How Can You Mend This Purple Heart Read online

  “That’s me,” I thought. “What’s happening?”

  I reached toward my face and looked at myself with a sense of overwhelming sorrow. I couldn’t see a single sign of what had just happened.

  As I continued to rise higher and higher, my lifeless body slowly became more distant. From nearly forty feet above the ground, I floated calmly over the wreckage, the strewn bodies, and the events beginning to unfold below.

  Bright red tail lights glared on the bridge and tires screamed as a car slammed on its breaks after nearly passing our burning car. Two young boys got out and ran back toward the flaming wreckage.

  “There’s nothing we can do here!” one of them shouted.

  “Let’s go for help!” the other one yelled as they climbed back in the car and sped off.

  I saw a body on the bridge, one near the creek in front of the car, one body lying almost ten feet behind the car, someone blindly crawling on his stomach through the grass about ten yards down from the other two. I couldn’t see Smitty anywhere.

  The fire trucks were the first to arrive, then the highway patrol, followed almost immediately by three ambulances. People were rushing everywhere, one man shouting out directions and pointing to the bodies.

  Everything was in slow motion. All sounds had faded to deafness. It was as though I was watching a silent movie about people I didn’t know.

  I watched as two ambulance attendants rolled my limp body onto a white sheet and twisted the ends like a taffy wrapper.

  “This one’s gone!” I heard the one holding my head shout to the other one as they lifted me onto the gurney and rolled me into the back of their ambulance.

  It was at this point I became aware of a bright yellow wall of light behind me with dozens of gray-silhouetted people casually walking past. I sensed that I knew some of them; all the others were total strangers. They were all ages—men, women, and children—and some of them were holding hands. A small group was walking very close to me, others back in the distance. They never spoke and never reached for me; they just slowly—and with no real purpose or destination—walked by and disappeared as others came out of the bright amber wall, walking in all directions.

  The chaos below was of no interest to me now. The entire scene had faded away into the darkness of the night and I was being drawn toward these “people” walking ever closer behind me.

  There was no fear, no anxiety, no bright light at the end of a tunnel, and no flashing of my life before me. I was filled with a total singular sense of choice—a decision that was mine and only mine to make. It was being “given” to me by the silhouettes that had gathered and stood silent behind me.

  My choice was simple and ultimate: turn completely around and I would join the shadow-people in the amber glow world, or do not turn around and remain in this world.

  I hesitated only briefly, refocused with absolute certainty on the scene below, and the wall of amber light and its shaded forms of inhabitants disappeared.

  Three of us were transported to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half away. I never saw the other two again.

  I lay in the hospital unconscious for three or four days. Once awake, it didn’t take long to know the extent of the damage: left femur broken in three places, skull fracture, brain concussion, both ankles broken, three fractured vertebrae, broken shoulder blade, kidneys bleeding, facial bone fractures, and deep cuts and other lacerations that had been “rough-stitched,” along with miscellaneous burns and bruises.

  I have never forgotten that first moment of consciousness. I craned my neck to look around, trying to understand where I was, what had happened.

  I gradually took in my surroundings, the rows of beds filled with young boys lying up and down and across from me. I saw kids my own age with raw muscle and bone protruding from where legs and hands and arms used to be, faces lacerated and swollen, bloody eye sockets and bodies burned and charred.

  The overwhelming sense of choice that had been given to me at the Amber Wall rushed through me like a burning fire; in an instant, it was gone.

  I was confused at first, and then my entire being was hollowed by an urgent and intense fear—a fear that I had died and gone to Hell. The fear was suddenly flushed over by a deep and profound sense of shame and guilt.

  These were Marines wounded in Vietnam. No one had to tell me. I knew it in my heart and soul. The irony and the reality lying around me were smothering me, sucking the breath from me, and I felt ashamed. Ashamed for taking an easier way out, ashamed for not being there with them. Ashamed of what these guys, these men, would think of me. Ashamed of the choices I had made.

