Reluctantly, as he sat there, David found himself thinking of the 40th. He had looked for someone from the 40th ever since he’d left the recovery and was sent to the ward. There were three other military hospitals in Japan and another, he’d been told, in Okinawa. They could have been evaced there. There was a chance, too, that the 40th had been spared, though David wasn’t so sure about that. The communists wouldn’t have left the 40th sitting in their rear. Some might have made it, though. Thorpe would have known what to do. If they had survived the initial assault, a few could have hung on. What had Tyler said to him? That he could see in the dark? It wasn’t much, but in the morning shadows, it might have been enough. A little edge was sometimes all you needed. After all, he was alive.
David tried again and made it another twenty yards. He was able to stand up again just as the choppers bringing in the afternoon med evacs began to land. The new litter patients were in the corridors when he walked back into the hospital. He looked carefully at each of the faces of the wounded as he passed.
He was walking down the main corridor past the clinics when he heard a commotion coming from the hallway leading down to the outpatient department. David stopped. A moment later the double doors of the surgical clinic flew open and a corpsman came running out.
Through the open doors David could hear the sound of furniture being moved. The corpsman ran past him. People were yelling. Someone was calling for a tourniquet. David glanced back toward the main corridor. He saw doctors and hospital personnel walking by, but no one turned down the hallway. There was more noise coming from the clinic. Damn, David thought, I’m done with this. He looked back. No one was coming.
David didn’t remember moving. One moment he was standing there waiting for someone to come and the next he was pushing his way into the clinic through the crowd blocking the center aisle. A patient, the bottoms of his hospital pajamas soaked with blood, lay sprawled on the floor. The tables and chairs had been shoved aside to give him room.
David kneeled beside the trooper, pressing his hand over the darkest part of the stain. The trooper, startled, looked up at him, his eyes wide with fright. David felt the bulge and pressed down harder.
“Don’t move,” David said. “It’s okay. I’m a doctor. You,” David said, picking out the nearest patient, “get his chart! And you,” he said, seeing another corpsman, “call the blood bank and tell them we’re going to need twelve units of blood.” David picked up the trooper’s dog tags with his free hand. “A positive,” he said.
“My leg started to bleed,” the trooper said. “All I did was stand up and start walking. All of a sudden my pants was covered with blood.”
“It’s all right,” David said. “Just relax.”
“They said I was okay. I mean,” the trooper said, his voice edgy with panic, “I mean they said everything was fine, nothing to worry about.”
The patient returned with the chart.
“Read the cover page.” David felt the bulge shift under his palm and pressed down harder. The trooper stiffened. “Don’t move,” David warned. “It’s all right; just don’t move.”
“‘Gunshot wound,’” the patient read, “‘ruptured iliac artery, ilial-femoral bypass graft.’”
“How long ago was the operation?”
The patient searched for the entry. “‘Graft placed February tenth, 90th evac,’” he said.
David turned back to the trooper. He was staring at David, the look of fear etched on his face. Startled, David saw the panic right below the surface. It seemed to hold him. For a moment David forgot where he was as visions of waves of heat rising off the flats swept over him.
“Look,” David said quickly, fighting off the dizziness that came with his own confusion, “they just put in an arterial graft at the 90th to replace your own artery. The graft is leaking a bit, that’s all. It happens sometimes. You had any fever in the last few days?”
“Yeah,” the trooper said, “but they said not to worry. They told me it was a cold or flu.” He looked frightened again. “Why?”
“Sometimes grafts get infected. I think they’re going to have to reoperate, take a look and maybe put in a new one.”
David, his arm weakening, shifted his position to get more of his own weight over the mass.
“Relax,” he said. “There’s still a lot of pressure. Means that you haven’t lost too much blood.”
“What’s going on here?” A captain wearing one of the long white lab coats that the clinic doctors wore stepped up beside the two of them.
“This fellow’s femoral graft is leaking a little,” David said, surprised at the calmness of his own voice. It was as if someone else were speaking for him.
“He’s a doctor,” one of the patients whispered.
“Better get the surgeons.” David turned back to the trooper. “They do this kind of repair all the time around here. Captain,” David said, “I’d get the stretcher.” It was not a request but a demand. “Now!” he said angrily. The captain, startled, left.
“You’re gonna stay … right?” the soldier said.
“Sure.”
The trooper lowered his voice so that only David could hear. “Doc,” he whispered, “do you really think they can get me out of this?”
David hesitated. “You’ve got a chance.” The trooper’s lips tightened, but he didn’t ask anything else.
The captain, accompanied by two medics, brought in the stretcher and put it down beside the trooper. The trooper took hold of David’s other hand; then, when David nodded, the medics lifted the trooper and slipped the stretcher under him.
As David moved, a sharp pain shot through his side. He managed to stifle his gasp. The trooper stiffened.
“You okay?” he whispered nervously.
“Yeah,” David answered, “I’m okay.”
It took only two minutes to get to the OR, but by the time they got there David could no longer feel his right side.
