War Year (10 page)

“Can't say I did.” It
did
hurt a little, now that he mentioned it.

“Well, it's just a little one. I'll fix it up.” He took a big Band-Aid out of its paper covering and smoothed it over the wound. “Got your shot record in your wallet here?”

“I guess so.”

“Mind if I dig through and find it?”

“Hell, no, go ahead.” I wished he would just bandage me up and let me get some rest.

“Hmm… looks like I better give you a tetanus shot, just to be on the safe side.” He produced a big wicked-looking needle and poked it in my arm. Funny thing, I hardly felt it. I asked him about that.

“Why, son, you're chock full of morphine… don't you remember the medic giving you a shot?”

“No, I was passed out most of the time.”

“Oh. Well, that's why it doesn't hurt so bad. Let's take a look at these holes in you.” He took the bandage off my head, and laughed.

“Just got a little scratch on your earlobe here, son; that always bleeds like a stuck pig. Doesn't mean anything, though; it'll be fine in a day or so.”

He passed right over my arm and went to the large wound in my thigh. He started to untie the pressure bandage and some blood slopped out. “You're still leakin' a little bit there, partner—” He slapped a new pressure bandage on top of the old one and laced it tight “—but that one'll be okay, too, given time.” The only other one that was still bleeding was the one on my knee; he put a new pressure bandage on it, too. The others he just wrapped up with gauze and tape. He wrapped a tube around my arm and took my blood pressure, and then pulled out the needle that was dripping blood into my other arm.

“You're in pretty good shape, son, all things considered.” He took all the things out of my pockets and put them in a plastic bag. My wallet was covered with blood. He handed me the bag. “Now hang on to this until you get to the hospital in Tuy Hoa. They'll take it and lock it up for you, while you're in surgery.”

“They gonna have to operate?”

“Sure, son, you don't want to go through life looking like a piece of Swiss cheese—and after they sew you up, you'll take it easy in bed for a few weeks. Just read funny books and goose the pretty nurses as they go by.” He squeezed my shoulder and smiled. “You'll be all right, John.” And I wondered if that was what Willy said when he put me on the slick.

“Chavez! McGill!”

“Yessir?”

“Take Mr. Farmer up to the waiting room and manifest him on the next flight to Tuy Hoa.”

They took me to a large room with a bunch of empty stretchers and set me next to a table with a pile of
Reader's Digests.
I picked one up and leafed through it but had a hard time concentrating on the words. No need to give myself a headache on top of everything else. Besides, if I hit “Humor in Uniform,” I'd probably puke.

With nothing else to do, I couldn't help but concentrate on the pain. It wasn't so bad, with the morphine, as I remembered it had been, first off; but it was still there—deep now, bone-deep and throbbing. “Medic?”

A guy came over, chewing gum, carrying the latest
Playboy.
“Yeah, champ?”

“You got anything for pain?”

“Just Darvon. Y'want a coupla Darvon?”

“If that's all you've got.” He left for a minute and came back with two blue-and-gray capsules and a tiny cup of water.

“You don't wanna drink too much, now, not if yer goin' into surgery.” He would say that. I was thirsty as a bitch.

By the clock, it was thirty-five minutes before Chavez and McGill came back to get me. They picked up the stretcher and one of them asked, “You ever ridden on an ambulance, fren'?”

“Never have.” Ouch. My leg hurt every time either one of them took a step.

“Well, this will just be a short ride, but we'll put on the siren for you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don' mention it.”

They put me in the ambulance—it looked just like any other olive-drab army panel truck—and actually burned rubber on the dirt road, taking off. They switched on the siren. It might have been fun if I'd been in any condition to enjoy it.

There was a big bump—which hurt like hell—and we were on the airstrip, howling toward a C-130 that was all ready to go, engines roaring. They loaded me on and strapped my stretcher in place, and the plane was moving before the rear door had closed all the way.

I looked around. All the other people on the plane were sitting on the other side, perfectly well. There wasn't another wounded person on board—and for all the attention they paid to me, I could be just another piece of equipment. Thinking about it later, I guess that was all right. What did I want them to do? Stare?

