Night Work: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 2)

by Dennis Foley

  Even though it was before normal visiting hours, the duty nurse let Susan sit in the room where Jim slept. It was a small favor. The nurse was their next-door neighbor in the housing area.

  She stuck her head in and made a questioning face at Susan.

  “He’s still asleep,” Susan whispered.

  “No I’m not,” Hollister said. “I’m just malingering.” He smiled and opened his eyes.

  Susan reached out, took his hand in hers, and smiled back. “Mornin’, sleepyhead.”

  “You have to pee?” the nurse asked from the doorway.

  Thinking she was kidding, Hollister mocked her question, “Pretty personal thing for a neighbor to ask, isn’t it?”

  The nurse nodded toward the IV hanging next to the bed. “Well, I’m going to keep pouring that stuff into you until you beg me for a bedpan. That way I’ll be sure we’ve replaced the fluids you lost last night.”

  The on-call doctor from the night before whisked by the nurse and entered Hollister’s room without recognizing Susan’s presence. “I’ve only got a minute, Lieutenant,” he said while flipping through some medical test results on an aluminum clipboard. “Looks like you are going to live, and I’m going to discharge you this morning. I want you on light duty for ten days, and then I want you back here for some follow-up lab tests. If you have some time off coming, take it and rest up for a few days. You are weaker than you think, and recovery will come lots faster with a little bit of pampering.”

  Hollister started to say something, but the doctor hastily took a look at his watch, flipped Hollister’s chart shut, and turned toward the door. “Gotta go. Remember, I want to see you again.”

  Susan, the nurse, and Hollister all exchanged looks of surprise at the speed of the doctor’s abrupt departure.

  “What the hell was that?” Hollister asked. “Bedside manner,” the nurse kidded.

  Panama City, Florida, wasn’t the most beautiful spot in the Southeast, but it did offer a nearby getaway for troops from Fort Benning, and Post Special Services was able to arrange for some discounts on motels and other tourist attractions.

  Susan put down the suntan-lotion-stained pages of an article she was writing for Cosmopolitan and looked over at her husband, who was stretched out on his stomach soaking up the sun. “You haven’t said much all morning.”

  “I know. I’m on vacation.”

  “From me?” Susan asked, a note of sarcasm in her voice.

  He rolled over and looked up at her, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Hey, am I ever going to get out of trouble with you?”

  “Jury’s still out. I still haven’t decided how angry I am. We hadn’t even talked about it when you started trying to turn yourself inside out at Camp Darby the other night.”

  “Oh, so I got the screaming meemies to avoid talking about putting in a 1049? Hell, I could have just not said something. Other guys have pulled that to avoid the heat from their wives.”

  She looked at him and realized he was at least sincere. “I just don’t understand what we are doing. I thought we had decided not to make any decisions about our future—your career, in or out of the army, for a while.”

  “We did decide not to decide, but Lyndon Johnson has other plans for my time right now. I didn’t have any idea that the turnaround would be that fast. And I just don’t want to work for the zips if I do have to go back. I wasn’t trying to go back to Vietnam early. I was just trying to avoid something more unpleasant.”

  “Honey, we haven’t had any time to talk. I’ve been living my life with you in ten-minute slices since I met you. I hardly knew you when we got married, and I hoped I could get to know you after. But it has been longer hours, you on the verge of exhaustion, and all kinds of unwritten rules about what we do and don’t talk about at Benning. When are we ever going to start our lives together? It all seems to be on hold until you get out of the army—and now that’s put off until you get back from Vietnam.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “At least tell me if you are staying in or getting out. I never had any idea you were thinking of staying in.”

  “I don’t have that answer.”

  Susan pulled off her sunglasses and looked at him, aggravated by his reply. “Well, when the subject comes up let me know, will you?” she said sarcastically.

  He sat up, trying to think of some way to explain his indecision. “I just can’t quit!”

  That was enough for her. She grabbed her things, stood up, and walked back toward the car across the warm sand.

