“Five by five, Booth. We heard about you already. Your call sign is now Badger One. Do you have a target for us?”
“I do, sir,” and he read off the coordinates. Within thirty seconds, a shell fell on the NVA forward lines. “You’re on ‘em, Bravo Mike Four. Fire for effect, and walk it straight north.” Shells began falling among the advancing troops.
A new voice broke in. “Sergeant, this is Colonel Ralph Ambrose. What the hell are you doing?” In the radio’s background, Booth could hear the sounds of a firefight.
“Defending my wounded, sir.”
The line went quiet for a moment. “Charlie’s got us pinned down here pretty good, son. I don’t know when we can get anyone to your position.”
“I’m here as long as it takes, sir. Charlie wants me out, he’s going to have to dig me out.”
Forty-seven minutes later, three Cobra attack helicopters came roaring in over the treetops and spat rockets and cannon fire at the North Vietnamese troops, who were soon in full retreat. Soon five big Huey helicopters landed on the slopes dotted with enemy dead and disgorged Marines, who immediately took up firing positions and advanced toward the retreating enemy. Two choppers with bright red crosses on the side circled in and landed near the field of wounded. Navy corpsmen poured out and began tending to them.
A command helicopter landed soon after and a tall man in fatigues and iron gray hair hopped out and trotted toward the firing position Booth had dug. He passed huge divots where mortar rounds had torn up the earth, and dozens of bodies of North Vietnamese soldiers, most dead, he saw, of bullet wounds. He found Booth’s body about twenty feet from his hole, lying on his side, covered in blood. He’d been torn to shreds, and half his face seemed to have come off. His left eye hung down across the bridge of his nose and a large flap of skin was torn loose from his hairline to his jaw. His arms and legs were gouged and ragged. There were shrapnel wounds and bullet holes everywhere the colonel looked. In his right hand he still clutched a .45 with the slide locked back.
The colonel shook his head and was about to turn away when he saw Booth’s chest rise and heard a sudden intake of breath, too little even to be called a gasp… it was more like a sip of air. He yelled, “Corpsmen!” and knelt down next to Booth.
“Son,” he said. “You still with us?”
Booth cracked open his remaining eye and it wobbled around for a moment before it focused on the colonel with obvious difficulty. “I… I guess so,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Oh, hello, Colonel. I’m glad you made it.”
It was the last time he regained consciousness for almost two weeks. Three times his heart stopped, but the doctors and nurses managed to revive him. He underwent one operation after another. When he finally woke up, covered almost head to toe in casts and bandages, his mom and dad were sitting by his bed. His mother looked like she’d been crying. “Hey! Hi, stranger. You had us worried.” He tried to croak out a reply, but nothing would come. His mother produced a glass of water and brought a straw to his lips. It tasted really really good. “Where…?” he managed to croak.
“You’re in Japan, sweetheart, at the naval hospital. You’ll be happy to know the doctor said you’re going to make it.”
“Can’t see much…”
His father leaned forward and took his hand. “You lost an eye, son. Plus half a lung, but they saved your kidney, which was all torn up. You’ve got a skull fracture from the shrapnel that took out your eye and some of the small bones around it. Let’s see, your left hand is busted up pretty good. Hey, which hand do you wipe your ass with?”
“John!”
“Uh… my right?”
“Well, it so happens that your right hand is fine, except for the stitches! See, things are looking up already.”
He laughed a little, and received a sharp jab of pain in his side, like a spear. Dark humor was his father’s favorite kind. His too.
“Let’s see. Four broken ribs, a busted hip, a busted leg, a busted knee and a broken ankle. A couple broken bones in your foot, which is no big deal. They’ll heal on their own, since you’re not going to be walking for a while. You’re missing three teeth on the right side and your jaw is wired together there. Broken bones around the eye and in your right cheek. Might be some nerve damage, definitely a nice scar. You know, if anybody asks how you got it—”
“I know,” he said. “Tell ’em I got it in a knife fight with a pirate.”
