Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  “A compression fracture of the fifth lumbar vertebra.”

  “Compression fracture?”

  “You broke your back. You’ll be fine.”

  Once I had been treated, Mary rolled me out of the ER, where I could light a cigarette without igniting the oxygen in use, and there in the hospital’s main lobby, I met the assembled reporters.

  “Sabbag refused to talk to anyone,” the Boston Globe reported. “His wife, by his side, said little more. ‘He’s had a tough day. He was lucky’ is all she would say.”

  The morning after the crash, Mary and the friend who had accompanied her to the airport were eating breakfast in a Hyannis diner. Seated nearby was a group of reporters, some of whom Mary recognized from our encounter in the hospital lobby. Now, with their stories filed, they simply nodded hello. Gone was the interest they had shown earlier in getting her on the record. With the passage of a few hours, she told me, she was literally “yesterday’s news.”

  Even members of the press take themselves off the clock, and subsequent coverage of the crash would indicate that a sufficient number of journalists, writers as well as photographers, were on the job that morning. But Mary’s observation is an interesting one and as good an introduction as any to a question that, while entirely hypothetical, nevertheless invites exploring: How would media coverage be different if the plane crash happened today?

  In the present environment, one would see a difference, I think, not only in the scale of the response, but also in the occupational makeup of the personnel responding. Carried out of the woods today, it is reasonable to imagine, survivors would be met not simply by an array of satellite trucks but by a host of characters like would-be movie-of-the-week producers waving contracts for “life rights.” The hospital would no doubt be home to a legion of segment producers employed by daytime TV. Families of the survivors, hustling to lawyer up, would be looking not only for personal-injury specialists but show-business attorneys as well. They’d be hiring literary agents.

  It is not to say that the response that night was in any way genteel or the activity anything short of chaotic. It is not to suggest that the press on hand wasn’t acting like the press.

  Paramedic William Smith, carrying the middle sister out of the woods, remembers “giving the finger to reporters” as they converged on him and his patient, and he told me it wasn’t the first time he’d done so in the four years he’d been on the job. His colleague Robert Jenney, a veteran EMT at the time, can still recount in detail a fight he had with one particular member of the media, a reporter he knew by name, an on-air guy for Channel 5, the ABC affiliate in Boston. “I had a problem with him,” said Jenney, who retired in 1999 after more than thirty years in the fire department, explaining that he took the reporter on in defense of the youngest girl:

  “Do you get turned on getting a picture of a ten-year-old all busted up?”

  “Well, it’s news, I have a right . . .”

  “No, you don’t have a right! Get out, or I’m calling the cops.”

  Today, in many parts of the country, there are cops and maybe a few firemen who would be signing deals with the media.

  In the frenzy’s immediate outbreak, Ann Williams said, her major concern and that of others on the hospital staff was for Doris Parmenter. The pilot’s widow was known personally to many of the people on hand. She managed the hospital thrift shop. (The thrift shop was situated off-site, taking donations on Main Street in downtown Hyannis.) One of the better-connected journalists covering the crash was Francis Broadhurst, the news director for local radio station WQRC, and through sources only he was able to access, Broadhurst was the one reporter who knew that George Parmenter had been flying the plane. Broadhurst had been acquainted with Parmenter and had been friendly with Ann Williams “for years,” having been involved with her in town politics in Barnstable, where Williams had served as chairman of the Finance Committee. Broadhurst, telling Williams what he knew, held on to the information until Doris Parmenter had been notified.

  “If it happened today,” Broadhurst told me recently, “there’d be a convention on her lawn. There would be photographers sneaking into the emergency room and taking pictures. Journalism’s changed.”

  And with it, I think, something else has changed.

  Tugging at the sleeves of every victim would be one of the insistent, altogether dysfunctional partners in the contemporary marriage of psychotherapy and the media.

  I do not dismiss the value of therapy—I didn’t question my fellow survivors about any help they might have sought—but I have trouble taking it seriously in the forum it has come to exploit. Individual therapy has measurable benefits, and I assume group therapy, in support of it, has its salutary effects. But therapy has lately transgressed the limits of the group, and grief and trauma counseling have gone public. Recovery today is entertainment.

  In this, the age of information oversupply, the age of celebrity without delay, has the willingness to step forward opened us up to what is perhaps a more salubrious way of dealing with trauma? The experts tell me no. Such scrutiny so distorts the experience as to render any of the benefits of openness trifling. Talking does seem to come naturally at times, and in its way may be therapeutic, but such talk is not necessarily driven by a need for therapy; it’s simply instinctive. Instinctive in certain circumstances. It’s not instinctive in the company of strangers. War stories are rare even among intimates. Veterans, we know, don’t talk to their spouses about combat. They don’t share such memories with their children, not even, in my experience, when those children reach adulthood. All I know of what my father saw in the South Pacific I gleaned from the albums compiled by my mother of the photographs he had sent home with his letters, pictures more atmospheric of the Broadway musical of that name than of the drama that was playing out in places like Guadalcanal. War stories, when they are shared at all, are typically traded by comrades, understandable and fully explicable only when growing out of the common experience of brothers-in-arms. Coming from that guy sitting alone at the other end of the bar, they are a symptom of dissociative behavior.

