Walking Wounded Read online

  There is, reasonably enough, a lull as the route passes close by An Khe itself. There is a pretty substantial base there, Camp Radcliff, which is the home of a lot of US muscle, including the 1st Air Cavalry. The relatively modest-sized opposition slinging junk at us so far wouldn’t stand up to what’s on offer up at the camp. Not that the North Vietnamese regulars and the Vietcong couldn’t, wouldn’t, and haven’t brought the almighty wrath to these bases from the very beginning. But when they do, it’s an operation, lasts for months, and is impossible not to notice from a very long way away.

  Right now, though, the only thing Camp Radcliff means to us is a short breather while we reel in all the millions of nerve endings that have been swollen and extended and electrified enough to leave us fairly exhausted for a “noncombat operation.”

  We don’t, however, stop moving. The trucks keep on barreling along the treacherous and unsympathetic road, and my admiration for the drivers has multiplied manyfold since I mounted this thing.

  And I was just hitching a ride. I laugh. This time, it’s a laugh.

  “Hey, that’s a Purple Heart, right there,” the grenadier says, pointing at my head. They are all sitting now around the square of the plated platform.

  I bring the rag down and examine it. It’s already much less out of control.

  “I’m coagulating, that’s the main thing,” I say.

  He shakes his head at me like I’m daffy or something. Then he goes into a metal supply box welded to the floor in the corner. He roots around, pulls out some gear, and approaches me.

  He has a better rag than I have, and a bottle of alcohol. He peels my rancid old rag down and tosses it over the side. He splashes alcohol all over the wound and mops it out hard enough to remove any gunk, but gently enough not to restart mad bleeding. Then he’s bumping my head with small punches as he plasters a big, thick bandage up there while the truck pitches and jumps around.

  “I’d say about a dozen stitches,” he says as he applies long strips of tape, affixing the bandage to my skull. He sits back on his haunches to admire his craftwork.

  I reach up and feel it. Could be professional. It’s hard like a splint, dry, and securely fixed.

  “Nah,” I say. “Seems like you gave it all it needs. I’m a fast healer, anyway.”

  “Jeez,” one of the gunners says, laughing.

  “I know,” the other adds. “Just take your Purple Heart already.”

  I shake my head to indicate no, and to test its soundness at the same time.

  “Purple Heart’s for combat injury suffered in a combat situation, in a combat unit,” I say like I am the regulation book itself, made man. The straightness I feel in my face nearly makes me want to laugh.

  The three of them stare like I am in a zoo and they cannot make out what species I am.

  “And?” the grenadier asks. “So?”

  “First,” I say, “I’m not even here. Officially. I’m just a hippie bum hitchhiker snagging a free ride. And second … C’mon, fellas. Pedaling up and down this hill delivering groceries is hardly a combat unit in a combat situation.”

  It seems, somehow, as if even the prodigious sounds of the engines straining and the trucks shaking and banging to pieces have ceased all at once. My three nameless hosts — because what do their names matter? — stare at me the way I know Charlie stares at me from beyond his range when I’ve just executed his pal for coming within mine.

  Snipers live to breathe this tension right here.

  “Heroic,” I say coolly, and with a salute to one and two and three.

  “What?” asks the multiskilled anonymous grenade-slinger from the United States Army’s 8th Transportation Group.

  “I said heroic,” I am pleased to resay. “As in, that was heroic of you. I was winding you up, just to see if you’d snap. You know, like the real fighters in this war seem to do all the time.”

  I am pretty certain I see all three of them reach, in the O.K. Corral sense of the term, before I hold up both hands in the Whoa there, pardner sense.

  I’m not even sure I’m enjoying this. And I’m not sure that I’m not. Fairly certain it is dangerous, though, which is all right.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll stop now,” I say. “The only way I could even play with you like that in the first place is because I know better from my own two eyes and I can respect what it is you do. You transport boys are a whole other kind of hero, and I mean that. Only wish I appreciated you more all along. I wonder how many more kinds are out there, because before, I thought there was just me.”

