Another War, Another Peace

by Ronald J. Glasser

  It wasn’t a request but a command. Cramer, to his credit, tried to maintain his composure. But David could see that Cramer didn’t know what to do and that it was taking too long. He had the same feeling he’d had standing at the jeep the day Tom had used his knife on the child; the sense that it was slipping away.

  The trooper’s chair moved. David saw Cramer freeze. He moved forward, slamming open the door. There was a sharp crack and the rifle spun past Cramer.

  “New evac coming in, Colonel,” David said, quickly stepping into the room. Cramer, startled, looked at him, his eyes so wide they seemed to fill his glasses. “They need you in the OR right away. Med evac chopper’ll be here in a few minutes.” David turned. The rifle was lying on the floor. “You’re Frank’s friend, aren’t you?” he said in the same breath. The soldier, a short, swarthy kid with pinched cheeks, stared up at him.

  “He sent word with your two buddies—a tall guy with a beard and a short, stockier fellow. They’re outside. Wanted to make sure you’re okay. Said you’ve been together a long time. You won’t need that,” David said, walking across the room and picking up the rifle. “Anyway, they told me to tell you they’ve got to go back and that everything’s okay. They’ll come to get you in a couple of days. Sergeant Parker, the sergeant you saw at the desk, will be here in a couple of minutes. It’s okay; your buddies checked him out. He’s going to give you something that’ll help you relax. The one with the beard, what’s his name?”

  “Pete,” the trooper mumbled.

  “Well, Pete says they need you rested when you go back. Says you’ve been pushing real hard and could use some rest.” David turned back to Cramer. “Come on, Colonel. Sergeant Parker will be right in; you’ve got to get back to the OR.”

  Cramer slowly got off his stool. “Hurry, Colonel,” David said sharply. Cramer, coming out of his daze, quickly followed David into the corridor. He was about to speak when David angrily motioned him to be quiet and to follow him. Back at the desk, he handed the M-16 to Parker. “You can give him his Thorazine now.”

  “You scared the hell out of me back there,” Cramer said when the sergeant left, “rushing in like that … damn, but …”

  “You had everything under control, right? Is that it?” David asked coldly.

  “Well, he was a little shakier than most, but a few more minutes and he’d have been okay.”

  “Tell me,” David said, “only out of curiosity, what were you going to do? Sit there? Fake a telephone call to the States? Or wait the half-day till maybe a call could get through? Those two guys I mentioned in the treatment room—I didn’t make them up. They’re right outside and they can barely tell the difference between me and you and the VC. They stole a chopper, Ted, right out of their LZ, and some more of them are out on the pad right now holding the crews at gunpoint. In the States stealing helicopters is a felony. I assume over here it’s a court-martial offense. You were running out of time. Frank’s been dead a week. This kid was hallucinating, Ted, and he had a loaded gun pointed at you. He didn’t want to hear about blood gases or hypocalcemic seizures.”

  “And he could have pulled the trigger when you barged in like that!”

  “But he didn’t, did he? And you’re safe and he’s got his Thorazine. You want to talk to his friends?” David asked. Cramer shook his head. “I didn’t think so.”

  David walked back outside. The two troopers had moved away from the front of the dispensary into the heavier darkness away from the building, but David could still make them out by the light coming past him through the open doorway. The night closed in again as he shut the door and walked over to them.

  “Your friend’s going to be all right,” he said. “But he’ll be sleeping for a while.”

  “We should all be sleeping,” the shorter one answered, “but he’s the one seeing dead people.”

  “That may be because he’s exhausted. We’re giving him something to help him rest.”

  “What?” the tall one asked.

  “Thorazine; it’s a tranquillizer.”

  “A tranquillizer.” For the first time, the trooper sounded interested. “You send them back with the shit?” he asked. “The dope, man. Does he go back with the dope?”

  “It’s not dope, it’s a—” David caught himself. He was beginning to sound like Cramer. “No,” he said. “It’s just used here, but it’ll keep him sleeping for a couple of days.”

  “And when he wakes up, what happens if he freaks again? It was a shitload of trouble getting him here. We might not be able to do it again.”

  David wished he could see the two of them better. It was like talking to ghosts.

  “The drug’s only to help him sleep. After he wakes up, we’ll be able to tell whether he’s been seeing his friend because he’s been pushing too hard and is just exhausted or because he really has cracked up.”

  “How you gonna tell that?”

  Surrounded by darkness, barely able to see, it made no sense to pretend.

  “Look,” David said, “I’m not a psychiatrist; none of us at the base is. All we know about what’s going on with your friend is what we’ve picked up over here, with some help from what we learned in the States. If he’s still seeing things after he’s rested, then it’s something more than exhaustion. We’ll do the best we can.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “Between the time he wakes up and you knowing if he’s okay.”

  “Depends on how much of the shit they give him, right?” the shorter one asked with a kind of malevolent humor, as if he and David shared a secret. But the raw hostility was gone. “You know,” he added, “we could have doped him up ourselves.”

  “A day or two,” David said.

  “You be taking care of him?”

  “I’ll be one of the doctors.”

  “And if he’s still seeing things?”