His father smiled and nodded. When he’d been small, whenever he got a cut or scrape, that was always his dad’s suggestion. A knife fight with a pirate.
“I think they said your nose is broken too. Perforated left eardrum, but that should heal. I guess you got blown up. Shot to shit, too.”
After a while, his mom left to call Evan back in the States, to let him know that his brother was awake. When she was gone, his father clasped his hand in his, and leaned close to him. “They told us what you did. There were eleven men on the ground there, and eight of them made it home. Because of you. You took on a whole battalion of NVA regulars, single-handed! That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen, son. I’m so proud of you.” He shook his head. “I can’t begin to tell you.” Tears sprang in his father’s eyes.
His parents stayed for a while, but he slept most of the time and it hurt him to see the sadness in his mother’s eyes, so he insisted they go home. Rehab was slow and torturous. He had to learn how to bend his leg again, how to stand, and then how to walk. It was painful, grueling work, and there were many times he just wanted to roll over and sleep, but the staff there rode him, challenged him, insulted his pride, called him every foul name they could think of until his anger fueled his body and drove him forward.
He couldn’t remember much of that time after he started calling in artillery. It came to him in flashes. Firing his M16, watching NVA soldiers drop like silhouettes on a range. Calling in targets. An overflight by one Navy jet, or was it two, the impact of its rockets shaking the ground underneath him. Artillery shells whistling in, and the slope below him lost in smoke and dust. NVA light mortar shells dropping on his position in deafening explosions. Enemy soldiers almost on top of him, the .45 in his hand bucking, and then he was flying through the air.
What he remembered most were the sounds and the smells. The hiss and whine of the AK rounds as they cut through the air above him and thumped into the dirt in front of him. The roar of the 82 mm mortar rounds that fell around him like judgment from above, the blunt concussions like a punch in the chest, making the ground jump underneath him. The acrid smell of the clouds of dust and cordite which filled his nose and the mouth he had to keep open so his eardrums wouldn’t burst. It seemed like a quarter of the time he couldn’t see and half the time he couldn’t hear, but the enemy kept coming in wave after wave.
When he healed well enough to get around with a walker, he got transferred stateside to Walter Reed.
When he wasn’t continuing his rehab, he spent a lot of his spare time reading, but that got old and he grew restless, so he found himself hanging around the Arts and Crafts room. At first it was because of the teacher, a large-breasted and flirtatious blonde named Jessica. She was at least ten years older than he was, but like every other wounded serviceman in the hospital he soon had a crush on her. He began to mess around with some paints, just to have an excuse to be there. After a while, though, he started coming for the art.
When he was a kid he loved to draw. Mostly it was comic book stuff at first, and when he was a little older he drew various bugs and plants that he’d bring home from the woods. After his sister died he lost interest, and then there was high school and football and girls. He was smart enough that he was often bored in class, and frequently doodled, and that was the sum total of his artwork, but you could see even from those that he had talent. With Jessica encouraging him he began to draw and paint, until he was dividing his time equally between art and rehab, returning
to his room only when it was time to sleep.
He got to be pretty good friends with one of the chaplains, an older Methodist minister named Guthrie who liked to shoot the breeze much more than he liked to proselytize. Their discussions were far ranging. He had seen a lot more of the world than Owen had and loved to tell stories about it.
One day, the Chaplain Guthrie came in and said, “Owen, there’s something I need to talk to you about. The After Action report is out. There were 28 enemy dead killed by gunfire, meaning you. Another 152 by artillery and rocket, and over a hundred blood trails. The stand you made is one for the books, my boy. The Marine Corps is going to award you a Navy Cross for what you did. Yes, it’s great, but you should know this… they were looking at the Medal of Honor. God knows you deserve it. But the Medal is only awarded at the end of a long investigation and every step of the event has to be exemplary, above reproach. Unfortunately, you started off by disobeying a direct order. Colonel Ambrose has been raising hell, trying to rescind the order after the fact or explain why it didn’t pertain to you, and every other thing he can think of, but the committee has made its decision. I’m sorry.”