TEN

The plane landed, not too gently, and there was an ambulance waiting for me. The ride in this one was just as fast and bumpy, but they didn't use the siren.

A couple of little Vietnamese unloaded my stretcher and jogged me down a covered sidewalk. The way they grunted and carried on, I was afraid they were going to drop me.

There was another building with bright fluorescent lights, this time aboveground. They put me on a table and a doctor came over (holding a clipboard, of course).

“John W. Farmer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me in your own words what happened.”

“We were walking down a trail… and the guy in front of me… stepped on a mine.”

“How do you know it was a mine?”

“Well, it sounded like one, you know, a little… pop before it went off. A ‘Bouncing Betty'”

“Did it kill the man who stepped on it?”

All of a sudden I could see Prof lying on the trail with his guts rolling out, throat split open, after all the shit we went through together… and it could just as well have been me. I couldn't make myself answer.

“He
is
dead, then, right?” I nodded.

He asked me other questions about my unit, rank, and so on. While he was quizzing me an honest-to-God woman came over and cut away my dressings. She was about as old as my mother. Her touch was very gentle, but it still hurt when she peeled the dressings off.

She hooked my arm up to a bottle that said “Penicillin 10 million units USP”—I guess that was a super-shot of penicillin. Must have been at least a quart.

Then one of the Vietnamese rolled me away, stretcher, table, bottle, and all. We went down the sidewalk about a block, and through double doors marked POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE. I wondered whether the Vietnamese could read English.

He rolled me up to a white table under a huge X-ray machine. A medic in a green tunic was talking on the phone.

“Right. He just got here. Okay… bye.” He hung up.

“Well, Mr. John W. Farmer. Ready to get zapped by the Monster Machine?”

“Ready as ever, I guess.”

“Hmm, that bottle's going to complicate things a bit.” It was hanging on a rack attached to the rolling table. “We'll see what we can do, though.” He motioned to the Vietnamese, and the two of them lifted me onto the cold enamel under the machine. “Now, we'll do the hard one first. Keep your arm stretched out so you don't pull the needle out, and roll over on your left side. Kick your good leg out to the left. Good. Hold it.” He moved the machine around until the nose, a yellow plastic cone, was pointed at the biggest wound. It would have been an uncomfortable position even if I wasn't shot full of holes. He turned to the Vietnamese.
“Di di! Di di mao!”

I don't know much Vietnamese, but I know that
“di di”
means “get outa here” and
“di di mao”
means “get the
fuck
outa here.” The boy left in a hurry.

“Now hold real still until I tell you. Good.” He went off into another room and flicked a switch. The machine hummed for a few seconds. “Okay,” he said, and came out of the room. Then he took pictures in two other, slightly more comfortable, positions.

He poked his head out the door and said something in Vietnamese I didn't understand. The boy came back in, they put me on the cart, and he wheeled me another couple of blocks.

We went into another building marked NO ADMITTANCE. It was air-conditioned, deliciously cool inside. We went down a hall and into a gray room. The only other patient was a Vietnamese with his arm in a bloody sling, screaming. A medic was sitting at a desk, ignoring him.

The boy wheeled me into position next to the screaming Vietnamese (who was a soldier, or at least wore battle fatigues). The medic filled a needle from a little bottle and came over to me. “You just get X-rayed?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, this little shot'll make you feel better. You
are
John W. Farmer, aren't you?” He poked the needle into my arm.

“Right.” Twenty Questions again.

“Yeah. Well, I'm gonna shave yer leg, so the doc won't hafta look at all that hair.” He soaped up an old shaving brush and lathered my leg. The Vietnamese soldier kept screaming.

“Look, shouldn't you be doin' something for that guy?”

“Nah. He's shot so fulla dope he can't be feelin' any pain. He's an enemy, though, NVA trooper they caught up by Kontum. Guess he thinks we're gonna torture 'im.” Then I saw that he was strapped down, the buckles all out of his reach.

