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

by Dennis Foley

  She raised her hand, without looking at him, and touched her tiny thumb to her forefinger, making a solid 0. A zero, a no-chance signal.

  “What happens if I just up and get gone myself?” he asked, half kidding.

  “You’ll fall on your ass—Captain,” the lieutenant said, emphasizing her pronunciation of Hollister’s rank.

  “Would I fall on my ass if I weren’t a captain?”

  She hesitated a long time before answering, and the two patients flanking Hollister’s bed started laughing.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well”—she turned and looked at him—“if you were a field grader there might be a chance to waive gravity.”

  More laughing.

  “Can’t get any respect around here,” Hollister grumbled to the CWO3 in the adjacent bed.

  The CWO3 was propped up against the head of his bed. His left arm and entire shoulder were confined in a cast supported by a bar that extended from his hip to a point under his elbow. He had been blown out of his helicopter in Da Nang when 122mm rockets hit the runway. He had been trying to get his chopper off the ground, and he was happy to be alive. He was a great bedmate to have in the huge, cold, and impersonal ward. He and Hollister had become friendly in the short time Hollister had been there. He had a last name, but everyone in the ward, the doctors and the nurses included, just called him “Chief.”

  “Least you can consider getting out of the rack. I’m still looking forward to the day when I can wipe my own butt,” the chief said.

  “I guess I ought to count myself lucky,” Hollister said. “How you doin’ today?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  The question referred to the plastic tube snaking out from under his blanket. It was filled with a pink- and rust-colored fluid and bubbles.

  “Still isn’t clear, Chief. But it’s lighter.”

  “Nope—gotta be clear piss or I don’t get any real food.”

  The chief had extensive internal injuries, and the drain from his bladder was still a warning flag of blood seeping into his system from the trauma he had experienced four weeks before.

  “Maybe you need a beer to flush it out,” Hollister said.

  “Hey! Now that’s an aviator’s flush if I ever heard one.”

  He reached up with his free hand and grabbed onto the triangular grip that dangled from the framework that boxed his bed. He pulled himself up a fraction of an inch and raised his voice over the sound of a radio playing at the other end of the ward. “Lieutenant Honey Buns?”

  The nurse turned to look at him, “Chief! For the last time—it’s Hunnicutt.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Anyhow, what’s the deal? Will a beer be on my tray today?”

  “You got a better chance of dancing on ‘American Bandstand’ today.”

  He turned back to Hollister. “Looks like we’re shit outa luck.”

  “Maybe they want to keep all this stuff from us until we get well.”

  “No,” Lieutenant Hunnicutt said, “we’d rather just deprive you of things. None of us cares if you ever get well.”

  “She hates us,” the chief said. “We need to plan a break.”

  The chief’s spirits were contagious. He kept everyone around him laughing, even though he was the only one of his four-man crew who survived the rocket attack.

  Dozing off after breakfast and before the doctor’s rounds was damn near unavoidable. Hollister tried to stay awake, but he had been in bed so long he was having trouble sleeping at night and staying awake in the daytime. Each day he promised himself he would not let himself drift off so he could sleep through the long nights. And each night he would doze off after lights-out only to find himself wide-awake within minutes. His nights would drag on while he tried to occupy his mind and coax himself to sleep.

  After the tenth day at Camp Drake, Hollister gave in. He had declined the offer of sleeping pills from the nurses who came by with them each evening. It wasn’t a matter of any one thing he could put his finger on. He just knew that taking sleeping pills had to be something he didn’t want to do. So without any fanfare, Hollister simply shook his head each time the night nurse offered the pills—pills the others took freely and without comment.

  Finally, one night he broke down and took the pills. He waited for something to happen to him. He knew he had been given pills on the plane ride from Vietnam, but he couldn’t remember the effect they had had on him. He imagined all kinds of strange things. After all, it was 1969, and the horror stories about drugs and hallucinogenic madness were everywhere. The army was particularly alarmist about the abuse of drugs. To Hollister any line dividing sleeping pills from marijuana or LSD was not visible to him. He had grown up knowing that all drugs were bad and that they all had the potential for disastrous addiction. He steeled himself to be able to control the effects of the sleeping pills.

  Early the next morning he woke up, unaware of when he had dropped off to sleep or of the effects of any of the pills. At that moment it seemed to him to be pretty much of a fuss about something he couldn’t be convinced had any influence on him.

  That night, and every night after that, Hollister accepted the offer of the two little red capsules. Each night he slept well and was able to take a nap during the day without any disruption of his sleep pattern.

  Toward the end of his second week in Japan, Hollister was taken out of the bed and to a treatment room. No one explained to him the purpose of the visit. His drain tube had been removed more than a week before with very little fanfare.

  A doctor whom he had never seen and a female medic came into the room. She motioned for Hollister to lie back on the treatment table while the doctor immediately went to Hollister’s records and began flipping through the treatment pages. He finally stopped to look at a hand-drawn diagram of the wound and the surgery done by the original doctor who had operated on Hollister at the 12th Evac Hospital in Cu Chi.

