Last Man Out (21 page)

“You got any war souvenirs? VC flags, guns, that kind of thing?”

“Nope,” I said, but I had hope. This guy had a price. This guy would go.

Suddenly I had a thought and left without a word. In the ward I bent over awkwardly, pulled my fatigues from under the bed, and took the Purple Heart medal General Seaman had given me out of my pants pocket—dried blood was on the box—and carried it outside to Richardson.

“General Seaman gave me this Purple Heart,” I said, opening the box as if it were very special, “and I’ll give it to you if you take me to the 93d today. Twenty-five miles there, I’ll spend an hour with my buddy, and twenty-five miles back. No problem. You’ll have an interesting day, I’ll have an interesting day, and you’ll get a real trophy for the rest of your life. What do you say?”

Richardson examined the medal closely. He finally looked up and around to see if anyone was looking.

“Okay, go get dressed, we’ll go.”

“Get dressed?” I asked.

“You ain’t going like that, with your ass sticking out of that gown, are you?”

“No, I reckon I’m not,” I said, knowing that the only clothes I had were the bloody fatigues I was wearing when I was wounded.

Specialist Wallace, the needle man, watched me as I came back in and shuffled to my cot. I smiled at him, the fatigues at my feet. He must have noticed a change in my attitude and thought something was up. He started toward my cot.

“I wonder,” I asked in a friendly tone, “if there is a shuttle that runs from this aid station to the 93d Field Hospital? You know, a bus or something?”

“You can’t just check into any hospital you want to, you know. You’re here, you belong to me, I’m going to make you whole again. You can’t make no reservations at the 93d.”

“No, you don’t understand. A friend of mine is there, leaving tomorrow for the States. Got shot up pretty bad. Need to see him. Just over and back, that’s all. Shuttle?”

“No shuttle. The doctor has ordered bed rest for you until your wound has healed. Even if there was a shuttle, you couldn’t go. You can’t even sit down.”

“What if I were to catch a ride? Say, a helicopter ride over and back? What do you think? Would the major go along with it?”

“No,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Would you please go ask him? Just ask him if I could get a pass to go to the 93d. That’s all.”

“He’s going to say no,” Wallace assured me, but he turned and walked out of the tent.

After dressing in the latrine and slipping on my boots—the laces had been sliced by the hospital staff when I arrived—I shuffled down to the ambulance. The stitching hurt when it caught in my pants. Richardson started his Jeep and I walked around to the passenger side. Suddenly I realized that the corpsman was right—I couldn’t sit down. I went to the back and painfully climbed up. Some of the stitches came loose and blood ran down my leg. As I crawled onto a stretcher behind the passenger seat, the bleeding stopped.

Richardson jerked the Jeep into gear and I grabbed the stretcher like a rodeo rider. On the open dirt road he floored the accelerator and whipped around the first turn without braking. My legs flew off the stretcher and I ended up half on it and half off. Screaming in pain, I yelled for Richardson to stop while I got back on the stretcher.

“Personally, my friend, I’m not that interested in getting there, you know, real,
real
fast. Fast is good enough. So you don’t need to speed just for me, and the VC weren’t that good a shot anyway, they only got me in the ass,” I told him as I crawled back up on the stretcher.

Back moving again, we did not go slower, however, and we hit bumps with jarring thuds. Passing a slow-moving truck, Richardson whipped out to the left and I was slung off the stretcher again. Finally he stopped and tied a strap around my legs. Back on the road, he went as fast as he could, playing chicken with oncoming traffic all the way to the 93d Field Hospital. He parked, asked for my friend’s name, and went into the administration building.

When Richardson was gone, I tried to reach down and undo
the broad strap holding my legs, but as I turned around and stretched out my right arm, a stitch popped. I yelled from the pain, jerked my arm back, and threw the stretcher off balance. My upper torso fell to the floor and the stretcher turned on its side, although the foot end stayed on the bracket because of the strap around my legs. I was trapped, tied upside down in the ambulance.

“Aaaaaauuuuuuugggggg,” I was moaning when Richardson returned.

“You’re dangerous, you know that?” he said quietly. “You sure you didn’t shoot yourself?”

