by T. L. Gould
“Welcome to Q, Shoff!” Moose bellowed. “You got that bunk because we don’t want someone we don’t know sleeping too close to us. Besides, you can stand watch over this end of the ward from up there.”
“No one gets past that you don’t want to get past,” I said. My face beamed with pride knowing they trusted me with such an honor.
“Big Al’s straight across the ward, next to my bunk, just inside the doors,” Moose pointed. “Ski has the bunk above him, and Bobby Mac and Roger have the bunk next to Big Al.”
“Just one big happy fucking family!” Bobby Mac laughed. “Maybe we can finally have that by-God family reunion.”
“I bunk right here, Shoff,” Earl Ray said as he rolled his wheelchair into the wide space separating my bunk and his. “This locker is yours,” he commanded, thumping the double green doors with his good hand. “The other locker is for the bottom bunk under you. We don’t want anyone in that bunk, for now.” Earl climbed from his chair onto the gray wool blanket of the lower bunk about five feet from mine. “May as well make yourself at home, Shoff. We’re going to be in this shithole for a while.”
The locker was four times too big for the meager bundle of possessions any one of us would have. The uniform on the rehabs was still the blue and white-striped pajamas, and we stuffed the drawers with as many fresh sets as we could gather. Seldom, if ever, did anyone wear a military uniform, so most of the hangers in the upper closet swung empty. The hanger pipe was one more thing not thought out too clearly; it was too high for most guys to reach. Below the hanger closet was an open shelf about waist-high. It was just the right size for Earl Ray to keep the photograph of Jennifer Ann Cooley. He would look at her photograph often, but never mention her name.
Very little effort was ever made to make the rehab wards “military.” No inspections, no brass, no hospital staff. The only regulation requirement was roll call on Monday mornings. If you needed any medical assistance, you went through sick bay. Q Ward would be the last stop before an honorable discharge and release to a place called home, wherever that might be.
A military code of respect for one another and respect for others’ space and personal belongings dictated our conduct. The rules had been engrained in our psyche beginning with the rigors of boot camp, the discipline demanded of living in the confined spaces of barracks, and for everyone but me and Roger, surviving in combat together.
No official duties were assigned except for one’s commitment to getting physically fit and physically fitted for artificial limbs.
Physical therapy came as an order from Dr. Donnolly. It was one of the rare times he would mention rank and the possibility of punishment if his orders weren’t followed.
Physical therapy and occupational therapy schedules were followed like clockwork, but like everything else, some guys made greater efforts and faster progress than others. For those who might look like slackers, it was really a way to delay the inevitable.
PT and OT were places to learn how to put a pair of pants on over new legs, how to Ace wrap a stump, how to button a shirt with one hand and one hook, how to shave, how to hold a fork and spoon, get out of a wheelchair and sit on a toilet, take a shower with no legs under you, brush your teeth and comb your hair, make your bed and fold your clothes, how to put a shoe on a plastic foot, strap an artificial arm or leg harness to your shoulders, and how to walk again.
The rehab wards gave guys time and personal space to re-learn everything that used to be routine. Frustration could be heard by the crashing of a wooden leg being slammed to the floor or a hooked forearm being smashed against a locker door.
Every evening, the artificial legs and arms were removed and the stump areas were wrapped with elastic bandages to keep the swelling down. A swollen stump meant you couldn’t get a leg or an arm back on in the morning for PT or for getting the hell out of that wheelchair for a while.
Legs were usually stored standing upright, “on foot,” at the side of the bed, and the arms were hung over the bottom rail at the foot of the bunk.
Getting up in the morning to shit, shower, and shave could take some guys more than two hours. The shower area was one big open space with ten showerheads, all at a height of about five and half feet. If ten guys were taking a shower at the same time, well, you just took a shower with nine other guys.
Wheelchairs were parked in the open space just inside the bathroom. Those with one or both legs missing would sit in one of the plastic chairs under a showerhead. We helped anyone needing or wanting a lift from his wheelchair into the plastic chair and back into his wheelchair again.
