Walking Wounded Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter One: Ivan

  Chapter Two: Morris

  Chapter Three: Beck

  Chapter Four: Ivan

  Chapter Five: Morris

  Chapter Six: Ivan

  Chapter Seven: Morris

  Chapter Eight: Ivan

  Chapter Nine: Morris

  Chapter Ten: Rudi

  Chapter Eleven: Ivan

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve: Morris

  Chapter Thirteen: Ivan

  Chapter Fourteen: Beck

  Chapter Fifteen: Morris

  Chapter Sixteen: Ivan

  Chapter Seventeen: Morris

  Chapter Eighteen: Rudi

  Chapter Nineteen: Beck

  Chapter Twenty: Ivan

  Chapter Twenty-One: Rudi

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Morris

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Beck

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Ivan

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Morris

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Beck

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Rudi

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ivan

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Rudi

  Chapter Thirty: Morris

  Chapter Thirty-One: Beck

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Ivan

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Morris

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Ivan

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Morris

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Ghostwriter

  About the Author

  Teaser

  Copyright

  It has to stop somewhere.

  It looks like it’s just gonna go on and on and on, but that would be such a nightmare, it’s the kind of nightmare that nightmares have nightmares about. It has to stop somewhere. Somebody’s got to do something.

  This war, or some version of it, seems to have been going on for centuries. Nobody has had any success in ending it over all that time, and I see no indication that anybody is going to manage any differently any time soon.

  Somebody’s got to.

  So it looks like it’s up to me. If nobody else is going to do what needs to be done, then I will.

  I am the one who will take Rudi home.

  Normal protocol regarding body escorts is that somebody from the same unit as the deceased is put on the detail. Meaning, in this case, somebody other than me.

  Absolutely, over-my-dead-body no.

  “Sir,” I say to the officer in charge, “I have a request.”

  The officer has seen a lot, as everybody here has seen a lot, so despite the urgency in my voice he’s slow in raising his head from his paperwork. When finally, lazily, he does, he goes wide-eyed as he takes in the sight of me from brain to boots.

  It does give me a small thrill to see his expression. It is nearly impossible to get anything but bombed-out boredom from these guys these days.

  “Sure, pal,” he says in a nearly human voice. “What d’ya need?”

  He is still sizing me up all over even as he politely struggles to pretend that he is not, that he is processing me just the same as every other faceless slob asking for his grace in this graceless situation.

  Except, of course, I’m not faceless. I have a face, and it is lacquered in my old pal Rudi’s truest, bluest, red blood. I feel the blood trickling down my features and puddling in the hollow of my collarbone. I see my hands, soaked in Rudi, look at my uniform, drenched in Rudi, and I wonder how I even got here, to this man, who makes these decisions.

  Beck is still there, right now. I left him with Rudi. With the remains of Rudi. For all I know, he’s still trying to revive the poor dope. Even though we know he’s gone. Even though we probably knew he was gone from the moment we saw him.

  Smart guys like Beck should know better. You would expect them to know better. You would expect the pathetic, mushy types like me to be back there on that trail trying to stanch the blood flowing out of the hopeless body, trying to breathe the kiss of life back into the life that’s already kissed us good-bye.

  But there you go. You would expect, and you would be wrong. I got straight up, left Rudi in the warm embrace of Beck, and simply knew there was one thing to do now, one thing that mattered more than every other possible thing.

  I had to take Rudi home.

  It was my pledge, for the love of God. My pledge that brought us here. I forced everybody into this, and the idea was that we were going to look after each other. We were going to look after Rudi.

  We failed at that. We did worse, even.

  “I need to be the body escort seeing a particular fallen Marine home,” I say.

  “I’m sure we can do that,” the officer says, happy to look away from me and back to his stack of sheets of human statistics. “Name of Marine?”

  I give it to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says after a long and increasingly desperate troll through the stats. He does, in fact, sound truly sorry. “We don’t have any casualties by that name reported.”

  I open my mouth and prepare to shout at him because, really, shouting at somebody in a position like his might feel pretty good right now. Then I realize it’s the opposite. Shouting at this man would feel obscene to me just at this moment.

  I hold out my arms instead. I see them glistening with all the wrong things.

  Who ever would have thought that one hole in that brain could have produced all that blood?

  “He won’t have been reported yet,” I say softly. “But he’s here, if you want verification. And here and here and here.”

  I hold out my weary and blood-sodden arms for as long as I can manage it. The officer seems to notice my struggle as my arms sink lower and lower and I foolishly try to hold on.

  He reaches out, seizes my putrid, decaying-Rudi wrists, and forces me to lower my arms back to my sides.

  “You will see your friend home,” he says. “Every step of the journey. I promise I will see to it.”

  Morris couldn’t take it.

  Which is fine. Who could take this? How would you even learn to take something like this? You can’t. And that’s why you only discover how you’ll do when you are forced to do.

  Morris couldn’t take it, so he just up and left. He got up, a bloody and crying mess, and staggered away down the trail that leads to the base. He must have passed the jeep that’s now tearing up that trail toward me. Toward us. Rudi and me.