  Someone appeared through the nighttime darkness and stuck a needle in my arm. The soothing warmth of the chemicals washed over me with a temporary relief from the pain, shame, and guilt, and I slipped into the darkened nowhere land of unconsciousness once again.

  Sometime late into the sloth-like sleep, I was awakened by two Navy corpsmen wheeling a new arrival onto the ward. He lay immobile in the hospital bed just to my left. The only thing between us was a small beige cabinet with a black countertop at eye level. The corpsman placed all of the Marine’s belongings, given to him by the Red Cross, in the top drawer: a shaving kit, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, a black comb, a small transistor radio, and a carton of Winston cigarettes.

  “Ski, we’ve put your legs back together,” the corpsman quietly assured him. “Dr. Donnolly is the best there is. He’ll be in to see you in the morning. We’ll get you another needle to help you sleep.”

  The kid responded with a tight grin and nighttime on Ward 2B fell back into its darkened loneliness and drug-induced calm.

  All too often the restless ghosts of war shattered even the deepest morphine-induced silence. The cries of endless nightmares cursed the pitch black air like screams for help from a darkened cave.

  Mornings never came soon enough.

  Ward 2B

  A POWDERY HAZE floated into the square of sunlight hanging over the bed on the opposite side of the ward. The early morning morphine clogged my senses as I looked up and down and around in a slow-motion gaze. Blurry forms emerged through large brown double doors, swinging inward and wide, as if to make way for an important guest. The doors would swing in the opposite direction, the faint, busy forms blending into the darkened corridor on the other side.

  The ward and its occupants blurred in and out like fog-swept silhouettes, but even the heaviest doses of morphine couldn’t block out the sounds and smells of war’s aftermath.

  Ward 2B was entrapped with the stench of open seeping wounds, layered with the sweet, persistent odors of rubbing alcohol, iodine, and antiseptics. Stifling doses of aerosol freshener couldn’t spray down the ever-present fog of hospital chemicals, burned flesh, open wounds, and the endless flow of blood and pain.

  Bandages, cotton swabs, gauze, and miles of white tape were replenished three times a day, like custodial supplies used for cleaning and mopping up this man-made horror.

  A half-dozen plastic trash bags, overstuffed with the medical waste of blood-soaked and flesh-laden bandages, sagging IV bags, and empty blood bags were piled near the storage cabinets against the wall, out of the way. Late in the afternoon, the bags were hauled out on a wagon, taking with them pieces of suffering and the promise of one more day of healing.

  “What do you do with that stuff?” someone asked.

  “Gonna burn it,” the guy in blue coveralls shrugged.

  Just to my right was a cabinet the exact same size and color as all the others. It was slightly wedged toward my head, a short reach to an assortment of necessities: a pitcher of ice water, a vomit tray, a small radio, a few loose packs of Salems, and a picture of a girlfriend who had long forgotten about me.

  The beds and cabinets mirrored down the entire length of the wall to the far end of the ward. The bed and nightstand arrangement reflected back and forth across the ward, thirty beds in all. Each bed was locked into a marked slo
t and not one bed was empty. The bed slots were vacant only when the bed and patient were taken away to the operating room, or worse. The empty slots seemed more like gaping holes, like a freshly pulled tooth. During those times, the entire ward would breathe uneasy until the bed and its occupant returned safely to its mooring.

  Orthopedic military beds were hulks of cream-colored metal with chrome trimmings at the head and foot and heavy locking guardrails on each side. A thick, square metal beam traversed the full length of the bed, about three feet above its occupant.

  Three beds down to my right, I saw a kid reaching up with his one arm to grab the trapeze triangle dangling from the crossbeam. The heavy chrome chain pinged as he pulled himself up and it tightened against his weight. He lifted himself up as best he could with his one arm. I couldn’t tell if he was adjusting his butt to sit on a bedpan or to ease his burning ass from bed sores. His weight threw him off-balance and he swung sideways toward the pulling of his arm. He was holding on as tightly as he could, but his hand slipped from the trapeze and he dropped to the bed like a small child from a monkey bar. He reached up and grabbed the swinging bar, did a couple of chin-ups, and let go.

