How Can You Mend This Purple Heart (12 page)

“I'm slipping, Doc!”

“Hold on, Ski. Let me get these up,” Doc said as he grunted and lifted the heavy plaster legs upward.

Ski scooted his ass away from the edge of the waiting abyss as far and as fast as he could.

“You okay, Ski?” Doc asked. “Damn, I'm sorry, Ski.”

Ski sat resting against the raised head of the bed, sweat dripping from his nose.

“I'm okay, Doc. Let's try eet again.”

“You sure? We can wait for another day.”

“Let's do eet.”

Ski took a drink from the water pitcher, took a deep breath, and Doc Miller cradled his plaster lower legs under both arms for a second try.

“You sure you're ready for this?” Doc asked.

“A Marine is aldways ready.”

Ski sat tall in the wheelchair, almost laughing with pride, the rubber heels on the bottom of his casts rested on the floor.

Doc Miller grabbed the crutches and handed them to Ski, smiling like someone about to become a new father.

Ski was about to stand upright for the first time since the explosion. He couldn't remember what it was like to be on his feet. His instincts told him it would be easy. Just grab the hand grips, thrust with your upper body, and push your legs upward. No sweat.

He made a fist around the padded hand grips and slowly began pushing upward as Doc supported him from the front. Ski was standing for the first time since his buddy tripped the booby trap wire five months ago. He looked at Doc Miller with gleaming hazel eyes and a toothless smile.

Suddenly, his smile collapsed, and his eyes squeezed into paper slits. His entire body began shuddering, not from his weakened physical state, but from the ground and air that he thought was thundering around him.

The blast of the land mine went off in his brain like a blinding inferno. It thundered through his head in white-hot pain. He was spitting at the metallic, smoky taste scraping his tongue. The flashback sent piercing shrapnel ripping through his legs and teeth; his nostrils were flaring from the phantom smells of pungent gunpowder and burning dirt.

Sweat came gushing from every pore of Ski's body. He flung the crutches into the air. Survival instincts and the razor edge of combat had taken over.

Doc Miller reached for him, but it was too late. Ski plummeted to the floor, crawling on his stomach and dragging his heavy plaster-covered legs under my bed. Doc raced to the cabinet to ready a hypodermic.

“My dlegs! My dlegs! Corpsman! Corpsman! Over here! I've been heet!”

The cries stabbed against my back from underneath my bed as I squirmed to reach down for Ski. He came crawling out on the other side, banging the rods against the floor and bumping his right cast into the nightstand.

The look on his face was that of a wounded animal. His eyes were glaring, searching with fear and pure survival. He was measuring his surroundings. His nostrils were making a slurry, sucking noise, and his jaws were locked so tight you could hear his teeth mesh. He was ready to kill anything and anybody that moved.

Then it was gone.

Ski slid forward, lying prone on the cold, hard floor, his face pushed against the nightstand, looking confused and bewildered.

It was only for an instant. The pain came rushing up his legs and into his consciousness like a fireball.

“Corpsman! Corpsman!” The cries for help bounced off the nightstand and echoed like an empty silo. Ski reached for the hole in his mouth where his front teeth used to be. “Corpsman!” he choked as his fingers probed for the back of his throat.

Earl Ray had not hesitated. He was over the rail of his bed and onto the floor and crawled under Ski's bed before Doc had taken five steps. He had moved so quickly, he almost beat Ski out from under my bed. The two were huddled together, Earl Ray leaning against the nightstand, his fellow Marine safe in his grasp.

Earl Ray was cradling Ski's head with his left half-arm, assuring him everything was okay. “It's over Ski. It's over. They can't get you here.”

Ski's lips formed the word “corpsman” again and again, but nothing came out. His breathing was hard and deep, his stomach heaving with convulsions.

Ski's dog tags and Star of David pendant had snapped from his neck and were coiled on the floor next to Ski. Earl Ray reached down and clutched the beaded chain in his right hand.

“It's over, Ski,” Earl assured him. “The bastards can't get you here.”

Doc was on his knees, leaning against Earl, injecting the hypodermic into Ski's arm. It was the good stuff. Ski's grip on Earl had relaxed, and Earl, through the pride and love of a fellow Marine, began brushing Ski's close-cropped hair, the dog tags and Star of David clanging happily below Earl Ray's elbow.

