Decoration for Valor

by Joe Cassilly

  “Kid,” he said with disbelief, “you just started sitting yesterday. Don’t start bugging me.”

  “No, Sam, I was just wondering what the schedule was.”

  “When I think you’re ready, and you’re not ready.”

  I pushed back up the hill but I had to stop every ten feet and lock the brakes and put my head between my knees and suck my breath in. Friday, I managed to push to the mess hall. It took me almost ten minutes. I did not use the gloves so I could start building up some calluses. For grip, I would spit on my hands and wipe it on my pants. I still had to stop constantly for breath; I could not believe how out of shape I was. All of my exercising had not strengthened my diaphragm and my hands would get ice cold because of the poor circulation. You do see the world from an interesting angle with your head hanging below the seat of the wheelchair. Even with the stockings on, my legs were not in shape to return the blood and my feet would grow very swollen.

  Trains of three and four wheelchairs would go sailing by. The guy in front pushed with both arms. The guys in the following chairs held onto the handles of the chair in front with one hand and pushed their own chairs with their free hand. One of the trains stopped to ask me if I needed a tow. I tried to hold onto the last chair but my crippled hands could not grasp and they pulled away.

  The daily routine went on with the doctors and me trying to avoid one another. Everyday, I learned new ways to do the simple tasks and they grew easier.

  16

  Ben

  The wheelchair had given me the ability to find distractions. Every time the despair started crawling from the dark areas of my mind, I was on the move. One day, I went from my end of the ward across the hall, past the nurses’ station and the showers, and into the other end of the ward. The patients here were, for the most part, horizontal. Some had pressure sores so severe that they had to lie on their stomachs on gurneys and push themselves along with canes. Others were severe quadriplegics.

  As I pushed slowly along down the aisle, a big voice boomed, “Hey Jake, come on over, boy!” I screwed up my face and cringed. I recognized the voice. It was fat Harvey from Walter Reed. I wished I had explored someplace else. I was sure Harvey was not my kind of people.

  I came over to Harvey’s bed and smiled weakly. “Jake, this is Ben,” said Harvey, pointing to a frail black man in the next bed. “Give him a hand will ya?”

  I rolled up beside Ben’s bed and watched for a few seconds as Ben tried to scratch his nose with his upper lip. “My nose itches terrible. Can you scratch it?” I took a Kleenex off the bed stand and reached over and rubbed Ben’s nose. “Harder,” said Ben. I rubbed more vigorously. After a few seconds, Ben nodded and I stopped. I sat there studying Ben’s mustache. It was a pencil thin line of white hair that went from corner to corner of his mouth following the contour of his upper lip. His closely clipped hair was also white. I wondered, if Ben could not scratch his own nose, then who took care of his mustache.

  Harvey was yakking on about Walter Reed, but I wasn’t paying attention. “Gimme a drink a water, please,” asked Ben. I clumsily slid my palm into the handle of the pitcher and moved it toward Ben until the straw brushed Ben’s lips. Ben caught the straw with his lips and drank deeply. As I held the pitcher, I noticed a small gold statue of a man with a baseball bat. The inscription on the base: “The Best Coach Ever, Roanoke Boy’s Baseball League.”

  “Howd ja get hurt,” asked Ben. I could see he had a problem breathing.

  “Vietnam,” was all I said. To change the subject I asked, “What about you?” The question took Ben off guard. I realized he was trying to get me to talk about myself. His story was a package; once begun, it had to be told from beginning to end the way it had been told a hundred times before.

  “I loved to play baseball. I played Double A ball a couple of years ago. How old do you think I am?” He paused for an answer. I knew from the way he asked the question that my answer would be wrong. “In your sixties, I guess.”

  “Forty-eight. Forty-eight, I am a young man. I was coaching little league.” His pupils crowded into the corners of eyes straining to see the statuette. “I loved to run. I loved to hit. Damn, I could hit. I was coaching for ten years, ever since they wouldn’t sign me to semi-pro no more.” He laid his head back in the pillow, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes, his voice would grow hoarse with emotion. I noticed dampness filling the sockets of his eyes.

