Dog Tags

by Stephen Becker

  Blue two did not know who Beer was.

  “Your doctor,” I said. “Your friendly neighborhood gynecologist. I need another truck.”

  Blue two complained. He complained. So I apologized. Blue two meditated that. Blue two asked where I was, and I gave coordinates. I heard no gunfire. I described the building.

  Blue two said that all of them might be falling back, and perhaps I should set up where I was. That was agreeable. “There’s another doctor on the way,” I told him. “On the main drag there. Noonan. No. N for Nan. Send him here if you fall back. Also transport. Trucks, for the wounded. Could they cut us off to the south?”

  Blue two said, “Yes.” Blue two went on at length, as if it was important to explain this defeat to Lieutenant Beer. I truly expected to live only a short while, and was bored by these details.

  “Blue two out,” Blue two said finally.

  “Bye bye,” I said.

  “How bad is it?” Ewald wanted to know.

  “Very bad. Even the good parts are bad. Lots of Chinese, they think. Anyway, this is home. Let’s unload.”

  “Home,” Ewald repeated, and moved to the tailgate. Ewald was short, fat, yellow-haired, a buttery boy of twenty-one, and it is my fault as much as any man’s that he is dead. I remembered being twenty-one and wanting desperately to be twenty-two. Now I was twenty-six and wanted desperately to be twenty-two. The afternoon air was crisp and still; no aircraft streaked the opal silence, no gunfire. I looked about me, great distances, far across the barren mountains. I saw patches of snow. I stared to the north, suddenly breathless, alien. I was fifty miles from Manchuria.

  Two fireplaces. A well out behind, bucket and windlass, and the water tasted good, cold and sweet. We opened the ponderous drafts and built fires, and Ewald made coffee. I lay on a blanket and smoked a cigarette. This was not a war for cigar smokers.

  Ewald brought me coffee and said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Thinking of my little boy. Soldiers in far-off places always supposed to think of their little boy. No way to fight a war.”

  “Not much war right now.”

  “Don’t knock it. You realize if I was a banker or a broker or some god damn yachtsman I wouldn’t even be here?”

  “You talk like a three-year man.” Ewald had a slow, bright, round smile as on some blue-eyed boy doll, eyelids flipping open, fat arms.

  “I am a three-year man. Almost. I got ribbons. I’m five years older and nothing’s changed.”

  “You’ll be too old for the next one,” Ewald said.

  “I’m too old for this one,” I said.

  “Quiet out there,” Ewald said.

  “That plane scared hell out of me.”

  “It was ours anyway.”

  “They’re all ours.”

  “Not all,” Ewald said. “We knocked one of theirs down a while ago. Jet against jet. First time in history. It was on the bulletin board.”

  “Another milestone for the human race. I wish I knew what it was all about. I get the feeling we’re not even in Korea. Chile, or Siberia. And we sit here with a dandy little clinic, and a dead truck, and several dollars’ worth of equipment, snake oil and rectal sandpaper and such, and the god damn phone doesn’t even ring.” I must have smiled about then, sourly.

  “You missed the worst,” Ewald said. “They shot prisoners.”

  “We will too.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe it.” I felt harsh, remote, old. The first surprise in that war: everybody was so young. “I’ve seen red-blooded American boys shoot down German prisoners, white men, blue eyes, blond hair. Gooks are nothing. Cockroaches.”

  “They started it,” Ewald said sullenly.

  “Right,” I said.

  Ewald made peace: “I hear there’s tigers in this country.”

  “I heard that too. And snow leopards. We got a weapon in here?”

  Ewald shook his head. “Against the rules.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Ewald’s father had farmed until the big war and then opened a liquor store in Minneapolis. Ewald’s mother was a good cook and missed the farm. She hated the city. Nothing tasted right. Ewald’s father was a rural agnostic but Ewald himself was inclined to believe. Ewald’s mother had had her gall bladder removed. Ewald’s father suffered a recurrent stricture; he required the old man’s operation but kept putting it off. Ewald had two sisters, both younger, one of them engaged to a water-softening expert who was also a qualified surveyor, and a Catholic, which distressed the parents on both sides. Ewald hoped to marry soon. It must be great to sleep with a woman every night.

