by Gayle Rivers
I heard my voice scream No! but the sound never left my head ... as if all of a sudden I knew I was going to die . . . it was like shouting under water . . . the impact hit me ... I began to fly . . . for a second I was numb, then coils of barbed wire tore the flesh from my limbs ... I wondered if my genitals had been blown away... I blacked out....
I awoke ... I was being hurled along the ground, bouncing and hitting things . . . the sound of the explosion seemed to go on for hours. I hit the ground, feeling nothing from the waist down ... I was a bust being hurled by a volcano ... I blacked out
I awoke, but it was dark, and I could hear no sound . . . how strange to be dead . . . but I was still bumping into things, still rolling . . . and then I stopped moving.
I felt completely relaxed ... it was all over ... I wanted to smile at my death . . . then I felt blood on my cheek, streaming from my eyes ... I was alive, and I began to see through a red film.
For a minute nothing moved ... I was deaf . . . then I felt that I was being blown up again ... the earth erupted all around me . . . but my body only rocked, and a great wind was rushing over me.
I recognized the downwash from the helicopters, though I could hear nothing. I was conscious, and I waited through a long, naked silence until a figure stood alongside me, and hands that I could not feel touched me.
I blacked out again and awoke when I crashed to the floor of the helicopter. I could hear noises now. Gunfire. We were in a great hurry to leave. Another body crashed alongside me. I saw a boy's face . . . eighteen perhaps . . . very close to mine. It was the face of a baby. A second man stood alongside, holding a plasma bottle.
"Adrenalin!" the boy shouted.
A great spear was driven into my heart, and my ) chest was filled with fire. I rose upright and screamed, then collapsed.
When I came around, I could see the man beside me. His stomach was open, and his guts were hanging j over me. He was dead. I wanted to turn his head, j to look in his face, to see who he was, but my body would not move.
I was on and off a stretcher, in and out of hospitals.. Hue. I remembered wakening once there. I underwent a field operation. I came around in a different hospital. The nurses were not in field uniform. The main base hospital in Saigon, I think. ,
Someone came to see me ... a face I did not J know . . . then Stacey ... the people who had been j involved in the briefings ... the colonel . . . the , civilians . . . only one face moved ... the one I did not know . . . they stayed there for a long time ] ... then the drugs would take me elsewhere....
How long had it been? I was flown out to another hospital in Japan or Hong Kong or Singapore ... a flight in a Cavac Jet. . . always people around me . . . a subtropical hospital with ceiling fans ... I reached for my dog tags, but they were gone ... a couple of months? . .. Welcome to Alice Springs....
I was in Darwin at the main military hospital, on a huge base. I began to collect my thoughts. I had gone through about a thousand bed changes and half a dozen hospitals, and I was still in intensive care. Why had they moved so many times a man so badly hurt? To protect me? To hide me? To get me as far away as possible? Or simply to save my life?
I had been literally blown apart from the waist down, and my chest and back and arms were filled with shrapnel. Much of the bone was missing from the heel of my left foot, and the muscle had been sliced half away. For four months the doctors grafted bone to bone and flesh to flesh. It was like driving hot needles into me. Then the drugs would carry me away, but that was terrible, because my sleep was filled with nightmares.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
"What others?"
"The rest. Tan and Wiley and Jackson, and Toliver and Morrosco and Prather and the others. The Five Fingers. Are they all dead?"
"You need rest."
"How can you bring a man half-dead into your hospital and you don't know anything about him, and you can't answer anything?"
They would put me out again. The pain subsided. The hospital, the doctors and nurses, all the sterile unreality of the present drifted away, and I was back with the team . . . Jackson dashed across the road into a hailstorm of fire, yet none touched him . . . we washed blood from our bodies by dawning sun, and Tan made brothers of us all ... a man's hands on my throat . . . Toliver saved me, then dragged me to the others . . . where was Toliver? ... oh yes, he was
buried deep, where the wild animals would never touch him . . . "That's it! Abort!" Morrosco had shouted . . . Wiley's hands trembling, his eyes aflame with fear and anguish ... a bridge ablaze, Jackson's body torn apart; my fatxilt? ... a river, fresh water for my canteens, a look into another world . . . Jackson would never go home . . . but Prather was so sure, so cocky ... he simply disappeared.
My condition improved. I could hear and see and sit up for a while. I had a room alone. I learned to walk in the garden. An orderly befriended me.
"Would you find out about these guys for me?" I asked. I gave him their names. He returned, shrugging his shoulders. He had contacted personnel in Saigon, Nothing came back.