  “I loved them boys, too. They was all poor boys—white ones, black ones—but all dirt poor. But they love that game of baseball ’cause they thought, like me, maybe if they play that game they could get outta being poor. Two and a half years ago, I was driving home and I picked up this nigger hitchhiking. He pulled a gun and wanted money so I gave him all I got.” He began sobbing and the tears ran freely. He turned and looked into my eyes. “He shot me anyway. What he want to do that for?”

  Suddenly, Ben began choking. He could not say anything and could not roll over to clear his throat. I hollered, “Nurse!” My wheelchair was jerked backwards out of the way, almost out from under me. Miss Adams grabbed Ben by the shoulder, rolled him over, and slapped him between the shoulder blades. I heard him take a deep breath. She sat on the bed and stroked his hair and then took a Kleenex to wipe his face.

  I turned and pushed back to my bed and sat reading. About an hour later, Miss Adams stopped by. “Scott, boy, if ever there was a magnet for trouble, you’re it.” She grinned; I liked her soft Virginia drawl.

  “I been sitting here,” I said, “thinking that two arms and crippled hands are better than no arms and no hands.”

  She nodded and told me, “Ben is worried that he scared you away. He wants you to come back.” I pushed back to Ben’s bed and sat beside it until he turned to look at me.

  “I ain’t gonna visit if you start dying on me,” I said, trying to be funny, and I forced a smile. He tilted his head back into the pillow. I rolled up by the head of the bed. We started talking for more than an hour, again about baseball. I had played second base in the Army. I learned that Ben liked checkers. I said I’d come back. I got one of the patients to get me a checker set from the activity room and every two or three days I went down to play with Ben. He told me the move to make for him and I moved. I did not win often and I never again asked someone how they ended up in a wheelchair.

  17

  HRONK!!

  The trips to the chow line helped break the monotony. I was still struggling, stopping very often to catch my breath and put my head between my knees. If I could not even push this far, how could I get out of the hospital? The neck brace had rubbed through the skin on my jaw and there were spots of blood on the padding. I had loosened the straps over my shoulders so that the pads barely touched my head. Eating had become my new learning experience. Each food was a new rehabilitative challenge. Like the time they served barbequed ribs, one of my favorites.

  I saw Dave sitting off by himself. A firefighter in the Air Force, Dave had been in Vietnam at Nha Trang when a wounded Army plane had come in. It crashed and Dave’s truck responded. The plane caught fire and the pilot could not get out. Dave took off his glove to unbuckle the man’s seat harness and his hand had been badly burned.

  I rolled up with my tray in my lap and lifted it onto the table. We talked while I tackled the ribs. I had brought the leather cuffs that strapped to my hands to shove a fork and knife in. I placed the fork against the rib and pushed with the palm of my hand until the fork slid in. I then took the knife and started to saw the meat but, instead of the blade sliding on the meat, the knife twisted in the cuff and lay sideways. After several attempts, I took off the cuff and wove the knife handle between my fingers and tried to cut the meat from the bone. The neck brace prevented me from tilting my head forward to look down at the plate. I looked down with my eyes but they kept focusing on the end of my nose and I would go cross-eyed. The knife continued to slip and my hand was covered with sauce. The fork had slid into the other cuff until it too was covered. I re
moved that cuff and grabbed the fork between my teeth and the cuff between my palms to pull them apart.

  Next, I took the handle of the fork between my palms and tried to cut the meat with the edge of the fork. The rib slid around the plate and suddenly pushed the beans and the cole slaw off the plate. Dave offered to cut the meat for me, but I wasn’t beaten yet. I grabbed the rib between my palms and brought it to my mouth. I bit as savagely as I could into the meat. I ripped with my head in one direction and my hands in the other. A piece of meat tore off and the greasy, sauce-covered rib squirted from between my palms, flying straight at Dave. He could not move fast enough and it caught him right between the eyes.