  “A lot. There are a lot more,” one gunner says, rolling back up to his station. The second does likewise without saying anything.

  “What’s wrong with you, man?” the grenadier asks me. Only he doesn’t ask it in the usual way, the timeless way, the way I have asked friends and foes all my life without thinking about it.

  He asks it in a way like he wants an answer. Like he’s trying to get at an actual explanation for whatever it is that is gnawing at him.

  He stays hovering in front of me for a bit as if he truly expects me to enlighten him. As if the question itself wasn’t all the answer he needed.

  In all my life I never asked it like that, no matter if I asked my best friend or my second-best friend or a nobody on the street, and it’s chilling me. I never used those words in that way, no matter how many thousand times I used them, no matter how strange the other person was to make me ask the question, no matter how smart, no matter how stupid, how lost or peculiar or sad.

  That was not the way those words in that arrangement were supposed to function.

  Bu-hooom!

  We are rocked three times as hard as at any time yet. And it is not even a hit to our group. Somewhere in the column behind us, in the next group, or the one after, an extraordinary explosion has gone off. We all look back in that direction to see the huge cone of fire and smoke and ash and airborne debris as if there were an active volcano on the road that we just happened to not notice before.

  “They got at least one of the ammo trucks,” one of the guys calls out.

  “At least three, I’d say,” somebody else yells.

  We haven’t come under direct fire yet, but we are all up and rigid with readiness. I have my rifle primed and ready to do whatever damage circumstances permit, though I know it wouldn’t appear to be much.

  I will make it count, whatever comes.

  Bu-hooom!

  This one is up in the group ahead. The lead bunch have taken a consistent battering, and while this explosion does not match the sheer spectacle of the last one, it seems to explode in a more focused, concentrated manner that could be all the more trouble.

  We rumble on in an almost eerily unmolested fashion, skirmishes audible in every direction while we feel not a pinprick.

  It nearly feels worse. At least fighting back at a thing that is coming at you is clearly a fight. Feeling nothing but the expectation leaves you sweating, twitching, vibrating to no useful effect.

  It is the very worst way for a warrior to feel. You anticipate away all your vital nastiness. Then when you need it, it’s spent.

  If so, you get what you deserve.

  I am perched high and leaning far out over the lip of the armor, trying to get a sense of the where and the what of what’s out there waiting for us. But it tires of waiting and comes to visit instead.

  Schwoom!

  A missile flies past the right side of the truck so close it manages to boil my eyeballs with the heat, and slams spectacularly into the truck two places back. Immediately, the truck blows every which way, the main section careening into the ditch off the left side of the track while cargo and chunks of metal and man go airborne and down the mountain to the right. The flaming chassis scorches a trail across the grasses to where it slams against the rocky base of the hill.

  Before it struck, the missile sounded like no other ordnance I had ever heard. It sounded like an F-4 Phantom jet, if you could get one to strafe that cl
ose to your head.

  And it brought me back.

  In a way I would not have anticipated, the missile has pulled me back together and into my correct condition.

  I’m in danger, but I’m not in a panic. Who wouldn’t take that deal every time?

  We haven’t spent this much time together since high school.

  We’re flying from Chu Lai to Da Nang. Da Nang to Tokyo. Tokyo to Honolulu. Honolulu to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California.

  At Da Nang I learn that Rudi was actually wise to get himself killed on his own base.

  “Nice and tidy,” says Lieutenant Grafe, a staff officer at the Da Nang mortuary who looks even younger than me. He’s boarded our plane to check that Rudi’s identification and follow-on details are all in order, and to inform me I’ll be escorting two more unfortunates as far as Tokyo. He checks over the paperwork, hands it back to me, and smiles in an unexpectedly friendly way. “Your comrade here did himself a clever favor by going down right there on the home court.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “he was always good like that, with the clever planning.”