He helped me out and gave me the number of Pete’s ward. He said he would meet me in Pete’s Quonset hut in a couple of hours.

I found the right building and straightened my bloody, dirty fatigue uniform as best I could. Smiling, I walked in.

Classical music was coming from speakers on the wall. Concrete floors. Bright lights. Clean sheets. Metal bed frames with thick mattresses. Pretty nurses. Air-conditioning. Smiling people.

Pete was halfway down the aisle on the right. A nurse was sitting on the edge of his bed writing a letter for him. His right shoulder was covered with thick bandages. Sitting propped up, he was watching the nurse as she wrote. His hair was wet and combed.

“You son of a bitch,” I said softly.

He looked up, his face expressionless, and then he smiled.

“Well, goddamn,” he said after a moment. “You look like hell.”

“I’m alive, though,” I said and shuffled around the bed to grab his left hand.

“This guy is a good friend of mine,” Pete said to the nurse as he continued to look at me. “Can you look after him?”

They brought in a rolling dolly and squeezed it alongside Pete’s bed. When the nurse noticed my fresh blood, she insisted on looking at the wound and had my pants down to my knees in a matter of seconds. I said that I thought she had undressed men before.

While I lay there talking and laughing with Pete, she called for a couple of corpsmen and they restitched my wound.

Pete showed me the bullet taken out of his shoulder, which he
kept on a bedside table. Someone produced some champagne, and we drank it from bedpans, even though glasses were available.

A doctor came in and wanted to know if I was registered in that ward. I explained that I had just come over for the day from Division, which he took in stride and then he left.

Pete and I talked without stopping.

Finally I said, “Pete, I have something to say about that insurance, something that I’m terribly, terribly embarrassed about—sorry about.”

“What?” Pete asked.

“I, ah, I, ah …” I couldn’t get it out.

“What the hell is it? I know it’s something ’cause every time that insurance came up, you’d look away or change the topic. What is it?”

“I never sent in my change-of-beneficiary form. If I died, Mother would get the money.”

Pete looked at me without expression.

“But I want you to know, Pete, I want you to believe me on this, that when I thought you were dead, I made a solemn oath to send the insurance money to your mom. I swear. And I am so glad that I won’t have to do that.” I looked away. “I am so glad you’re alive.”

Pete smiled and looked away. Finally he said, “I got a letter from the insurance agent right before we left base camp. Our policies were canceled. War zone clause or something. His company doesn’t write policies on people who swallow swords or go fight wars.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Never had a chance.”

Richardson came back late in the afternoon. He said we had to be leaving so we could get back before dark. By then, most of the people in the ward were around Pete’s bed—telling stories, laughing with the nurses, drinking champagne.

I told Richardson it’d only be a few more minutes and invited him to have some champagne.

We continued with the bedside fellowship until Richardson said the “Richardson freight” left in five minutes.

I bounced my eyebrows, Pete smiled, and I crawled off the dolly.

As I started shuffling down the aisle Pete said, “Be careful. Your mother told me to tell you. Be careful.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Take care. See you in the States.”

“Hey, by the way,” Pete said suddenly, and I turned around. He reached under his bed, “Take this back with you.”

He pulled out a box and put it on the part of his chest that wasn’t covered with bandages. I returned to his bedside, and he extracted a bathroom scale.

“Momma sent this. Maybe she was thinking I was getting out of shape.” Pete handed me the scale with his good hand. “Put it by the bar.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, trying to think of something silly to add, but nothing came to mind.

Outside, Richardson strapped me in and I grabbed the stretcher. Racing the setting sun, we took off for Di An.

We arrived as the MPs were putting barricades across the road at the perimeter’s main entrance. Specialist Wallace and the doctor were standing in front of the tent when we approached. Both men walked toward us while Richardson unstrapped and helped me to the ground.

“There are several things here,” the major said, “that we need to talk about. Like AWOL. You were ordered to bed. No one authorized the dispatch of that ambulance. You’ve been nothing but a problem since you arrived.”

“Sorry,” I said, but my tone and the set of my jaw probably indicated that I didn’t care.

“I am going to discuss your case with the adjutant general. You can’t just take a vehicle like that and go out on unsecured roads. You are in my hospital ward and you answer to me. You understand?”

