Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  “How long have I been here, Chief?”

  “The better part of a day.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Da Nang. But cheer up. The Doc said you’re on your way to Japan with that wound.”

  “Japan? Really?” I looked at my right leg. I had thick bandages from the knee to the groin.

  “Your war’s over, John.”

  “Chan! Did anybody hear anything about Chan?”

  Swift Eagle’s face looked uncomfortable with the question, and my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. “I don’t know, John. I heard they took some more casualties, but no one knows who.”

  I felt slightly relieved.

  “Hey, Clark! We’re on our way to Japan!” Corporal James shouted from his bed.

  “How’s Striker?” I asked.

  “He’s going to Japan too,” James said.

  “Striker got shrapnel bad,” the chief said quietly. “It went up his rear end and tore up his insides.”

  “Is he going to make it?” I asked. A corpsman dressed all in white strode up to the front of my bed pushing a cart full of pills and needles.

  “Yeah. I think so,” Swift Eagle said, watching the corpsman in a state of nervous discomfort.

  “How ’bout you, Chief?”

  “I’m okay. Just some shrapnel,” he said nervously, still staring wide-eyed at the Navy corpsman. “I want no shot!”

  “Is this it? Are you going home? How many Hearts have you got?” I asked as the corpsman cleaned a spot on my arm with alcohol.

  “Seven or eight, I think. They’re sending me home.” He winced and turned his head as the corpsman shoved in the needle.

  “You’re not comin’ back again, are you?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked away like the subject bothered him.

  “Look, Chief, if we were going to try to win this war I might come back. I don’t know what we’re doing over here, but we sure aren’t trying to win, and you know it.”

  “I know. I knew that on my first tour.” The corpsman pushed his cart past the chief’s bed. Swift Eagle took a deep sigh of relief.

  “Then why do you keep coming back?” I asked.

  He turned his eyes toward me and off the corpsman. “I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

  “Go home!”

  “I have no home. I was born on a reservation.”

  His remark sounded terse. I didn’t like it.

  “I wouldn’t try to compare my life to yours, Chief. But I grew up poor too. We lived in garages and Quonset huts. My dad was blind and crippled, and we lived off seventy bucks a month, and our food came out of those green government cans for the poor that coal-mining towns are famous for, so you ain’t talkin’ to some spoiled brat. And you’re not ever going to convince me that America’s worse to go back to than this hole!”

  Swift Eagle looked at me with a curious smile, and I wondered if I’d shot off my big mouth too much.

  “You have the spirit of an Indian, John.”

  I wanted to put that compliment in bronze. I felt sad that no one else heard it.

  “But,” he continued after a pause, “you react like an Apache. I did not mean that America was at fault. I have no family. No reason to go back. No home or work. The Marine Corps is my home.”

  “Then stay in the Corps.”

  “I don’t think I could stand the spit-and-polish crap. Stateside duty sucks. That’s why I’m only a corporal. I get busted every time they send me home.”

  “You can’t fight the war forever,” I said.

  “I know. I’ve been thinking about it.” The chief put his hands behind his head, leaned back, and looked at the ceiling.

  Two corpsmen wheeled in a double-layer cart stacked with trays of meals. A half hour later I shoved down the last bite just as a boot-looking second lieutenant walked through the swinging doors at the end of the room.

  “Are any of you men from the Fifth Marines?” he asked somberly.

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Staff Sergeant Morey replied.

  “We need a positive ID on a Corporal Joseph Arthur Elbon. Did anyone of you know him personally?”

  My heart sank. “I did,” I said hesitantly.

  “Would you mind coming with me if your doctor says it’s okay?”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” I answered.

  A few minutes later the lieutenant and two corpsmen unhooked an IV from my arm and placed me gingerly into a wheelchair. The lieutenant wheeled me out of our building and into the bright hot sun. Sweat popped out of every pore almost immediately. He wheeled me past two large gray Quonset huts and into a cold concrete one-story building with two heavy white doors. We entered a small room with a desk and a group of large Army-green file cabinets. He stopped in front of two wooden swinging doors that had no windows.