  “Right,” I said.

  The radiophone crackled. “Beer on.”

  “We’re falling back all right,” Blue two said. “Noonan’s dead. Mortars.”

  “We’re ready,” I said.

  “See you soon,” Blue two said. We were both wrong.

  We began badly but soon had no time for omens and auguries. A jeep skidded into the courtyard, the driver shouting, and Ewald was there with a stretcher and an unconscious soldier was on the table in seconds and I was cutting his uniform away. It was a single shot in the abdomen. “Aaach,” I said, knowing, and felt the faint, fluttery pulse, washed the belly with one quick motion, a little excited now, a real patient, echoes and memories of a hundred classrooms and clinics, but the man was dead before the dressing touched him. The driver pushed in with another case, this one walking, or stumbling, bandages caked brown on an arm that had to come off. They toted the corpse into a corner and shot number two full of morphine and I went to work; trimmed the wound, pumped a little plasma into him. Ewald tagged him, and he was ready: “Take him,” I said. “Where?” the driver asked, another boy—God Almighty, how young they were! “Anju,” I said. “Just run south. Take that body too.”

  “Body.” The boy shook his head.

  “You’ve got room. We haven’t. Or leave him for the crows,” and there was hubbub outside, and Ewald ran to the door. “Jesus,” he said. There was plenty of noise now, jets, and farther off crumps and rattles. “Jesus,” Ewald said. I was afraid, cold, but again there was no time. Men staggered in; men were carried in. “Christ, he’s all gray.” A raw red hole in him, hipbone to kidney, blood vessels; more plasma, while I swabbed and packed. “Transport. What’ve we got out there?” “Two trucks.” “Plenty of room.” “For now.” “Any officers?” “Not conscious.” “Call home,” I said. “Tell them we’re busy and need wheels. Or choppers. Tag this man.”

  Next on the table a Negro. That was another difference, Negro soldiers, a surprise. Otherwise the world seemed much the same. The language was as foul, and before long I would regain my former virtuosity. Perhaps not. I felt forty. Perhaps as we aged we spoke less, reserving grand obscenities for true crises. The choppers were a difference too, but there were not many, not enough. “And find out what’s happened to the chain of evacuation. Are we number one or what?” I remembered a phrase: “quickly to restore to duty those suffering from minor ailments.” No minor ailments today. Chest. Good Christ, what can I do about a chest? I staunched, cleaned, packed, a mechanic. My God, I’m all alone. Ewald with the syrette. Oh Christ, the femoral artery too. Hunter’s canal wide open. Barges, tugboats. My gloves slipped through blood, tripped and groped through small masses of jelly. “He’s dead,” Ewald said. “God yes,” I said. Men lugged it away. It was replaced. “Good,” I said. “Broken femur.” “He’s conscious.” “Knock him out.” “They’ll send trucks,” Ewald said. “A bunch coming down. Choppers if they can. The mobile hospitals are on the run too, so we’re just about number one.”

  “Call back,” I said. “Tell them we’re it and we need everything. Doctors, medics, plasma, dressings, the works. Lamps, even. All right, that splint now. Keep these men warm.” No one listened; no matter. I worked, I muttered; iron-headed generals killing their own men, too good to think about a retreat. Chinese won’t dare! There. You’re all right, mister. You�
�ll live to fight again. Move him. Next. A corporal would have done better. Corporals always think about a retreat. I heard motors, horns, shouts. Corporal Beer wondered if we would all be overrun, dead by dawn; Doctor Beer worked. Men crowded into the room, and icy breezes froze my sweat and I hollered, “Shut the door.” The line was longer. “Ewald: Get some of these live ones to work. Keep the bad ones warm and comfortable. No water. The others can clean up some of this shit. Find me a live officer.” Holy Jesus Christ, a nose and an eye. The room tilted and I took hold of the table. After some blinking and deep breathing I was well again. “Easy, fella, you’ll live.” Time. An hour perhaps, seemed like seconds.

  “Sir.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Lieutenant Hovey. What can I do?”

