by Dennis Foley
“What the fuck happened to you?”
“Sir?” Cathcart said, confused by the question.
“How’d that happen?”
“Sir … I’m One-three Bravo,” he said, dropping his head and his voice. “I’m real sorry I got you and the others fucked up.”
“What? What are you talking about? You mean you were the lost team member?”
“Yessir, and if I hadn’t gotten separated you might not be in here.”
“I’m sorry, Cathcart. I’ve never heard you whisper before. I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“No sweat. I guess I fucked up.”
“How’d it happen?”
Cathcart toyed with the floppy brim of his LRP hat and took a breath. “We busted out of the trees to get to the chopper. I fell behind just a bit and got parallel to the tail gunner. I tried to catch up, but instead I tripped on something and went down like a train wreck.”
He pointed to the wiring on his face. “I hit my face on the top of my M16 and broke my jaw. It must have put me out because the next thing I know I’m laying in the tall grass and you’re calling me on the horn.”
“It’s not your fault. Blow it off. You hear me? There never was till a LRP that didn’t bust his ass about every other dash across a landing zone.”
Cathcart didn’t look up and didn’t say anything.
“You did the right thing. Accidents happen. But you soldiered on out there, brought in the choppers, got yourself a couple of bad guys with some good instructions for the Cobras. Good work.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now get it out of your head.”
“Okay, sir. Thanks. I really been feelin’ bad about this.”
“Well, don’t.”
He smiled, reached out, shook Hollister’s hand, and left quietly.
“Nice work, Captain,” K.O. said, standing on the other side of Hollister’s bed.
He turned and saw her walking away to attend to another patient. He leaned back and replayed the extraction in his head. Pieces started to come back—the RPG, the chopper crash. Then he remembered the bodies. He wanted a drink—bad.
“We have cleaned out the wound and debrided it. There was a lot of trash, dirt, and chopper fuel in and around the wound. There is a large amount of muscle tissue missing—that we cut out. And there’s going to be some pain while you rebuild it,” the doctor said, searching his pocket for a pen and putting his reading glasses on.
He never looked at Hollister while he spoke, only at the patient record he held open at waist level. His lips moved a bit while he read some of the nursing notations and flipped through the small lab slips snugged up under the file’s spring clasp.
“So—is there any real permanent damage?”
The doctor looked up for the first time. “No. You might suffer a loss of strength that’ll take some months to regain. But if you don’t have any complications or nerve damage, you’ll be ready for light duty in six to eight weeks.”
“Can I go back to my unit till I get cleared?”
“No. I’m sending you to Japan for a month or so. You stay here with a wound that big, and you risk infection. You need some physical therapy and some rest. You’re also anemic, and you have a slight respiratory infection. You go back to that stink hole you guys live in, and you’ll rip my sutures out, tear the wound open, and give yourself a pile of grief. Japan,” he said, snapping the lid of the file closed and walking abruptly away without another word.
Japan? Several thoughts rushed through Hollister’s mind. He’d worked so hard since he’d been with Juliet Company—too hard to lose his job over a wound. But Japan? He could use a little time to get his head clear about a few things. The thought made him feel guilty. But Japan? It was still Japan, and he remembered it with mixed emotions from his first tour.
Things were suddenly crowding his head. If he could just go heal up and not lose his job. After all, they got along for a while without him. But the company was a mess when he arrived.
“Going to Japan, huh?” It was Major Sangean. “Yessir. That’s what they just told me.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay. I haven’t even been out of this bed yet. I don’t really know how I feel. My leg throbs like a son of a bitch, and I’m really just now coming out of the fog.”
“Good. We need you to get back to duty as soon as you’re up to it.”
“Can you hold my job, sir?”
“Vance and I will take up your slack.”
“I’d like that,” Hollister said, feeling some of the worry go out of his gut.
“We’ll need you where we’re going. We’re moving.”
“Moving? Where?”
“Well, the last couple of contacts have been large enough and turned enough intel for Two Field to move a brigade of the Twenty-fifth and the One hundred ninety-ninth Infantry Brigade into the AO.”
“They think we’ve developed it enough to commit maneuver units back into the area to clean it out.”
“That’s great! We earned our keep?” Hollister asked.
“Seems so. Anyway, we’re moving to War Zone D.”
The words were chilling. War Zone D had gained a reputation for a great number of brutal battles and held many secrets of operations launched out of the forests and old plantations.
“I’m going to have to do some homework. I’ve never been there.”
“Well, you know it is north and a little east of Bien Hoa—so we relocate back to our rear area. The terrain is much more forested and varied than that damn border.”
“We have a mission yet?”
“Same old deal. They aren’t sure just what is going on in there. They don’t want to move a maneuver unit in there unless they’re sure there are some bad guys worth going after. There’s been some sightings of very small parties—probably couriers, bearers, and Admin types,” Sangean said.
“Saturate the area with teams?”
“Yep. If they’re in there, we should be able to find them.”
