by Steve Thayer
Then the feed from the chopper, both audio and video, was back on the air. The resonance of the pilot’s voice was foreign. “This is Skyhawk 7. We’re in trouble here. We’ve crossed the St. Croix heading for Elmo. My ship is out of control.”
Chris Mack sensed immediately what was happening. He was on his feet screaming into the microphone so loud he could be heard on the set. “Bucky, can you put it down anywhere? Put it down!”
The silence that followed was chilling. It was the silence of a newsroom choked with fear . . . the silence of two cities bracing for even more . . . and the deadly silence of an airborne helicopter when the engine quits. Even the thunder stopped. The picture displayed on TV sets spun dizzily out of control, raindrops attacking the screen. Then the voice of Bob Buckridge came over the air one last time, hauntingly calm and clear. “This is Skyhawk 7. We won’t be coming home.”
And then they crashed.
In front of a million spellbound viewers, they crashed. With the piercing, heartbreaking sound of twisting metal and snapping trees, over the sound of a newsroom full of friends shrieking in horror, they crashed. Where the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army had failed, Minnesota weather had succeeded. It brought them down.
It takes a lot to shock and silence a newsroom, morbid by nature. At Channel 7 the only sound was of Ron Shea feebly ad-libbing at a red light atop a camera.
Andrea Labore turned to the Weatherman. His back was to the set, his face in a radar screen. Phosphorescent green light flowed through his thick hair. The orange-fire light over the console outlined his huge shoulders. Red digits flashed around him. But the apparition didn’t move. Dixon Bell seemed frozen . . . almost possessed.
No wind instrument has ever survived the full impact of a tornado, so they are measured after the fact. After this tornado, the wind intensity was factored at F-5—winds topping 300 mph. The most accurate barometers fell to 26.97 inches. Canceled checks from Minneapolis floated to earth on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the age of satellites, radar, computers, radio, and television, the Eden Prairie tornado killed seventy-nine people and injured a thousand more. Property damage was over one billion dollars. Trees that had stood proud for a hundred years now lay on their sides, wrapped in power lines, waiting for chainsaws to come and finish what the tornado had started.
The two real heroes of the killer storm were dead in the thick woods east of town, their necks snapped in a crushed helicopter, their bodies tangled in twisted aluminum and broken tree branches, warm rain washing over them. Sirens wailed through the woods, in mourning instead of warning.
In the aftermath it was learned that most fatalities occurred in the early minutes of the storm, at the southwest end of the deadly trail, among those who weren’t watching television. As it moved northeast, homes had been blown into fragments. Leveled with the dust. Gone in seconds. But as neighbors climbed out to assess the damage, there was relief and happiness that they had survived.
Thousands of sightseers poured into the hardest hit areas, creating additional traffic problems and sparking official warnings about looting.
“Have you been able to salvage anything?”
“No . . . and we’ve had people who have walked through already and picked up cameras and things.”
“Looters?”
“Looters . . . right . . . how they can do it, I don’t know. I thought people were different here.”
“What are your thoughts now?”
“I think maybe God sent that tornado to punish us. Or warn us.”
Tornadoes are often accompanied by a high-pitched noise that crescendos to a scream. The spookiest part of this twisted tragedy was that as the tornado roared by, uprooted, maimed, destroyed, and killed, almost all survivors would universally describe what sounded to them like the amplified, terrified screams of a woman in an echo chamber—a horrifying, frightening cry for help they would never forget.
But not all was destruction, ruin, and death. At Channel 7 a legend was born.
The Marine
Marines never leave their dead or wounded behind. Or so says the legend.
He knew they had called in an air strike, could see the sliver of silver angling out of the sun, but he believed there was still time. He threw his M-16 to the ground, tore the sweat-stained flak jacket from his back, and yelled “cover me!” the way John Wayne did in the movies. Then, with the speed of a halfback, he ran through heavy sniper fire. He reached the first bloody grunt, shot all to hell, in shock, but still alive. He hoisted him over his shoulder the way a fireman does and ran him back to the eroded ravine that served as a trench. All the time he waited for a bullet in the back. But the bullets passed him by. He dumped the wounded Marine over the dry red dirt and turned again. He checked the silver bullet in the sky. Death descending. Two more grunts lay bloody in the yellow grass just before the tree line. There was still time.
Nobody ran in Vietnam; it was just too damn hot. A dry, suffocating heat: 115° in the sun. He popped salt tablets into his mouth. He tore a blue-and-white bandanna from his head and took a swipe at the sweat stinging his eyes. The fusillade being laid down by the Marines was so intense he couldn’t hear incoming, just the occasional wisp of deadly air tearing by. Again he serpentined through the firefight and grabbed another grunt. He too was alive, and the young master sergeant knew he was doing the right thing. The Marine thing. He dumped wounded grunt number two into the dusty red trench and turned for number three.
It was the dry season. The ground was rock hard. Dust hung in the air like smoke. He spit the taste of salt from his mouth. He was exhausted. The heat was killing him. Again, he pulled the bandanna from his sweltering head and wiped his red-hot face.