I was staring down in awe and wonderment. It was a selfless act of one man taking care of another. No hesitation, no questioning, nothing in return. It was the deepest connection between two human beings I've ever witnessed. Earl looked up at me, and I looked back with the stone-cold reality that I would forever be an outsider.

Doc Miller and two other corpsmen lifted Ski back into bed and Doc called down for the portable X-ray cart. He immediately began making out the report, being extra careful not to leave anything out.

Dr. Donnolly was on the ward as soon as he had finished in OR. Doc Miller had ordered the head corpsman in radiology to get the word about Ski's flashback and fall to Dr. Donnolly. For the large number of patients and the massive size of the U.S. Naval hospital, it was still a tight network of military efficiency that fostered immediate communications.

“How are you doing, Ski?” Dr. Donnolly asked, leaning over Ski and touching the casts over his legs as if to feel inside.

“Nawt too bad,” Ski responded in a sluggish voice.

“We need to take some X-rays right away, Ski. I have to see if anything serious is going on in there,” Dr. Donnolly said, almost apologizing. “That means we need to lift your legs up a bit. You ready to let us take a look?”

“A Marine is always ready,” Earl Ray said, sitting on the edge of his bed.

“Damn dright,” Ski whispered, trying to smile.

Dr. Donnolly ordered a dose of morphine. Several X-rays of both legs were snapped and hurried down for processing.

Earl Ray lay on his side, keeping an eye on his friend and brother-in-combat.

Ski slept restlessly over the next hour, fluctuating between the searing pain and the effective power of the drugs.

Dr. Donnolly came through the double doors holding a brown manila envelope marked with large red letters: RADIOLOGY. He pulled the cloth curtain around Ski's bed.

The ten minutes seemed like an hour. Dr. Donnolly pulled the curtains open and scribbled something in the bulging clipboard and quietly left the ward.

Ski looked over at Earl Ray and slowly toward me and back to Earl Ray.

“A Marine eez always ready,” he said.

Nothing was said the rest of the evening, and most of us just shoved our evening chow around the compartments of the metal food trays. Around 1800 hours, the nurse on duty came over to Ski's bed, and the worst of our thoughts and the shock of the reality for Ski, was taped to his bed frame—a small, square piece of blue paper with the letters “NPO.”

If you had been on Ward 2B for more than one day, you knew what it meant: Non Per Os, nothing by mouth—the first step in preparation for surgery the next day. Ski's supper turned cold in the food cart.

Early the next morning, Ski was readied for surgery, and he and his bed were rolled off the ward headed for OR and the amputation of the lower half of his right leg. He reached over and shook my hand. “Weesh me good luck.”

I couldn't say anything.

Earl Ray was sitting in his wheelchair and rolled over to Ski as they pushed his bed past him. He whispered to Ski and shook his hand.

The empty slot where Ski's bed had been looked like a gigantic hole in the ground. I hadn't realized, at least for me, how close we had become and how much I missed him being there. I prayed they would start his surgery and realize they had made a mistake.

It was around three in the afternoon when they brought Ski back to his place between Earl Ray and me. He was still very sluggish from the surgery and was puking up green bile from the anesthesia. Doc was the first to welcome him back to the ward. He took his vitals and helped him with a drink of water. Doc put his hand on Ski's shoulder and apologized for letting him down. “I'll make it up to you somehow, Ski,” he said as he slowly backed away and headed toward the green and white tiled entryway.

Earl Ray had spent the morning repairing Ski's dog tag chain and polishing the Star of David pendant. He slid down into his wheelchair and rolled slowly over to Ski. As he slipped the shiny metal beads over Ski's head, he took Ski's right hand and whispered, “Welcome to the club, my friend.”

Incoming!

THE SHINING BRIGHT
silver spokes and chrome handles flashed like sparklers as the foot pedals spun out of control just off the floor. Big Al came out of the third spin and touched down the front wheels with the precision of a fighter pilot landing on an aircraft carrier. The chair glided forward, took a lightning left turn, and rolled to a slow stop at the nurses' station desk.