  “Take charge,” I told him. “Everything not medical is yours. Organize evacuation. Steal all the rations you can, and medical supplies, sulfa, syrettes, stuff we’ll need here, before you send men out. Don’t let anybody run off with an empty vehicle. Nothing goes south without a wounded man. That’s orders. Anybody argues, shoot him. Get somebody to supervise loading, somebody else unloading. Clear the dead bodies outside.”

  “Yessir,” Hovey said, greenish.

  “How many healthy men out there?”

  “About thirty.”

  “Thirty!” I straightened up, stretched. “A real retreat?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Damn. Get on the radio. Find out how bad it is.”

  “Yessir. Sounds like a chopper coming in.”

  “Good. Next! Next, for God’s sake! Get out there and have them clear a pad. Ewald! Ewald, where the hell are you?”

  He pushed through the crowd. “Yessir.”

  “Tag the worst ones for the chopper. Make up a detail and move them carefully.”

  “Lieutenant,” Ewald said.

  His eyes were hard, ice-blue and mock-old in the round young face. He was acting. He had seen many exciting war movies.

  “Some of these bad ones,” he said. “Some of them—well, some of them going to die pretty quick. Should we maybe—”

  “No,” I said. “Tag the worst ones for the chopper.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Hovey,” I said. But Hovey was gone. “You. Sergeant.”

  “Yessir.” Black, frozen.

  “Anybody not hurt or working stays outside. They can build a fire, eat, anything, but outside.”

  “It’s snowing.”

  “Tough. Damn. Can they use choppers in snow?”

  “I don’t know. Never saw snow before.”

  The innocence of it. “Clear this room anyway. It’s a hospital, not a hotel.”

  “Yessir.”

  I stared down at a liver, and experienced the beginnings of a vast arctic horror. Don’t cry.

  By nightfall my arms were weary. I worked. I made and lost acquaintances. Hovey was gone, replaced by a captain named Wyatt. Sergeants assumed responsibilities and shortly moved out, omitting farewells and leaving confusion behind. With darkness the firing diminished. Trade remained brisk. I had not understood how truly random nature could be. Bullets flew about like atoms and hit anybody anywhere. I had idiotically imagined a war in which soldiers were politely shot in the shoulder or the fleshy part of the leg. Or cleanly, painlessly, expired from a single clean and painless wound won in a noble action. The triumph of myth over experience. I knew better but my mind had balked. It was still balking but without conviction, mainly because I was repairing arms, legs, bellies, necks, heads, hands and feet, white bone, red meat, slippery veins and slippery arteries, some of the meat nicely marbled. I must remember to tell Pinsky; I was carving a brisket, well marbled. I neatened up: removed a pair of mashed testicles and looked for further damage; none, it was a clean shot, the coup du roi, a hundred points and a teddy bear, nothing touched but the scrotum and that gone forever. Perhaps it had been a double. Over and under or left and right? Into a bucket. Future Einsteins, Kallikaks. Better off dead. That was wrong, they would say that was wrong but I could oppose a vigorous argument. It would bear thinking about. Instead, or also, I thought of Carol, and was immobilized by a flaming, inexplicable burst of pure rage; then for an instant stupefied. That too would bear thinking about. “That fire outside,” Wyatt said. “It’s a target.”

  “Any planes up?”

  “No.”

  “Artillery?”

  “Damn little. But if they take a big enough hill. Or come close enough for mortars.”

  “You watch,” I told him. “Some general’s going to get a big fat gold medal. Good news, they’ll say. An exemplary retreat. Christ, Wyatt, I just got here. I haven’t even talked to a Korean yet.”

  “What about that fire?”

  “You’re in charge out there. I don’t need it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Okay. No fire. Can they come back in?”

  My back ached. Occupational hazard. Compensation, partial disability. “How many now?”

  “Too many. Forty. Fifty. But maybe in shifts.”

  “All right. You do it. Keep them out of my way.”

  Wyatt looked like a wispy blond poet and wore a West Point ring.

  “Doc. Something wrong? Is he dead?”

  “I’m tired. I need a clamp.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  It was not Ewald but a stranger. “Where’s Ewald?”