“Can you have someone slip me some maps and keep me posted on the operations while I’m in Japan?”
“No problem,” Sangean said as he pulled his hat out of his pocket and flipped it open. “I’ve got a couple of teams to debrief and a shitload of paperwork. You need anything?”
“I think I’ve got everything I need.”
“Good. See you later,” Sangean said as he turned to leave.
“Sir,” Hollister said.
“Huh?”
“Thanks.”
Sangean cracked the beginning of a smile. “You might be sorry you asked for the job back.”
The next morning K.O. raised his bed, and he was able to watch her change the dressing. She cut the old blood-soaked dressings off and revealed a slightly withered and very purple and yellow upper thigh. Running from the outside of the knee to the bend at his hip was a long and jagged cut that was sewn closed with dozens of sutures. “What the hell is that?”
“What?” K.O. asked, swabbing the area down with some pHisohex.
“What kind of stitches are those?”
“Wire.”
“Wire?” He reached down and touched them.
K.O. slapped his hand. “Hey! How the hell do you think you’re going to heal up if you keep messing with it?”
“Why wire?”
“They had to cut away too much skin—raggedy edges. And when they tried to close it up, it meant they had to stretch the skin. Regular sutures would pull out or break. So they wired you up like a chain-link fence.”
He thought for a moment about the removal, and it bothered him a bit. “Guess taking them out is going to be a real picnic.”
“Nope. ’S’gonna hurt.”
“Thanks. You’re a lot of encouragement.”
“I got an A in disingenuous encouragement in nursing school.”
He watched as she continued to bathe his wound in disinfectant and then cleaned away the excess fluid from around the wires.
The touch of her tiny fingers was so soothing, even though the area was very tender. In the few months away from Susan, he had forgotten how it felt to have a woman’s hands on his skin. He leaned back on his pillow and enjoyed her touch and the rich, clean smell of her hair.
The thump on his midsection startled him. He opened his eyes with a start and saw a large, stainless steel bedpan resting on his abdomen.
“Your turn to do some work,” she said.
“Me?” he sputtered, feeling a flush of embarrassment come to his cheeks. “How do you expect me to, ah …?”
“I expect you to slip that under your butt and make it happen, Captain,” K.O. said, half teasing him.
“But all I’ve been eating is Jell-O and tea. I’m not sure I can fill your order.”
“You will, or it’s enema time.”
The thought brought cold fear to his chest. “Oh, no. I’ll do … ah, something.”
She threw the sheet back over his leg, patted him on the arm and smiled as she walked to the next bed. “I have complete confidence in you. Never met a LRP who couldn’t fill a bedpan on a moment’s notice.”
It was not much different from the trip he had taken to Japan on his first tour. Cold, even though it was still hot and wet in Vietnam. But the trip was a medevac flight. The huge C-141 jet had been configured to hold patients. The full length of the cargo compartment was fitted with stacked stretchers, each holding a patient. The worse the condition, the closer to the front of the airplane you were. Up near the cockpit, a small seating area remained for the few ambulatory patients who didn’t need stretchers.
The screaming jet engines prevented anything but hand-signal communications, and the air force flight nurses had to pantomime most of their messages to the patients. It finally got manageable when the large loading ramp was closed for taxi and takeoff.
Hollister was happy to see that he had been placed in a lower stretcher near the tailgate. That was a sign that he didn’t need too much attention. But the dark lower rack was cold and drafty.
It was well after midnight before they were all loaded onto the aircraft. By takeoff time it was nearly three. His stitches itched, even though there was still a drain tube sewn into his thigh. He tried to scratch without scratching. He was sure if he scratched his leg too much it would only make the area itch that much more.
Bored, Hollister looked at his watch, moved the patient’s ID band from its face, and checked the time. It was nearly five A.M., Saigon time, but he had no idea what time it was in Japan.
The nurse must have seen him check his watch because she came to his stretcher and kneeled down to be able to see his face.
“Here. The flight will dry you out.”
She handed him a carton of orange juice that had an American brand name on it—Foremost. It looked familiar and felt icy cold as Hollister took it.
She then reached in the pocket of her flight suit and pulled out two red capsules, and put them in his other hand. “Take these. They will help you sleep.”
“Thanks. I …” Hollister started to talk to her, but before he could, she had stood up, and was attending to the patient two stretchers above him.
He was groggy from the sleeping pills when he realized two American stretcher bearers were carrying him off the jet. The sudden blast of cold, rainy wind sobered Hollister up. He reached down and tried to tuck the single army blanket in around his hips to keep out the cold, only to get a face full of rain that dripped off the two-story-high tail of the large jet.
He got up on one elbow to see where he was and immediately recognized the air base at Tachikawa, Japan. He remembered the cold morning he had spent there picking up and escorting his brother platoon leader’s body. Lucas had been a good friend. But the memory was not good.
The bearers carried Hollister up into a large American-made bus that had been converted into an ambulance of sorts. The seats were all gone, and poles had been installed with U-shaped devices that locked the stretcher handles in place, allowing patients to be stacked three high against the large windows.
