by Cullin Mitch
With his consciousness now ebbing, he heard a burst of machine-gun fire from the apple orchard and a single explosion somewhere else, perhaps across the river. He had the impression that major combat was resuming, although he didn't trust his ears anymore. “In God we trust,” he began again, “times flies,” but was unable to continue. Later, when he reflected on it, the conclusion of the incident seemed anticlimactic to him, because he was strangely at peace, somewhat relieved; the resentment and anger he had harbored toward McCreedy had been eradicated — and rather than transfer those emotions to the boy, it was an odd kind of gratitude he experienced instead, especially since he had survived circumstances which should have easily killed him. Then just as a wounded animal or insect might die quietly in its own environment, so had the boy. But Hollis had never belonged there, and, as such, he wouldn't allow himself to expire beside the Naktong; he wouldn't rot on the shore or get sent floating downstream: two lives may have been claimed at dawn, yet his life was about to begin anew; that was how he felt. Conceiving this to be his outcome, he closed his eyes. He heard the sound of multiple footsteps approaching, pounding the rocks and pebbles and sand — and, he knew, they were coming to save him, to carry him away from the river and, hopefully, ship him home alive.
14
When did Hollis awake again, buoyed in a sanctuary of whiteness? When did he open his eyes again, perceiving his surroundings through a drug-laced filter, believing then that everything charitable in the world — every-thing benevolent, clean, and restoring — was pure white? And how often had he woke, straining his groggy mind for answers he had already been told? No, he hadn't gone to heaven, nor was he somewhere in Korea: “I can't be dead, right?”
“Far from it, dear,” she had said, hovering above him like an angel in her spotless white attire — an indistinct navy nurse resting gloved hands upon his body. “You're at Yokosuka,” she ‘d revealed, her soft voice saturated with comfort, assurance. “You're safe now.” She had bathed him that night, dabbing and wiping his skin with a sponge. She had shaved his chin, throat, and cheeks; she had made his skin glow. With the aid of a corpsman, she had put white pajamas on him, and then she had rolled him in a wheelchair to a ward with wooden floors and white walls, bringing him to a bunk amid a row of other bunks — where wounded soldiers slept, their uniforms now pajamas. He had wanted to know her name, her full name; she had repeated it more than once — yet he had still forgotten it and her face, remembering only the white of her clothing and the soothing touch of her covered hands. After administering his painkillers and tucking him in, she had asked if he wanted anything. “Milk,” he'd heard himself say — and she had obliged, leaving him and, minutes later, returning with a tall glass of milk which grew warm on his bedside table, staying there because he had already drifted off again, falling asleep in white sheets. But what was her name? And how long — he wondered now — since he had arrived at the hospital in Japan?
His mind worked backward from that first night. He had been awake when the ambulance brought him to Naval Hospital Yokosuka, half conscious while a pair of Japanese orderlies pushed him on a gurney, sailing him down corridors which seemed endless. Sometime before that, he had stirred elsewhere — not at the naval hospital, not anywhere he had recognized — glancing around at what looked like a vision of hell, a living tableau of infirmity: a large, open ward packed with cots and men, everyone draped in brown blankets. The ward reeked of sickness, of blood and urine and human waste. A moaning, anguished cacophony of voices called for a medic, the same plea echoed from cot to cot. Then he comprehended his own pain, surging underneath the blanket that covered him, pulsing within his body like a fever. Pulling the blanket up to his chest, he saw that the left pants leg of his uniform had been cut away at the hip; the flesh between his left thigh and kneecap was bandaged thickly, a watermelon-size dressing sprouting tubes which coiled past the foot of the cot and disappeared. He tried wriggling his toes, but nothing moved. “Medic!” he shouted, the pain suddenly overtaking him. “Medic — ” and then he was gone once more.
A hand had slapped his face and he came to, his body aching horribly. “Stay awake, private,” someone was telling him. “You stay with us, all righty?” He wasn't dead; this wasn't heaven. He was being carried on a stretcher, taken up a ramp and brought inside a cargo plane, where the hold was lined with rack after rack of stretcher cases, where those who could walk — heads bandaged, arms wrapped — had to settle for benches, their shoulders pressed against one another.