  “Have you ever been here before?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s not a very happy place. Get yourself prepared for it. We’ll get it over with as fast as possible. I just need you to sign a couple of papers saying whether or not this is Corporal Elbon.”

  He turned me around and pulled me through the doors, then faced me toward what looked like a wall of giant filing cabinets. I knew they were filled with bodies. In front of the wall of cabinets lay ten large green plastic bags with heavy metal zippers. An irritating hum filled the cavernous room. I looked right to see the cause of the noise. Two men in blood-splattered white coats were busy embalming the naked, bloody corpse of a muscular young man lying on a long concrete table with a drain at one end. The noisy machine pumped fluids in while another machine sucked fluids out. The lieutenant wheeled me in front of the last one in the line. He bent over and pulled the zipper down the center until a pale, dead face showed.

  “Yeah, that’s Joe.”

  An hour later two corpsmen hauled me out of bed again. This time they dumped me onto a stretcher.

  “You’re going to love Japan!” Swift Eagle said. “I’ve thought about it.”

  “And …?” I said.

  “I’m going home.”

  “I’ll miss you, Chief. I think you’re making the right decision.”

  He gave me a thumbs up. Everyone shouted goodbyes, ranging from Semper fi to gung-ho to good luck, as the corpsmen carried me through the swinging doors. “Guns up, Clarkie!” Swift Eagle shouted. I knew I’d never hear that again. They carried me to a familiar-looking Army-green truck with a big red cross on a white background painted across the back doors. It made me think of Texas and redheads. A few minutes later two corpsmen loaded Corporal James in beside me. Then came Striker with IV bottles and blood bottles hanging over him on metal poles. They stuck an IV in my right arm and hung a bottle over me, too. The drive to the airstrip was quick. It seemed like only a few minutes had passed when two corpsmen carried me onto a big C-130 that had been converted into a hospital plane with metal bunk beds that folded out from the sides of the hull. They put me on a top bunk. Then they carried Corporal James in and laid him below me. They laid Striker across the aisle from us.

  “You guys sure are lucky!” A black corpsman smiled down at Corporal James. “Only serious wounds get to go to Japan!”

  I laughed. I thought of Chan and asked God to take care of him.

  The tail section of the big converted cargo plane dropped open, and the icy air of Yokosuka startled me. I could see a wintry layer of trackless snow on both sides of the runway. It really is over, I thought.

  “Get ready, men!” an Air Force medic shouted from the front of the plane. “You are about to experience a ninety-five-degree drop in temperature!”

  Some of the wounded started cheering. A couple of minutes later two Navy corpsmen dressed in thick warm pea coats threw a blanket over me and wheeled me down the tail ramp. The overcast sky melted into a gray sleep that turned black and deep. The next thing I heard was a soft faraway voice. It was a woman talking.

  “You have to be awake for this, Marine.” My eyes wouldn’t open. “Try to keep your eyes open,
Marine. You might feel a little sting.” Oh, no! Where had I heard that before?

  “Yes. I agree,” a male voice said. “The hole is too large for a local.” The voices began fading farther and farther away until I no longer heard anyone.

  When I opened my eyes, puffy white clouds drifted across a powder-blue sky through a large old woodframe window. Right below the window was a hospital bed. The guy in the bed was all bandages except for eye, nose, and mouth holes. I rolled my head left to see a spacious old hospital ward with rows of beds all filled with young Americans. It reminded me of old Saint Petersburg High School. It was even the same color—drab green. Vintage 1930s, I guessed. Someone rubbed my right arm, and I turned to see who.

  “How do you feel, PFC?” An American nurse with dark hair, blue eyes, and a fat face was rubbing my arm with cold cotton that reeked of alcohol. She picked up a needle from a pill cart beside her and stabbed me in the arm.