Booth shrugged and shook his head. “That’s up to them. Honestly, I don’t much care.” He did care, some, but the Cross made him feel pretty good.
One afternoon while he was still at Walter Reed he got a call from his mother. “Sweetheart, we got a package here for you. It looks like it’s from Okinawa. It’s says it’s from Colonel Ambrose. Wasn’t he the one—”
“Yeah Mom, that’s him. Open it, will you please?” Ambrose had written him a couple times since The Day I Got Shot to Shit, to find out how he was doing. The colonel had his address at Walter Reed. Booth wondered why he’d sent the package to his parents’ house.
“It’s very heavy. Must’ve cost a fortune to mail from Japan. Oh my. It’s a gun.” He heard a muffled voice on the other end. “Here. Talk to your father.”
“Owen, it’s a 1911 Colt Government Model. I’d say it’s Marine issue. No Army or Navy stamp. You suppose this could be…? Wait, your mom says there’s a note. Hang on.”
His mom came back on line. “It says, ‘Picked this up on the field that day, and I’ve held onto ever since. Thought you ought to have it. All the best. R.A.’ Oh, that’s nice of him. Do you want us to send it to you?”
“I can’t have firearms here, Mom. That’s why he sent it to you. Can you hold onto it for me?”
By the time he was finally discharged, he was able to get around with a cane. Jessica helped him to put a portfolio together and he got accepted into Cooper Union, the famous art school in New York City, and between the GI bill, all the pay he’d saved while he was in the hospital, and the 80 percent disability check he received from the government each month, he scraped by.
Life at art school was not all that he’d hoped it would be, however. He got a lot of crap from some of the other students who looked down their noses at his scarred face, his eye patch and his Marine Corps tattoo. More than once he’d been in some artsy bar off campus and had some hippie asshole ragging him about being a baby killer, and ended up beating the stuffing out of the guy. There were too many times, as the old country song had it, that “the whiskey and blood ran together.” He smoked too much marijuana and drank too much booze, trying to drown the ache in his heart.
He had to spend more of his time than he wanted continuing his rehab at the nearby VA Hospital on the East Side, but eventually he was able to lose the cane. It also gave him a free place to work out, which he did religiously, building up the slabs of muscle he’d lost in the hospital, and adding more on top of them.
Academically, the first two years weren’t bad. Cooper Union still taught in the old atelier fashion, where students drew and painted from classical sculptures to refine their skills and their understanding of basic elements like light and shadow. When it came to that stuff, he was a total star, maybe the best in his class. But junior year that all seemed to go out the window. Now his instructors wanted creativity and originality, and the emphasis was on the avant-garde. He liked art that looked like things, that presented harmony and beauty, but the staff gave him nothing but grief about it. Representational art was dead, they told him, murdered by the camera. Now it was all Andy Warhol, or a movement that was actually called “bad painting.” As far as he could see, that’s exactly what it was.
Late one afternoon in March he sat up on the roof with a few other art students, relaxing on some old plastic lawn chairs between classes. He looked up and said, “Wow, look at the clouds.” They were beautiful. Puffy white and gray clouds against a cobalt blue sky, tinged around the edges with orange from the setting sun. One of the other students glanced up and said, “Clouds are trite.”
That evening he called his friend Rick in Idaho, who was now back living and working on his family’s massive sheep ranch. Rick had been his best friend in Boot and they had served two tours together, and they’d both saved each other’s butt a few times. They stayed tight even after Owen got his sergeant’s stripes and got transferred to another outfit. Rick had managed to visit him in the hospital in Japan and again at Walter Reed after his enlistment was up. The past couple summers he’d been able to spend at least a week with Rick and his family at the ranch. There were aunts and uncles and cousins all around the area. He loved the big family, and they embraced him as well.