Eight sinks with small mirrors above each one lined a cream-colored tile wall. Guys would roll from the shower up to the sink and shave, comb their hair, and brush their teeth.
Big Al got tired of us having to lift him into and out of the plastic chairs, so we stole a wheelchair from the supply room near the mess hall. He would transfer from his own chair and roll the permanently borrowed chair directly under the showerhead. When he finished, he would climb back into his own chair and leave the other chair next to the toilet wall. It rusted a little around the spokes, but some WD-40 from the maintenance supply closet kept it rolling. We permanently borrowed five more wheelchairs and kept them ready by the toilet wall for the other guys who wanted to take a shower without relying on someone to lift him into the plastic chairs.
“I’m taking a piss today,” Earl Ray said.
“You take a piss every day,” Moose replied.
“This time I’m standing up. I’m tired of sitting down to piss like a girl.”
“Go for it, man,” Bobby Mac laughed.
“I need you guys nearby…just in case.”
Earl spent the next half-hour putting his three limbs on, and we followed him to the open entryway toward the waiting urinal.
A full-length mirror fastened to the wall near the entryway glared back the passing reflections like flashes on a camera. Eye contact with the mirror was avoided by everyone, even though the shrinks insisted it was “good therapy.”
Earl Ray showed them what he thought of their therapy. As he wheeled into the head to take that piss—standing up—he glanced over at the mirror. He took a deep breath and slowly turned to face the reflecting glass. He squinted and then opened his eyes wide as he looked straight into the mirror. Looking back was the person he had never seen. He saw himself for the first time, sitting in his skivvies, his body as much plastic as it was flesh.
He spit at the mirror—not at his reflection, but at the mirror.
His determination to stand up and piss in a urinal was not dampened by what he had just seen in the mirror. Earl Ray rolled his chair up to the first urinal and with near flawless execution, he grabbed the support rail with his right hand, lifted himself from the chair, leaned his weight onto his plastic left arm, got his balance on his new legs, pulled his dick out, and took a good, long piss standing up.
“Told you, Shoff,” he said as his body dropped itself into the wheelchair.
“I never doubted it, Earl.”
He didn’t look back into the mirror as he rolled passed it on his way back onto Q. He didn’t even stop by his bunk to put clothes on. He left the ward wearing only his underwear and plastic limbs and rolled down to physical therapy. He returned a few minutes later with a five-pound dumbbell weight in his lap.
Earl Ray rolled straight over to the mirror where he beat it into a thousand pieces with the cast iron disc.
“Dumb fucking shrinks.”
Say a Little Prayer
WEEKENDS ON Q WARD were left to do nothing. If you were lucky, your parents or girlfriend lived close enough to get you off the ward for a couple of days. Sometimes a buddy would invite someone else to tag along. You could leave on Friday afternoon and not return until muster on Monday morning.
Getting off the ward and getting out into the real world was encouraged, and being back “on base” for roll call Monday mornings wasn’t even mandatory. If you were a no-show, you w
ere listed as AWOL, but nothing ever happened—even if you didn’t show up until Wednesday afternoon. It was military limbo, but most guys followed the rules.
We still had open prescriptions, and we never failed to pick up our weekly supply of painkillers. Some guys had broken free of the Darvon hook, but they would continue to pick up their sixty pills in a bottle and sell them to anyone for five bucks or a carton of cigarettes.
Ski, Roger, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the concrete patio while the other guys were at PT. Our own physical therapy certainly was not at the level of Earl Ray’s, Moose’s, and Bobby Mac’s. Ski’s left leg had healed completely, and his right leg had healed quicker than most guys. He was walking on the wooden masterpiece as natural as his muscular left leg.
Roger continued to go to the PX and deliver goodies to the new arrivals on 2B. Ski continued to make an occasional trip with Roger, but I never went back after my second trip. Ward 2B seemed like a foreign place, and I couldn’t shake the intense guilt waiting for me on the other side of the brown double doors.