  “You run into guys, in various stages . . . they haven’t left there yet,” my friend Kevin Roberts tells me.

  I’ve known Kevin for some thirty years now. We’ve experienced a lot together, most of it good, some of it bad, the worst of it his. There’s not a lot we don’t talk about. “There” is Vietnam, where he served with the U.S. Marines about fifteen years before he and I met. In all the years we’ve been friends, we’ve never talked about that. When he and other veterans cross paths, they don’t talk about it much either.

  “ ‘When were you there, where were you?’—and that’s about as far as it goes. It certainly never gets into combat.”

  Calling upon such memories outside intimate circles is seldom rewarded, though there are circumstances in which doing so is entirely natural. In discussion of a plane crash reported in the news, or in discussion of air travel in general, I, for example, am not averse to bringing some perspective to the exchange of ideas.

  “The reason she wants you to raise your seat back,” I might notify the argumentative passenger reclining in front of me, “is not for your safety, it’s for mine. When the airplane crashes, and there’s a pretty good chance it will . . .”

  Stuff like that.

  It’s one of the few subjects on which my expertise is never challenged.

  But opening up to the typical stranger or media personality, unbuttoning your shirt and letting your heart fall out before a television psychologist and the public at large, is neither instinctive in humans nor in any way natural and ultimately perverts the experience in a way that makes transcending it that much more difficult.

  When I started looking back, one of the things that struck me as telling was that in over twenty-five years, none of us who had survived the crash (the three Michigan sisters being considered collectively) had been in contact with any of the others. I think that simply registering the thought
shows how much things have changed. For on the most natural, human level, a reluctance to relive the experience, to subject it to the kind of public postgame analysis we bring to almost everything these days, doesn’t seem unusual at all and never did, not to me or to the other survivors I talked to. Yet I believe it is unlikely that survivors today would similarly disperse never to see one another again. They would fall prey to external forces that didn’t prevail at the time.

  Denial, as it is commonly articulated, or that hobbyhorse of every therapist, “being defensive,” may well be a response not to the traumatic experience itself, but to the impossibility of conforming the experience to what you perceive to be the expectations of others.

  I can’t speak for my fellow passengers—I offer it with no authority, and I’m really not sure myself, it’s just an idea that won’t let go—but I believe there may be something more to the inclination not to talk. Especially to one another. Despite the fact that nine of us came together to survive the crash, in one way, in its most primal way, it was not a group experience. In the end, survival never is. The trauma is so personal, so individual, and one’s response to it is so solitary, that opening it up to varying interpretations threatens the equilibrium that each of us independently strives to recapture.

  It probably started there in the woods, where we sat nursing our private fears, casualties propped up as in the pictures you see—though you couldn’t see anything that night—of those Seventh Cavalry riflemen on the third day of battle in the Ia Drang Valley, strung out in the grass of the Central Highlands, the wounded waiting on MedEvac, each unwilling to wonder what the fight had forever taken away.

  It’s a suspicion I arrive at when I look back to the conversations I had with Paul and Suzanne. When I set out to revisit the crash, to ask others to relive the events of that night, I didn’t know or try to guess what answers I might get. I didn’t even know all the questions. I understood that I’d be finding my way, and I proceeded on faith that I’d light upon something of value, as difficult as those questions might be to answer. What I came away with was something I never expected: I never counted on how difficult those questions would be to ask.

  Sitting down with Suzanne and later with Paul, I was startled by how awkward and inappropriate it seemed, how greatly the task I’d assigned myself differed from any I’d ever undertaken. I sat there with my notebook, the dutiful reporter; they sat dutifully entertaining my questions in the manner of cooperative sources. But this engineered formality defied the essence of our relationship, and in no way did it reflect the dynamic at play. Looking back to those conversations, I have to believe that the enterprise was somehow unbalanced by the weight of things I didn’t really want to know.

  Only now am I struck by a realization that eluded me then: They had no questions for me.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was the one passenger who was separated from the group who recalled our waiting on rescue as a collective experience:

  “Out there in the woods we were running out of things to talk about, back and forth,” Jonathan Ealy said, when he and I spoke on the phone. “We’re there, and the only thing we’ve got to keep us from collapsing is, ‘Let’s just keep the energy going so that we don’t all disintegrate here.’ The whole point for me, two things, one was just make sure I stayed in contact, in emotional contact, with you guys [who were] all together. The other was to make sure there was somebody over there in case . . . if the copilot got any worse, I was going to just yell for all the help I could get from anybody that could move. I was nineteen years old and I didn’t want the guy to die with me supporting him from underneath.”

  When Jon had first appeared on our side of the airplane, everyone had been evacuated, and Suzanne had just made the decision to leave. “That was not my favorite decision of the evening,” he told me. “I was pretty late to that party. I was a little steamed that a healthy-bodied person wasn’t sticking around. . . . Everybody was so dinged up, and we needed to move people around. . . . If there had been a fire, in particular, we would have needed a lot of help with people who couldn’t move.”