“Come on, kid! Stay with us! You're doing fine!”
Someone had slapped him. There was the odor of feces.
“Oh, for Christ's sake, this one here shit his self!”
A medic put a blanket over him. His throat was dry. Where was he then? Canvas bulkheads, dark and bloodstained — racks of injured soldiers: an ambulance bouncing along a dirt roadway, jostling its occupants while heading to an aid station. He was sweating but felt cold, and he had soiled himself. With each hard bump of the ambulance, the pain shot through him, becoming so much larger and more consuming than his wound, rushing to every single nerve. Someone screamed out for morphine. Someone groaned, lowly cursing the driver. Someone grabbed his wrist, poking a needle into a vein. As the pain subsided, a warm sensation filled his extremities, relaxing him.
“He's lost a lot of blood — ”
The initial dose of morphine had worn off. He was so thirsty. Two men were transporting him on a stretcher, running across the apple orchard by the Naktong. Sunlight burned his forehead, as blinding hot as the pain which coursed in heightened, spasmodic waves. They passed a sergeant he had only spoken to a couple of times, the man's pace then quickening as he jogged alongside the stretcher for a moment, leaning a tanned, grubby face toward him, saying, “Got to hang in there, Adams. Can't go belly-up until after you get to Yokosuka. Them nurses are so damn beautiful — you'll be thanking that gook who did this to you, no kiddin’. Just hang in there — ”
And so Hollis had somehow hung in there, delivered from the waking nightmare of Korea to the bright, airy confines of a U.S. Naval Hospital which hadn't yet been given an official dedication ceremony (the public works operating on twenty-four-hour shifts, remodeling and converting additional buildings, creating further ward space for a patient census which would soon triple). In time, his mind would regain its full lucidity, his memory becoming less piecemeal. The pain medication was decreased; the pain itself still flaring up when he or a corpsman or a nurse tried lifting his bad leg. But with each nurse who stopped at his bedside — same white uniform, same accommodating manner — he attempted without success to recall which one had bathed him on that first night, had wiped his body with a sponge, scrubbing places where no woman other than his own mother had ever cleaned: Nurse McGill, Nurse Hayward, Nurse Christian, Nurse —?
Subsequently, he had been washed by corpsmen or Japanese male orderlies, yet it was the invigorating touch of that particular nurse which he longed to feel. And if recollections of McCreedy's final seconds ever flashed across his mind — or the corpse of the boy he had killed beside the Naktong — Hollis banished such images by letting better thoughts of the nurse's gloved hands preoccupy him at night, his fingertips acting as her fingertips while he slid them between his legs: the breathless, viscid aftershock of orgasm producing immediate disgust and regret, a potent kind of self-loathing which lingered through the daylight hours, often turning his face red whenever any of the nurses conversed with him, causing him to avert his gaze and, too, making it impossible to simply ask who it was that had tended him upon his arrival at Yokosuka. Instead, he said very little, appearing painfully shy, and feared that his uncontrollable blushing might actually betray the embarrassing truth behind his shame.
For a while, one day at the naval hospital was much like the next, and he had only to rest and eat and heal, his needs met by the small staff of nurses, corpsmen, and doctors who busily roamed the ward — checking wounds, emptying bedpans, offering magazines a
nd small talk. From his bottom bunk, he watched the comings and goings, aware of the new patients helped into the double-and triple-deck bunks which had previously been unused: some had slight injuries, a little shrapnel embedded in a thigh, calf, shoulder; some had shattered jaws and cheekbones, a Penrose drain inserted at their necks, their mouths wired shut; some were the worst of the worst, having bugged out at the front, escaping combat by shooting themselves in the foot or hand; some were bandaged head to toe; some didn't have arms or legs, or legs and arms. As the main military objective of the hospital was a prompt turnaround, many of the patients would be sent back to the battlefield once their wounds had mended, but those who were the most seriously injured would also leave Yokosuka, allowing extra room for incoming patients by completing their recovery at stateside naval hospitals.