On one of his trips to 2B, Roger got word of a Marine on 4A who had died and had no real family. His body was to be held in the morgue until someone could prove he was a relative or authorities from his hometown could arrange for his burial.
“We’ll go to the morgue and hold a service for him,” Moose said.
“What’s his name?” Big Al asked.
“Don’t know,” Roger responded. “All I know is they can’t find his family.”
“Shit, he could be a relative,” Bobby Mac laughed. “Maybe my old man could claim him.”
“I know the guys who run the morgue,” Moose said. “We’ll go tonight.”
It was around ten o’clock when Moose led us from Q Ward down the dim corridor to the area of the morgue. Big Al leaned forward and grasped the handles of Earl Ray’s wheelchair as I grasped the handles of Big Al’s chair and pushed the two along. Roger was standing in front of us, holding onto the handles of Ski’s chair, with Moose and his chair rolling in front of Ski.
Moose had called the corpsman from the wall phone on Q and made the arrangements for our entry. The lock to the shiny, metallic door had been left open. We pulled cautiously against the heavy barrier as the cold air rushed out onto our faces. It looked and felt like a walk-in freezer, like the one at the old restaurant in Missouri.
We followed Moose and the small beam from his flashlight into the cold pitch-black room. The two-inch band of frost around the edges of the six metal drawers sparkled like white ribbons wrapped around gift boxes. The blue-white cold smoked from our nostrils, and an icy chill covered the bare metal arms and wheels of the four chairs.
“He’s in here,” Moose motioned to the fifth drawer down the wall.
“Did you get a name?” Earl Ray asked.
“Yeah,” Moose whispered as he pulled the handle on the drawer. “I got a name.”
A screeching of metal against ice, like the nightmare cries of 2B, shrilled from the black square hole of the horizontal chamber as the sliding tray and its sleeping passenger slowly glided into the waiting beam of light.
“God dammit,” Earl Ray sagged.
The left side of Mike Bower’s face cast a bluish moonlight glow from Moose’s flashlight. The mangled right side of his face had been packed with cotton, and his right arm had been amputated just below the shoulder.
“God dammit,” Earl Ray said as he reached over and touched Mike Bower on the left cheek.
Moose told us all we would say a prayer, any prayer, or we weren’t getting out. “I don’t care what you say, just as long as you say something.”
We took turns stumbling through whatever words we could get out. Earl Ray waited until the rest of us had finished. He rolled as close as he could get to the Navy corpsman and leaned into the waxen face of Mike Bower.
“We’ll meet again, my friend. Someday soon.”
Pappy the Sailor Man
“HOW’S IT GOING?” I asked the stranger in the funny uniform who had just appeared on Q Ward through the side doors. He stared at the sight of Q as if he had stumbled into Hell.
“Doing okay,” he half-whispered. His sailor-like uniform was tailored to his small but strong frame. I wasn’t sure of the branch of service. His kid-like face contradicted the more than four years in the military denoted by the red stripe on the sleeve of his blue jumper. A funny Donald Duck-like cap shifted restlessly from his right hand to his left. A white plaster cast covered his left thumb and forearm.
“Uh,” he said with a nervous grin. “I’m supposed to bunk here for a couple of weeks. They sent me out here and told me to find an empty bunk. Is this the right place?” He looked from side to side as if he were hoping someone would say no.
“Well, fuck yeah!” Bobby Mac jumped in. “Anybody that’s got a four-year stripe on his arm is welcome on Q! You look like you just seen a fucking ghost!” he howled. “C’mon on in. Grab any bunk as long as it ain’t mine.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Is anywhere okay?”
“You got two full legs and both arms, you take a top bunk,” Moose said as he coasted his wheelchair over to the stranger.
“That’s not a problem,” he said, looking at anything but Moose’s left arm stump and three-quarter leg.
“What’s your first name?” Moose asked, pointing with his stump to the “Richards” stenciled in white letters on the black name tag.
“Sonny,” he replied.
“Well, Sonny Richards, what kind of uniform is that you’re wearing?” Moose asked.