  “We’ll evac him to the 70th. There’s a chance then that he’s real sick, maybe even psychotic.”

  “Psychotic!”

  There was a moment of silence. “Did you hear that?” the shorter one said, amused. “Psychotic … shit. Doc,” he said, “if you think just seeing dead people is psychotic, then what’s the real stuff?” They both laughed.

  The dispensary door opened and the tension returned with the light as Cramer stepped into the doorway.

  “Come on,” the short one said to his friend. “Let’s get out of here. Todd’ll be okay. Ain’t no one here going to hurt him … Psychotic.” Still laughing, they both walked away.

  Cramer stepped up beside David. “They going?” he asked nervously.

  “Yeah, they’re going.”

  “Sergeant Parker told me what happened.”

  “How much Thorazine did you use?” David asked, continuing to look in the direction the two troopers had taken.

  “Three grams, why?”

  “That’s a lot, isn’t it? Normal dosages are somewhere around five hundred milligrams.”

  “Normal levels don’t work. Look,” Cramer said, changing the subject, “I don’t want you to get me wrong about what went on in there; I appreciate what you did. It just kind of caught me by surprise, that’s all.”

  Through the darkness David could still hear their laughter, thin and distorted by the misty night air. “Ted,” he said wearily, “where you think you’ve been all these months? Maybe it is time for you to go home.”

  A few minutes later when David reached the barracks, the choppers had already started their engines.

  Chapter 20

  “YEAH, I HEARD THE two of ’em come in. Damn, stealin’ a chopper! Now that,” Tom said, “takes real balls.”

  “I checked on the kid before breakfast,” David said, putting the canteens into the jeep. “He’s still asleep. Tyler’s on sick call today, so he’ll be watching him. The kid will probably be out for at least another forty-eight hours, maybe longer. Three grams of Thorazine can act like four or five when you’re dehydrated, and that kid w
as real dried out.”

  “Just took the chopper, huh, and right out of a hot LZ? Not bad, not bad at all,” Tom said appreciatively.

  David walked around the back of the jeep and got in. “You don’t see anything wrong with it, huh?” Tom looked at him. “All right,” David admitted, “I guess I don’t see much wrong with it either.”

  Tom started to laugh. David began to laugh himself.

  “You know,” he said, still laughing, “you should have seen the look on Cramer’s face when I barged into the room. Damn … I’ll tell you, it was something. Can you imagine,” David said, trying to be serious, “explaining the pathophysiology of hyperventilation to a kid holding a loaded gun on you, and doing it with a straight face?”

  But being serious didn’t work. It only made it more ridiculous, and they both started to laugh again and kept laughing until all the heat and worry were forgotten, and they drove out of the 40th as relaxed and comfortable as they’d ever been with each other.

  “There’s no doubt you can get really dingy out here,” Tom said a few minutes later.

  “Talking about Cramer, the kid or his friends?” David asked.

  “All of us,” Tom said without the slightest hesitation.

  “Yeah,” David admitted, “that’s true. What happens when they get back?”

  “Back?”

  “Like this kid, say he’s okay. What happens when he gets back to his unit? During basic we only had an hour lecture on military psychiatry—not a hell of a lot—and they made it sound pretty simple. No one calls it shell shock anymore like they did in the first world war or battle neurosis like in the second or Korea. Now it’s combat fatigue. They think it’s all exhaustion, so you let them sleep or put them to sleep, and when they wake up they’re fine, and if they’re not the idea is they were in trouble before the Army and the stress of combat or whatever pushed them over the edge. Since the majority of those who freak out aren’t supposed to be crazy, just tired, all you have to do is let them rest. I know,” David said, seeing the look on Tom’s face. “But it seemed to make sense in Texas. You don’t evac them out of the combat area so that when they wake up the guilt they’re feeling because they left their units doesn’t become fixed and end up a bigger problem than what caused them to be evaced out in the first place; that’s supposedly the reason you send them back to their units so quick. Simple, huh? What does happen when they get back?”

  “Never gave it much thought,” Tom said. “Doesn’t bother anyone. Besides, it’s hard to keep track of who’s freaked out and who hasn’t. When there’s a firefight or you’re just taking incoming, everyone that’s hit or sometimes just bleeding gets evaced out together. There ain’t no time to figure out who’s really bad off and who isn’t. Sometimes a lot of blood ain’t nothin’ and a little wound that you figure was no more than a scratch ends up killin’ someone. Things get even worse when contacts come one after the other. Hard to tell how bad someone’s wounded, so when they come back you never know exactly what’s happened to ’em. There’s no way to tell who’s freaked out and come back and whose wound didn’t amount to much.”

  “And it doesn’t worry anyone?”

  “Having guys freak out and then come right back? Nah,” Tom said, unconcerned. “It don’t take all that much to pull a trigger.”

  “That’s the point,” David said. Tom looked over at him. “There’s no medical follow-up. Once the trooper steps off the chopper, that’s it; no one watches him. Maybe his commander doesn’t even know why he got evaced out. No one ever checks to see if he’s the one who steps left when everyone else steps right or walks into a booby trap that everyone else missed.”

