How Can You Mend This Purple Heart Read online

  “Sir, here’s your surgical packet,” Doc Miller said. “I’ll have the drill ready.”

  “I’ll be out in just a couple of minutes. Is everyone here?” Dr. Donnolly asked.

  “Yes, Robert, I think everyone is here,” Miss Berry replied.

  Dr. Donnolly disappeared into the large open entryway just to the right of the cabinets. The four-foot-wide opening, with its gleaming white and green tiled border, gave access to the utility and storage rooms, sterilization room, toilets, and bathing area. He came out a few minutes later, a thin green smock covering his khaki shirt, a surgical mask hanging around his neck, his hands shiny with latex gloves, and forearms orange with iodine.

  Commander Robert Donnolly, doctor and surgeon, teacher and counselor, was never comfortable as a Navy Commander. His purpose was that of a surgeon, not a military officer. His preference in uniform was the long khaki smock and stethoscope. He didn’t care for the rigid, power-wielding authority of some of his colleagues, preferring the orthopedic operating room to the medical boardroom. He would rather be bedside on a Saturday evening than sitting restless at a cocktail party with the power-hungry military types.

  “Is everyone ready for this?” he asked.

  “We’re ready,” Miss Berry said as they headed toward my bed.

  “Uh oh, eet looks like dyou are next,” Ski warned.

  Dr. Donnolly, Miss Berry, Doc Miller, and three other corpsmen encircled my bed like a posse surrounding an escapee.

  “Jeremy, now that your concussion is clear, we need to get this leg into traction. We need to pull your leg tight to keep the broken ends of your femur from scraping together or cutting into your thigh muscle,” Dr. Donnolly said. “We’ll insert this pin crossways through the shin bone just below your knee. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but it should only take a few minutes.”

  He must have seen the “Oh shit!” look on my face.

  “We have a special pain medication to help,” he smiled. “It should last just a little longer than what it will take for us to finish.”

  Miss Berry put the amber liquid directly into the vein of my left forearm and within seconds I felt like I was submerged in a pool of perfectly warm molasses.

  It took four corpsmen to hold me down while Dr. Donnolly drilled the five-inch long pin crossways through my shin bone just below my knee.

  The pain was unbearable. I thrashed my upper body and grappled at the bed sheets with clawing fists. I tried to kick the air with my right leg, but one of the corpsmen had it pressed against the mattress.

  I was groping desperately to keep the pain inside—not give it a voice, not let it out—just like Ski.

  They must have known this was going to hurt like shit.

  My head and face were oscillating like a high-pitch tuning fork.

  Two corpsmen were holding my shoulders and chest down. Dr. Donnolly bent over my leg, the whining electric drill spinning the stainless steel pin deeper into my shin bone.

  The pain was blinding.

  The whir of the electric drill was louder and louder. It let out a shrill sound, like a squealing pig.

  Or was it me?

  Everything and everyone was becoming a blur.

  Don’t you dare make a sound.

  Keep it inside, god dammit!

  I held my breath. I kept pulling tighter and tighter at the sheets, my fists clutching wads of fabric as the shocks raced through my thigh and up my back.

  Push! Push! Keep the pain inside! Don’t make a sound!

  The pin came poking through the other side of my leg like a metal worm squirming its way from a cocoon.

  And Ski had set the mark too high.

  I don’t know what it was, but whatever I said…whatever came out…it was loud and forceful and angry and pitiful. The air blasted from my lungs, a sonic vomit of incoherent vulgarity.

  The failed effort to squelch the screams of pain were suddenly extinguished by a profound embarrassment—an embarrassment so intense, so consuming, I was exhausted by its force. Shame swept over me like the certainty of a cardinal sin.

  I sucked the air back deep into my body and forced it down hard. Holding it deep inside where it could never get out.

  “Breathe, Shoff! Breathe now!” Doc Miller hollered over the screaming drill.

  I tried to exhale all of my emotions with one long outward blast of relief, but the shame clung to my guts like an anchor in thick mud.

