One Man's War (10 page)

Just as the helicopter began to descend to the white-painted landing circle on the tarmac, the engine sputtered and died. The bird flailed, the nose suddenly dropping downward. The deadly silence was filtered by the whooshing of the blades. Tess gave a cry, her hands pressed hard against her lips. At the last possible moment, the nose was yanked upward, the helicopter's dying blades found an invisible cushion of air as they sluggishly flailed around and around. Instead of crashing, the helicopter steadied, caught the last bit of available air in the autorotation mode and sank with a loud clanking sound onto the apron.

Tess stood shakily watching as men ran forward with hoses, spreading foam retardant across the nose of the aircraft to put out the smoke and flames in the engine compartment. Her gaze was riveted to the cockpit where she saw only one man moving. The other man was slumped in his seat, held by an array of harnesses, his helmeted head against his chest. Who was it? Pete? His copilot, Joe Keegan? She didn't know.

For the next five minutes, Tess lived in a hellish limbo. Once the smoke and flames were extinguished, an ambulance hurriedly backed up to the fuselage door. Only one of the three men was moving around in the helicopter. She saw navy corpsmen scrambling from the truck to the helicopter to get to the wounded men. Was Pete one of them?

The wait was excruciating. After the ambulance careened away, siren screaming as it headed for the nearest MASH unit tent complex, Tess saw Gib get out of a jeep in front of the line shack. His face was gray, his eyes dark.

“Pete?” Tess asked as he drew up to her.

“They're all wounded,” he muttered as he gripped her arm. “They're going over to the MASH unit, Tess. I'm going over now to see how they are.”

“How bad is Pete?”

“He was the least injured, I think. I don't know how bad or good, Tess. There was blood everywhere inside that bird...on the crew.... I just don't know.”

“I'm going over there. I've got to see Pete.”

“No.”

“Let me go, Gib.”

He gave her a doleful look. “That's no place for you, Tess.”

“It's no place for anyone!” Tess cried, pulling her arm out of his grasp. “I like Pete. I care for him. I want to know how he is!”

Stunned, Gib stared at her. He started to protest, then shrugged. His face mirrored his own exhaustion. “Okay, you can come with me. But just wait outside until they get them stabilized. Lieutenant Commander Leslie Simmons is the head of OR over there. I'll try and find her. She'll answer any questions we have.”

Tess could see the surprise and question in Gib's eyes at her concern for Pete. She'd told no one of the feelings boiling up inside her. How could she have? This crisis had only just revealed the real truth to herself. She smiled weakly and leaned over, giving Gib a hug. “Let's go.”

* * *

Pete was sitting on a gurney in the emergency section of OR when he saw Tess walking hurriedly toward the huge tent. Lieutenant Carolyn Purser, who had dressed the wound to his arm, stood next to him. She gave him a penicillin shot to combat any infection.

“That arm will be sore for the next couple of days, Captain. Do you want a sling for it?” she asked.

“God, no,” Pete said. He slid off the gurney, pulled his blood-soaked flight suit back on and awkwardly zipped it with his left hand. He was trembling badly. He wanted to hold Tess and escape the unraveling horror twisting in his gut and chest. “Just help my buddies,” he pleaded to the young navy nurse.

“They're getting the very best attention, Captain, believe me.” She hurriedly walked away through the swinging doors to the triage area that held the worst of the injured crew.

Pete stood there, torn between staying near his friends in the unit, who were being worked on by a separate group of doctors and nurses, and going to Tess. Gib had come in to visit him earlier and make sure he was all right. Pete had assured him he was fine. It was a lie, but he wasn't about to cry in front of his commanding officer. His mouth dry, the metallic taste of blood in it, Pete hung his head and tried to get a grip on the terrible avalanche of fear now thrumming through him. He felt himself wavering.

The doors to the left swung open and then quietly whooshed closed. “Pete?”

Tess stood there uncertainly. Her voice was low and urgent. The trembling sound of it impinged upon his spinning, shocked senses. He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head. She stood three feet away from him, her hand extended to him, her face pale and her eyes huge with fear.