As I walked by them with Pete’s scale in my hands, I said, “Yes, sir.”

I put on the fresh gown lying by my bed. One of the men from the other end of the tent said in the half light, “Man, you are in some heavy shit. These people are mad.”

I didn’t respond as I awkwardly crawled onto my cot and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I put on my fatigues and
jungle boots with the cut laces, picked up Pete’s scale, and shuffled out the rear door of the tent. Ignoring the looks from other people, I crossed the busy intersection near the hospital tent and shuffled to the division helipad. I located the dispatcher and told him I was looking for a ride to the 1st Battalion 28th Infantry base camp.

At midday I was back in the company and ate lunch standing by a table in the back of the mess hall.

For the next ten days, as my wound healed, I worked at battalion operations. Standing by a battery of radios, I followed the movement of the battalion as it completed its sweep of the area near Cu Chi. On the night of 27 January, the VC attacked my platoon as it lay at rest in a defensive perimeter. Sergeant Rome was killed, blown apart by shrapnel.

Two days later the battalion returned by truck from Cu Chi. Woolley was the first off. I thanked him for getting to Peterson as fast as he did, but he said that Colonel Haldane and Sergeant Major Bainbridge were the first to get there. Pete was in the hospital at the 93d within an hour after he was shot.

“Pretty fast,” Woolley said, and then added with some suspicion, “like your return to battalion.”

“Sir, on that, ah, there may be some paperwork on the way,” I told him.

He shook his head. “I’m not surprised.”

My platoon clambered off another truck and walked by me, making comments about my wound. Spencer came by with the radio. “We been talking. That toilet seat you are so famous for, I think that VC knew about that toilet seat. Pissed him off. Someone carrying a toilet seat around ought to be shot in the ass. You know what I mean?”

Bratcher came over to me. The hospital staff had told him to go back to the base camp, but instead he had rejoined the platoon in the field. He was the acting platoon leader the night Rome was killed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know, a round came in on top of us, could have been ours, could have been theirs. Landed by Rome. He never heard nothing.”

That night when McCoy and Dunn came by the tent, we talked about the randomness of war.

“It is altogether a proposition of chance,” McCoy said. “Remember when we were talking on the USNS
Mann
about courage and presence of mind and that kind of shit. War for us grunts is none of that so much as it’s just pure luck. War—this war—has no heart, no rhyme or reason.” We got drunk that night, toasting our men who died at Cu Chi and to Pete’s safe exit to the States.

During the next few weeks, as my wound continued to heal, I stayed in the base camp and occasionally helped at the battalion S-3 (operations section) manning the radios. Someone had bought a chess set and McCoy I would play a game most evenings when he was in the base camp.

After Operation Crimp, my platoon was down to twenty-one men. Some of the wounded had been sent to the States, other men had left because their enlistments were up. We got few replacements because the limited reserve of infantrymen in the United States was used to fill out new units for deployment to Vietnam.

We collected Rome’s personal effects and sent them to Division so they could be forwarded to his next of kin. In preparing Patrick’s effects, however, Bratcher and I realized that his billfold and some other personal items must be with his body, which we assumed was in the morgue at Bien Hoa. I took a day trip down there to pick them up. Starting out by the brigade helipad at sunrise, I caught an early flight for Bien Hoa and was standing in front of the MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) field morgue later that morning. There was an unusual smell about the place—antiseptic and forbidding. When I walked into the reception area, I told a young corporal that I had come for the personal effects of one of my soldiers killed in mid-January and gave him Patrick’s name and service number. The corporal looked off into the distance for a moment and then reached for a field telephone on his desk. He was soon in lengthy conversation about what was Patrick’s and what wasn’t. He hung up and suggested that we go in the back.

We walked into the working area of the morgue. Six dead, nude GIs were laid out on marbletop tables. Other, unprocessed body bags lay in the rear. The concrete floor around some of the tables was covered with blood. A man was calmly hosing down the area. The morgue operators, wearing rubber boots, were
talking among themselves as I walked through. One or two apparently noted that I was trying not to lose my breakfast. My muscles froze and I walked awkwardly.