Chapter Twenty-seven
So when you wake up you are blinking in a white room on a white bed and you are warm and your muscles hurt and you have this splitting fucking headache so you go back to sleep.
And then you wake up again and you look down and you see that you are some kind of hospital gown with a sheet pulled up to your chin on just on the edge of what you can see there is a little medal pinned to the sheet, and you lift your arm up carefully and see that there’s a tube in it, and so you lift up your other arm and see it has a bracelet on it, and so you use that one to lift up the sheet and the medal falls back off the ribbon part, and you look at it and can see George fucking Washington and you say holy fuck that’s a purple heart and then you see a head poke into your vision from the top and he looks at you for a second, and then he goes away.
And you feel the room roll to one side and then hang there for a long moment and then come back to the other, and all the sudden you know you are on the boat, and that way is left and that way is right.
And then two doctors come into your vision and one says petty officer can you hear me and you say yessir and he says how do you feel and you say alright sir and he says what is your name and you say BM3 Kieffer sir and he says good, and you say why am I in medical sir and he looks funny for a second and then he says what do you remember, and you say I remember being on the boat sir and getting ready to go, and then you have to think and you say somewhere sir I must have hit my head or something, and he says you go back to sleep petty officer and you say yessir and you drop your head down and go back to sleep.
And later you wake up in one of the regular beds in medical and there’s a corpsman sitting beside you and he says morning there beautiful and you look down and say where’s my purple heart and he says for tripping on a tent rope they don’t give out no purple hearts for tripping on a tent rope and you say what the fuck and he says you can’t remember shit can you? You went up to Iraq like GI fucking Joe and tripped on a tent rope and whacked your head on a tent stake. They hauled your ass back here and you been in medical for the last week.
And you say I remember going up to Iraq now, and you think with Mr. Holden, and you say where’s Mr. Holden and the corpsman looks sad and he says he got killed up there in a truck accident, it rolled over on him and crushed him up pretty good, guess you’re lucky you’re a dumbass and can’t walk in the dark, though I heard you were pretty fucked up when you did it, getting drunk in a combat zone – that’s not going to play good at mast – and you lost your rifle up there and that’s not good either and you lay back on your rack and you stare at the ceiling and you can feel tears in your eyes and you kiss your supply gig goodbye.
The rest goes fast.
The XO comes by to check on you and he brings the legalman and you sign off on a bunch of forms and shit that say you are a stupid motherfucker who got drunk and tripped on a tent stake and lost your rifle, and then later that day the Skipper comes down and masts you right there in you bed, you become a seaman again and when you get better, you got 60 days restriction coming and extra duty.
After another two days you get freed from medical and you get back to Deck and people are acting weird around you, no one talks to you, and you go down to supply and clean out your shit and the senior chief don’t even say hello, and you go back to the deck office but there’s a new guy running admin now, so you get sent up to the paint locker, all the way up in the bow of the ship and you work like a dog up there cleaning it all out and carrying the old gunky cans back to the stern and dump it into the garbage barge, and then inventorying everything, and you go back on watch but not on the helm, just lookouts all alone up on the signal bridge in the dark.
And after a while everything goes back to normal and the days go by, and soon enough the boat gets relieved and all the Marines come back and they do a big washdown on the beach, and one by one the little boats come back to the big boats and the cranes haul all the trucks back aboard, and you are on a working party one day and you see the master sergeant talking to the Bo’sun and they are looking at you and you feel ashamed.
You Are Free Page 27
