Pounding, pounding, he’s pounding his fist into his chest. “Get the machine!” screams the corpsman.
The nurse is pulling the machine across the hangar floor as quickly as she can now. They are trying to put curtains around the whole thing, but the curtains keep slipping and falling down. Everyone, all the wounded who can still see and think, now watch what is happening to the pilot, and it is happening right next to me. The doctor hands the corpsman a syringe, they are laughing as the corpsman drives the syringe into the pilot’s chest like a knife. They are talking about the Green Bay Packers and the corpsman is driving his fist into the black man’s chest again and again until the black pilot’s body begins to bloat up, until it doesn’t look like a body at all anymore. His face is all puffy like a balloon and saliva rolls slowly from the sides of his mouth. He keeps staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. “The machine! The machine!” screams the doctor, now climbing on top of the bed, taking the corpsman’s place. “Turn on the machine!” screams the doctor.
He grabs a long suction cup that is attached to the machine and places it carefully against the black man’s chest. The black man’s body jumps up from the bed almost arcing into the air from each bolt of electricity, jolting and arcing, bloating up more and more.
“I’ll bet on the Packers,” says the corpsman.
“Green Bay doesn’t have a chance,” the doctor says, laughing.
The nurse is smiling now, making fun of both the doctor and the corpsman. “I don’t understand football,” she says.
They are pulling the sheet over the head of the black man and strapping him onto the gurney. He is taken out of the ward.
The Korean civilian is still screaming and there is a baby now at the end of the ward. The nurse says it has been napalmed by our own jets. I cannot see the baby but it screams all the time like the Korean and the young man without any legs I had met in the ambulance.
I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. The corpsman is telling the baby to shut the hell up and there is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him where the black pilot has just died, right next to me. He has thick bandages wrapped all around his head till I can hardly see his face at all. He is like a vegetable—a nineteen-year-old vegetable, thrashing his arms back and forth, babbling and pissing in his clean white sheets.
“Quit pissin’ in your sheets!” screams the corpsman. But the nineteen-year-old kid who doesn’t have any brains anymore makes the corpsman very angry. He just keeps pissing in the sheets and crying like a little baby.
There is a Green Beret sergeant calling for his mother. Every night now I hear him. He has spinal meningitis. He will be dead before this evening is over.
The Korean civilian does not moan anymore. He does not wave his one arm and two fingers above his head. He is dead and they have taken him away too.
There is a nun who comes through the ward now with apples for the wounded and rosary beads. She is very pleasant and smiles at all of the wounded. The corpsman is reading a comicbook, still cursing at the baby. The baby is screaming and the Armed Forces radio is saying that troops will be home soon. The kid with the bloody stumps is getting a morphine shot.
There is a general walking down the aisles now, going to each bed. He’s marching down the aisles, marching and facing each wounded man in his bed. A skinny private with a Polaroid camera follows directly behind him. The general is dressed in an immaculate uniform with shiny shoes. “Good afternoon, marine,” the general says. “In the name of the President of the United States and the United States Marine Corps, I am proud to present you with the Purple Heart, and a picture,” the general says. Just then the skinny man with the Polaroid camera jumps up, flashing a picture of the wounded man. “And a picture to send to your folks.”
He comes up to my bed and says exactly the same thing he has said to all the rest. The skinny man jumps up, snapping a picture of the general handing the Purple Heart to me. “And here,” says the general, “here is a picture to send home to your folks.” The general makes a sharp left face. He is marching to the bed next to me where the nineteen-year-old kid is still pissing in his pants, babbling like a little baby.
“In the name of the President of the United States,” the general says. The kid is screaming now almost tearing the bandages off his head, exposing the parts of his brain that are still left. “. . . I present you with the Purple Heart. And here,” the general says, handing the medal to the nineteen-year-old vegetable, the skinny guy jumping up and snapping a picture, “here is a picture. . . ,” the general says, looking at the picture the skinny guy has just pulled out of the camera. The kid is still pissing in his white sheets. “. . . And here is a picture to send home. . . .” The general does not finish what he is saying. He stares at the nineteen-year-old for what seems a long time. He hands the picture back to his photographer and as sharply as before marches to the next bed.
“Good afternoon, marine,” he says.
The kid is still pissing in his clean white sheets when the general walks out of the room.
I am in this place for seven days and seven nights. I write notes on scraps of paper telling myself over and over that I will make it out of here, that I am going to live. I am squeezing rubber balls with my hands to try to get strong again. I write letters home to Mom and Dad. I dictate them to a woman named Lucy who is with the USO. I am telling Mom and Dad that I am hurt pretty bad but I have done it for America and that it is worth it. I tell them not to worry. I will be home soon.
The day I am supposed to leave has come. I am strapped in a long frame and taken from the place of the wounded. I am moved from hangar to hangar, then finally put on a plane, and I leave Vietnam forever.
2
THE BUS TURNED off a side street and onto the parkway, then into Queens where the hospital was. For the first time on the whole trip everyone was laughing and joking. He felt himself begin to wake up out of the nightmare. This whole area was home to him—the streets, the parkway, he knew them like the back of his hand. The air was fresh and cold and the bus rocked back and forth. “This bus sucks!” yelled a kid. “Can’t you guys do any better than this? I want my mother, I want my mother.”
The pain twisted into his back, but he laughed with the rest of them—the warriors, the wounded, entering the gates of St. Albans Naval Hospital. The guard waved them in and the bus stopped. He was the last of the men to be taken off the bus. They had to carry him off. He got the impression that he was quite an oddity in his steel frame, crammed inside it like a flattened pancake.
They put him on the neuro ward. It was sterile and quiet. I’m with the vegetables again, he thought. It took a long while to get hold of a nurse. He told her that if they didn’t get the top of the frame off his back he would start screaming. They took it off him and moved him back downstairs to another ward. This was a ward for men with open wounds. They put him there because of his heel, which had been all smashed by the first bullet, the back of it blown completely out.
He was now in Ward I-C with fifty other men who had all been recently wounded in the war—twenty-year-old blind men and amputees, men without intestines, men who limped, men who were in wheelchairs, men in pain. He noticed they all had strange smiles on their faces and he had one too, he thought. They were men who had played with death and cheated it at a very young age.
He lay back in his bed and watched everything happen all around him. He went to therapy every day and worked very hard lifting weights. He had to build up the top of his body if he was ever going to walk again. In Da Nang the doctors had told him to get used to the idea that he would have to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He had accepted it, but more and more he was dreaming and thinking about walking. He prayed every night after the visitors left. He closed his eyes and dreamed of being on his feet again.
Sometimes the American Legion group from his town came in to see him, the men and their wives and their pretty daughters. They would all surround him in his bed. It would seem