15 Months in SOG (32 page)

She led Fischer and me to a bed at the far end of the ward. The occupant was almost hidden from view by tubes and wires and a portable iron lung noisily pumping air into the still patient. It was Sergeant Sanderson. He was silent and pale, looking weak and helpless in his medical contraption. “Just a minute,” she firmly reminded us.

“Hi, Sandy. Glad to see you. How you feeling?” I tried to sound as upbeat as I could in those cheerless surroundings. The tile floor was some shade of blue, and just about everything else was navy gray. The swabbies must have stripped the market of gray paint. Everything they owned seemed to be the same dull shade of gray. The only bright color in the room was the white sheets and bandages covering the occupants of the gray, iron-frame beds. But the ship was cleaner than any place else I ever saw in South Vietnam, and it was cool, thanks to the air-conditioning. The ward was full, about twenty beds, each separated by a cloth screen pulled open to make the room seem less enclosed. The men were all silent, desperately wounded, and mostly dying, I suppose.

Sanderson’s eyes opened at my greeting, and he smiled
weakly. His throat and upper chest were covered in bandages, and a tube was inserted in his mouth, so he couldn’t answer. But he did blink a greeting in reply.

Fischer and I mumbled some platitudes about hurrying up and getting well. I didn’t feel like I was doing much to raise his morale. Finally, we patted his arm and got the hell out of there.

“You’ll take good care of our friend, please, Lieutenant Wright,” I told the nurse, reading the nametag on her crisp, white uniform.

“We will,” she assured us. “He’s in a bad way. A lot will depend on how hard he fights to live the next few days.” She stopped and took something out of her desk drawer. “You want to see what hit him?”

Into my hand she dropped a tiny sliver of metal, no bigger than a fingernail clipping. “This is what hit Sandy? This little thing?”

She nodded. “It cut his spine nearly in two, right at the third cervical vertebra. Almost seems impossible, doesn’t it?”

I dropped the offending sliver of metal back on her desk. “Some of the men like to keep the stuff we take out of them. That’s why I’ve kept it.” She put it back in her drawer.

“Please, Lieutenant. Call me at CCN if I can be of any help.” I passed her our phone number, and Fischer and I hurried outside. The cloying smell of ether and disinfectant was nauseating me. As we left, I peeked back at Sandy, lying so still in his gray-painted hospital bed. The chest pump wheezing, tubes in his arms and nose, the cardiograph blinking on the table beside him. The
blip, blip
of his heartbeat traced in the green phosphor of the cathode ray tube.
Blip, blip. Blip, blip
. The miracles of medicine working to keep the young soldier alive.

The high technology that had paralyzed him and then allowed him to be rescued from the jungle was now augmented by the high-tech medical equipment that was keeping his lungs pumping and his heart beating. The whole thing was a perfect example of our high-tech approach to that war. We
fought, lived, and died by the machines, and our bodies took the pounding meted out so dispassionately by the objects of our creation.

The sun was a welcome sight after the depressing scene in the ward. As we headed back to our camp, I discussed Sandy’s condition with Sergeant Fischer. “He’ll have to fight off the infections that he’ll come down with next,” Fischer commented.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen men paralyzed before. Their lungs and guts get infected real easy, since they’re lying so still on their back all the time. Yep, he’ll come down with something, you watch and see. That will be his next big hurdle.”

The next few days were busy, and I had to put Sandy’s plight at the back of my mind. I put off going back out to see him until the weekend. I was anticipating going Sunday afternoon, but got a call Saturday morning from Lieutenant Wright, on the
Repose
. “Sergeant Sanderson has a pneumonia infection in his lungs. He wants to see you. Can you come out today?”

“Sure. I’ll be there right after lunch.”

“No, come now. He’s in bad shape. Don’t wait, please.”

I headed out on our motorboat. The water was choppy and restless, and the low, dark clouds in the eastern sky promised a storm before the night was over. I got another corpsman to guide me down to the ward. Lieutenant Wright was as crisp and clean as before. But her eyes looked even more tired if that was possible. “Go right in,” she instructed me. “He’s waiting for you.”

