David slowly shifted his weight and at the same time swung the launcher around. He pulled the trigger as a second round buried itself in the dust directly ahead of him. The grenade bounced once as it hit the ground. The figures hesitated. David could almost feel their confusion, but it was too late. The grenade went off, killing all three even as they tried to jump away. David rolled to his left and quickly cracked open the barrel. As he tore the shotgun round loose from the stock, an artillery round landed seventy yards from him on the open ground just inside the wire. The concussion from the blast stunned him. A second round hit closer.
David quickly got to his feet as the air around him filled with the roar of a dozen speeding freight trains. The ground began exploding around him. The launcher was torn from his hand. He stumbled backward, but there was no place left to go. The breath was sucked from his lungs. Gasping, he spun around, losing consciousness as the earth rose toward him.
Zama
Chapter 32
“THE OBJECT,” MAJOR MITCHELL said, “is not to hurt yourself. Second operations take longer to heal than first ones. Patients are always sicker the second time. Nutrition’s poorer because of the first operation; muscle tone’s minimal, if it’s there at all; and there’s all that newly formed scar tissue, always weaker than normal connective tissue.”
David continued to dress. The major, since he’d discovered David was a doctor, had deluged him with theories about everything from the best foods to eat before a marathon to how much pain different ethnic groups can tolerate. David wasn’t sure about the major’s other opinions, but there was no doubt he was right at least about second operations being worse than first ones. It was not so much the pain as the prolonged weariness. He had lain in bed for days after the second operation, barely able to move. It was an effort to lift his head, to reach for a glass. There was no energy left. Sleep made no difference, nor did the IV fluids or even food. It was as if his heart, brain and lungs were all functioning, but with no real connection to each other or to any other part of his body.
For days he was alive, but that was about all. David never would have thought it, but there were times when the pain following the first operation seemed preferable to the profound exhaustion after the second. Indeed, the pain was really all that David remembered of the first. Even three weeks later only bits and pieces of what had occurred after the bombardment had come back to him.
He remembered lying on the ground being unable to breathe, the terrible sense of suffocating. There were people running past. He could hear voices. He knew he was outside in the air; yet he was drowning. In a few seconds he’d be dead. Someone kneeled beside him. Then suddenly there was a pain in his side and as if by a miracle he could breathe again.
Someone was shouting for a medic. But there was another voice closer, telling him to hold still, that everything would be okay. David didn’t believe it. He tried to move, but something was holding him down. “Hey,” the voice said, “your lungs collapsed; there’s a drain in your side; don’t move.” Someone lifted him. David fainted with the pain. When he did open his eyes again, he was staring up into a bank of fluorescent bulbs swinging back and forth above his head.
A surgeon, still in a scrub suit, had somehow materialized out of the surrounding darkness and was standing beside him. David remembered the greens were splattered with blood and so soaked with sweat that the cloth stuck to the doctor’s body. The surgeon was talking to him. “If I had my way, I’d keep you here a few more days until the drains and tubes come out, but everyone who can make it is being evaced to Japan. I’ve written the morphine orders for the flight. Sorry,” he said, “but we need the beds.”
An hour later David was on an ambulance bus. For some reason he remembered the ride clearly. They had passed one destroyed building after another, and those still standing were pockmarked with rocket and bullet holes.
At the gate to the air base, hollow-eyed troopers covered with dirt sat on top of their armored personnel carriers, nervously fingering the triggers of their M-60s.
From the bus as far as he could see, the field was a cemetery of charred wreckage. The main terminal building was a burned-out shell. There was nothing left of the dozens of flight lines. Parked helicopters and planes had been destroyed where they sat. In places the concrete had been scorched black by the heat of the burning metal. The ambulance bus maneuvered past the wrecks out onto the tarmac. At the far end of the field half a dozen C-141s were clustered protectively well away from the broken fences.
Grim-faced Air Force corpsmen off-loaded the patients two at a time. No one spoke. As the wounded were carried to the planes, the flight nurses stopped each litter to check the tags and medication orders. David got his second morphine injection. But as soon as the engines started up, the vibrations began to work their way through the bandages into his wounds, rubbing the nerve endings together. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. It was as if his wounds were on fire. By the time the plane was ready to take off, he was soaked with perspiration. He fainted for the first time less than a minute after takeoff. When he started to vomit, they took his litter forward and started an IV.
He was told that the trip from Vietnam to Japan was less than five hours, but it seemed more like days. Every other pain he’d known in his life had gradually gone away. His stomachaches had subsided; the pulled muscle in his thigh had gotten better; his broken leg had mended; even the headache from his encephalitis had eventually disappeared. All he’d ever had to do before was wait and it would be over, or at least not get any worse. But this was different. He tried to shift, take the weight off first his right side and then his left. He bent his legs under him to help lift his chest off the litter, took small breaths. But nothing worked; the pain only increased. He was given more morphine, but soon that, too, was of no use.