  Unknown to the rest of us, for whom activity had essentially ceased, there was a veritable opera being enacted on the other side of the aircraft, as Jon, for an hour and a half, in physical contact with the copilot, fought to keep him alive. “Minute-to-minute I was intensely involved in a relationship with a guy I didn’t know.”

  Had Jon not wound up as he did, in front of the plane, it is almost certain that there would have been one less survivor of the crash.

  “My nose was bleeding,” he told me, and though, having broken it once before, he was used to the taste of blood, “it was really annoying,” he said. “Later, the adrenaline wears off, everything starts hurting, my ribs start hurting—I wondered if maybe I’d punctured something—and then there’s that taste and that smell of the blood and the fuel together. You know how smell is, it goes right down to the reptile brain. This is a memory I have at the most sort of primeval level. . . . At the end there, he was fading and I was clinging on to that tourniquet . . . it sapped all the energy away.”

  As a mechanism for putting trauma behind us, immediately or eventually, we are all naturally inspired to silence. It’s almost as if one doesn’t discuss these things in polite company. Putting words to a moment relived up to now only in silence does not come reflexively, nor does one approach it with any measure of ease. It is not something that suggested itself to me until thirty years after the fact, and I have a literary agent. It is only out of a generosity of spirit that those with whom I survived the crash came forward to help me, and nothing they might have said could more accurately have reflected the courage that was on display the night we first met.

  A few years ago, I reported to Cape Cod Hospital for a minor outpatient procedure. In the course of prepping me for surgery, the nurse doing the intake vanished. It happened while I was momentarily distracted. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and others were coming and going, Pat was with me, she and I were talking, and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I turned back in the nurse’s direction, and sitting there, picking up where she’d left off, was the magician who’d orchestrated her disappearance, acting as though nothing had happened, behaving as if I were just one more patient and she just another of the several nurses on hand. I stood up, circled the instrument table, threw my arms around her, and laughed.

  Her name was Mary Ellen, but introducing her to Pat, I didn’t stop with that. Unsure of her marital status, I ventured all three of the last names by which I had known her when she and I were palling around. Now, twenty years since I’d last seen her, she was still going by the most recent of them, the product of a remarriage after which she and I had remained friends and largely in anticipation of which we had cut back on the palling around.

  I’d met Mary Ellen at Cape Cod Hospital in 1979. We’d first laid eyes on each other on the morning of June 18. I was the guy in bed 209D.

  “You were covered with jet fuel,” she reminded me recently.

  I had been admitted three or four hours earlier. She had just reported for work. They’d cleaned me up some in the ER, but I was only about as clean as a chimney sweep, still dressed out in what Mary Ellen remembers as a fine layer of soot.

  “The first thing I did was wash your hair.”

  It wasn’t the last thing she did.

  Mary Ellen is one of the three or four nurses I remember looking after me that week. But as others came and went, she was the consistent presence, and for that and other reasons, she was special. When she wasn’t there, I noticed it. Every day was a party with Mary Ellen, or that’s how it seemed at the time. Maybe it was the smile with which she indulged the party I appeared to be throwing, clowning with all the offbeat acquaintances of mine who showed up on the ward, or maybe it was just a shared irreverence, but she and I would always find something to laugh about, and it is thanks to her that I can honestly say my being hospitalized was actually enjoyable.
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  A hospital is only as good as its nursing staff, and at the time of the crash, certain Cape residents, many of whom had never been treated there, took a perverse kind of pride in deriding the quality of care available at Cape Cod Hospital. Clearly they weren’t paying attention. Today the hospital is rated among the top one hundred hospitals in the country, and back then you could see it coming. None of the nurses who treated me fell anywhere short of world class. I can’t speak for the food. The crash had left me with a paralytic, or adynamic, ileus. Essentially what that meant was that my digestive system had called it quits, which was consistent with the trauma I’d sustained. An NPO order hung at the foot of my bed. Having graduated from the Boston Latin School (with grades that my best friend’s mother was politely invoking when she assured me that “Every family needs at least one gentleman, Bob”), I knew that nihil per os meant “nothing by way of the mouth.” Five days after I was admitted, my intestines resumed function, and I was put on a clear liquid diet. I don’t recall eating solid food until after leaving the hospital. Four days into my stay, I celebrated with injections of Demerol while welcoming others to enjoy my birthday cake.

  Mary Ellen is not the only nurse who dramatically affected my stay. First impressions being the most lasting, there is one other nurse I will never forget: the angel of mercy on duty Monday at four A.M., which was the time showing on the wall clock of the orthopedic floor when I was admitted. She may have been a supervisor. Before bedding me down on the ward, she wheeled me around the corner into the solarium where she permitted me to light up a cigarette. And I think it was she who engineered the accommodation that today makes me feel as if I were looking back over a century. Not simply did she allow me to smoke, she did it without admonishing me to quit, and then, without my requesting it, she took it upon herself to solicit from my ward mates the necessary approval that allowed me for the duration of my stay to smoke in the room, in bed—yes, a hospital bed.