I softly hurried over to the bed where my young sergeant lay. The iron lung was still pumping away and the cardiotrace was still blipping on the screen. “Hi, Sandy. How you feelin’?” Wow, was that an original greeting.

He had to whisper around the tube in his mouth, but I got his message. “Don’t forget your promise.”

I nodded. “Yeah, don’t you worry. I’ll send the letters and
handle everything. But you won’t need me to. The people here tell me you’re gonna be just fine. You’ve got to fight hard and lick this thing, is all.”

Sandy whispered and I bent down until my ear was next to his mouth. It sounded as if he asked, “Can you stay with me?”

I nodded and squeezed his arm, hoping I was helping. “Sure, Sergeant. I’ll stay with you a while. I’ve got all day. Let me bring you up to speed on what’s happening back at camp.”

I sat beside him and started telling him about the comings and goings at CCN. I couldn’t tell if he was listening or even heard me, but it made me feel like I was doing something useful. Nurse Wright came in from time to time and looked or touched or gave him a shot of medicine through the tube dripping its contents into his arm.

In the next bed was a burn victim. He was Vietnamese. I didn’t know if he was North or South and I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter anyway. Two men, desperately hurt, and we were using every high-tech device available to keep them going. I could only pray the machines would do the job.

About five, Sandy’s breathing grew markedly shallower. Lieutenant Wright was nervously beside him every few minutes, checking, fiddling, and injecting. Sandy’s hand clenched, and I grabbed it with mine. His grip was weak, but I could feel it.

“Hang in there, soldier. You can beat this. Just hang on and fight.” Anxiously, I looked for a sign. Did he hear me?

Sandy choked, and I felt a slight squeeze of his hand. I squeezed back, hard. The blipping monitor of his heartbeat went flat. A bell rang, and the nurse rushed to his side, followed shortly by a white-coated doctor. The doctor didn’t even acknowledge my presence, he just pushed me out of the way and started to do whatever he did when his patients quit breathing. I stepped back and stumbled to the doorway, fighting the tears that threatened to overflow. I hadn’t even had time to say so long before he was gone. White-hot rage coursed through me again, just like when Paul Potter was killed. Too many good kids were being wasted in that meat-grinder of a war.

The bell was silent, and the doctor was putting his stethoscope away. His shoulders sort of slumped, and he said something to Lieutenant Wright. She wrote something on Sandy’s chart, and pulled the sheet over his head. Then, she walked around to the heart and lung machines. The line was flat and still. She flipped a couple of switches and shut down the lot of them. High-tech had failed Sandy, and all I could do was say, so long, as two husky corpsmen put his still form on a gurney and wheeled him down the sterile corridor.

“I’m sorry about your friend, Captain.” The white-suited nurse was standing beside me. Her voice reflected the weariness and loss she felt. “He was terribly paralyzed. He would have never moved a muscle in his body below his chest for the rest of his life. Maybe it was better this way.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. All I know is that he had a lot to live for. Now his daughter will never know her father.”

I stood on the deck of the USS
Repose
. I don’t even know how I got there. I leaned against the railing and looked down at the water below. I fought to keep my guts from spewing out. Revelation washed over me in thunderous waves. Cause and effect are curious comrades. I’d seen worse, done worse, maybe even felt worse, but a tidal wave of comprehension flooded my brain. I finally admitted it to myself. We weren’t going to win the war.

Like fog blown away by wind to reveal the sun, bright and shining, I knew. That was it for me. I wasn’t going back there, no goddamned way, no siree. A little ol’ back-assed country was gonna whip us, as sure as I was standing on a boat in the water. I would resign my commission rather than return again. I was the fifth generation of my family to wear the uniform of our country, and the first to lose, unless you counted my great-granddad on the Confederate side. My relief at the decision was so profound that I knew it was the right choice.

Slowly, I drove the motorboat back to CCN. The shock of losing Sandy and the realization of what I had decided made
the trip seem long and slow. I wasn’t happy with my vow, just satisfied that for me it was the right thing to do.