Seven years into the war, Congress rewrote the rules for the draft. Student deferments were done away with. A lottery system was set up, and President Nixon gave speeches about how much more fair it would be. A Selective Service official would draw birthdays from a fishbowl and thereby decide the fate of America’s young men. He was born on the tenth of May. Growing up in the Midwest, his hero was Fran Tarkenton, number 10 of the Minnesota Vikings. At Stillwater High School his red football jersey had a big white 10 on it. During homecoming week they taped a big red 10 to his locker. He took to writing the lucky 10 on his tennis shoes. But when he turned eighteen years old his luck changed. A nameless, faceless bureaucrat in Washington cast his hand into a fish bowl and hooked May 10, on the tenth cast. His dreams of college football were deferred. He went to Vietnam.
The Marine tossed the bandanna aside. His head was bare now, a target for the blistering sun. The last of the wounded grunts lying in the scorched grass below the trees wasn’t moving. But the Air Force Phantom was, screaming down from the sky. Its guns would take out everything in its sights. Its bombs would leave nothing alive. Though a thousand arguments go through a soldier’s head at these moments, they pass through in a split second, and in that split second this soldier, now twenty-one years old, decided to go for that last fellow Marine lying dead still in the grass.
And dead he was. The Marine rolled him over. His neck was open, his dog tags blown away. Insects were feasting on the wounds. It was Sax, Robert J., Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps. Twenty years old. Texarkana, Arkansas. Married his high school sweetheart. One child, another on the way. The Marine picked up his dead buddy and started for the trench. Bullets shot by him in both directions. Never in his young life had he felt so alive yet so near death. For the first time in the war, the burning feeling came over him that he wasn’t going to make it. He was scared. The diving Phantom grew in the corner of his eye, and the scream of the jet engines grew in his ears, and he realized how foolish he was being, and he dropped the lance corporal from Texarkana and ran as fast as he’d ever run in his life.
He heard his men yelling, “Tac air! Cover! Cover!”
Again he was number 10 sprinting down the field, the goal line in sight. But the roar in his ears was not the roar of a crowd. His stomach was cramp
ing. Sweat was smothering him. He was choking on his dry tongue. It was a sprint through hell now. He knew it was going to be close. So he prayed: prayed he could outrun the bombs, prayed they would miss him, as they always missed his hero in the movies. But this was Vietnam, and there had never been any movies like this.
The Phantom pilot flipped a switch, pulled a lever, and dropped two hundred yards of napalm in a straight line along the trees. Flames exploded toward the trench.
And just when the Marine thought he was so hot his face was going to explode, it did. A fistful of the gasoline jelly splashed squarely on top of his head, dripped over his skull and face in an instant, then ignited. Friendly fire. He sprinted to the trench like a human torch, toppled over the ridge, and set the grass beneath aflame. He jerked around on his back with violent spasms, his body out of control. As his men tried to extinguish him, he screamed so hard he ripped his lungs and throat and spit blood on them between the flames.
His family was told he was in grave condition. He was supposed to die. But the Marine hung on.
From an evac station in Khe Sanh he was flown to the Air Force base at Yokota, Japan, then choppered to the burn unit at the 109th United States Army hospital on the Kanto Plains. His head swelled up until his neck disappeared. Through one eye slit the charred Marine could see an IV bottle hung from a ceiling hook. Liquids dripped down the tubes and ran into the back of a bloody red hand left dangling from the whirlpool bath. They jammed rubber plugs up his nostrils and forced a breathing tube into his mouth. Then they completely submerged the roasted marshmallow that was his head. Bandages that had become a part of the wound floated free in the steaming water. Next, the dead skin began coming off, his face floating before his eyes. When the skin wouldn’t come off, they ripped it off. Parts of his face were so deeply burned that crisscrossing muscle fibers were exposed.
They wrapped him in a cooling blanket to bring down his temperature. Then back into the whirlpool he went, immersed in hot, bubbling water, like a neverending baptism. It became a torture chamber, the scalding water churning and churning over his raw head, the skin being ripped from his face. One of his ears fell off. With no voice to scream, he wept in silence. Next day they pulled off his other ear.
He heard muffled voices talking over him. A sergeant trying to explain the bases for this torture. “Dead skin collects bacteria.”
A woman with a funny drawl kept speaking sweet to him while holding his burnt hands. “Every day that you’re free of infection, you’re one day closer to living a healthy life.” For days this went on. Or was it weeks? Or was it a month?
The first conscious memory of his recovery came when he awoke one morning with a feeding tube in his mouth. He was choking; choking awake. The woman wiped his blistered lips and asked him how he was today, as if there had been other days. He was spread-eagled across a steel arched frame. Strapped in. The sun was shining through the window. He couldn’t move his head. Only one eye was working for now; the other was still swollen closed. But he could see her in the sun. She was young and tall. Somehow he made her understand he was awake. She put the tube back into his mouth and helped him drink his breakfast.