  A startled Dave gasped and stared at an embarrassed me. Dave broke into choking laughter and the milk he had been about to swallow came out his nose. “If you are gonna grovel with your food and wrassle it around the floor,” he gagged through his laughter, “I’m getting a shield.” I ignored the rib on the floor and started with another rib with more success. Dave feigned ducking from imaginary flying food and said, “I’ll bet you’re a real adventure when they serve corn on the cob.”

  In traveling to and from the mess hall, I learned of one potentially fatal hazard. The hospital staff loaded stainless steel carts with the meals to be sent to the wards. These carts were hooked in strings behind an electric tractor to be towed to various ends of the hospital. Each cart was unhooked at a different ward and the tractor left to deliver the rest. The danger was that the train delivering to the spinal cord injury section turned a blind corner into the hallway that the men in wheelchairs used. Rather than stop at the corner to see if anyone was coming, the driver of this train had solved his problem by attaching a bicycle bell to his tractor. This he rang vigorously before entering the hall. It was up to the people in wheelchairs to get out of his way. Complaints to the hospital staff about the danger of this brought no response. So the patients decided to solve things in their own fashion.

  The staff should have guessed that something was afoot by the size of the crowd outside the mess hall so early. The driver climbed aboard his tractor and pulled away. As he approached the corner, he began ringing the bell. But today, the sound of his bell was answered by the sound of an air horn. “HRONK, HRONK!”

  He attempted to stop the tractor, fully believing that he was about to be struck by an eighteen-wheeler, but the carts slammed into the tractor, shoving it into a concrete wall and throwing the driver up onto the steering wheel. The carts banged into one another and the side doors flew open. The trays came sliding one after another off of the racks inside, shooting down another intersecting hallway. Two nurses walking up the incline had to jump several runaway trays. From around the corner came a train of wheelchairs, each occupant going, “chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga.” As they came alongside the electric tractor, the leader pulled out a can of compressed air and let out a “HRONK.”

  The effect on the patients was pandemonium. Guys on crutches fell down. Guys with breathing problems almost passed out laughing. I could not see for the tears of laughter and I had to put my head between my knees to catch my breath. It was an event that became a legend, funnier and grander with each re-telling.

  One evening, I sat outside under the roof that covered the sidewalk and watched the cold March rain. Dave went by pushing two empty wheelchairs. “Where the hell you going with those?” I called after him.

  “Come on, you gotta see this.”

  I struggled to keep up with him. “Slow down.”

  “I can’t. I gotta get to those idiots before security finds them.”

  “Who?”

  “Marv and Duke wanted to go buy some beer. They found one of the electric tractors and took it.”

  Just ahead in the dim light, I saw the bright yellow tractor on the side of the road. As it happened, they were going fine until they got to a speed bump. Fearing that the low frame of the tractor would get stuck on the speed bump, they had driven off the road to go around, but the tractor had sunk into the rain-soaked earth. The two men had been sitting in the drizzle for forty-five minutes trying to figure a way back to their wheelchairs when Dave came along and rescued them.

  The VA hired a psychologist, a female in a wheelchair, to work on the spinal cord wards. She wanted to take me and some of the other guys out for a ride one evening. The only vehicle the hospital had that would hold us and the wheelchairs was a station wagon in which the police force had put a cage across the back of the front seat and against the windows to haul their K-9 dog in. One Saturday afternoon, three of us struggled into the back seat with the help of some aides. She drove us out toward the park. It felt weird riding in cage. At a stoplight, a car with a family in it pulled up beside us. We could not resist and opened the window. We grabbed the cage and started growling, howling, and shaking the metal bars. One of the kids started crying and we went into hysterical laughter. Her task of making us sane was overwhelming.

  The stories of this insanity were the best medicine and so the patients were constantly devising and scheming. As I looked back years later, I wished that I had done some serious work with that psychologist, but I did not know how much I needed the help.

  18

  REMFs

  I called Suzie once a week, but it was a month before she got back to Richmond. In that time, I had progressed from the four-post collar to a hard plastic cervical collar. I only had hospital pajamas to wear until a few days before Suzie got there when I went to the hospital store and bought a gray sweat suit.