The operating room was ready, the doors leading to the surgical suite held open. They carried the stretcher through the open doors directly into the operating room. The surgeons, masked and gowned, were ready. As they put the stretcher down on the operating table, one of the surgeons stepped in behind David. Another moved up to the other side of the table. The trooper lifted his head and looked around and then, apparently satisfied, put his head back on the table. He looked at David. “Going to be around when I wake up?” he asked. Before David could answer, the anesthesiologist put a mask over the trooper’s face.
The surgeon behind David moved closer. “When I say so, step to your right. Do it quickly, one motion. I’ll move into your place.”
There was a hiss of gas. A moment later the trooper’s hand slipped free of David’s.
“Blood pressure’s dropping!”
A nurse stepped up to the table and pushed a large IV needle into a vein in the soldier’s neck.
“The aneurysm’s getting bigger,” David said.
“Now,” the surgeon ordered.
But as David started to move, the whole thigh began to swell. He pressed down again. Another pain shot through his side. This time he gasped, but he didn’t let go.
“Heart rate’s one eighty. Pressure’s sixty over zero!”
The surgeon pushed David aside. As his hand came off the thigh, a great geyser of blood and muscle shot into the air. There was a great deal of hectic movement about the table as a familiar smell suddenly engulfed the room. It was the odor of rotting fruit.
Stunned, David stepped back from the table. It took him a few moments to collect himself. During those seconds the OR had quieted, falling into its usual, more ordered routine.
David watched as the surgeons worked and the corpsmen and nurses walked back and forth, setting up new trays, carrying in new equipment. As he stood there, ignored, surrounded by the clinking of instruments and the hiss of the ventilator, his attention was drawn to the suction bottles slowly filling with blood. The bottles were fastened to a wall socket a few
feet from the operating table. Two sets of tubing ran from the table to the bottles. He watched as inch by inch the level rose. They hung more units of blood. The surgeon at the head of the table mumbled something and a nurse left the table, walked to the wall suction and turned the valve. The blood siphoned off from the first container, splashed into a second bottle, and then slowly, as with the first, began to rise. They hung more units of blood but the more they hung the faster the bottle filled.
David knew, as the blood continued to rise, that they would never be able to stop the bleeding. When he’d lifted his hand, whatever had been left of the infected graft had torn loose. Even in a hospital, with operating rooms only minutes away, with all the blood and plasma you could need, surrounded by all the latest gear, there was no difference. There was no way to clamp an artery that wasn’t there anymore. You were killed in Nam, but you could die anywhere. The only way to survive was never to have become part of it. What had Plunkett told him the day the chopper crashed? “They all burn.” He should have listened. David watched the bottles that would not stop filling with blood. And he didn’t even know the trooper’s name. The idea that he had chosen all this to ensure a career that hadn’t even started left him almost as bewildered as it did angry.
David left the OR, and as he stepped back into the main corridor he realized he couldn’t feel his right side. But he didn’t care.
He looked up at the clock over the mess hall entrance. It was time for physical therapy.
David took the first unoccupied treatment table. He didn’t see Mitchell come up behind him.
“You’re bleeding!”
“Bleeding?” David said, looking down at the front of his shirt, seeing the bloodstains from the OR. “It’s not mine.”
Mitchell pointed toward his side. “I don’t mean the front,” he said angrily.
David lifted his arm. A red streak ran from his armpit to the bottom of the shirt.
“I’ve warned you about all that running. Now let me see it. Let’s go,” Mitchell said, annoyed. “Take off your shirt. I don’t have all day. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re trying to do something here.”
“Do something!” David seemed to come out of himself.
“Let’s go get it off. We don’t have time to waste on patients who won’t listen.”
“What did you say?” Mitchell didn’t hear the warning in David’s voice. “Have you looked around, Major?” David said. “Go on, look!” The patients at the nearby tables had stopped their exercises. “What these kids need, Major, are arms and legs, not to learn how to drag themselves along on crutches or paint with their teeth.”
“Corporal,” Mitchell said to the corpsman, “I want this patient out of here.”
“I’m not finished with my exercises,” David warned.
The corpsman, suddenly wary, hesitated. David went back to the small barbell he’d set up.
“Corporal,” Mitchell demanded, “I want this man out of here and on report.”
“On report!” David was as amazed as he was amused.
What astonished him was that Mitchell actually believed that he’d listen. In the midst of all this, the major must have thought that nothing had changed, that despite everything it was still the same old game with all the old rules. It was that blindness that had led them all there in the first place.
“Stupid bastard,” David mumbled, picking up a loose quarter-pound weight to balance the barbell.
“What did I hear you say?” Mitchell demanded. The major seemed to draw himself up even straighter than usual. “Jenkins, if this patient isn’t out of here in three minutes, call the MPs.”
David threw the weight. There was no time for Mitchell to react. His head jerked back and he stumbled sideways, his hands covering his nose and mouth. Twisting, he fell against one of the inclines. Getting up, blood running from between his fingers, he lurched down the center aisle and out the door.
There were a few moments of silence, and then, as if nothing had happened, everyone went back to his exercises. Fifteen minutes later David finished his workout and left the ward. He felt no malice toward the major, nor did he feel any remorse. If he felt anything, it was that he had done Mitchell a favor.