  “What I mean is, I get guys in here every day in every state of dishevelment. Straight from the field, planes, choppers, jeeps, some with no prep at all, no identification. We are set up to process about three hundred and fifty bodies a month through this facility and it is always a real test to get it all done, done right, and done with the proper attention to each deserving individual. And man, after Tet, we were doing more like a thousand a month. We do a fine job, but c’mon, everybody, everybody deserves more careful attention than is really possible under these conditions.”

  Like with a great many of my encounters I’ve had with people along the military maze of this war, I am not entirely sure what the lieutenant wants out of this exchange. But I do get the feeling he doesn’t always have this time and space to say his bit.

  I take a stab at it. “Sure,” I say. “Of course, you’re right. It’s important.”

  “They should all have this,” he says sadly, but also with appreciation. “You don’t have a big proper morgue up there in Chu Lai like we have here. But I already know from past experience that when a body has been prepped up there, it’s been done right.”

  He’s just a little bit more emotional than I would have figured a mortuary lieutenant to be. And I’m glad for it.

  “I only saw the doc, the one who … you know … only saw him for a few seconds. I’m sure he was very precise. Not much bedside manner, though.”

  “Not much need for one, if you think about it.”

  “Good point. I keep trying not to think about it, though.”

  He nods. He looks both boyish and eternal. Like meeting your own grandfather when he’s still young. There is a kind of hopeful expression that flits and flags across his face. That’s rare enough around here, kind of miraculous in his job.

  “It’s a holy thing,” he says, leaning in and making his case fervently. “Not necessarily religious-style holy. Way beyond that, as a matter of fact. I have yet to bring even one guy back once he’s brought to me dead, but all the same I feel so sure, so sure, that my days here have as much impact on lives as anybody else’s in the whole show.”

  Two groups of solemn, stout soldiers now march up to the plane, bearing coffins. To be honest, I’m glad for the company right now. The atmosphere’s gotten so strange it would still be welcome if the two stiffs came and hopped aboard without anybody’s help.

  That was bad. Stiffs. That can never be right. What if somebody called my poor pal here a stiff? What would I do? Grab the nearest gun and shoot him? Burst into tears? Both options feel about right.

  “Right,” Lt. Grafe says as he strides over to receive the first box personally by resting one hand on the lid while the six bearers carry on with carrying him on. “Once these two are settled in, that’s your full complement of stiffs and you are free to be on your way to Tokyo.”

  I am shocked for about a second and a half. Grafe has got both hands placed lightly on top of the coffin when he utters the word, the stiff that sounds like a term of affection the way he uses it.

  If I were dead, I would want Lt. Grafe overseeing my passage from wherever we are to wherever we go.

  “Feetfirst, right?” I say, striding over to the men who clearly already know what they are doing. I need to be doing something. They are good men, and they let me.

  The first coffin is aligned alongside Rudi. Then the next one eases in next to him. The boys all do the same unnecessary saluting to me as they turn away from their task, as they have turned away from it with the same grace three hundred forty-nine other times this month.

  “Everything’s settled here, yes?” I say, sidling along and inspecting the arrangement as if I am anything other than a joke here. I have to have something to do. Everybody has to have something to do.

  The people here are so quiet. Quiet, and kind. I have experienced nothing like it since I arrived in Vietnam.

  I feel a little better now that Rudi has peers to hang around with. I make a close inspection of the traveling angle of the three of them and then turn away, satisfied that nobody will be decomposing unnecessarily on my watch.

  I pivot directly into the gaze of Lt. Grafe. The other guys have melted away like they were possibly never even here.

  Maybe the two stiffs did deliver themselves. Maybe that’s the way things happen in the Da Nang mortuary.

  He’s smiling at me. It makes me fidgety. He is so odd — decent, dedicated, unsettling. I wish he would just go now. Or alternatively, I wish he’d go and pull up that cargo-bay door and make this trip with me.

  “Why are you telling me all this stuff?” I blurt. But I blurt it in a whisper so I don’t know what you would call that.