  He watched her walk away with a sinking feeling inside. In her floral two-piece suit, she was as pretty walking away as coming toward him. Her anger was evident in the way she threw her hips and the way she carried her head, causing her long, straight hair to whip at the middle of her back. He knew he had to try to explain his feelings to her, but wasn’t able to describe them. He was filled with her and the newness of their marriage. Still, he was unable to just quit the army—outright, cold. There was a war on. He felt that quitting would be just that—quitting. It wasn’t a word he was comfortable with. He felt stirrings of loyalty to the guys he had served with on his first tour, and he felt a pang of guilt every time he even thought about quitting. Too many good troops, good friends, had died for him just to walk away as if it didn’t mean anything.

  But Susan would never understand his confusion. He’d have to see it through a second tour, try to get her to stand by him until he could make some more definite plans for them.

  The beer tasted flat, but it satisfied his thirst. He sat cross-legged on the tiny concrete patio just outside their living-room window. Putting his cigarette out, he field-stripped it, scattered the remaining tobacco in the grass surrounding the slab, and rolled the remaining paper into a tiny ball that he flicked off into the darkness.

  “Honey, it’s three-thirty in the morning!” Susan said, opening the screen door.

  “I know. I just couldn’t sleep. Why don’t you just try to get back to sleep.”

  She came out and sat down on a lawn chair. “You haven’t slept one night since I’ve known you, Jimmy. You work out at that damn Ranger Department until you’re a walking zombie and then come home still thinking about work. You haven’t missed a late-night newscast about Vietnam or a newspaper article about it. Sometimes I think you know more about what’s going on over there than Westmoreland does. You don’t eat enough, you drink too much, and you need to quit smoking. I know that you’re not here with me, and you won’t be till you get this goddamn war out of your system.”

  He looked at her face outlined in the glow of the horizon as she paused, knowing that he just ought to let her get it out.

  “I don’t know how much trouble this marriage is in because we haven’t had enough time together even to find out what it is like.” She paused, took a breath, and steeled herself for more. “You know I hate this war and I have been doing my damndest to keep from saying too much about it here. I understand a lot more than you think I do, and I know we are never going to get going until this is over. So, go back to Vietnam, Jimmy Hollister, and know that I love you and that I will hurt every day you are gone. But when you come back this time, it is our time. No more army, no more Vietnam, and no more distance. I want you all to myself, and you and the army are going to have to figure out how to do that.”

  He looked at her and marveled at how lucky he was to have met and married her. She was much smarter than he was, but never made him feel it. She was strong, but never pushy. Most of all she was saddened by the war, but she never whined. He searched for something to say.

  She didn’t give him a chance. “All I know is that I love you, Jimmy. I don’t have any more answers than you do. Now, come back to bed,” she said as she stood and opened the screen door, giving him no chance to reply.

  Chapter 4

  THE FEVER FELT LIKE a heavy blanket pressing down on Bui. Sweat pooled in the hollow of his neck as he lay in the cramped cutout along the tunnel passage.
He could not tell how long he had been there or how long he had slept—asleep or awake, it all seemed the same to him.

  He was tormented by fever and nightmares that were grotesque amalgams of reality he had lived and children’s fables he had heard at the knee of his grandfather when he was a boy. Dragons danced with tiny moorhens that fed in his father’s fields. Fire mixed with children’s faces. All of this came to him in a state of semiconsciousness that was never real sleep. And when he tried to clear his head and take stock of himself and what was going on around him—the heavy malaise held him down.

  There were moments when Bui was sure he heard voices and sensed people standing over him, tending to his wound and feeding him. But he couldn’t see their faces or recall their words. Somewhere in the deep haze he felt fatigue and frustration and even a momentary thought of just giving up and letting the fever blanket just take him away … to something peaceful and cool.

  Water replaced his own perspiration. Bui opened his eyes and saw Tich’s face just above his as she leaned over to swab his arm with cooling water dripping from a rag she squeezed.