"Tell them to ask Colonel Stacey," I pleaded. "He'll know."
This time he had a reply.
"Stacey's no longer in Vietnam."
"Where is he?"
"He's retired."
"Where's he retired?"
"How the hell should I know?"
"Do me a favor. There's a thing called the Fr Fingers Exercise. China mission. Find out what yo can. I've got to know what happened."
He avoided me for ten days. One afternoon I caught him in a corridor.
"Did you learn anything?"
"Listen, mate. If you want to know about any exercise, you go find out for yourself. I got my ass in a crack asking questions."
"What did they say to you?"
"Look, I don't want to know anything more about what you or anybody else has been up to. Just leave me alone."
It was six months now. Six months my mind had been twisted by pain and drugs. Six thousand miles since I had lain beneath a helicopter, my body broken.
s
I had become a recluse, turned inward to find the answers denied me by others. I spent days trying to make sense of it until my head was burning with brain fever.
I finally accepted that the mission must have been genuine. Then someone in the Pentagon or the White House decided that d6tente was the better part of valor. As the man said, there had never been a mission like ours in China. There must have been good reasons. So we had to go. The Five Fingers were very special people, but the powers that be were going to push and keep pushing us until we faded out. It was like wringing a rag until there was nothing more to squeeze.
The only thing that had kept us alive so long was that we had seen ourselves being run out, and we had turned in upon ourselves, until we, alone, were responsible for our survival. We were in the shit on our own.
In the end ... it was a strange thing I thought about for many hours. Maybe we turned inward so deeply that we could not save ourselves when friendly hands had reached out to take us in. I could not pinpoint a single incident when we had not acted correctly, and yet . . . Surely there must have been shorter alternatives to the two-month journey out of China. We had been mad to look for help in South Vietnam; the area we entered was as contested as any in Southeast Asia, it was crawling with enemy.
By the end, we had had enough. I do not believe we could have walked away from that bare patch of ground on a hillside if the helicopters had not come. We could have taken no more.
Now I found myself clutching at small mercies. The fact that I had been blown out of Indochina meant that I did not have to go through the transition back to a normal world. That explosion closed a chapter, just like slamming a book. If I had walked out of that jungle and climbed into a helicopter whole and
intact, the pain would have been greater than a thousand surgeons' knives, the scars deeper than those lacerating my body.
Little by little, I began to forget. The only alternati
ve was to lose my mind. Days passed without a thought of the mission. More slowly were my nights freed of the terrible dreams. I decided to go away. Walk away from my past. Build a new life. Revenge? Even that lost its sharp edge as the months slipped by. I thought about going to the other side of the world. America. Maybe South Africa.
I was asleep in my room one hot January day. A young nurse shook me awake.
"There's someone to see you."
A very young, very cocky New Zealand adjutant strode in. Under his arm was a soft leather brief case.
"Good afternoon, Gayle," he said with an enormous forced smile.
"Hello, Captain," I said.
"Uh . .. Lieutenant," he corrected me.
I waited.
"I'm glad to see you looking so fit. I've been in several times to check on you, but you were either in therapy or asleep. The doctors tell me you are about fit to go."
I made no reply.
"Uh . . . first, I want to extend the deepest apologies from the New Zealand Government for having notified your parents that you had . . . died. Please extend my . . . uh . . . apologies for any suffering we may have caused. You are, of course, to be immediately discharged. Now you are qualified to receive a substantial disability pension. Or a cash settlement. I'm sure you'll want to think about that. When you know what vour plans are. Have you thought about your future?"
"Stav out of my life."
"Well.. . Gayle . .."
"Get me the cash."
"I'll be seeing you before you leave...."
I spent another month in the hospital. One day as I was walking in the garden, the adjutant turned up again. He gave me four thousand pounds in Singapore dollars.
"Where are my discharge papers?"
"Oh, those. They've been forwarded to your house."
"Do you want a receipt for the cash?"
"No... no..."
He gave me a one-way plane ticket to Hong Kong.
"I've put a suitcase in your room. Clothes as per your request. Call me when you're discharged from the hospital, and I'll have a car take you to the airport."
I flew to Jakarta. And from there to Hong Kong.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
gayle rivers (a pseudonym) was the youngest man on the team but second in command. His target was General Giap.
james Hudson was born in Dallas, Texas. After serving in the army, he studied at the Sorbonne and then took a job with The New York Times International Edition. He has been Paris Correspondent for two major Dallas newspapers, as well as a freelance journalist.
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