  If he is put off by my challenge I can see no sign of it.

  Lt. Grafe shrugs and smiles shyly, as if he’s a little bemused about it himself. But his words say otherwise.

  “Because it’s important,” he says. “Because it’s the only part of war that is.”

  He needs to fight to hang on to his friendly smile during that last part, but he does fight, and he wins.

  “I’m kind of a preacher, I guess,” he says. “And my congregation is usually either too frantic or too deceased to hear me.”

  I nod, happy to understand this unusual, gentle soldier better.

  “Well, I’m glad I was able to be here, unhurried and undead.”

  “And you heard me,” he says, nodding vigorously before executing a sharp heel turn. He takes a couple steps, and salutes each coffin in turn. “Thank you, soldier,” he says. “Thank you. And thank you.”

  He steps backward, pivots again, and comes to me.

  I salute him crisply, more happy to do so than with almost all the other salutes so far. He waves off the salute, extends his hand and shakes. It is a surprisingly strong grip, capped with a second hand and some high-speed pumping.

  “It’s all yours now, friend,” he says just before hopping off the plane. “A dignified departure. A gentle journey home.”

  “Gentle journey home,” I echo as he waves and hot-steps across the airstrip toward his relentless roll call of departures to dignify.

  It seems strange to call any aspect of this journey strange, what with the thorough strangeness of every other aspect, but I have to call the Da-Nang-to-Tokyo leg strange all the same.

  First, I cannot stop thinking about the lieutenant’s words. Or, not so much his words, maybe, as his … spirit? Life here, under these conditions, has taken on a different meaning, a different status from everything I ever knew from life back home. It’s not that people — okay, soldiers — are so cold that they don’t value lives anymore the way that regular citizens do —

  Hold it. No. It is that. It is exactly that. How could it not be that?

  We spend every day trying to slaughter as many as possible of the people we think need killing. Those people spend their days trying to slaughter our guys first, a
nd anybody who doesn’t believe they are doing pretty well at it should go and see Lt. Grafe for confirmation.

  Life is less here, that’s a fact. Most of us were not allowed to kill people before we got here and now we are urged to do it. Most of us did not start the average week with a group of buddies and coworkers knowing that some of them were sure to be too dead to start the following week with you. That is, if you were even there to start the next week.

  It would be crazy if that reality did not alter the way people computed the whole life-death equation.

  It matters. Of course it matters, and people feel the deaths of comrades deeply. But they do not feel them as much as they would feel them back home, back in their realer selves.

  That’s what made Lt. Grafe such a crosswind to everything else. With everybody else pulling away or numbing themselves or going out of focus or whatever works for self-preservation, that guy is making a point to make a connection — to make each life matter more, not less. And he’s doing it at the point of life when every impulse says to let it go.

  He cared about my boy as much as I did; he made me feel that Rudi mattered to him. I am ten thousand feet up and many miles out over the South China Sea before the impact of that hits me with a bam.

  It gives me a searing ache to talk to Rudi about it right this minute. Did he notice? I hope he noticed. It’s important. It’s important for all of us.

  I get up out of my seat, walk over to him, and I think I’m going to say something.

  Then I don’t. Can’t. I freeze, seize, without warning, and I get flushed and hot.

  It’s the other two. I had talked to Rudi-in-the-box on the earlier leg and he was easy to talk to, easy as always. But now, I feel like I’m intruding. I feel like I’m doing something out of line.

  I shuffle back to my seat and go back to staring out the window.

  I’m sure he noticed, though. The few enough times anybody treated Rudi with any kind of respect, he would notice.

  When we reach Tokyo, the other boys are transferred to another aircraft, headed for Alaska. I wouldn’t have thought there were two soldiers from Alaska at all until this moment when I realize that two of them died in one single day. I feel good about the fact that they are keeping each other company through this whole awful trip. Then I feel bad thinking about how big a day it’s going to be when they land in Anchorage.