Lucking out, Hollister got a slot that allowed him to look out. The air base quickly gave way to the streets of a suburban Japanese community. Men and women threaded through the narrow streets on bicycles that all seemed to have been made by the same manufacturer. Hollister found it curious that not one single bike rider was just riding a bike. They all seemed to have a purpose for their ride, carrying goods, parcels, briefcases, baskets of food, and one even had a bicycle strapped onto the back of his bicycle.
Schoolchildren in uniforms were everywhere. The girls wore white blouses and blue pleated skirts, while the boys wore black uniforms with high-buttoned collars. All of them carried briefcases for their books or wore leather backpacks. All were spotlessly neat and devoid of any signs of individuality. It amused Hollister—like being in the army.
After only twenty minutes of enjoying the clean, wet look and feel of Japan, Hollister drifted off again. The medications, sleeping pills, and strain of his healing had drained his energy to the point where he found himself in a constant state of drowsiness or sleep.
The smell of hospital filled Hollister’s nostrils as he woke up. He was in a large, statesidelike hospital bed made up with rough, clean sheets. He found himself covered with a wool blanket and wearing heavier hospital pajamas than the ones he was wearing when he left Vietnam.
The ward had twenty-six beds—all filled with wounded GIs in various traction devices and plaster casts. He looked left and right and saw that the two patients in the adjoining beds were asleep. Everyone seemed to be asleep except him. He looked at his watch. Someone had changed the plastic and paper ID on his wrist. It had his name and GEN HOSP CAMP DRAKE USARJ, SURGICAL. His watch read 0200 or 1400. He guessed that both were wrong.
The sounds of a woman’s footsteps came from the far end of the ward—out of his sight. Hollister watched and waited until a uniformed army captain wearing crisp whites, a nurse’s cap, and a forest-green sweater came down the aisle in front of his bunk. He caught her eye.
“Ma’am.”
“Well, good morning,” she said as she stopped, stepped into the space beside his bed, and reached out for him. Hollister thought she was reaching to shake his hand and was embarrassed to find that she raised the other hand and looked at her watch to take his pulse.
“Morning,” he said. “Is this the end of my trip? Or am I waiting for something else?”
“Like what?” she asked, plucking his chart off the hook at the foot of the bed.
“Like being moved again to another ward?”
“You are in a surgical ward at Camp Drake—near Tokyo.”
“But these folks here seem to be a lot worse off than I am.”
“You’ll be here until they yank that drain tube, then they’ll decide to put you in another ward if you’re just mending and don’t need monitoring.”
He looked out the window at the spring blossoms on the dogwood trees. “Sure looks like a great place to be stationed.”
She smiled broadly, and looked up at him as she was straightening the sheet she had lifted to check his wound. “Got that right.”
“So?”
“So, what?”
“So, how am I doing?”
“You hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yes.”
“You are going to be one sore soldier until you get over most of the damage. What hit you—a tank round?”
“Not really sure. Piece of frag or some parts from a helicopter that was coming apart on the way to the ground.”
“Well, it took a chunk of you with it. I’m glad I don’t have to do your physical therapy.”
“Bad?”
“Ranger School?”
“Yeah. I went through it,” he said.
“You’re gonna do it again,” she said. She made a note in his chart and put it back at the foot of his bunk.
He let the news sink in. For a fleeting
second he was dreading the healing, but then he smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m real glad to be here. And real glad to have to go through this. I could be in a box somewhere.”
“Guess that’s one way to look at it.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m real glad,” he said. It was the first time his head was clear enough really to absorb his situation.
“Can I call home?”
“After the doctors clear you for a wheelchair. Until then you belong to me and you are on the wagon.”
“On the wagon?”
“You eat in bed, and you pee in a bottle.”
“Guess that means more balancing on a bedpan, too.”
“Got that right, too.”
Chapter 22
AN ORDERLY BROUGHT HOLLISTER back from the phones on the other side of the huge hospital complex. He hadn’t minded the discomfort of being bounced along the corridors on a gurney since he had been able to talk to Susan.
He lied to her, just as he knew he would. He told her he had been slightly wounded and he was at Drake to let him heal up without excessive exposure to the chance of infection. He told her there were just a few stitches, and he would be up and around in no time.
It was the third day at Camp Drake, and Hollister found himself wide-awake at three in the morning. He had nothing to occupy his time or his mind, and he was not supposed to leave his bed. He tried to write a letter to Susan, but found he was filling the pages up with chatty talk about the weather and the dogwood trees. He had been promised another trip to the phone as soon as the doctors pulled his drain tube. The removal was scheduled for nine that morning.
He stopped the letter, rationalizing that he would talk to Susan again, and maybe his parents, before they could even get the letters he was trying to write. What he had written was full of lies and omissions. But why tell them? Why worry them?
“What’s chances of getting out of bed?” Hollister asked the nurse who was working on a patient across the aisle that separated his row of hospital beds from the other half of the ward.