  “I’m not sure,” I grimaced. “My leg hurts.”

  “How’s he doing, Nurse?” A familiar-looking man in his early forties was asking from the foot of my bed as he lifted a sheet away from my leg.

  “He seems to be doing fine, Doctor. He says his leg hurts.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” The doctor dropped the sheet and picked up a clipboard attached to the foot of my bed. “The bleeding seems to have stopped. Watch the bandages. Keep him on antibiotics and check his vitals every hour.” He paused and flipped through a couple of pages on the clipboard. “Your chart says you are PFC Johnnie Clark.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why are you still a PFC with the record I’m looking at?” He looked up from the chart. “You get busted?”

  “No, sir. They told me promotions were frozen in the Fifth Marines.”

  The doctor’s face grew flush with anger. He wrote something on my chart, walked around the end of the bed, then slammed the clipboard down on the nurse’s pill chart with a bang. “You’ve just been promoted to lance corporal, Marine.” He turned and walked away briskly, talking to himself all the way to the end of the ward, where he turned and went down a staircase and out of sight.

  “Congrats, man!” an unfamiliar voice said from the bed on my right.

  I looked around the fat nurse as she pushed the pill cart away toward the next bed. A young guy with a flattop haircut that looked like it came out of the fifties was lying on his stomach. A sheet covered him from the waist down.

  “That’s the fastest promotion I’ve ever seen!” He laughed in a friendly way. “We need more officers like that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say. Who were you with?”

  “Bravo, One-seven.”

  “We were working with the Seventh Marines when I got hit.”

  “Oh, yeah? I’m a corpsman.”

  “How bad are you hit?” I asked.

  He pulled back the sheet. He was naked from the waist down, with a large bandage covering his rear end. He pulled it back, and I felt myself make a face. The entire right cheek of his rear end was gone. What was left looked like raw hamburger. “Got hit by a fifty cal’. I was behind a tree. It went through the tree and then did this. I won’t be wearing tight jeans for a while.” He flipped the sheet back over himself and laughed again. “Hey, you’ve had some buddy of yours in here a couple of times, but you were still out.”

  “Really! Wasn’t Oriental by any chance?” I asked, not really expecting the answer to be yes.

  “No. As a matter of fact it’s that guy right there.”

  “It’s about time you woke up.” I turned to my left to see Corporal James hobbling up on a pair of crutches, wearing a blue bathrobe and a cast from the knee down on his left leg. He looked happy to see me. “How do you feel?” he asked as he sat on the edge of my bed, carefully avoiding my legs.

  “Sore. It feels like I got hit by a one-five-five and two Ban-San Bombers.”

  “They’ve really had you drugged out, man!” the corporal said.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Let’s see,” James mumbled to himself. “This is our fourth day in Japan.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said, but my headache told me he wasn’t. “Anybody else here we know?”

  “Yeah. Striker’s here.”

  “Where?”

  “Downstairs. You’ll never believe what he’s been doing down there.” James chuckled.

  “No tellin’,” I said.

  “Every time I drop in on him, he’s reading a Bible.”

  “Our Striker?”

  “Yeah, really!” James laughed again.

  “I love it. Sure wish Chan could see that!”

  “When you’re well enough to get out of bed, I’ll take you down for a visit. He won’t be there long. We got orders for the world! You’ll probably be getting yours soon. I better get back before I miss chow. You only get one chance at it around here. Take it easy. I’ll get back with you later.”

  “Okay, James.”

  James hobbled across the shiny waxed brown tile floor and then down the same staircase that my doctor had disappeared down. I never saw him again. He and Striker were sent home. The next four weeks went by faster than even one day had seemed in the bush.

  Everything felt new and strange. Eating hot food with spoons, forks, and knives felt foreign. It was too quiet to sleep, so the nurse would feed me a sleeping pill each night. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It didn’t feel right with no one standing watch. Sometimes at night one of the wounded Marines would wake up screaming. It never bothered me, because I was usually already awake. Then one night I woke up screaming and covered with sweat. The buttless corpsman said I was screaming “Incoming!” He thought it was a riot, because two beds down some guy dove onto the floor. The doctor assured me that an occasional scream was normal. I wondered if I would ever be really normal.

