked me if I was supposed to be Captain Save-a-Ho. I punched him in the mouth. He got ahold of me. I tried to get around him so I could choke him out, but I only got him in a headlock. I was at a loss for what to do then. I tried running his head into the door but it didn’t work; I couldn’t get enough momentum. He said, Let go of me. And his voice was all froggy and it made it so I couldn’t concentrate. This fucking rapist was once a child, I thought. His friends were on me. I got punched in the jaw, and it clicked for days after. Kovak tried to help me and he punched me in the neck. A woman was shouting behind the door, “I CALLED SECURITY.” We all scattered. Harlow and Kovak and I ran down the stairs and out of the hotel. We went back to the Fake River. The Fake River was shit. It was Top 40 music. It was stale Bud Light and it was cargo shorts. It was quesadillas and Axe body spray. It was everything I was guilty of.
Harlow had a glow about her. She cleaned up nice. She asked me for a cigarette and I held out the pack and she touched my wrist. I held out a lighter for her, and she held my arm at the elbow when she leaned toward me. We walked for an hour before we felt like it was safe to go back to the hotel. She stood real close in the elevator. The room was on the seventh floor. Kovak ordered a movie on pay per view. I made a gin and tonic. Harlow wanted one as well. She sat next to me on the edge of the bed. She kept brushing her tits against my arm and breathing on me on accident. I told her that I had a girlfriend and that it was serious. But we’re scared, she said, and it’s okay to do things when we’re scared. I said I was sorry. She fucked Kovak in the bathroom. You could hear she was really going. She liked dick a lot.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We all got our orders on the same day. My orders said I was going to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas.
Fort Hood hadn’t been on my wish list.
There were two divisions at Fort Hood, the 1st Cavalry Division and the 4th Infantry Division. I knew I wasn’t going to 1st Cav because people going to 1st Cav had orders that were different from mine. Theirs said 1st Cav and mine didn’t. Mine only said III Corps. But that meant 4th ID.
It wasn’t five minutes before I’d found out that 4th ID was deploying to Iraq that fall. And I was thinking, Emily will be mad at me.
Kovak’s orders said he was going to work in a hospital on a base in Alaska. He wasn’t happy about it, but I envied him.
I walked to the stairs. A girl was there. She was crying into her cell phone. “They’re sending me to Walter Reed, Mom….No….But, Mom…but, Mom…MOM…Mom, I’m a WARRIOR Medic!”
Life is strange.
* * *
—
I HAD read in the news that Joe’s battalion was in some bad shit that summer. There had been one week when his battalion lost 19 killed, all kids from Ohio.
I’d tried getting in touch with Joe by email and I hadn’t heard back from him. I did talk to Roy, though. He said his cousin was still alive and in one piece. He said he would let me know if anything changed as far as that went.
* * *
—
WEEKEND PASSES had come to an end because clinicals were to start that week, so we were stuck on post. It
was 21:00. We were formed up and waiting on Drill Sergeant Masters to come down and do accountability. Masters was a fuck, and he had got it in his head to go upstairs and inspect the barracks. I didn’t remember having locked up my aid bag, and sure enough when Masters came down the stairs, he was holding it up like he’d really done something.
“WHO IS NUMBER EIGHTY-NINE?” he said. “WHOSE AID BAG IS THIS?”
I raised my hand, and he had me get out of ranks and stand at attention.
“FRONT LEANING REST POSITION…MOVE.”
I got in the front leaning rest, and he left me that way while he went about telling us what the black market was.
“HAS ANYBODY HERE EVER HEARD OF THE BLACK MARKET?”
We assumed this was a rhetorical question.
“WARRIOR MEDICS, SOME OF YOU WILL BE GOING TO IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN SOON. IN IRAQ, IN AFGHANISTAN, THEY HAVE THE BLACK MARKET. THE PEOPLE THERE ARE POORER THAN DIRT. THEY WILL STEAL ANYTHING THAT IS LEFT UNSECURED AND SELL IT ON THE BLACK MARKET.”
He picked up my aid bag and opened it and dumped its contents onto the ground. The contents—a few field dressings, some Ace wraps, two Israeli bandages, a dusty-looking combitube set, an oral pharyngeal, a nasal pharyngeal, an unpackaged syringe, some IV tubing, two 500-cc bags of lactated Ringer’s, maybe half a dozen 14ga needle catheters—had little to no monetary value.
He tossed the bag aside: “MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IS A BIG SELLER ON THE BLACK MARKET.”
He bent down to address me face-to-face. “WARRIOR MEDIC, YOUR BATTLE BUDDY HAS JUST DIED BECAUSE YOU DID NOT SECURE YOUR AID BAG AND IT WAS STOLEN AND SOLD ON THE BLACK MARKET. WHEN HE GOT HIT YOU COULD DO NOTHING TO HELP HIM. YOUR BATTLE BUDDY IS DEAD AND IT IS YOUR FAULT. YOU HAVE JUST KILLED YOUR BATTLE BUDDY, WARRIOR MEDIC. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO TELL HIS FAMILY?”
He had me do push-ups till I reached muscle failure. It didn’t take three minutes to get there. Still I did a lot of push-ups. I was good at them. Most of us could do push-ups. And were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Brooke Army Medical Center, BAMC, was the hospital on Fort Sam. It treated civilians as well as military. The floors were very clean. It was a nice hospital. We did clinicals there, two weeks. We were supposed to go to BAMC and act like we knew what we were doing. There were five us on the floor I was on, five trainees. They split us up. We each made our rounds.
There was a guy who had been in a motorcycle wreck. His leg was broken. His wife was there in the room. I put the BP cuff on inside out, and it blew up like a life raft when I turned the machine on. He was cool about it, but his wife thought I was a total asshole. I kept on with my rounds. A man had been stabbed up in some kind of hobo war. The smell of his body was overpowering. I was to give him a sponge bath. I lifted up his balls and everything. I was storing treasure in heaven, where no thief can get to it.