  “Here, Lieutenant. Coming. Sorry.”

  “A clamp. Tag him. Morphine and plasma.”

  At dawn I stripped off another pair of gloves and stumbled outside. The courtyard was full. Men slept in pairs like lovers, un-American, treason, hugging and groaning, livid in the pearly light, powdered white by snow. Motors droned and thumped. I counted eight trucks, two jeeps. Snow fell in sparse, minute flakes; to the east the sky was clearer. I breathed. I trudged into the brush and relieved myself, stiff, tired; yes, made Korea my own. My breath steamed and my head was leaden. I buttoned up, found a match, smoked. I walked on back. “How you doing, Swede?”

  Ewald nodded. “I slept a little. This is bad, isn’t it.”

  “Bad as can be. Any word from anybody about anything?”

  “Big retreat. Anju and maybe farther. In the east too, right down to the ocean.”

  “We’re in trouble.”

  “They’re still coming in,” Ewald said.

  “As long as they come, we stay.”

  “Okay. I wasn’t asking.”

  “You sound like you want a transfer.”

  “Soon as possible,” Ewald said.

  A light booming commenced in the north. “The Chinese,” Ewald said. “Millions of Chinese.”

  “Five years ago they were all heroes.” Lin was at Bellevue. Another year and Lin might come down from the north with a red star on his cap.

  No. Hazily, puzzled, I received an illumination: such meetings were not life. I would not find Lin in an exotic Oriental compound. I would never see 57359 again. Or … or her. Paths crossed, diverged; the past was always prologue. And the future was never a tidy epilogue; the future was opaque until it became the present, and then it was the past, and more prologue, and possibly I had already made my greatest and most irrevocable decisions and mistakes. But I would never know. I might never see Jacob again, or Carol, or Joseph. “Take some chocolate and coffee to the table, will you? I’ll come in.”

  “All right. You need sleep.”

  “Soon. No word about another doctor?”

  “No word.”

  I would never talk to Blue two again. Or to Wyatt, or the Negro sergeant, or after a while to Ewald. I was a dead fish floating on life’s tide, a tide neither friendly nor hostile but inexorable. I was a chip, a bubble, a nothing; only a function. Here or there, then or now, I was a doctor. That was something. I saw myself driven by a silent destiny to a tent in Central Asia, an igloo in the Arctic, a hut in Samoa, each day new faces, new wounds, new ills, and Benny nameless, homeless, friendless, repairing men, women, children,
whose language he could not speak.

  The sweet German dance I love came to me, and I shouted aloud in pain.

  Business slacked off in midmorning. By then I was accustomed once more to the noise of war, and could distinguish a variety of instruments: mortars, machine guns, distant single rounds like firecrackers; perhaps a carbine. In a corner of my clinic stood several rifles. ’Tis expressly against the law of arms. Bits and pieces of equipment—and, I supposed, of men—littered the room: cartridge belts, a mess kit, packs, ration boxes. Outside were many corpses; within, a skinny sergeant with a broken arm and probably a bad concussion; he was conscious and smoking but with the empty, incandescent eyes of a parrot. On the table was a young man who had lost a one-inch ribbon of his left side from armpit to hip; bits of rib flashed white as I swabbed and trimmed. “Ewald, my boy, we may have missed the last bus. How long since a vehicle went past?”

  “Half an hour anyway.”

  “And no foot soldiers either.”

  “I hear some now,” Ewald said.

  “Raise him up a little,” I said. “I hear them too. It’s been lovely, Ewald.”

  “God damn it,” he said. “You were supposed to get me out of this.”

  “I was supposed to treat the wounded,” I said. “So were you. Let him down now, easy.” I was as good as drunk (no, not quite as good; I would have given a deal to be rowdy drunk), wallowing in bloody bits, waving red hands, exhausted, blinking gritty eyes, hungry.

  It was not over. All day long they trickled in.

  Dark again, and brutish silence, like a cheap saloon at dawn; along one wall, six patients in a row, one whimpering, others asleep, unconscious, one smoking in the half-light. In the courtyard another vehicle, slamming to a stop; boots on stone, the door flung open: “Bring him in! Bring him in!”