  “Comrade?”

  Bui answered, but then was unsure if he actually spoke or if he only thought he spoke.

  She asked again. “Comrade Bui, can you hear me? Are you still sleeping?”

  He knew that moving a hand was something he could be sure of. He tried to raise his left arm, only to find it was underneath her bent-over torso. The backs of his fingers brushed the thin shirt that covered her soft breasts. He knew instantly what he felt, but he didn’t have the strength to keep his hand up, making contact with her. It seemed to fall of its own mind back to the dirt shelf.

  Tich did not react to him grazing her breast. She simply spoke to him as if guessing that he could hear her. “Your skin burns. We are going to have you moved to a vat where you can be cooled. I want you not to worry. Just let the others carry you. You must be cooled, or you will suffer more from your wounds.”

  She paused and listened. Bui said nothing, but tried to lift his hand again. This time she had straightened up. She saw him move his hand and reached out for it. It was filthy from being on the ground for days without anything to keep the sweat and the dirt from mixing and clinging to him.

  She dipped the cloth in a small pan outside of his sight and then washed some of the dirt from his fingers.

  Bui tried to move, to lift his head, only to find that he didn’t even have the strength to raise his matted hair off the ledge.

  He didn’t remember being moved. But the water took Bui by surprise. The medical assistants in the tunnel complex were anything but gentle. Their days were filled with moving and tending patients in the dark, wet, and foul-smelling tunnels.

  He had been stripped of his clothing and roughly dumped into a tub made out of a large teak log that had been hollowed out. The water was dark and smelled from some unseen antiseptic that had a distinctive pine and alcohol smell to it. It was not one that Bui had ever smelled except in Western soaps found on the black market

  The shock of the cold water caused Bui’s skin to tighten and his stomach muscles to spasm. He began to shiver almost immediately. Within a few minutes he had tired of steeling himself against the cold in an attempt to get his shivering under control.

  Tich replaced one of the men, who was called off to tend to another patient, heard wailing from another part of the tunnel.

  Bui jumped as Tich reached down between his submerged legs without warning. She filled a cup with water and then poured it over his head. The fluid ran through his hair and down his face, cooling as it went. As quickly as Bui got used to the repeated dousing, he felt somewhat self-conscious about her scooping the water from the space between his thighs. He worried that she might come in contact with his nakedness shriveled between his legs from the cold water. He wanted her not to think of him as any less a man than he was. He thought that if he focused on her, and not on the water, that he might be able to generate enough arousal in his member to at least bring it back to normal size.

  But he was unable to focus, the cold water converting his shivers into teeth-chattering shudders just short of convulsions.

  If Tich was even aware of his nakedness, she never let on.

  The swelling in Bui’s leg made his calf and ankle appear larger than the thickest part of his thigh. The doctor seemed angry at Tich for taking him away from more serious wounds in the infirmary.

  “He will die. We cannot save him, even if we cut off the leg,” the doctor said to Tich as he dropped the leg and walked away—angry.

  Tich seemed to be waiting for Bui to react to the frightening pronouncement. But he said nothing. He had heard the doctor, and he wasn’t being brave for her benefit. He was just stunned by the words in addition to being groggy from fever and exhausted from the demands of the infected wound. He couldn’t even form a response.

  Bui seemed to remember seeing Tich from time to time. It was a dream, or it was real. In either case he watched her tend to his wounds. The images of her visits were disgusting. She would put hot compresses on his wound and draw the greenish pus from it. She would then rinse out the emptied pocket with some astringent liquid and lightly rebandage the wound with a dressing she had removed earlier, washed and dried somewhere in the tunnels.

  During one fairly coherent visit, she smiled at him and told him not to worry. She would not abandon him. She continued to talk to him as she cleaned the wound, but he fell back into the fog of his feverish state.