  The trapeze was the only means of movement for most of the guys here. On a couple of the beds, the trapeze had been removed. The young occupants had no hands, or no arms, or a combination. Even with the countless turning and the four-a-day lotion rubs by the staff, their bed sores never healed.

  A four-foot-wide corridor dissected the two rows of beds, dispatching traffic north to south. It was the main thoroughfare for an endless march of doctors, nurses, corpsmen, food and supply wagons, volunteers, wheelchairs, and occasionally, a visitor.

  The hospital received a daily influx of Marines and Navy corpsmen from the fields and jungles of South Vietnam, and the military made every effort to place the most severely wounded as close to their hometowns as possible.

  It was the bottom-feeder, low-life, primitive devices of the war that caused the very worst imaginable wounds, and so many unimaginable emotional and mental scars. The explosion of a land mine was the last time these kids were able to fully walk or touch or see or hear. Those who had lost only one leg, only one arm, or only one eye considered themselves the lucky ones. Those who had escaped the fiery burns to the face and body, or had taken only a partial blow from the explosion, they considered themselves the lucky ones, too.

  Anywhere from three to seven weeks would pass from the time the telegram arrived until the parents could walk in and see their wounded sons on Ward 2B in South Philly. Mothers and fathers, wives and fiancées, and brothers and sisters would come from nearly every state east of the Mississippi River.

  The first visit was always the most difficult for parents and patient. The slow walk down the ward, seeking the familiar face that left home just a few months ago, and hoping the wounds weren’t as bad as the telegram had told them. Their eyes would unwillingly spread the fear, the sadness, and the confusion as they passed between the countless beds of other mothers’ and fathers’ young boys, each step taking them closer to their own son.

  The sadness and the hurt deepened in the mother’s eyes as she tried desperately not to cry, but the trembling lips and sagging shoulders were unmistakable signs of the surge of emotions soon to follow.

  The father would try somehow to be strong, to be a man, but the shock of seeing his young boy, his soldier, his Marine, wounded and dismembered was always more than any one of them could take.

  The silence of these reunions blanketed everyone and everything. Nothing moved. No one breathed. No sounds from anywhere. It’s as though time stood still until everyone had absorbed his share of the fear and pain and confusion. Anything to make this easier; make it go away.

  The terror would well up inside a kid as his mother and dad stepped slowly toward him, about to see him for the first time, the bottom half of his legs gone or nothing left of his arms. Legs that would never carry him through their doorway back home or hands and arms never again able to touch a loving face or hug a mother goodbye. And, dear God, when the silence would finally succumb to reality, the explosion of sadness and disbelief would engulf the entire being of Ward 2B.

  Nightmares would swell up and down the ward following a first visit. Irrepressible bursts of terror cracked the darkness as land mine explosions repeated themselves and phantom pain soared through ghostly limbs, and the war came back to life again and again. One nightmare ignited another, and another. The nurses and corpsmen would rush from one end of the ward to the other, crisscrossing up and down, frantically comforting the haunted souls with morphine.

  A couple of hours would pass and Ward 2B would lay awash in a trembling quiet and wait—wait once again for morning.

  Salute

  THE BROWN DOUBLE doors opened and closed exactly eleven times this morning. Dr. Donnolly had pushed his way in or out eight of those times. He was back on the ward from his third surgery since seven; he and Miss Berry were doing post-op checks and changing out IV bags.

  I glanced across the ward at the big-faced clock hanging above the green and white tiled entryway to the backroom; it was 11:21.

  Counting was about the only mental activity you could accomplish while in a constant drug-laden buzz. Count the squares in the windows across the ward. Count the green and white tiles around the utility room entryway. Count the number of cigarettes left in the open pack. And count the number of times someone came onto or went off the ward.