Hollis belonged to the latter category, for that single shot from a Japanese-built rifle had rendered him useless, something he finally understood at Yokosuka when the bandages were changed — the gauze unfurling down the length of his left thigh, slowly displaying the extent of his injury and its repair. What he had imagined as a dime-shaped perforation was, in fact, a seventeen-inch scar after surgery was completed, with a sizable gash indenting a portion of his thigh so deeply that it looked as if the skin had collapsed into a cavernous sinkhole of discolored flesh. At some future point, he was told by a nurse, the indention would decrease, the scar would thin out. Another forecast came from a pair of young doctors — Dr. Golding and Dr. Buchman — who sat in chairs on either side of his bunk. Both similar-behaving, deadpan-voiced men leafed through files and sheets of notes while they took turns speaking, concluding a prolonged rehabilitation was in store for him, a period in which Hollis would have to use a wheelchair, then crutches, then a cane, then — if all went well — his own two feet.
“They should have you up and walking by Thanksgiving,” Dr. Golding assured him, nodding at Dr. Buchman. “You'll be in good hands.”
“Very good hands,” Dr. Buchman concurred, nodding at Dr. Golding.
“That's right, very good hands,” Dr. Golding agreed, nodding at Hollis.
“You got lucky, private.”
“Very lucky.”
But it was a high-strung, energetic corpsman nicknamed Sparky — a third-class petty officer, a wiry reservist, a choir director back in the States, somewhat of a dandy — who let Hollis know how lucky he had really been, lucky because he hadn't lost his leg: “Take it from me, I've seen plenty of boys brought here lacking all kinds of body parts, and they were still in better shape than you are.” In fact, Sparky had taken an interest in several of the quieter patients — ”the sweet ones,” he called them — and managed to learn about their individual conditions in detail, doting on them even when the attention wasn't required or wanted, eventually gaining their trust with an overly generous dispensation of barbiturates and a relentless sense of humor. For the patients whose faces and eyes were bandaged, Sparky delighted in teasing them, joking about the only two older nurses on the ward — veterans of World War II, women who had seen their share of the wounded — commenting to the men whenever one of the gray-haired nurses walked by, saying things like, “Oh my goodness, too bad you can't see this knockout. She's a vision of perfection. She'd make Elizabeth Taylor feel like Eleanor Roosevelt.”
It was Sparky, not the doctors or nurses, who first informed Hollis about his fate prior to arriving at Yokosuka — how his left femoral artery had been severed by the bullet and was ligated by doctors in Korea, his left foot having become cold and pale and lacking a detectable pulse, the drop of capillary circulation indicated by a delayed return of color upon a release of pressure from the skin; with edema also occurring, a couple of days had lapsed before it was decided the leg could be saved. “You came close to showing up here with just one boot, but you were probably too far gone to realize it.” Sparky discreetly pressed a painkiller against his palm. “Anyway, you really must do me a favor. While you're triumphantly tap-dancing again at Carnegie Hall, please remember me, would you?”
“That pretty much goes without saying,” replied Hollis, grinning.
“Good boy,” said Sparky, patting him on the shoulder. “We're all so proud of you.”
Hollis popped the barbiturate, chased it with a sip of water, and sank into the pillow — giving a sideways glance as Sparky about-faced on the heels of polished black shoes and flitted away, whistling happily between the rows of bunks, heading for another sweet one to comfort. Presently, while shadows crept along the floorboards and evening approached, he felt the induced fog settle across his slackened body like an ethereal weight, tiring him with ease. Hell of a way to quit smoking, was his last thought — and then he slept some more, not moving an inch, free of dreams or nightmares or any memories which bound him to such an ungaugeable present.
Later on, he was woken in darkness by a heaving cough, a throat being cleared. Overhead came a raspy voice, the Southern drawl of someone talking, mumbling from the top bunk which, hours before, hadn't been occupied. “Did you stop to think?” the voice asked, the tone languid and sluggish, medicated. “Did you stop to think to ask why it was we was fighting for? Did you stop to think to ask that? What'd it got to do with us? Did you stop and did you think?” But he hadn't heard the corpsmen bring in a new patient, hadn't sensed the rattling or shifting of the bunk as someone was made to lay above him. “Did you? Me neither. I didn't.”
The voice went on and on, repeating itself with alternating degrees of volume — a faint whisper, a sudden exclamation waking others.
“Will you shut up!” somebody cried from the adjacent bunks.