“Don't come any closer,” he joked weakly, gesturing toward his flight suit. “I'm covered with ketchup. Somebody in the bird spilled ketchup all over the place....”

Wincing inwardly, Tess realized Pete was trying to cover up the horror he'd just experienced by joking about it. She gave him a wobbly smile and tried to play along. “I can see that.” The front of his flight suit was soaked with blood. Tess knew Pete was in shock.

“It's Joe's, my copilot. We...uh...we were delivering C-rats to the guys at an LZ when the VC started shooting. Joe and my gunner, Jerry Random, bought it.” Pete looked down at his drenched flight suit, the flies buzzing around him, the smell cloying and making him nauseous.

Girding herself, Tess saw Pete's face go waxen, all color draining from it. She stepped forward, gripped him by his good arm and guided him over to a chair next to an empty desk. It was probably the receiving nurse's desk, but Tess knew she'd understand. She helped Pete sit down.

“You're going to faint,” she whispered.

“No, I'm not.”

“Don't argue with me, Pete. Where the hell's some water?” She looked around.

“Dunno.”

Anxiously, she saw his eyes go dull. “Put your head between your legs.”

“...What?”

He was in shock and going deeper by the moment. Angry that there was no one to care for him, Tess pushed his head down between his legs. “Stay there. The blood will come back to your head,” she muttered. Where her hand rested, blood was splattered up across his neck and matted in his hair. Swallowing hard, Tess placed tight control on her own emotional reactions. Pete needed her help, not her weakness, right now. “Just stay that way until your head starts to clear,” she croaked. “I'll be here. I won't leave you.”

P
ete shut his eyes tightly. When Tess returned with a paper cup containing water, he was sitting on the chair, elbows dug deeply into his thighs, head hanging down between his legs.

Kneeling beside him, her hand on his slumped shoulder, Tess whispered, “Here, Pete, drink this.”

Her shattering words, “I won't leave you,” spun in his aching head as he lifted his gaze. She was a woman, someone fully capable of abandoning him, just as his mother had. Barely twisting his head to the right where she knelt next to him, he studied her drawn features.

“You came back,” he rasped, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Of course I did. Here, drink this, Pete. You're in shock.”

With a trembling, bloodied hand, he reached for the water. The paper cup slipped through his fingers. Pete watched the contents splash across the plywood floor.

Grimly, Tess stood up. She gripped his shoulder. “It's all right. Let me go get another for you.” She would have to walk to the next tent and get it.

Shutting his eyes, Pete waited until Tess was gone. A terrible coldness was spreading through him, a door flung open from the past beneath the shock of the mission, flowing into the present. He had to get away. Staggering to his feet, Pete stumbled back on the heel of his black flight boot, then moved drunkenly toward the swinging doors of the MASH unit.

The world tilted crazily around him as he moved in a daze away from the tent. He had to get clean. The smell of the blood was making him gag, and more than once on his way to his tent, he stopped, vomited and moved on.

As he staggered into his tent, empty since Joe Keegan, his roommate, was still in surgery, Pete jerked at the zipper of his flight suit. He had to get the suit off! He had to get away from the smell of blood. At the shower stalls at the end of the row of tents, he leaned against the wall and fumbled with the laces on his flight boots. His right arm had taken a piece of shrapnel, and his fingers weren't obeying him as well as they should. Making a frustrated sound, Pete tore wildly at the black laces.

Finally, the boots came off, and then so did the flight suit. Both ended up in a gory pile on the sand outside the entrance to the shower, and Pete staggered into the stall. He turned on the shower, feeling the tepid water. It didn't matter what temperature the shower was. He stood, shaking, as the streams of water washed across his head, face and shoulders, rinsing the foul-smelling blood from his hair and skin. Goose pimples rose on his flesh as he hunched over, hands pressed against his face. As badly as the emotions wanted to tear loose from him, nothing would come out. His mouth, dripping with water, stretched into a twisted shape, a fist of rising emotion lodged in his chest. The sound refused to escape his throat and be born into a primal scream of rage, grief and frustration.