I didn’t have much of a problem with the antiwar protesters, as long as they fought to influence the politicians to end the war. They made a choice, I made a choice. That was what America was all about. I didn’t want them on my case because I chose to honor my oath of allegiance. I knew I’d bop the first one who insulted me when I returned. I had to fulfill my own sense of honor and could not worry about theirs. It was just that I had come to know the war was wrong for me. I couldn’t be a part of its continuance any longer. My passion, which at first had been just as fiery in favor of the war as the anti’s was against it, had been quenched in the hotter flames of fire and death. It cost too much to fight for no purpose, with no clear goals or vision as to what we wanted to accomplish, no understanding of the price being paid by those doing the dirty work. The butcher’s bill was too dear.

Sergeant White helped me pull the boat up on the trailer we had made to haul it back and forth to the supply shed. “How’s Sergeant Sanderson,
Dai Uy?
”

“He’s dead. Died about thirty minutes ago, just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “We lost a fine kid. The machines couldn’t keep him alive. Just another high-tech failure in this goddamned high-tech war.”

“That’s too bad. He was a nice guy. Say, they’re serving fresh ice cream at the mess hall tonight. We’d better get our ass in gear, or it’ll be all gone before we get there.”

My long-awaited DEROS was getting so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Only two weeks and a day left in country. I decided to celebrate a little early, so on the first Monday in December I took all my company officers to see the Bob Hope show at the big outdoor amphitheater over at the Da Nang Air Base. It was quite a spectacle and gave me a chance to show off a little. I had met Bob and his wife, Delores, on my previous tour in 1966.

Bluffing one of the MPs into believing I was an old friend, I conned my way past the guards to the trailer the performers were using as a dressing room. Bob was real nice and friendly, even though I’m certain he really did not remember me at all, but his wife did.

Delores Hope was a sweet jewel of a person and as natural as spring rain. She acted as a hostess while Bob got ready and then introduced my officers to Bob. Then she arranged for us to sit right in front, right behind the wounded men in wheelchairs from the local hospitals. That was as close to the stage as anyone healthy could get. After the show, we got to talk with Ann-Margret, Rosey Grier, and some of the Gold-diggers, a dance group of beautiful young women who performed on several of the popular TV shows back home. My guys were impressed with me! They thought I could do the impossible.

We returned to camp quite enchanted with the afternoon’s entertainment, and I was now elevated to the highest level of
esteem by my young officers. It meant as much to them that I had gotten them a handshake with a pretty girl as it would have if I had gotten them back from Indian country in one piece.

It was a good way to finish off my tour, alive, unhurt, and admired. Of the five captains I had met on the plane trip from America, over a year past, I was the only one still around. One was KIA, one badly hurt in a jeep accident, and the others medevacked out with combat wounds. All I had was a small scar in my back and an even smaller one on my calf to show for all of Charlie’s effort to get me. I took Major Skelton to the club for a beer and got a tacit assurance that I wouldn’t go back into the field unless it was the most dire of emergencies. I began to relax and coast home, so to speak. Once again, I was asking too much of Lady Luck. She had one more little hurdle for me to clear before I headed home across the pond to the land of the big PX.

Major Buelher, the S-1, or personnel staff officer, called me to his office and passed the word that a new captain was being assigned to command B Company the following week. I would take a couple of days to turn over the unit and get him broken in. Then I could sit around as a supernumerary until my orders to DEROS arrived. Just like my friend Paul Potter had been doing when I arrived so long ago.

The new officer transferred up from CCC (Command and Control Center), our sister unit to the south. They did their work in Cambodia, as we did in Laos and North Vietnam. He had extended to get a command assignment, but because CCC didn’t have a slot available he came north to us. He appeared to be a top-notch officer, and I felt confident giving up B Company to him. He was shorter than me, but solid, and had plenty of self-confidence. He was a Citadel graduate and was ramrod straight about soldiering. He was already in shape for the demands of leadership and anxious to take charge. I was happy my company was getting such a good officer.

We started the cycle of inventorying company property and signing over the unit’s accountable items from me to the new CO. I sold my jeep for three hundred dollars and some of the nifty toys that I had so painfully accumulated for three hundred more, so I had money for a first-class vacation when I got home. I gave away to my officers and NCOs what I didn’t sell until all I had left was my rifle and the Buck knife I’d carried the entire time I was in country.