“Did you?”
“We aren't supposed to ask why,” somebody else responded nearby, “so shut the hell up!”
“Me neither. I didn't stop to think to ask. You didn't neither. You didn't stop to think to ask why neither. Did you?”
As the voice persisted, Hollis caught the strains of less disquieting creatures, hearing the purring of crickets just beyond the ward windows, communicating within the groupings of abundant weeds sheltering them. And if he believed it was possible to silence his noisy bedfellow with words, he might have brought up the insects and the weeds, mentioning how they never engaged in the wars of men. Perhaps, he wondered, that was why they were allowed to come back throughout the ages. People weren't afforded those kind of perfect rebirths. Individuals who died during war weren't destined to return as the exact same thing, thriving once more in the exact same place. Then he strained to perceive a vision of his own life long after his involvement in the war had ended — and, instead, saw the insects nestled inside the weeds, their shapes quivering securely among the hardy shoots, having claimed a home in an impossible world. It was a version of this sort of existence he would seek for himself, a methodical, consistent, and unburdened type of continuation — avoiding wearisome complications, unnecessary pain and, without doubt, steering clear of battles in which the outcome was uncertain or defied logic. He would take a page from the little things, from the things taken for granted and trampled underfoot. No, he wouldn't be reborn as the same old Hollis, but he would strive to be a more sensible, more prudent Hollis anyway — someone who would grow content with himself and his given surroundings, a man who believed he was done with war and pointless death.
“You do realize the war to end all wars wasn't,” Lon once said, when lounging by Hollis's swimming pool one evening. “Think we're always doomed to repeat ourselves? Are we just that pitiful?”
“Probably,” Hollis answered. Except, he thought, whatever comes along next won't be my war. It won't have anything to do with me. He'd paid his dues in the contextual name of freedom nearly five decades ago, and he had left Korea changed and resolved — becoming indifferent to what later loomed in Vietnam and elsewhere, having already recast the much earlier “war to end all wars” as a regrettable starting point rather than an emphatic, universally acknowledged conclusion.
“Sure, people go in circles,” Lon s
aid, sighing as he spoke. “The important lessons keep getting taught, no one learns though, I guess.”
“You've got a real firm grasp on the obvious,” Hollis said, scratching at his navel. “Tell me something I don't know, could you?”
Still, there had been another battle Hollis never quite anticipated facing, that most enduring of wars — as sweeping, widespread, and illogical as any which were waged in his lifetime; yet it was a taciturn offensive, routinely countered on a microscopic level, where the defending generals and corporals and lieutenants wore white coats and aqua green or light blue uniforms, and the randomly chosen, ill-prepared foot soldiers often dropped hard and irrevocably at the front lines; their deaths were now so numerous that a towering monument etched with their names would, most likely, climb beyond the moon. But this, too, wasn't to be his war, not truly; it was Debra's time at the front, it was her fight — and the best he could do was aid her, standing by as a reliable ally, fearing all the while that her defeat would also serve as his defeat.
Nonetheless, luck had always been at their side. When the 1994 North-ridge earthquake jolted Los Angeles, their Arcadia house was badly shaken yet escaped any serious damage, nor were they affected by the L.A. riots of 1992 — watching the neighboring violence unfold on television like a cheap action movie, remaining safe in the suburbs while police helicopters raced across the sky. They had evaded freeway accidents by milliseconds, and they had also hiked along an Eaton Canyon trail which, on the very next day, was submerged by a flash flood, the rapid waters then sweeping a Hispanic family of four to an untimely end. As a couple, they were first spared from harm in the early 1960s, somehow avoiding injury after their Chrysler got caught between club-wielding members of the American Nazi Party — who were parading through the streets of Monterey Park to demonstrate against interracial marriage — and an angry gathering of civil-rights protesters which had lined the sidewalks to confront the white-supremacist marchers: rocks sailed back and forth above the Chrysler, vehicles in front and behind them had windshields smashed, a bystander was struck by a brick, and yet, as would happen again and again, they miraculously weathered the turmoil without receiving as much as a scratch. They were, as Debra usually commented whenever tragedy had narrowly avoided them, blessed with an abundance of good fortune.