  The medic took a pair of surgical scissors and cut the dressing off Hollister’s thigh.

  Hollister raised his head and looked at the wound. It still looked bad. The skin was wrinkled from the constant heat and moisture under the dressings. The wire sutures had cut so deeply into his flesh that at each point where they disappeared into his skin there was a swollen pink spot. Some of the wire had been lost as the skin had swollen into place over it.

  The doctor opened up a sealed package of surgical drape and revealed all the necessary equipment to remove the wire sutures. Without a word, he snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and picked up an expensive-looking set of wire cutters—all stainless steel.

  “We going to pull these?” Hollister said lightheartedly, hoping to prod the doctor into saying something.

  The doctor never looked up at Hollister, but replied flatly, “No. Not we. I am, though.”

  At that point Hollister decided just to shut up and let the cold fish of a doctor get it over with.

  The doctor grabbed onto the first stitch of wire closest to Hollister’s knee and jabbed the point of the pliers under it. The movement of the wire and the point of the cutters shot a lightning bolt of pain down to the bone in his leg. He winced.

  “You get too uncomfortable, tell me. We’ll just stop, give you some local anesthetic, and then finish this.”

  “No. I’m okay,” Hollister said. He was determined not to give the shit of a doctor the satisfaction of seeing him ask for a painkiller.

  The next morning the doctor who had been coming by on rounds for two weeks dropped by again and spoke to Hollister instead of about him. He was a balding lieutenant colonel with GI glasses that had been stained at the temples from repeated applications of aftershave lotion.

  “Young man,” he started. “We’ve done all we can do—surgically speaking. You will now be turned over to the physical therapists to get you back on your feet and walking again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hollister said, waiting for him to drop the other shoe.

  “If you regain the use of your leg wit
hout any problem—we’ll return you to duty.”

  “Picket fence?” Hollister asked.

  “Yes. No medical profile if it goes like I think it will.”

  “How long?”

  “About a month of PT, then a month of convalescent leave, and then duty.”

  It came as a surprise to Hollister that the doctor had already carved out what would be too much time away from Juliet Company. Hollister’s heart sank. He knew that Sangean could never hold his job open that long. And if he got a clean release, he would be sent back into the manpower pool in Vietnam and might still end up in a shitty advisory job or some REMF job that would make him miserable. He knew he had to think of some way around it all.

  Hollister started to ask the doctor about the schedule only to see him hand the chart to the nurse and walk to another patient.

  “You’ll be required to come in here every day for two hours in the morning, and we’ll work on your leg. We expect you to work on it yourself each afternoon before the next morning’s appointment. If we don’t think you are holding up your end of the prescribed physical therapy, we will double your appointments and require you to come in morning and afternoon,” the graying major, a physical therapist, said after she read Hollister’s medical chart. She was in her late forties, severely manicured, lean, and businesslike. She wore a white jacket with her rank and insignia on the collar and white trousers. Her nameplate said URBANIK.

  “Yes, ma’am” was the only thing Hollister could think to say. He wondered if she was expecting him to say, I promise.

  She looked up from the records and smiled. “Call me Connie. And you are …” She looked at his records again, and they both said “Jim” at the same time.

  “Okay, Jim. First, let’s get you to stand up.”

  He found a point of balance on the arms of the wheelchair he had ridden to Connie’s office, and began to raise himself, most of the weight on his good leg.

  She reached over and flipped on the brake that locked the wheels to his chair. “You gotta watch out for those machines. We’ve put more patients back into bed after wheelchair accidents than came in here with ambulatory complaints.”

  He smiled and nodded thanks as he raised himself to full height. His head spun, and he started to feel the pain shooting up his leg. He had not been on his feet since the day he was wounded, and the first sensation was one of complete lack of control over his leg.

  Major Urbanik grabbed his hand and put it on her shoulder to steady him. “Hold on.” She then kicked the wheelchair out from behind him.

  He found himself standing in a shaky upright position with one hand on her shoulder as she stayed seated next to his bad leg.

  “Okay, let’s have a look,” she said as she ripped the snaps loose that ran the full length of his orthopedic pajama leg.

  The move caught Hollister by surprise, and he almost fell over trying to hide his nakedness as his pajama bottoms fell to the floor around his ankles. The only other thing he was wearing was the top to his pajamas, and it only reached to the top of his genitals.

  “Easy. This is a hospital. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I have to look at this leg,” she said as she reached over and traced the contour of his thigh muscle, feeling for the loss of mass he had suffered.

  He didn’t respond and didn’t look down. Her touch on his leg was anything but unpleasant, and he was terribly afraid that he might be stimulated to respond to her slender fingers. He concentrated on not allowing it to happen.

  “You have lost a considerable amount of muscle, but there is not much damage to bone or connecting tissues that attach the muscles to the bones.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means work. You’re going to the gym this morning and every day from here on out. After a workout you will go to the whirlpool and soak the leg, knee, and hip for an hour—each day.”

  “That it?”

  “Nope. I want you to walk—anywhere, for an hour each afternoon, and a half hour each evening.”