One of the patients was a soft man in his 30s who had been run over by a car while crossing a street. The car had snatched off his penis and left him no-bullshit retarded. His mother was at his bedside, and her grief was so intense that to look at her was like to stare into the sun. I was glad to have the blood pressure cuff figured out by then because they were nice people, and I’d have hated myself were I to give them any more cause for sorrow.
At the end of one of the corridors was a sealed room with a kid who’d been burned up in Iraq. A soldier, a kid: no difference. The room was off-limits because his burns made him ultravulnerable to infection. But there was a window that looked in on him, so you could see him in there, where his whole life had led him to.
* * *
—
I GOT through clinicals without accidentally murdering anyone. And I guess I was proud of myself. The feeling lasted well into Friday evening, up till the moment my balls died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I had got punched in the balls.
As a joke.
An Army joke.
I knew something was wrong, but I waited till my balls had swollen up real bad before I told the cadre. I went back to BAMC, this time as a patient. They took X-rays in the ER. The doctor said some shit about an inguinal hernia. I didn’t know what that was. He said I wouldn’t need surgery, at least not as far as he could tell. Still there was the swelling and my balls hurt like a motherfucker.
I was laid out on a gurney in the ER, and the hospital staff wheeled in a guy who’d been picked up off the street. The guy was beat up pretty bad and sobbing. They put him next to me. Through the curtain I heard the nurses talking. They said the guy was concussed and he’d swallowed some teeth and he had broken ribs and somebody had poured bleach in his eyes.
They called his mother.
His mother got there.
She wouldn’t stop talking.
“Who did this to you, honey?…Honey, did they take your billfold?…Did they take your billfold? They did? Honey, did they take your billfold?”
Jesus.
I got out of the hospital early in the morning with a week’s supply of 800mg ibuprofens and a light-duty profile. I was glad to still have my balls, but I didn’t know if I’d get to do the big field training exercise that was coming up that week. It was the last thing before graduation, and I didn’t think I could graduate if I didn’t go. I’d get kicked down to Delta Company and they were a month behind, so I’d be stuck at Fort Sam an extra month. I couldn’t let that happen. I was supposed to go home for three weeks after graduation. I’d do it. Balls be damned.
I didn’t make it through the first day of the field training exercise. It was one of those deals where they gave you a rubber M16 and you were supposed to go around saying BANG BANG BANG. I was with a squad riding up a ridge in a deuce and a half, and when we got to the top of the ridge we were all supposed to jump out of the back and get ready to say BANG BANG BANG. But when I jumped out something went wrong in my crotch and I crumpled to the ground. They took me from the field on a litter and brought me to the aid station. The medics had a look at my balls. My balls weren’t doing so good. I had bled into them and they had turned royal blue. The supervising medic of the aid station had all his medics come through to look at my balls. They discussed my balls in front of me. The company first sergeant came in, and he looked at my balls. He thought it was funny. I went to the hospital and a man stuck his finger up my ass. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it; he just let me have it. Then there was another man who came to talk with me, and he told me that the bleeding into my balls had inflamed my epididymis. At last I got some morphine. Then I felt better: the morphine was super nice. The bed was very comfortable. The hospital menu had a veggie burger and I ordered one and it was good and I was about ready to turn in for a night’s rest when a doctor showed up with a group of interns so they could all have a look at my balls and talk about them.
* * *
—
I WENT back to the field the next morning with a bottle of penicillin, a three-day supply of Percocet, and a bed rest profile. There was a company formation. The first sergeant and the captain were out in front, being dicks, and the first sergeant said, “Hey, where’s old Smurf Balls at? He back yet?”
I was obliged to raise my hand.
The first sergeant said to the captain, “That’s the one I was telling you about. His balls turned blue.”
The formation was dismissed and I was told to go see the first sergeant and the captain.
“Well, Smurf Balls,” said the first sergeant, “how did you like BAMC?”
“It was alright, First Sarr.”
“Good. Take good care of you, did they?”
“Yes, First Sarr.”
The captain said, “Did they put you on any kind of a profile?”
“Bed rest, First Sarr.”
I’d just fucked up. You didn’t call a captain a first sergeant, you ca
lled him a sir. But I was dehydrated and had a couple Percocets in me, so I’d accidentally demoted him.
He was displeased. “I’m the captain, son. You call me sir. You got that?”
“I’m the first sergeant, son. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Do they have you on any pain medication?”
“Percocet, sir.”
“You’d better let me have that.”
So I was tired and dismayed. But then I got some good news too. The good news was that I was going to graduate on time even though I wasn’t taking part in the FTX. And then I’d go home. And I’d see Emily.
* * *
—
THE DAY the company did the mass-casualty exercise part of the scenery was a lot of old ripped-up fake-bloody Air Force uniforms for the fake casualties to make them look fake-bloodier. I was on a one-man laundry detail cleaning these uniforms. There wasn’t going to be any bed rest for me, never mind that I was practically fucking crippled. I was carrying an armload of these fake-bloody Air Force uniforms up to the shack with the washing machine in it when I ran into a make-believe perimeter patrol from the make-believe forward operating base.
Somebody said, “HALT!…HALT!…HAAALT!…YEAH, YOU.”
I knew him of course. I had punched him in the mouth before, at the Fake River Hyatt. We didn’t like each other, and he outranked me. He was an E-5, a sergeant; and I was an E-2, nothing. I was at a disadvantage. I said to him, “I’m not part of this shit. I’m on the laundry detail.”
“What laundry detail?”
“This laundry detail. What do you think I’m carrying these uniforms for?”