  The medics realize in less than a second that there is nothing they can do for the boy. So, gently but insistently, they pry him out of my grip. I think we must have looked like that sculpture of Mary holding the body of Jesus, the Pietà. Then, as the body of Rudi rises in front of me, lifted away by the medics, I see dangling around his neck, with his dog tags, the scapular. The little cloth image of Jesus that Rudi got from Ivan’s parents. To protect him from harm.

  Couldn’t protect him from Ivan, though.

  Rudi is stretchered across the back of the jeep as it barrels back down the trail, and I sit there with him, holding him in place so he doesn’t go bouncing out and onto the ground. That would be just like him.

  I helped him pass his tests back in school, so he could keep up and stay with us.

  The medic at the wheel drives with a sense of urgency that strikes me as bizarre since Rudi is in less of a hurry than he has ever been. Time doesn’t mean much.

  The jeep skids to a stop in front of the base’s medical building, and I follow silently behind as the medics carry the stretcher through the doors, across the main ward with a dozen variously mangled soldiers who salute to the best of their abilities as we pass, and out another door at the far end.

  I guess you would call this the morgue. There are four tables, two of them supporting bodies that are covered in she
ets. One is empty. One is now Rudi’s rest.

  The medics salute me, which they don’t have to do and which makes me feel childishly better about things. Then they leave, and I am alone. With Rudi and two strange man-shaped sheets.

  Is that alone? I’d say, probably.

  I stare at his stupid little face there and almost smile when I realize that, despite the sick pallor and the gruesome hole at his temple and the general obscene mess of him, he looks like Rudi. He looks like the Rudi we knew in Boston. He looks more like himself than he did the last time we saw him alive.

  “What am I going to tell your ma?” I ask the little dope as he lies there all emptied. “What am I going to tell all the mas? And the dads.” I think about my own father, his horror and disgust over this whole conflict even before this. I think about … Jeez. I think about Ivan’s dad. What will this do to The Captain? “No parting words for me, Rude? Isn’t there some wisdom that comes with death that you could pass on, huh? Look at this, kid, me asking you for wisdom. Probably not likely to happen again, so you should probably take advantage.”

  I wait a few seconds, because I guess when it comes down to it, in a moment like this, I am just as foolish and hopeful as any true believer who wastes time praying for stuff he’ll never get.

  Ultimately, Rudi does take the opportunity to lay his wisdom-of-the-dead on me. By lying there quiet, broken, and bloodless.

  “Right, pal,” I say, and scoot my chair up close to his bedside. I lean forward and lay my head on his chest, on ribs almost certainly cracked by Morris’s maniacal efforts at resuscitation.

  I listen, foolishly, for the dead heart to thump again, but I hear something else, a voice from behind me: “I’m taking him home.”

  I keep my head resting on Rudi.

  “Did you hear me, Beck?” Morris says. “I said I’m taking Rudi home.”

  “I think he’s already as home as he’s going to get.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m delivering him to his real home, in Boston. I’m his body escort.”

  I lift my head to look at Morris. My hand rests on Rudi’s chest as I do. It’s almost as difficult to look at the old pal standing upright as the old pal on the slab. Morris’s face looks just as drained of blood as Rudi’s. Except, of course, where Morris’s face is wearing Rudi’s blood.

  “You have a little somebody on your face there,” I say, pointing at my own face like you do when you try to point out a spot of food.

  “You do that joking thing if you have to, Beck….”

  I have to. “I’ll stop.”

  “The officer in charge is arranging it, for me to body escort.”

  “That’s where you went? To arrange that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was pretty quick thinking. I’m impressed.”

  “I’m not sure if I was thinking at all. Just found myself doing it.”

  “The good old subconscious. It always knows what it’s doing, even when we don’t.”

  Morris grins at that, looks down at the floor, then up again. He gestures toward my hand on Rudi. “Any miracles in the cards? How’s he doing?”

  My turn to grin. “A little sluggish.”

  We linger for a minute on the laugh. The last of probably a billion the three of us shared. The four of us shared.

  Morris’s already big softy eyes go all bleary and teary. “Maybe you should come along with us,” he says.

  I shake my head. “Nah. They’ll never let it happen. And I have a job to do. I’m happy enough knowing you’ll be with him. Awful to think of him traveling all that way, in that box, all alone.”

  That makes him worse, and he snuffles along through it. “Wouldn’t be alone anyway,” he says. “There’s always somebody for an escort, even if it’s somebody who didn’t know him.”

  My subconscious decides this is a good time to be rubbing Rudi’s chest the way you would a good dog’s belly.

  “That would be alone,” I say. “Nobody knew him. Just the three of us.”

  The three of us.

  “What are we gonna do, Beck?” Morris asks, on the pleading side of asking. He walks over to us now, pulls a chair to the other side of the table, and puts a hand alongside my hand on Rudi.