  That Saturday morning, I was sitting by the door to the parking lot at eight o’clock, I was very anxious. My hair had grown back to about an inch on top, too long to stand up and not long enough to lie down; I had done my best with water to plaster it down. I hadn’t said anything to Suzie about going out. I hadn’t bothered to get a pass from the nurse. But I had brought my sliding board with me. As I sat there, I remembered waiting for a ride at the main gate at Cu Chi.

  There was a covered space inside the gate where guys who were hoping to catch a ride could ask outgoing vehicles for a lift. I was dressed in a clean set of my dress camouflage fatigues with colored patches on the sleeves. My black beret, which was only worn when a Ranger was not in the field, and especially when he was hoping to meet women, was set at an angle with the crest over the left eye. I carried an M-16 rifle with a clip of ammo in each pocket and a bandolier of clips under my jacket.

  I was going to Long Binh to see Harry, a guy from the unit who was due to be sent stateside. Of all the dumb luck, I thought. We had all been playing football in the company area when Harry went out for a long pass and fell into a drainage ditch that ran across the end zone. Harry ended up with a compound fracture and had to have a pin put in his leg. The next day, I went out on a mission and when I came in, I asked about Harry. They told me he was to be shipped home any day. I hadn’t bothered to get a pass or say anything about going to Long Binh. I just walked down the road to catch a ride.

  It was getting toward 5:00 p.m. and, any second, the guards would close the gate and no more vehicles would leave. Even in the summer with the longer days, it was just too dangerous to travel in the evening. Just then, a jeep pulled up, but it wasn’t like any I had seen before. The back had been extended to hold stretchers. There were a man and woman in the front and a man and two women on the benches in the back. “Where are you going?” one of them called.

  “Long Binh,” I replied.

  “That’s where we’re headed,” they said, and they waved me in. I climbed in the back. As we rode, the man in the back explained that they were doctors and nurses from Long Binh and they had spent the day visiting the hospital in Cu Chi. I told them that I was going to visit my friend who I guessed was in their hospital. They weren’t from that hospital, but they had to drive by it on the way in and would drop me off. No one bothered to introduce themselves.

  I sat back and laid the rifle across my lap. The doctors and the head nurse, a major who appeared to be in her early thirti
es, started talking about what they had seen that day. The two younger nurses were not included in the conversation. They sat watching the passing countryside. I sat watching the nurse across from me.

  She had an unusual shape to her mouth. It was as if she were pouting. I could see the inside of her lip. I was staring at her lip, wondering if it got windburned. I realized that she was aware that I was staring and she was glaring at me. I shifted my gaze around the jeep. Suddenly, it struck me and I interrupted the conversation in the jeep and blurted out, “Hey, you guys aren’t carrying any guns.”

  The driver responded in a superior tone. “We’re medical personnel. We don’t carry guns.” I was more surprised by the tone of his voice than what he said.

  “What, you think the gooks won’t shoot at you because you got that big red cross on the front of this thing?”

  The driver proclaimed, “I don’t care for that word ‘gooks.’ It’s demeaning.”

  I mumbled to no one, “You want demeaning, you ought to try shooting at them—that demeans the hell out of them.”

  The nurse beside me leaned over and spoke into my ear. “The reason we stopped to pick you up was because you are carrying a gun.” I sat in silence, looking out the back of the jeep at the flat expanse of rice paddies on either side of the road. We drove past the 11th Armored Cavalry base camp. We were halfway there. The conversation in the front droned on, and then the topic changed to stopping to get a soda. I looked out of the windshield and saw a small grove of trees by the side of the road. Standing near it was a boy of about ten or eleven years old holding two bottles of Coke in one hand and waving them to stop with the other. The driver was already slowing down and pulling to the shoulder of the road. I glanced fore and aft and saw no other vehicles on the straight stretch of road.

  “Hey,” I called out. “This isn’t a good idea. Why don’t you wait till we get to Long Binh to get some sodas?”