Chapter 35
THE NEXT MORNING AFTER breakfast david went back to the lower complex. He was determined to continue with his program. He had torn his suture line, but only along the edges. He would have to be careful about stretching, but with the ribs and all the muscle gone, he’d have to watch out for that no matter what he did.
As for Mitchell, David did not give what had happened a second thought. He was convinced nothing would come of it. The Army was not about to publicize a fight between two officers. He understood that much about how the military worked. At least, he thought with little satisfaction, he’d learned something in the last few months.
David had planned to run the whole distance but he made it less than half what he’d done the day before. He was tired. His energy was gone. He decided to try it again, determined to fight the growing sense of exhaustion. He was resting, waiting to catch his breath, retying his shoelaces before he began a second time, when he saw a lone officer walk down the slope from the main hospital. There was a constant traffic of patients and hospital personnel between the two complexes, but there was something familiar about this officer.
“Shit,” David said as the colonel changed direction and started to walk directly toward him.
“Congratulations,” the colonel said. He was wearing a mustache. “I never thought you’d make it even part of the way.” David saw the medical insignia on the colonel’s collar. “My office is up there,” the colonel said, gesturing up the slope in the general direction of the hospital. “It overlooks the lower complex. As I remember, you ran almost the whole length of the road yesterday, a great improvement from your first try. But,” he added pleasantly, “you’re obviously a determined fellow. My name’s Ed Rollins.” The colonel was a big man, overweight, but despite his size his uniform fit neatly, giving him the well-kept look of the career Army officer. David stared at the mustache.
“I know, they fell out of favor right after Custer,” the colonel answered as if David’s look were a question.
“Custer, huh,” David said dryly, going back to tying his shoes.
“Not a popular name these days, but take my word for it, mustaches will come back.” He smiled. “There’s a rhythm to these things.” But he added quickly, “I didn’t think Major Mitchell had hundred-yard dashes as part of his physical therapy program.”
“They’re hardly dashes.” David looked again at the colonel. “I’ve seen you somewhere before. You were at the window of the …” He hesitated.
“Psychiatric wing. I’m a psychiatrist. It’s the reason I’m allowed to wear the mustache. Generals think we’re able to read minds; so they leave us alone. It’s never a good idea to cross the witch doctor.”
David wasn’t amused. He stood.
“Going back to the hospital?” the colonel asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’d like to walk along. I was thinking we might be able to help each other.”
“Help each other?” David said, surprised.
“With what’s going on, you don’t think we could all use some help?”
“They sent you down to talk to me. A psychiatrist. Christ.” David sighed. “That what they plan to do, Colonel? Tell us that what’s happening is just in our minds?”
“No,” the colonel answered matter-of-factly, “not likely. All right if I walk along?”
“Sure,” David said. “Why not?”
They started toward the road.
“You were hit at the 70th, weren’t you?”
David, suspicious, slowed down.
“I read your file,” the colonel said. “Part of my assignment. I was sent here to write a report on the psychological effects of the offensive.” He spoke calmly, without apology. “Part of that evaluation is to collect data from all the hospitals in Japan—numbe
rs of evacs, types of operative procedures, any incidents, things like that; tedious but necessary.” The colonel went on in the same conversational tone. “It appears as if our Major Mitchell has a blow-out fracture of his right orbit. He was operated on last night. I’m not a clinician, but there was something about double vision, muscles of the eye being detached. But,” he went on, “you’d know more about that kind of thing than I would.”
“Mitchell’s a fool.”
They reached the road and had to stop to let an ambulance pass.
“Maybe not a fool,” the colonel offered. “A bit pompous and overbearing at times; boring, I’m sure; but competent at his work. A quality that, after all that’s happened, shouldn’t be lightly dismissed.”
“He a friend of yours?”
“I haven’t been here long enough to have friends,” the colonel answered.
They started across the street together.
“Then they did send you about my fight with Mitchell.”
“From what I heard it didn’t last long enough to be called a fight. How about some coffee? I could use a cup and I assume your afternoon’s free. I doubt,” he added pleasantly, “you’d be welcome in physical therapy and I would like to talk to you.”
David stopped. “About helping each other?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, I’ve seen military psychiatry in action,” David said. “You don’t need anyone’s help. The Army’s already got all the Thorazine it needs.”
The colonel wasn’t flustered. “And how would you handle combat fatigue?” he asked. “Like the Russians or the Chinese? Anyone leaves his position or refuses to go forward and it’s desertion. No extenuating circumstances, no discussions. You have him shot right then and there, end of problem? Not very humane, but definitive, and I assume somewhat effective.”
“So we give them drugs and send them back to their units; that’s even more effective,” David said. “They can still pull a trigger.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” the colonel said. He waited a moment. “The reality is, David, that we’re here and we’re fighting and no one knows exactly how to handle the stress of combat. Now that we’ve settled nothing,” he went on, “how about that coffee? If you’re worried about me, don’t. I’m not Mitchell. I duck.”
Another War, Another Peace Page 17