  She took out a tape measure that was marked off in centimeters, slipped it around the top of his thigh, and took a measurement. She did the same to his midthigh and the area just above his knee. Each time she made a notation in his record of the circumference of the part of the leg she was measuring.

  “Okay. Sounds like something I can do.”

  She got up, leaving him standing, and walked across the room, then looked at him from fifteen feet away. He self-consciously bent a bit, hoping the bottom of his shirt would cover him a little more.

  “Stand up straight,” she said, looking at his legs, knees, and feet.

  He stood up.

  She made no more remarks. After making a few further notes in his chart, she walked around behind him, then stepped out into the hallway where she could view his legs from the back.

  Again, he was aware that his cheeks were exposed below the midline. He just stood there and waited for her to make some remark. She didn’t.

  He felt the wheelchair touch the back of his heel. She had returned from the hallway and pushed it to him.

  “Sit,” she said. “This is your last day in a wheelchair. You will go down to this room.” She handed him a prescription with a number on it. “They’ll give you a pair of crutches you’ll use to get around for four days.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you turn them in, and get a cane. I just want you to use them for stability—so you won’t bust your ass.”

  He was pulling his trousers up over his behind when she said that. He chose not to recognize her timing.

  “I want you off the cane inside ten days.”

  “Great with me. I’d love to be able to walk.”

  “To the latrine,” she finished his sentence.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Professional experience,” she said. “And I broke a leg in three places skiing in Colorado a couple of years ago.”

  He smiled. He knew he and no-nonsense Connie were going to get on well.

  As soon as Hollister got his crutches, he went to the phones instead of going back to his ward. He got one call through to Sangean even though the line was bad. Sangean’s voice sounded up and eager to get Hollister back. Hollister dodged the question of when and let Sangean know he would get back as soon as he could get them to break him loose.

  As soon as he was able to, he changed the subject to the troops and operations. Sangean gave him a quick overview. They were working War Zone D, and it was far superior to Cu Chi. Hollister asked Sangean to have someone send him whatever unclassified info they could on the mission and the AO.

  Mobility was a sheer delight for Hollister. He took advantage of being able to leave his bed to make trips to the phone to call his family and Susan. He wandered over to the small PX and, after drawing partial pay from Finance, bought some flashlight batteries for the nurse captain with the pageboy back at 12th Evac. He went to the small post office and bought some stamps and envelopes to mail the batteries.

  Back in his rack, Hollister wrote to Sangean and told him only part of the truth. He explained that he was ambulatory, sore, and working on getting the strength back into his leg. He said that the doctors told him he would be pretty close to healed up in a month and could expect to dodge any permanent profile that might restrict his duty. He promised to try to call Juliet Company if he could get through the maze of military connections.

  He didn’t tell Sangean the doctors were going to prescribe several weeks of convalescent leave after his therapy.

  Connie Urbanik was a tough taskmaster. She checked on Hollister regularly, dropping in on the small physical therapy gym near her office.

  She also checked up on him in the whirlpool. Soon he became used to her dropping in on him when he was naked. His response was mixed. It embarrassed him a bit and disappointed him that she didn’t seem to care. He was aware that this was a sign of male ego.

  His days were filled with exercise, whirlpooling, and walking. His mind was crammed
with the conflicting demands on him. He missed Susan and wanted to get on with his life. “Getting on with his life” was every soldier’s way of saying he wanted the war to be over—soon.

  But he had unfinished business back at Juliet Company. He didn’t want an endless stream of changing faces running the company, planning and supervising operations, and training the teams. He knew there was nothing more demoralizing in the life of a soldier than turbulence—both within and above. He knew he had to go back. He didn’t know how he would explain the need to Susan.

  It didn’t take him long to find out what to do with his evenings. He found the small Officers Club in the hospital complex. Patients were allowed in the club if they could get there under their own power.

  A small table was in the corner of the poorly lit room where a badly set light dribbled a pool of reading light. He staked the table out every evening and sat there drinking Scotch, listening to the reel-to-reel tape recorder playing popular music, and writing. He wrote letters to family and friends and made notes on training and operations.

  It was the first real chance he had to catch his breath and think about what did and didn’t work in Juliet Company. In short order he made another trip to the PX and bought his third lined notebook to capture his thoughts.

  He would get back to his bunk after lights-out, a little drunk. He would take the sleeping pills the nurses had left for him and sleep without dreaming. Each morning he awoke with a hangover and went to the gym to work out the pain in his head and in his leg. By the time he got out of the whirlpool, he would almost be recovered from the hangover. Each day he decided that as long as he didn’t have a drink until he got to the club after dinner he had no problem.

  But each night he would take his place in the corner, order a double Scotch, and begin to write. He kept writing, and the Japanese waitress kept refilling his glass. One night she asked him, after he had had several drinks, “You hurt?”

  He thought she was talking about his leg, as his limp was obvious. “Yeah,” he replied, and smiled. “But the Scotch is good medicine.”

  She wasn’t talking about his leg.