Each minute of the flight tore away another layer of his life. Conviction and confidence vanished, then any remaining sense of order and finally control. There was no one to help. He was utterly alone. Soon even that didn’t matter anymore. In a world that should have held possibility, he was left shivering, incoherent.
David awakened to a rush of cool, wet air. The vibrations had stopped. The back of the plane was open, and through the bay of the cargo area he found himself staring, dazed, at a steel-gray sky. It took him a moment to realize it was raining. It was still raining when, two hours after landing at Zama, the main U.S. Army Hospital in Japan, they wheeled him into surgery.
What they had not had time to do in the makeshift OR at the 70th was done by the surgeons in Japan. They removed two infected ribs and a lobe of his right lung. They operated on his abdomen, resecting a quarter of his liver and removing two pieces of shrapnel, one lodged near his aorta and the other near the right kidney. The operation took eight hours. He had received fourteen units of whole blood and five units of fresh plasma before they were done.
It took David days to understand the true seriousness of the military disaster, but even in the recovery room he began to have a sense of the dimensions of what had happened. Troopers were being wheeled in from units across all of Vietnam. Isolated support and fire bases, province capitals, even large cities had been hit.
The story was much the same as at the 70th. Bases had been hit at dawn, the communists through the wire before anyone knew it. Many of the smaller units were overrun in the first hour. The larger bases had had time to react, containing the initial attacks, though the casualties were staggering. It was when they started to wheel in troopers who had been stationed in Saigon itself that David knew there had been a reckoning of gigantic proportions. When after a few days they started to push beds together to make room for more patients, he was sure of it.
David found things even worse once they transferred him out of recovery. The hospital was running out of space. The surgical wards had beds in the aisles. There were three chopper runs a day from the Air Force base at Yokota to the four U.S. Army hospitals near Tokyo. So many patients were being evaced in
that as soon as one new group of patients had been processed, the next were already being rolled off the helipad. David counted fifty evacs in one afternoon run alone, and there were three other hospitals.
He listened to cooks and clerk typists tell of having to grab rifles and fight to keep their units from being overrun. He listened while riflemen spoke in hushed tones, as if they were embarrassed that someone from the hospital might hear, of hanging on till morning expecting daylight to bring the gunships and fighter bombers, only to have to fight on through the rest of the day and the next night. Troopers talked of killing NVA and VC at distances of three and four feet, of using the bodies of friends as sandbags to keep themselves alive another hour. They spoke of falling asleep in the middle of firefights and waking up to find everyone around them dead. David heard the same stories told and retold a dozen times, always with the same sense of bewilderment. “Hell,” one kid said, “it was like World War One.”
Major Mitchell was talking to David. “Tomorrow, same time.” He handed David’s chart to the corpsman standing beside him. “And no more running; I mean it. You haven’t healed yet; you could hurt yourself.” But David was distracted. He was watching a trooper three tables down. He had been watching him ever since the major had started to talk.
The trooper, a lean blond kid, had limped in on crutches while the major was looking at David’s suture line. He’d gone right to one of the exercise tables. There were curtains around the treatment tables, but he didn’t close them.
He’d leaned his crutches against the wall and, sitting down, ignoring all the comings and goings around him, stretched out his leg so that the top of his foot hooked under the padded extensor arm at the end of the table. A huge surgical scar ran from the upper part of his thigh down across what was left of his knee joint to his ankle. From where he sat, David could see that not only was his knee gone but a good part of the muscles of his leg too. The trooper grabbed the sides of the table and clenched his teeth as he struggled to straighten his leg. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead, but the leg wouldn’t extend. He tried again and again, but nothing happened.
“Did you hear me?” the major said.
David, still watching the trooper, didn’t answer. Whatever else this kid wanted to do, David thought, he’d have to learn to do it without that leg. “Sure,” David finally answered.
“All right,” Mitchell said, “tomorrow, same time; and no more running.”
Chapter 33
DAVID TURNED DOWN A side hallway marked To Lower Complex. The corridors were empty. The morning evacs had all been processed and were either in surgery or on the wards. Here and there pushed up against the wall was a stretcher or wheelchair left by some enterprising orderly. Army regulations were to have the corridors clear at all times. A few more days of all these evacs, David thought, and it would be more than a matter of ignoring regulations; the machinery of the hospital itself would start breaking down. One of the service corps officers had told him that the OR had gone to three shifts and that even with that they were falling behind and thinking of opening a second operating area down in one of the empty buildings of the lower complex. The labs were all working overtime, and most of the corpsmen and specialists were already on twelve-hour duty rosters.