If the first weeks of his recovery were spent in and out of consciousness, the following weeks were spent in and out of sleep. Some nights he could hear the screams of other victims. He envied them. Crying out was still physically impossible. For him there was no relief from the searing pain of blistering wounds. Of all the wounds of war, burns carry the highest casualty rate. Just too many complications.
He wore no bandages. Nurses smeared a white antibiotic ointment around his head with a butter knife. Soldiers call it napalm cream because it stings like fire. Tears got soaked up by the cream before they could leave his eyes. An increase in Demerol only added sickness to his suffering. Then one day doctors came to him with an ungodly choice. He could endure months of this torture, or they could put him on morphine, but he would probably end up addicted to the drug for the rest of his life. Think about it, they told him, let us know tomorrow.
That night the ward master, an army sergeant, whispered into the stumps that were his ears: he could administer heroin. “Send in the Marines.”
Next day the Marine signaled no to the morphine.
One day during the sleepless weeks she told him her name was Angela. But because of her Texas accent, or perhaps because his mind kept thinking it over and over, her name came out Angel. She had warm brown eyes. Her army nurse’s uniform showed off a shapely figure. She was attractive from the start, her black skin under the white uniform was soft and flawless. Slowly in those painful months of recovery she became to him the most beautiful, most wonderful woman on earth. The angel from Corpus Christi.
With his face buried under white cream and his vocal cords reduced to silence, his only means of communication were his arms, and there was little strength in them. If he raised his right arm off the sheet it meant yes. His left arm meant no. Even with those limits, Angel had a remarkable way of knowing what he needed, and of reading his attitude. For what kind of attitude does a young man have who has been burned beyond recognition in a war he didn’t understand in the first place, in a corps he was forced to join? But when his mood was darker than the darkest corners of hell and he didn’t think he could go on, it wasn’t pity Angel gave him. It was a scalding scolding. “Okay, just stop it, now!”
It takes a special kind of person to care for burn victims—they’re horrible to look at, and most of them die. Through a slow game of yes and no, Angel determined what kind of music the Marine liked and saw to it that it was played for him every day. She read to him in the beginning. She helped him drink his meals.
In his second month of recovery the swelling went down and his other eye opened up. He still couldn’t move his head, so they fitted him with prismatic glasses that enabled him to see around him. He was at the end of the ward with a window to his left. A white curtain hung on his right. Angel had an army mechanic hook a book stand to the frame in front of his face. She bought him a conductor’s baton and stuck a wad of chewing gum to the end of it so that he could turn the pages. Then she’d open a book or a magazine and let him read for himself. At first it was hard to concentrate through the pain, but slowly mental discipline prevailed, and he came to realize that he would have been lost without his books. Angel’s father taught English at East Juarez State. She knew the importance of books. As a result the Marine was given the kind of reading students hate, but the very best literature America has to offer. During his fourteen months in the hospital he read the works of Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London. He fell in love with the short stories of Minnesota’s own F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Marine read Shakespeare.
In his third month of recovery they wrapped his face in cadaver skin. But after three days the grafts failed. Back into the whirlpool he went.
His voice returned, but he had to learn to use it over again. He took it one word at a time. Then a sentence at a time. A speech therapist came in, a Japanese woman who taught English. It would be several years before his stuttering disappeared, and even after that he had a bad habit of slipping into a Brando mumble.
With the return of his voice came the return of a personality, although one that had changed dramatically. Through the months of treatment and therapy, Angel managed to retrieve his sense of humor. He made jokes about his face being blacker than hers. He asked if she wanted to see an imitation of a mummy. Then he raised both his arms and growled. It never failed to crack her up.
They grafted again, using skin from his stomach. Skin from his back. They stretched the bright pink sheets of skin over his stunted features and told him how much better he looked. He did hand exercises to prevent atrophy. He did facial exercises to keep the scar tissue loose so it wouldn’t lock his jaw.
By his sixth month of recovery he could move his head about. The glasses came off. The bed straps were undone. He had miraculously escaped infection. He was feeling better. Then Angel told him her ord
ers had come through. Any soldier knows what that means. It means good-bye. She’d been transferred to Germany. In the days that followed she could see he was pouting. “Just stop it,” she scolded. On the day of her last rounds she promised to return after dinner and bid him farewell.
No mirrors were allowed in the burn unit. Just from watching his hands heal, the Marine correctly guessed his head and face were totally hairless, almost completely featureless, and probably the color of sour milk with bloody shades of pink. But he hoped.
When the sun went down he waited for her, a vigil that went on for hours. But she didn’t come. At midnight the ward master drew the curtain and whispered lights out. The Marine lay in the dark, tilted his head to a position where it hurt the least, and stared out the window at the midnight sky over this land of the rising sun. The industrial lights of the Kanto Plains blotted out the stars and gave the Japanese heavens the face of a dismal abyss. So unlike home, where the North Star hung. He watched the lights of choppers as they dropped out of the sky with more charred bodies. He felt as low as he’d ever felt since his arrival. He could hear the slow hissing of a respirator: in a burn unit, the sound of death. Victims put on respirators always died. Perhaps it was time to send in the Marines.