  “We’re going to wait for the doc, who’s going to come in and look the boy over. Then he’s going to write up the form that declares that little Rudi is truly gone. That the cause of death was a single, perfect sniper’s bullet to the head.”

  Perfect sniper’s bullet.

  “But then? What are we gonna do after that?”

  “Well, my experience having one of my friends shoot another one of my friends is pretty limited. But I’m thinking, after that, you’re going to take a trip home with our poor pal and I’m going to report back for duty.”

  It’s Morris’s turn to lay his head down on the kid. That rib cage has had to withstand a lot in death. Though not nearly what it absorbed in life.

  “Beck?” Morris says in a whisper of a wounded moan.

  The doctor pushes through the door.

  “After that, I don’t know,” I say. “We’ll just have to get to after that after that.”

  “Excuse me, men,” says the doctor, who is all busy and all business. He gently and coldly removes my hand and all of Morris from the body so he can do his thing and be done with it.

  See ya, Rudi, pal.

  I put my arm around Morris as we head for the exit, and he puts his arm around me. He can’t stop looking back, and we nearly do the old Three Stooges stuck-in-a-doorway routine as I manhandle him out of the morgue.

  I catch a ride with a convoy of Army Engineers heading south on Route 1 from Chu Lai to Qui Nhon. The weather is balmy and I feel like I want to be outside for the rest of my life, so I’m perfectly content to jump in the back of this big, dirty transport vehicle and nestle in the dirt watching the sky go by.

  They are transporting some rich and aromatic soil for whatever creative weirdness the Engineers are up to this time. It makes a comfortable nest for me.

  It’s busy here, I realize as I watch vehicles pass us regularly. It’s busy on the road and it sure is busy in the thickets of trees that line the route.

  It reminds me of Route 93, which my dad and I used to take up into New Hampshire to the little cabin there. Just the two of us, and a lot of quiet country and shooting. I loved those hunting trips with my dad.

  I watch all those trees and think of all the Vietcong who have set up in there to kill Americans over these last few years. We should have snipers like me on every truck, in every vehicle, riding shotgun up and down each major route in Vietnam, picking off every assassin out there. That would work. Then we could leave this place. We could all go home.

  It should be harder to kill people than it is. But it’s so easy. Only the afterward is hard.

  The duty officer, Daniels, is a man true to his word.

  You would think it would be a pretty rational and straightforward thing. I was visiting Rudi in Chu Lai. I had known him forever. I was pumping his chest as he died. You would think that I would be given the body-escort assignment without even needing to ask for it.

  You would think. If you were never in the US Armed Services, you would think that to be the reasonable conclusion.

  But, after five miles of red tape, we are almost there. One significant hurdle remains. It had not immediately occurred to me that I would have to clear the assignment with my own commanding officer. There is no good reason why this had not immediately occurred to me, since that is precisely the way the Navy works, but recent events have possibly affected my thinking.

  “Your CO wants to talk to you,” Daniels says as I walk into his office. I am all showered up but have gotten right back into the awful clothes I had on when Rudi got splattered all over me. On Daniels’s desk is a sharp new set of proper Navy dress gear. He points at it and nods at me as he hands me the phone and leaves.

  “Captain?” I say.

  “Are you well, private?” he says.


  “I’m … okay, cap. Thanks for asking.”

  “I got your request.”

  I don’t say anything because I can’t think of what I’m expected to say.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes, captain.”

  “Okay, to the point. I am very sorry about your friend.”

  “Thank you. I really —”

  “But you know, everybody’s best friend is dying here. It doesn’t stop them from doing their duty.”

  Oh. Oh, no, no.

  “Sir, I’m sorry. I understand. It’s just, this is important. It’s a special case. There was this pledge we all made to stay together, and I forced that on —”

  “You realize there is only seven weeks left on your tour.”

  “What?” I say, confused by the turn of the conversation, oblivious to this or any other statistic right now that does not involve me and Rudi and a long, long trip. “Uh, no, sir. But this won’t take too long. I won’t spend any more time there than absolutely necessary to see things right, to talk to Rudi’s … and my …”

  “Well, it will take some time.”

  “Please, cap. You have to let me.” I have picked up the fresh uniform and am cradling it like some fragile creature I’m trying to keep alive with my will and hope and not much else.

  “Calm down, son. I’m letting you go.”

  “Thank you, captain. Thank you. I’ll make sure you won’t regret this, and I’ll get the job done and turn around and be back before you hardly know I’m away.”

  “Well, no,” he says calmly.

  “No? Captain? No?”

  “No. No, I won’t regret it, and no, you won’t be back.”

  My heart starts beating like chopper blades, and I wonder how much more of this it can take.

  “You’re losing me, sir.”

  He lets out a small, sharp laugh. “Well, yes, precisely. Son, for the last several weeks you’ve spent more time on the radio trying to arrange this family reunion of yours than you have on anything else. Since the day we lost Moses, in fact, you haven’t been much good to me. I’ve been worried you are going to get yourself killed and maybe the rest of us, too. I need a full complement of fighting men, and frankly, at this stage, you are not one.”