  Tom thought for a moment. “You mean the docs don’t know if they’re doing it right?”

  “Hard as hell to figure out who’s mentally ill and who isn’t in a couple of days, much less an hour or two after they wake up from being zonked with a tranquillizer. The Army does get what it wants, though. The troopers get sent back to their units, and like you said, it doesn’t take all that much to pull a trigger. You need a follow-up in medicine to know if what you’re doing is right.”

  “Damn,” Tom said, “you do take things down to their parts.”

  “I’m a little behind,” David said dryly. “Someone in the Army’s already done it.”

  David was shielding his eyes. While they’d been talking, he’d been looking at a rock formation out on the flats. “Hold it,” he said.

  Tom, putting on the brakes, stopped the jeep.

  “See that formation over there, the one that looks like a boat?”

  Tom leaned past him. “There’s something different about it from two days ago. I think something moved.” Tom put the jeep into neutral, leaving the motor running. “Let’s go see.” He grabbed the M-16 from under the dash. They walked together across the rocky ground.

  There was a six-inch piece of cloth snagged on one of the rocks. Tom pulled it off. It was faded by the sun, but they could still see its basic khaki color.

  “I might have missed it last time,” David said. “It could have been here for weeks.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Tom, walking around, looked at the ground.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Hard to tell. The ground’s pretty messed up around here. Could mean a lot of people moving through.” He looked up at the sun. “Nice place to keep out of sight in during daylight. Well, come on,” he said. “There ain’t nothin’ else here.” Tom put the cloth back where he’d found it. “You know,” he said, “it was really something to spot this. I mean it.”

  David was pleased. “Thanks,” he said softly. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  Chapter 21

  DAVID HURRIED TO THE dispensary as soon as they got back from the villages and unloaded the jeep. Tyler was there. The patient was still asleep, but he had an IV running.

  “Figured I’d improve his hydration while he slept,” Tyler said. “I heard about what happened last night. You might have saved our soon-to-be-departed commander from significant bodily injury.”

  “Hard to know,” David said.

  “Oh, really,” Tyler commented dryly, “you may not have found out yet, but our patient and his friends aren’t your average run-of-the-mill combat riflemen. They’re rangers, and what you saw last night was all that was left of their unit. They’d been scaring a lot of people, ours and theirs. As for saving our commander, we’ll never know, will we. Part of the problem of dealing with negatives, things that never happen. You can’t be sure. But then again,” he said with a slight shrug, “if you’d decided not to bust in …”

  “I guess I was worried about the kid, too,” David said.

  “A reasonable concern. Ted is not at his best when dealing with the unusual or the bizarre. I infer from all the dust on you that you came to see your patient before you cleaned up.”

  “Right.”

  “See, you do get an instinct for these things after a while.”

  The trooper was asleep. The IV solution hanging above the bed was running slowly through the tubing into his arm. David checked the composition of the bottle. It contained exactly the right concentration of electrolytes for a dehydrated patient.

  “Not bad for a dermatologist.”

  “Well,” Tyler answered, trying to act indifferent, “sooner or later everything connects to the skin.”

  David didn’t have to ask who’d washed the trooper and shaved him.

  Chapter 22

  “TEETH!” TOM EXCLAIMED.

  “Sure, why not? If there’s one thing we can do that’s worthwhile and that might last for more than a couple of weeks, it’s dentistry. Hell, you see it—all of them have rotten teeth, I mean if they have any at all. Besides, it’s single-visit care. Itinerant surgery at its best. Pull the tooth, give them some penicillin for a day or two, and they’re cured. Believe me, it’s one of the few things we can do that might make a difference out here.”

  “And how do we do it?” Tom
asked warily.

  David opened his surgical kit and held up two cellophane bags; one contained a small pliers and the other a surgical clamp. “I sterilized them last night in the hospital pressurizer. Got the idea last week.”

  Tom took the kit and pulled out a small vial.

  “Topical thrombin,” David said, “to put on the gums to stop any bleeding. Plunkett had an article on its use. Looks real simple—just sprinkle it on the gums and press down for a minute or two. Don’t worry,” he added, “I promise we won’t branch out into brain surgery.”

  They pulled their first tooth the next day. It took some coaxing to get the villager, an old man, into the jeep, but the extraction was an unqualified success. The peasants, forgetting their usual sense of caution, crowded around them. The villager sat in the front seat while Tom held his head, and David, standing over him with one leg braced against the dash, the other against the seat, worked the pliers back and forth until the tooth, miraculously intact, came loose. David, triumphant, held up the tooth to a round of spontaneous applause. He winked at Tom.

  “I think we’re gonna be famous,” he said.

  David gave the tooth to the old man, who, standing in the jeep, proudly raised it above his head to renewed applause.

  They pulled two more teeth that day. The results were equally spectacular. When they left, the villagers stood in the road and waved good-bye. David was ecstatic.

  “Not much different from people in the States, huh? All they want is what anyone else wants—results,” he said.

  Tom was silent, but David, flushed with success, was too happy to notice. Against all odds, they’d been able to do something worthwhile and they’d done it without anyone’s help or direction. It was so obvious, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of taking care of their teeth before.