“Incoming! Incoming!” he announced with the volume and diction of a court bailiff as he pushed the bulging envelope onto the nurses' station desktop. The envelope housed the paper trail of yet another young combatant, a reverse chronology of his journey from the jungle to the operating room. It was five inches of official procedure, a neat little package of all the critical details of his wounds, his surgeries, his amputations, and his chances of survival.

Big Al idled in front of the desk and flirted with Lt. Rowland, nurse-in-charge of the 1600-to-midnight duty.

Miss Rowland had a sure posture about her, perfectly upright with shoulders straight back and firm. Her long, gleaming hair, rolled up like thick folds of shiny black taffy, lay firmly pinned beneath a gold-braided nurse's cap. Her crisp white uniform fit her slim body with the same tightness as her posture. She was much too beautiful to be in here, and the sullen look in her eyes was much too mature for her young, lovely face.

Big Al would push as close as he would dare against the barrier between enlisted and officer, nurse and patient, with his flirting. Lt. Rowland would maneuver past the compliments with grace and with the same crispness of her uniform.

“You're too beautiful to be sitting in here all evening. You and me, Linda, we're meant to be. Fate put us here. You believe in fate? I do. Fate took my legs. Fate's gonna get 'em back for me. You get off at midnight, right? As fate would have it, I get off at midnight, too. So it's a date?”

“It's Lt. Rowland, Corporal Labonte.” It wasn't a put-down. Her voice was soft with just the right level of discipline. It was easy to sense her respect for these wounded young men but also her respect for military code. It wasn't just the uniform and the officer's gold braid across her nurse's cap that separated her from us; it was the total differences in family, education, affluence, opportunity, and fate.

“Yes, ma'am,” he half-apologized. “Al…I mean, Lance Corporal Labonte, requesting permission to leave, ma'am.”

“Permission granted—Al.”

She didn't notice Big Al's flirting wink. She hadn't looked up. She was suddenly flushed with an uneasy feeling about the patient soon to be an occupant on Ward 2B.

Lt. Rowland slowly opened the envelope and emptied the contents onto the desk, carefully keeping the history in order. The first two pages described the extent of the young man's injuries and instructions from the last attending doctor on the west coast.

Lt. Rowland read over the first page with the eye of a scientist examining a slide under a microscope. By the time she had reached the bottom of the page, her head and shoulders had slumped into the desk. She proceeded down page two, and her breathing became shallow and forced. Tears were blurring her ability to read, a reaction unexpected and unwelcome for a nurse and an officer.

She regained her composure and gently placed the stack of papers on the desk. The emotions that had betrayed her training were pushed below the surface, but the tell-tale traces still showed wet on her cheeks.

Big Al rolled slowly toward the young nurse, her posture now upright and shoulders square. “You okay, Miss Rowland?”

“Tell Corpsman Becker I'll be back in a few minutes. Tell him to have a new patient setup ready and shuffle some beds; I want this slot open.” She hurried down the ward and through the brown double doors.

Corpsman Becker was the head medic on second shift. He was in the back room steaming out a stack of bedpans. Big Al raced his wheelchair through the doorway and down the short corridor to where Corpsman Becker was finishing up.

“Miss Rowland left the ward, says she'll be back in a few minutes. Wants you to have a new setup ready. She's really upset. Cryin', too.”

“What's going on, Big Al? You drop off papers for incoming?”

“Yeah, he's supposed to be in pretty bad shape. I didn't read anything, but scuttle has it he's two above the knee and burned pretty bad.”

Corpsman Becker read over the new patient's papers: Corporal Jesse P. Hall, both legs blown off above the knees, multiple shrapnel wounds, and third-degree burns over eighty percent of his remaining body.

The latest arrival to Ward 2B was on his way up.

The Rotating Bed

THE SCUTTLEBUTT FLASHED
up and down the ward.

A new arrival was coming up from surgery, and the talk was phosphorous. Big Al scooted and zigzagged his way to the guys who couldn't hear the chatter easily and repeated what was being whispered across the ward.

“The guy coming up was hit with a mortar. Got stuck bad with phosphorous. Both legs out. Burned front and back,” Big Al repeated.