How long Pete stood there, his feet spread apart on the glistening plywood floor to steady his shaking body, he didn't know. Just the sound of all that cleansing water gradually cleared his mind. Like a robot, he sought and found a bar of Ivory soap. Looking at the clean white object, Pete remembered the commercials on television about how the bar of soap would float. His fingers curved around it.

First, his hair. It hurt like hell to raise his right arm, and the dressing was now soaked with water, but he did it anyway. The smell of the soap filled the air around him as he scrubbed. He vaguely remembered shrapnel exploding into the cockpit, pieces of it flying around like scattershot. His helmet had taken a direct hit, nearly jerked off his head but for the strap beneath his chin.

Almost an hour later, Pete emerged from the shower and, naked and dazed, walked back to his tent. He left the bloody flight suit and boots exactly where he'd dropped them, not even looking back. Two single cots and metal lockers furnished his small rectangular tent. Pete sat down heavily on his cot before his knees gave out. Shivering, he reached over and found an olive green towel at the foot of the bed. He began to dry himself with shaky, convulsive movements. Somehow, he had to get himself together. Part of his functioning mind knew that his copilot and gunner were in surgery. He didn't know anything more about their condition and probably wouldn't for some time. He'd have to wait.

When he'd dried off, Pete went to his locker, found a clean flight suit and put it on. He had to get rid of the blips of the explosion, of the screams in the cockpit. Locating his second pair of flight boots, Pete grabbed a pair of socks and struggled several minutes before he was able to put them on. He left his boot laces untied. The officers club was where he wanted to go. There, he could drown out the horrible pictures flashing in his head. He could drink enough alcohol to anesthetize himself.

* * *

Gib looked up from his desk in squadron headquarters. After he'd spent two hours tensely waiting at the MASH unit, the head nurse had gently suggested that he go back to work. Surgery on the crewmen was going to take a long time. Gib reluctantly left, his heart and mind still back at the MASH unit with his men. His sister, Tess, came in, looking worried.

“I thought you were with Pete,” Gib said as he laid his pen aside on a stack of papers that desperately needed his attention.

Tess shook her head. All around Gib, the heart of the helicopter squadron continued to throb—men at various desks doing the necessary paper-chase jobs to keep it functioning. It was two hours after Pete's near crash, and everything appeared to be back to normal. But Tess could tell by the looks on the faces of Gib's men that it wasn't really so. Everyone was affected by the crash. As she halted at Gib's desk, she lowered her voice.

“I'm trying to find Pete. When I went to get him a cup of water, he disappeared on me.”

Grimly, Gib nodded and gently pushed back his squeaky wooden chair. “I'm not surprised.”

“Why? I was there for him, Gib. I was someone who cared, who would listen if he wanted to talk. Why did he take off?”

Gib's mouth stretched into a sad smile. “Baby sis, this is the side of my business I hoped you'd never get tangled up in.”

“It's a little late for that. You're in it.”

Gib hesitated, then nodded. “Being part of the service means taking the good with the bad, the peacetime with the wartime, Tess.”

“Being squadron commander means twice as much responsibility, too,” Tess griped, her emotions frayed.

“Every flight is potentially dangerous, Tess.” Gib kept his voice low so only his sister could hear him. “Look, things are heating up out in the bush. I've been trying to tell you that for the last month, but you wouldn't believe me.” He gave her a pleading look. “Please come in every night from the villages. Pete was out on a milk run, a flight that was supposed to be routine and boring as hell. According to the company commander, just as his helo was lifting off, the VC opened up with a rocket attack, Tess. A rocket went off right in front of him. It shredded the aircraft like a sieve.” Gib grimaced, his voice dropping even lower. “The copilot, Joe Keegan, just died in surgery.”

“Oh, no!”

“And from what Lieutenant Commander Simmons, the head of OR just told me, it doesn't look good for Random, the gunner, either. He's critical and unstable.”

“Then,” she whispered, “Pete was lucky.”

“Yeah, according to Lieutenant Purser, he has a couple of scratches. She dug shrapnel out of his right arm and his neck at the base of his skull, plus some Plexiglas splinters from his left leg. He's the one who will remember this.”

Anguish soared through Tess. “I've got to find him, Gib. He needs someone.”