It's funny, I never could get up much hate for the enemy. Like I say, this is Johnson's fuckin' war, let him fight it. But I can't say I felt too bad about that guy, screaming bloody murder over a bullet in the arm. In fact, I'd rather have seen him lying on a jungle trail with his throat ripped out and giblets dribbling all over the ground. He couldn't have been the guy who buried the mine, not if they caught him in Kontum—but he'd do until the real thing came along.

The medic finished shaving me and I started to get a little woozy. Thought that shot was supposed to make me feel
better.
At least my ears were ringing so loud I could hardly hear the guy screaming, if he still was. For some reason, I couldn't focus on anything more than a few feet away.

The medic rolled me down to the other end of the room and through a door and into a room that seemed much darker and cooler. I remember an old guy with white hair and big bushy white eyebrows, wearing a green surgical mask, leaning over me, then everything shrunk away and I was out cold.

I woke up struggling against the straps that held me in bed, shouting and crying. A pretty little nurse held my hand and dabbed at my face with a piece of cotton.

“It's all over, soldier. You're gonna be just fine.”

Nobody ever called me “soldier” before. But the way she said it, it was nice. She must have given me a shot—the world sprang into focus and I was wide awake. The first thing I saw was a big red NO SMOKING sign.

I looked up at her and asked, “Got a cigarette?”

“See what I can find.” I watched her walk away. The white uniform was tight enough to give her a nice swivel.
That
was something I hadn't seen for a few months. Not that I'd stopped thinking about it.

She rummaged around in a desk drawer and came up with a stale pack of Kents. She brought them over with an ash tray and a pack of matches. First civilian matches I'd seen in a long time—they had a tomato sauce ad on the front and a recipe inside. I lit up, about the best cigarette I'd ever had.

She had gone back to her desk. “Say, is it all right if I undo these straps?”

“Sure. Just don't try to run around the block.” She smiled. Jesus Christ.

I unbuckled the straps and looked under the sheet. All I was wearing was one big roll of bandage from ankle to crotch. There was a dark brown bloodstain on my thigh, over the largest wound. The whole thing ached, but I can't say that it bothered me too much.

“GI… ay, GI.”

There was a Vietnamese strapped in the bed next to me. I didn't recognize him at first, because he was wearing blue pajamas. Then I saw the cast on his arm and knew he must be the NVA who was carrying on so much earlier. He made smoking motions, quick little jerks with an imaginary cigarette.

I lit one up and passed it to him—not the easiest trick in the world, with both of us all tangled up in tubes and bottles.

“
Cam on ong
,” he said. “
Toi la ban
.”

I didn't catch most of that, but “come on” means thanks. Didn't know how to say “you're welcome” or anything, so I just nodded and leaned back in bed and smoked, watching the chick shuffle papers around her desk.

Whatever kept the leg from hurting wore off real fast. “Ma'am?”

“What would you like?” She smiled again. God damn.

“Can you give me something for the pain?”

She looked at her watch, and at a clipboard on the wall. “Not for another half-hour, I'm afraid. You could have a couple of Darvon, but I don't think they'd help much.”

“Anything's better than nothing.” Actually, I just wanted to see her walk again.

I took the Darvon and chain-smoked for a half-hour. Then she came over again and gave me a shot. It stopped hurting before she even had the needle out, and I was asleep in a minute or two.

I dreamed that the NVA next to me was chasing me down a jungle trail, throwing lit cigarettes at me. My pack was full of blasting caps.

Somebody shook me awake; it turned out to be the medic who had shaved my leg earlier. “Wanna sleep yer life away, Farmer? It's breakfast time.”

“Oh, man, go away.” The leg was throbbing.

“Here, lemme crank you up.” He turned a crank at the foot of the bed and the top half rose to put me halfway into a sitting position. “You'll feel better once y'get some chow inside.”

The bed next to me was empty. “Where'd my buddy go?”

“Him? Oh, they took 'im to the POW ward last night. Here comes the chuck wagon.”

A big Negro with a white uniform pushed a stainless-steel food cart down the aisle. “How 'bout some bacon an' eggs?”