  The ground rumbled, then dirt and large clumps of roots and clay fell onto Bui. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming, but he instinctively rolled out of the collapsing pocket that had been his sickbed for weeks.

  He hit the tunnel floor facedown and covered his head with his arms. Before the pain in his leg had settled to something manageable, he felt others scrambling over the top of him.

  He had never been able to find out just how large the tunnel complex was, or how many of his comrades were in it, or even what level he had been on during his stay. Now he was in a tunnel being bombed, and he had no idea how to get out or even if he could move far enough to escape. His heart started to pound.

  The explosions were mostly muffled, but one seemed to have a sharp crack—then the quality of the air and the pressure in the tunnel seemed to change. A bomb had broken open the ground somewhere in the tunnel!

  Where was Tich? Bui couldn’t see anyone. There were just figures ahead and behind him in his short stretch of tunnel. They were all yelling conflicting instructions to one another. He tried to get up. His knee wouldn’t work. One leg worked, but the other wouldn’t find purchase in the slime of the floor. He dug his hands into the earth and tried to pull himself forward, as if climbing horizontally. The pain was bearable, but his strength was absent and he had no idea if he was going the right way.

  There was a short lull in the bombs, and then one bomb ripped open the earth just above him. He heard the deafening crack, and then he heard a more frightening sound—water! A large volume of water was coming down the narrow tunnel that held him in its path. A river, stream, or flooded paddy was emptying into the tunnel complex and rushing toward him.

  Should he brace himself? For what? He couldn’t get away from it. Could he get back up into his cutout in the wall? Yes, he thought … Get back up. Get above the water!

  He spun to his left, reached up to what remained of his shelf, and had begun to pull his weakened body up when the water hit him broadside. His fingers never got a chance to get a solid grip on the few exposed roots he had become intimately familiar with.

  The water was a mixture of mud, fine gravel, silt, shrubbery, and the contents of the tunnel. Bui felt water rushing up his nose—burning. Then he felt himself being swept toward the depths of the tunnel levels below him.

  He tumbled and thrashed out for some control over his travel through the tunnel, coughing in an attempt to clear the mud and debris from his throat and sinuses. The sensation was much like sinkin
g, even though he knew he was doing more horizontal travel than vertical.

  Every few feet he collided with root stubs and hard objects. He couldn’t catch his breath, and he was beginning to panic. He knew that if he didn’t get at least one breath soon he would surely drown before he ever came to a stop.

  The channel narrowed, and the speed of the rushing water increased. It turned quickly, hurling him against a wall. The impact dazed him. Water shot from his nose and mouth, and his head banged against a hardened point in the wall. He gasped, but couldn’t get enough air.

  His hand came in contact with a length of sunken rope on the floor, and he grabbed onto it as he was caught up in a swirl at a bend in the tunnel. Not knowing what the rope was attached to, he jerked up on it. It was fastened to an empty wooden ammunition box, probably a discarded American or South Vietnamese artillery packing crate. The box came up from its jammed position on the floor of the tunnel and was quickly swept up by the flowing water.

  Bui heard at least one, maybe two, more dull explosions on the surface. Then the movement of the box yanked him out of his protected corner. He reached out and hugged the long narrow box to his chest and used it to try to hold his head above the brown current still coursing through the complex. Again and again he hit the tunnel ceiling, stunning himself.

  By the time he had hit the ceiling for the third time, he thought he might be better off letting go of the box. Then he remembered being totally submerged on the first part of his travel through the tunnel.

  The tunnel narrowed again, and the rushing water made him lose sight of his course once more. He was thankful he’d had enough time to take a breath before he was forced under by the narrow passage.

  After Bui had a few more moments of submerged travel at a much faster rate, the water took him into a larger intersection, where he was able to raise his head above water. But just as he did he caught sight of a large root, about as big around as his arm, stretched out in his path at the waterline. Before he could duck his head to get under it, he collided with it. It struck him in the side of the head. And that was the last thing he remembered before going unconscious.