“Hey buddy, I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I’d like to come hang out at your place for a while. Do you think your grandparents would mind?” The next day he packed up all his art supplies and took them to a freight company, and had them shipped to his folks’ house. He packed the rest of his things into two old suitcases and boarded a train to Chicago, where his folks picked him up. His parents loaned him a thousand dollars and he used half of it to buy an old 1963 aqua green Dodge Polara with a push-button shift. He loaded his art stuff and the 1911 into its big trunk and headed for Idaho.
Rick’s grandpa set him up in a charming little guest cabin, and gave him a heated shed for a studio where he could work. He wandered around the ranch, sketching and painting. He bought a camera and a huge telephoto lens from a pawn shop and started photographing the mule deer and the pronghorn around the vast landscape so he could draw them.
One day he was finishing up an oil of a big bull buffalo on a grassy plain. Rick’s grandpa came in and admired it. “I’d love to hang that above the mantle in my study,” he said.
Owen said, “Sir, I’d be honored.”
The next day he found an envelope with $1,000 cash on his drawing table. He went straight up to the house. “Mr. Cenarrusa, I can’t take this. You’ve fed me, put a roof over my head, and treated me like family. It’s not right, sir.”
Rick’s grandfather put his big weathered hand on Owen’s shoulder and said, “Owen, some day you’re going to be a famous artist, and I’m going to be able to say I bought the first painting you ever sold. Besides, Rick has told us a bunch of times about how you saved his rear end over there, and how he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. Now don’t you argue with me, son.” By the time Owen left the house, the money was in his pocket and Rick’s grandfather had commissioned a painting of his two bird dogs, a pair of beautiful English setters.
When he finished the dog painting, the Cenarrusas threw a big dinner party for the unveiling, inviting a bunch of hunting buddies, many of whom were landowners like them. The painting was a huge success. Owen ended up with six more commissions on the spot, and that had been the start of his career.
After that there were gallery openings, limited edition prints, coffee table books and magazine covers. He traveled around the continent and around the world, hunting and photographing, and then he’d lay up in his studio for months on end, cranking out paintings. He succeeded enough so he had money to go where he wanted and do what he wanted. Homes, cabins, land and lots of nice toys all came to him.
But t
he depression dogged him everywhere he went. It made him feel like scum, like vermin, like if he let people know what he was really like, no decent person would want to associate with him. It was not something he’d ever let anyone see. He learned to hide it, to cover it like a cat covered its shit. Even when he was at his worst, when he felt like crawling under his bed and sobbing, he could hold court at a party and keep a crowd roaring with laughter.
There were women too, lots of them. He was smart, he was funny, he was charming and self-deprecating, and even good looking they told him, in an ugly sort of way. But none of them ever stayed around long. He’d almost been married once in his late twenties to a beautiful woman he met in Telluride. Her father was rich and she was spoiled, and she decided he was the one for her. They made it as far as the altar. They got to the part where they exchanged their vows, but when it was her turn she’d let go of his hand, took a half step back and begun to cry. “I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t do it.”
He stammered out, “But...why?”
“You’re just so... You!” she wailed, and wheeled around and ran out of the church. He stood there, stunned, in front of all those people. He looked at their faces, and saw that they all had expressions of shock and surprise. But underneath that, he knew what they were thinking. Good for her! We never understood what she saw in that asshole! He drove home, saddled up his favorite horse, loaded a pack mule with whatever food he could find, and disappeared into the San Juan mountains for almost two months.
There was something in him, especially after that, something remote and hard, women would say, something that pushed them away. The truth was, he knew himself for what he truly was, and that was not something he’d wish on a woman he cared for. He killed his sister, and he’d killed hundreds of men. He bore the mark of Cain, and it was better they stayed away from a man like him. Down deep he knew that if decent people really got to know him, they’d make him walk from village to village with a string of bones around his neck, calling “Unclean! Unclean!” like a leper. And he couldn’t blame them.
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 18
