Down Around Midnight (15 page)

Denial, as it is commonly articulated, or that hobbyhorse of every therapist, “being defensive,” may well be a response not to the traumatic experience itself, but to the impossibility of conforming the experience to what you perceive to be the expectations of others.

I can't speak for my fellow passengers—I offer it with no authority, and I'm really not sure myself, it's just an idea that won't let go—but I believe there may be something more to the inclination not to talk.
Especially
to one another. Despite the fact that nine of us came together to survive the crash, in one way, in its most primal way, it was
not
a group experience. In the end, survival never is. The trauma is so personal, so individual, and one's response to it is so solitary, that opening it up to varying interpretations threatens the equilibrium that each of us independently strives to recapture.

It probably started there in the woods, where we sat nursing our private fears, casualties propped up as in the pictures you see—though you couldn't see anything that night—of those Seventh Cavalry riflemen on the third day of battle in the Ia Drang Valley, strung out in the grass of the Central Highlands, the wounded waiting on MedEvac, each unwilling to wonder what the fight had forever taken away.

It's a suspicion I arrive at when I look back to the conversations I had with Paul and Suzanne. When I set out to revisit the crash, to ask others to relive the events of that night, I didn't know or try to guess what answers I might get. I didn't even know all the questions. I understood that I'd be finding my way, and I proceeded on faith that I'd light upon something of value, as difficult as those questions might be to answer. What I came away with was something I never expected: I never counted on how difficult those questions would be to
ask.

Sitting down with Suzanne and later with Paul, I was startled by how awkward and inappropriate it seemed, how greatly the task I'd assigned myself differed from any I'd ever undertaken. I sat there with my notebook, the dutiful reporter; they sat dutifully entertaining my questions in the manner of cooperative sources. But this engineered formality defied the essence of our relationship, and in no way did it reflect the dynamic at play. Looking back to those conversations, I have to believe that the enterprise was somehow unbalanced by the weight of things I didn't really want to know.

Only now am I struck by a realization that eluded me then: They had no questions for me.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that it was the one passenger who was separated from the group who recalled our waiting on rescue as a collective experience:

“Out there in the woods we were running out of things to talk about, back and forth,” Jonathan Ealy said, when he and I spoke on the phone. “We're there, and the only thing we've got to keep us from collapsing is, ‘Let's just keep the energy going so that we don't all disintegrate here.' The whole point for me, two things, one was just make sure I stayed in contact, in emotional contact, with you guys [who were] all together. The other was to make sure there was somebody over there in case . . . if the copilot got any worse, I was going to just yell for all the help I could get from anybody that could move. I was nineteen years old and I didn't want the guy to die with me supporting him from underneath.”

When Jon had first appeared on our side of the airplane, everyone had been evacuated, and Suzanne had just made the decision to leave. “That was not my favorite decision of the evening,” he told me. “I was pretty late to that party. I was a little steamed that a healthy-bodied person wasn't sticking around. . . . Everybody was so dinged up, and we needed to move people around. . . . If there had been a fire, in particular, we would have needed a lot of help with people who couldn't move.”

Unknown to the rest of us, for whom activity had essentially ceased, there was a veritable opera being enacted on the other side of the aircraft, as Jon, for an hour and a half, in physical contact with the copilot, fought to keep him alive. “Minute-to-minute I was intensely involved in a relationship with a guy I didn't know.”

Had Jon not wound up as he did, in front of the plane, it is almost certain that there would have been one less survivor of the crash.

“My nose was bleeding,” he told me, and though, having broken it once before, he was used to the taste of blood, “it was really annoying,” he said. “Later, the adrenaline wears off, everything starts hurting, my ribs start hurting—I wondered if maybe I'd punctured something—and then there's that taste and that smell of the blood and the fuel together. You know how smell is, it goes right down to the reptile brain. This is a memory I have at the most sort of primeval level. . . . At the end there, he was fading and I was clinging on to that tourniquet . . . it sapped all the energy away.”

 

 

As a mechanism for putting trauma behind us, immediately or eventually, we are all naturally inspired to silence. It's almost as if one doesn't discuss these things in polite company. Putting words to a moment relived up to now only in silence does not come reflexively, nor does one approach it with any measure of ease. It is not something that suggested itself to me until thirty years after the fact, and I
have
a literary agent. It is only out of a generosity of spirit that those with whom I survived the crash came forward to help me, and nothing they might have said could more accurately have reflected the courage that was on display the night we first met.

A
few years ago, I reported to Cape Cod Hospital for a minor outpatient procedure. In the course of prepping me for surgery, the nurse doing the intake vanished. It happened while I was momentarily distracted. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and others were coming and going, Pat was with me, she and I were talking, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention. I turned back in the nurse's direction, and sitting there, picking up where she'd left off, was the magician who'd orchestrated her disappearance, acting as though nothing had happened, behaving as if I were just one more patient and she just another of the several nurses on hand. I stood up, circled the instrument table, threw my arms around her, and laughed.

Her name was Mary Ellen, but introducing her to Pat, I didn't stop with that. Unsure of her marital status, I ventured all three of the last names by which I had known her when she and I were palling around. Now, twenty years since I'd last seen her, she was still going by the most recent of them, the product of a remarriage after which she and I had remained friends and largely in anticipation of which we had cut back on the palling around.

I'd met Mary Ellen at Cape Cod Hospital in 1979. We'd first laid eyes on each other on the morning of June 18. I was the guy in bed 209D.

“You were covered with jet fuel,” she reminded me recently.

I had been admitted three or four hours earlier. She had just reported for work. They'd cleaned me up some in the ER, but I was only about as clean as a chimney sweep, still dressed out in what Mary Ellen remembers as a fine layer of soot.