  The buttless corpsman became my alarm clock. He woke me each morning with a stereo setup that the fat-faced nurse had purchased with his money at the PX. Each day started with the Young Rascals singing “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” It sounded like every guy who could hobble or crawl to the PX, which was right next door, had bought a stereo, radio, tape deck, or anything that would play music. The doctors didn’t mind. They seemed to think it was good therapy. One day the Beatles’ new hit single became available. From then on “Hey, Jude” reverberated through the cavernous room constantly, usually from three different sources. Of course it was never coordinated, so I’d listen to the beginning, middle, and end at the same time. It somehow became my favorite song.

  I kept waiting to feel good. I was supposed to be excited about being out of the bush, I thought. I should be jumping up and down and getting ready for Christmas or something. Anything! I kept waiting. I wrote home a lot to keep the folks from worrying. I lied about how great I felt, but the truth was that I felt more depressed each day and didn’t know why. I got the fat-faced nurse to paste up a new photo of Nancy Diez in a black bikini. It helped a little.

  I sent a steady stream of letters to Chan. They all said pretty much the same thing: “Write me soon and let me know how you are or I’m going to kick your butt all the way to China.” The letters started returning, each one stamped with four or five different locations ranging from Alpha Company to Da Nang to An Hoa to Casualty Company Okinawa and back to me with ADDRESS UNKNOWN RETURN TO SENDER stamped over all the other stamps in dark red letters. I wanted to kick myself for not getting Chan’s parents’ address. It just had never occurred to me that I would need it.

  Then one day the fat-faced nurse handed me a dirty, tattered envelope. It was another one of my letters being returned. I started to toss it into the wastepaper basket next to my bed when I noticed three little letters scribbled in pencil down in one corner: KIA. My stomach reacted like a heavy ball of ice-cold lead had dropped into it. Killed in action. I didn’t cry. I don’t know why. Maybe because I wasn’t going to believe Chan was dead just because some office pogue in An Hoa felt like using his pencil. Maybe becaus
e it just didn’t look official.

  Frustration, confusion, and finally despair took control of my thoughts. After five weeks in Japan I was sent to Okinawa for rehabilitation. By December my leg was getting strong again. I still hadn’t received any more information about Chan. A strange, illogical sense of guilt began taking hold of me. I had left him. I had to go back to Nam. I had to finish my tour or I’d never be able to live with myself.

  I knew my leg wasn’t ready yet, but I didn’t care. Each day I requested orders for the Fifth Marines and each day my request was refused. The doctor in charge of the rehabilitation program told me I was suffering from mild combat fatigue. They started feeding me Valium to calm me down and Darvon to stop the pain in my leg and something else to sleep. Nothing seemed to help. Then one day in early December some of my gear from An Hoa caught up to me. The first thing I found in my sea bag was a small green hospital bag containing the things I had on me when I was brought into Da Nang. I dumped it open and out fell my little Gideon with the shrapnel hole. I could almost hear Chan laughing at my depression. I cried for a long time. I figured I had about three months of tears built up. After that I started reading the Word and talking to the Man again. I even went to chapel on occasion.

  Christmas came and went. Then New Year’s. I was still on Okinawa. I felt better every day. I was ready to go home. In March they put me in Casual Company. That was a good sign. I knew I’d be going home soon. My third day in Casual Company I got a letter that had been forwarded from Yokosuka. The return address was Saint Albans Naval Hospital in New York. It was from someone named Dr. J. T. Adelman, Lieutenant, USN. At first I thought I had someone else’s mail, but it was my name and serial number so I tore it open. The first line lifted me out of my bed and banged my head on the top bunk so hard I started bleeding, but I couldn’t feel a thing.