Earl Ray had locked his wheelchair in place about three feet from the intruder.
“It’s Coast Guard,” he said, looking back at the side doors as if he were planning an escape.
“You’re fucking Coast Guard?” Earl Ray shot. “Jesus Christ, we got us one more non-combat motherfucker. You’re in a world of shit. Just ask Shoff.”
“Uh, I don’t have to bunk here, guys, if it’s going to be a problem.”
“Bullshit!” Bobby Mac howled. “We don’t really give a shit what you do. You’re in here now, and that’s that.”
“Don’t mind Earl,” Ski said. “He’ll be okay weeth it.”
“You sure it’s okay? I can bunk somewhere else,” he said, trying desperately not to look at anyone’s stumps.
“You’ve come to the right place, my friend,” Bobby Mac assured him. “Let me give you a hand with that duffle bag.”
“Sure, uh, thanks,” he stammered.
With that, Bobby Mac took off his plastic hand and tossed it to Sonny Richards. The poor guy just stood there holding Bobby’s hand as if it were a ten-legged spider.
“Ain’t that some shit!” Bobby Mac howled. “We just fixed you up with a good hand!”
“Here, give me that thing,” Moose said as he grabbed it and tossed it back to Bobby Mac. “What brings you here, anyway?”
“Busted my hand at a training exercise here in Philly. I’ve got two or three weeks of physical therapy to get out of the way.”
“If they’re telling you two to three weeks, you may as well plan on two months,” Big Al said, squatting in his wheelchair next to Moose. Sonny Richards stared at the floor.
“Why the hell did you come through the side doors?” Earl Ray demanded.
“Well,” Sonny Richards said, turning away toward the doors. “That’s where I parked my car.”
“You fucking what!” we all sang in unison.
“Yeah, I drove. My car’s sitting right outside.”
We all scrambled over to the side doors as if a meteor had fallen from the sky.
“Ain’t that some shit!” Bobby Mac shouted.
There it was: an old four-door Buick sedan, its faded dark blue paint chipping away from the fenders. It was beautiful; a full-length luxury limousine if we ever saw one.
“Son of a bitch,” Moose said. “Our prayers have been answered. Come on in. We’ve got just the bunk for you, my friend.”
Sonny Richard
s sat on the bottom mattress three bunks down from the side doors and emptied the contents of his duffle bag.
“How long you been in the Coast Guard?” Moose asked.
“Just over seven years.”
“Shit, man, you don’t look old enough to be out of high school,” Bobby Mac said.
“Yeah, I’ll be twenty-eight my next birthday.”
“No shit! You’re an old bastard!” Bobby Mac hooted. “By God, we’ll just call you Pappy! Pappy the sailor man!”
Pappy settled in and was eager to do anything he could for the guys on Q. He had an easy smile, like Big Al’s, and a quirky, naïve innocence for a guy who was almost thirty. He didn’t say much and seldom offered conversation unless he was directly asked a question. He stayed as private as anyone could on Q, pretty much kept to himself, and other than breakfast in the mess hall and his early morning physical therapy, we never saw him on the ward during the day. He would get in that old Buick sedan and disappear until evening chow. Occasionally, he would hang around on the ward, but only if we asked him to join a card game or just sit and bullshit awhile. He offered to drive anybody, anywhere, anytime. Pappy, with his old faded blue Buick four-door sedan, became our chauffeur, our taxi, and our official bootlegger for the next several weeks.
Pappy had two important missions. On Sundays, we would take up a collection, and Pappy and a couple of other guys would make a beer run over to New Jersey. Pappy had found a bar that would sell him beer in half-gallon, wide-mouth plastic jugs, packaged in cardboard boxes—four jugs to a box. It was usually a little warm by the time he got it back to the patio off Q Ward, but it made for some great late Sunday afternoon distractions.
Pappy’s first—and most important—mission was to carry Earl Ray and the rest of our small group of rabble-rousers away to temporary freedom from the stifling isolation and repetitive monotony of life on Q.