“The first thing I did was wash your hair.”

It wasn't the last thing she did.

Mary Ellen is one of the three or four nurses I remember looking after me that week. But as others came and went, she was the consistent presence, and for that and other reasons, she was special. When she wasn't there, I noticed it. Every day was a party with Mary Ellen, or that's how it seemed at the time. Maybe it was the smile with which she indulged the party I appeared to be throwing, clowning with all the offbeat acquaintances of mine who showed up on the ward, or maybe it was just a shared irreverence, but she and I would always find something to laugh about, and it is thanks to her that I can honestly say my being hospitalized was actually enjoyable.

A hospital is only as good as its nursing staff, and at the time of the crash, certain Cape residents, many of whom had never been treated there, took a perverse kind of pride in deriding the quality of care available at Cape Cod Hospital. Clearly they weren't paying attention. Today the hospital is rated among the top one hundred hospitals in the country, and back then you could see it coming. None of the nurses who treated me fell anywhere short of world class. I can't speak for the food. The crash had left me with a paralytic, or adynamic, ileus. Essentially what that meant was that my digestive system had called it quits, which was consistent with the trauma I'd sustained. An NPO order hung at the foot of my bed. Having graduated from the Boston Latin School (with grades that my best friend's mother was politely invoking when she assured me that “Every family needs at least one gentleman, Bob”), I knew that
nihil per os
meant “nothing by way of the mouth.” Five days after I was admitted, my intestines resumed function, and I was put on a clear liquid diet. I don't recall eating solid food until after leaving the hospital. Four days into my stay, I celebrated with injections of Demerol while welcoming others to enjoy my birthday cake.

Mary Ellen is not the only nurse who dramatically affected my stay. First impressions being the most lasting, there is one other nurse I will never forget: the angel of mercy on duty Monday at four A.M., which was the time showing on the wall clock of the orthopedic floor when I was admitted. She may have been a supervisor. Before bedding me down on the ward, she wheeled me around the corner into the solarium where she permitted me to light up a cigarette. And I think it was she who engineered the accommodation that today makes me feel as if I were looking back over a century. Not simply did she allow me to smoke, she did it without admonishing me to quit, and then, without my requesting it, she took it upon herself to solicit from my ward mates the necessary approval that allowed me for the duration of my stay to smoke in the room, in bed—yes, a hospital bed.

In the week that I was hospitalized, my ward mates came and went. One of them, a teenage kid, or as the newspapers would have it, “a local youth,” was the second patient to occupy the bed between mine and the window. He was admitted from the scene of a car crash. A good friend of his had been killed. He wasn't talking to anyone, not even his father, who visited regularly. A couple of days after he arrived, a state trooper, in uniform, showed up to question him. You could hear the creak of leather and the rattle of gear when he crossed the room, spit-polished from his boots to the peak of his combination cap. You could almost smell the gun oil and saddle soap. Walking up to the bed, he stood towering over the kid, radiating authority, the reflective surfaces of the tack and the hardware catching light from the window. Even I was intimidated, and he wasn't looking at me. He had questions for the kid about the car crash, and it was clear from the way he asked them that somebody had been lying about something.

The kid was alone, no parents, no lawyer, and I struggled with whether to tell him, “You don't have to say anything.” I didn't want to make things worse, and I didn't want to get into a fight with the cop. It would have been a hell of a way to say thank you. The cop was one of the people whose job description included saving my life a couple of nights earlier. As things progressed, it became clear to me that the kid didn't need my advice. To the extent that he was responsive, he was monosyllabic, the same typically sullen, unsociable teenager that his father had found himself up against. He didn't give the trooper anything to work with.

The kid's dad was a character. I don't know what he did for a living. I had him figured for a workingman. He could have been an insurance guy or maybe an accountant, a generation removed from a working-class background, but something about him said blue collar to me. He was a lot like the people in my family, very much the kind of guy who'd be hanging around giving me advice when I was growing up. He seemed old enough to be one of my uncles, a little bit old, I thought, to be the father of a kid so young. He gave the impression of a man who'd come to parenthood late in life. His son wouldn't say more than a few words to him, so when he came to visit, he spent most of his time talking to me, or just keeping me company. Or letting me keep him company. One day, when I wasn't really paying attention, he said one of those things that secured for him a permanent place in my memory. He was standing at the foot of my bed, talking to himself, it seemed, as much as he was to me, when I heard him say, “Bob, this is very good,” and I glanced up to see him reading my chart. He nodded his head, looked up from the clipboard, and assumed me, “You're never going to have a problem with your blood pressure.” I would forever take comfort in that, and never afterward would I think of my blood pressure without thinking fondly of him.

The morning I was admitted, there was a middle-aged fellow occupying bed B, the other windowside bed. I remember him for being the man who set me straight on the correct use of a term one encounters regularly on the Cape. I'd made the mistake of suggesting to him that with my recent acquisition of property, I was about to become a Cape Codder. He was the one who advised me—and all new arrivals can probably tell you from whom they received the advisory—that a Cape Codder is someone, and refers only to someone, who had the good sense to be
born
on the Cape. Those who wash ashore need not apply.

He himself, I believe, was one of the latter, and he was careful to make that fact clear. To read any class consciousness into his advisory is to be reading from outdated texts. The embrace of the Cape is all encompassing, blind to considerations of pedigree. Among its more festive traditions is the annual Blessing of the Fleet in Provincetown, when the bishop of the Catholic diocese travels out from Fall River to confer benediction upon the fishing vessels of Provincetown's largely Portuguese-American fleet. In celebration of the town's seafaring heritage, he stands at the end of MacMillan Pier casting protective aspersions of holy water on the procession of boats as it passes before him.