Tet, as the offensive was unofficially called, had caught everyone from battalion commanders to the generals at MACV by surprise. Worse, it had caught them unprepared. A captain evaced from Saigon who ended up in a bed on David’s ward told him that the first reports indicated that the NVA and VC had infiltrated between forty and sixty thousand troops in the months before Tet and then concentrated these forces in and around fifty to a hundred U.S. bases, most province capitals, and the major cities of Hue and Saigon in the weeks before the offensive. They’d hit them all the same morning and, according to the report, most at precisely the same hour.
“No one believed what was happening for the first twelve hours. Hell,” he said, “there was so much going on we didn’t know where to send reinforcements first. They even hit the embassy in Saigon. I’ll tell you,” he went on, “someone’s going to have to explain all this. You can’t have the enemy infiltrate all those troops across a supposedly occupied country and then let them set up for a nationwide offensive without anyone knowing it, and not have people wanting to know why and how.”
Yet from what David could tell, the hospital personnel did not share the captain’s view. They were worried by the numbers of casualties and genuinely concerned about the patients, trying their best to handle the increase in evacs, but strangely indifferent to the cause of it all. It was as if they were just workers on some production line where the conveyor belts had speeded up, with everyone having to work faster and faster to keep up, willing to push themselves to exhaustion rather than ask what was happening or, more important, if something might have gone wrong with the machinery itself. It seemed incredible until David realized that like the doctors at the 70th, they didn’t want to know. It was as if it were better for them to believe that someone was in charge than to ask questions and perhaps find out the truth, or, by asking, label themselves as troublemakers. Still, he noticed that the pressure of more and more wounded was having its own effect.
Even Mitchell, so confident at first, had gradually lost some of his pompousness as he scrambled to readjust schedules to accommodate the rising number of incoming wounded. The corpsmen and enlisted personnel, too, over the weeks since the offensive had become quieter, less talkative. They weren’t fools, and they could tell that with all the wounded there would have to be some reassignments to Vietnam. The U.S. bases in Japan were the ones closest to Southeast Asia.
David walked out the rear door of the hospital and started down the grassy slope toward the lower complex. The hospital was built in a great semicircle, the two end wings overlooking the lower complex, a group of buildings set out in the middle of what was left of an old polo field. The main hospital as well as the polo field had been built in the 1930s by the Japanese as part of their military academy. The Americans had taken over the base at the end of the second world war and during the Korean War had added the buildings of the lower complex as a support area for the hospital. Part of the complex had already been reopened with the increase in casualties and was being used as an outpatient department and blood bank. Construction crews had remodeled one of the buildings into a surgical ward and were in the process of turning another into an operating and recovery suite.
As he walked down the slope, David saw someone standing in the corner window at the end of the east wing. It was the psychiatric area, and David noticed with some surprise that whoever it was wore a mustache. It was the first mustache he’d seen in the Army.
David crossed the street that separated the hospital from the lower complex and headed across the open field toward the half-dozen concrete buildings. But he didn’t stop at the buildings. As he had done for over a week, he walked past them toward an old wooden utility shack that sat beside a section of abandoned road, marking the furthest edge of the hospital property.
Chapter 34
DAVID STEPPED OFF TEN more yards on the road than he had the day before. He hadn’t planned on running, but when after two weeks of physical therapy he still felt weak, he had decided something else had to be done. His muscle tone was returning, but he had no sense of strength or endurance. There was no reserve, nothing to draw on.
Mitchell had told him not to worry, that strength would come with time, but David had no intention of waiting. He would never wait for anything again. As for the major’s pronouncement, he’d had enough of experts. No one would ever tell him what he should or shouldn’t do again. Any belief David had had in expertise had died for good when the first mortar round blew in the rear wall of the dispensary.
David began getting back into shape by walking around the hospital grounds, at first once and then twice a day, trying each time to cut a minute or two off the time of the preceding circuit. It was on one of his walks that he saw the uti
lity shack and next to it found the road, a hundred yards of forgotten, weed-covered cinder that started nowhere and ended nowhere.
The first day David made it a little over ten yards. It wasn’t much of a run; he couldn’t even call it jogging. It was more just hobbling along, but at least he was moving again.
Mitchell had been outraged. “You tore the suture line!”
“I pulled it,” David corrected.
“Pulled it? Look here at the corner.”
David had been surprised to see that there was a little blood. The major was furious.
“You’re not helping one bit,” he said.
“It doesn’t hurt,” David said as he continued to dress.
“Scar tissue doesn’t hurt till it tears.”
“Really?” David asked. “That true all the time?”
Mitchell flushed, and David left it at that.
It took David four more days to make it half the length of the road. It was toward the end of his third week in Japan that he ran his first hundred yards.
Afterward he had to sit on what was left of the steps of the shack and wait over half an hour till he could straighten up again, but it was worth it. The running was getting him back into shape in a way that Mitchell’s isometrics never could. The minimum you had to do was be able to move.
Another War, Another Peace Page 16