  When the double doors swung open for the twelfth time, a solemn-looking sailor in all-white dress uniform stepped through. He cautiously made his way onto Ward 2B. His eyes drifted back and forth, gaining an endlessly saddened face from the bodies lying on either side of him. Slowly rolling his Navy cap through his fingers, he made his way over to me and forced a hard grin. I didn’t recognize him. Then he smiled.

  It was William Otis Johnson.

  Bill Johnson gently placed his cap on the foot of my bed and touched my left hand. His thin, six-foot frame had an ever-present preciseness, as if he were going to snap to attention at any moment for no reason, yet he radiated with a natural, relaxed charm. He had a way of making you feel better just by being in his presence. His smile was broad and easy, with perfect teeth as white and clean as his uniform. It was the same smile I saw the evening I left him standing outside Fiddler’s Green.

  His dark black eyes sparkled even through the sudden sadness that had punctuated his slow walk onto 2B.

  “Hello Jeremy.”

  “Hello Bill.”

  “My, my, look what you’ve done now. I won’t ask how you feel; it’s pretty obvious.”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “You really messed up this time.”

  Thanks for coming,” I said. “I’m just glad you weren’t with us.”

  “You got that right. I knew something was wrong when you didn’t show up for muster. The chief told us about the accident. I got here as soon as I could.”

  Dr. Donnolly had made his way toward us. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Yes sir,” Bill replied.

  “He’s very lucky. I understand one of your friends didn’t make it.”

  “Yes sir. The chief said he died instantly.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “The other two…are they okay?” Bill asked.

  “They’re doing well. They’re down the hall on Ward 2A,” Doctor Donnolly said. “Well, the worst part is over for your friend here. Isn’t that right, Jeremy?”

  “Yes sir,” I replied.

  Dr. Donnolly gave Bill a quick smile and circled around him toward Ski.

  Our conversation drifted in and out with the ebb and flow of the morphine in my brain.

  “I think you’re in pretty good hands here,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, I think they’re some of the best,” I grinned. “You have a great time on that tour, okay?”

  “It won’t be the same without you.”

  He made a quick glance ar
ound the ward. “Don’t give them too much trouble. You take care.”

  William Otis Johnson turned away and walked back down the ward. As he approached the brown double doors, he turned sharply around, firmly placed his white sailor cap to his head, snapped to attention, and gave a quiet salute to the Marines on Ward 2B.

  Earl Ray Higgins, from his bed five spaces down, raised his right hand into the air and gave him the finger.

  Keep It Inside

  THE SUNLIGHT CAME glaring through the windows, framing the wall directly across from us. Ski lay defiant in the early morning light. A Star of David pendant rested against his neck just below his right ear, propped up by the dull gray beaded chain of his dog tags.

  “Dyou look like sheet,” he said to me with a wry grin.

  “What?” I asked, thinking he was speaking a foreign language.

  “Dyou look like sheet,” he grinned harder.

  “You don’t look much better,” I smiled back.

  A black and green bulldog tattoo with the inscription “USMC,” arched below a pair of boxing gloves, was peeking out of the short sleeve of Ski’s blue and white-striped pajama top. IV tubes, bulging up into a half loop on both forearms, disappeared under a ribbon of tape. Small blackish-red bruises marked the needle punctures.

  Chalky white plaster casts completely covered his legs from his toes to his torso. The top edges of the hardened shells had already rubbed blisters high on his thighs. A metal crossbar, wrapped in plaster, bridged a one-foot span between his legs. The crossbar was molded into the casts at each knee, ensuring the impossibility of leg movement in any direction.

  A catheter tube slid from under the sheet, snaked over the cast of his right leg, and emptied a cloudy, reddish liquid into the plastic bag strapped to the bed frame. The catheter tube was an obvious visible blessing that things could have been a lot worse.

  Less than five weeks ago, Ski had been standing and squatting, running, crawling, sitting, and laughing. A couple of months ago, he had celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Just over a year ago, he was dancing at a senior prom.