  One last squeal from the drill motor and the pain shut off, as if it had been unplugged along with the electric pig.

  I tried desperately to force my face into the pillow, bury my embarrassment and shame as deep and suffocating as I possibly could.

  “We’ll finish up in a couple of minutes, Jeremy. Just a few mechanical adjustments and we’ll be done.”

  Dr. Donnolly attached small, metal rods to each end of the exposed pin. Fused into the end of each rod was a thick cord about ten feet long. Dr. Donnolly and one of the corpsmen spooled the cords into pulleys fastened to a framework high above the foot of the bed. A second cord was lassoed around the leg cradle and strung over the top of the bed. Another corpsman attached the cord to a set of weights that swayed silently just behind my head.

  Dr. Donnolly and one of the corpsman carefully pulled on the cords and rods attached to the pin below my knee, lifting the cradle and my leg about a foot off the mattress. Once Dr. Donnolly had set the proper tension, Miss Berry and Doc Miller secured each cord to a set of circular cast iron weights. The cabled tethers swung, nearly motionless, from side to side like a quiet pendulum. The weights pinged against the metal bed frame as if to signal their satisfaction that the jagged bone ends inside my thigh could do no damage.

  “Sorry, Jeremy, but we had to do this,” Dr. Donnolly half-apologized.

  “I’m sorry, too, sir,” I said, looking straight up.

  “It’s okay. I wouldn’t want to have to go through it myself.”

  Miss Berry placed a hand on my throbbing knee, her motherly eyes soothing some of the shame. “We’ll have something ready for your pain in a few minutes,” she said. “In the meantime, I think we need to remove some of the glass from that cut in your head.”

  Doc Miller had a pair of tweezers nipping at the furrow that ran from my forehead to the back of my skull. The shiny pieces of leftover wreckage were half-buried under my scalp, tucked beneath the fifteen or so stitches, the dried blood, and tangled hair.

  “Too bad these aren’t diamonds,” Doc Miller chuckled. “We could make a fortune.”

  “How’s it look, Doc?”

  “Take a look for yourself.” He handed me a small mirror from the nightstand and guided it toward the top of my head.

  A wide swath had been shaved on either side of the gash, leaving the rest of my head covered with inch-long hair. It looked like a really bad Mohawk.

  I lowered the mirror to my face. My right eye looked like a meatball. The bone fragments from the crushed cheek bone had penetrated the eye socket, stopping just millimeters short of becoming a blinding shard.

  “Shoff, is this yours?” Doc said as he jerked toward me, holding a sample of my urine he had just measured into a plastic cup.

  “Yeah, that’s mine,” I said.

  The liquid was more blood than urine.

  “Doctor Donnolly will want to order X-rays of your kidneys,” he said. “And you know what this blood means?” I was going to be the latest recipient of a rubber hose running out of my penis.

  Doc Miller took a quick look at my left ear. It had been nearly severed in half and was sewn back into place with rough stitches.

  “Everything looks pretty good, considering Dr. Donnolly had to put you together as quickly as he did,” Doc assured me. “He didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  “Don’t think we do that bad of a job on all of our patients here,” Dr. Donnolly smiled as he checked the tension on the cords overhead.

  I took a slow look around. “I don’t think I have much to be worried a
bout, sir.”

  “No. No you don’t,” Dr. Donnolly said as he walked away.

  Ski gave me a quiet glance and looked back up into the air above his bed.

  “I’m sorry Ski. I tried, man. I really tried,” I said, staring straight up.

  “Eet’s okay. They must have known eet would be bad.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said as we both kept our gaze on the ceiling.

  Getting to Know You

  “FEELIX DAWNTAY JAMNEETZKY,” Ski said, looking over at me, his accent so viscous I thought he was speaking in tongues.

  “What?” I said.

  “Feelix Dawntay Jamneetzky,” he said as slowly as he could. “Alld my friends call me Ski.”

  I leaned over with my left hand stretched out as far as I could, and for the first time we made eye contact. I suddenly realized I didn’t know Ski by any other name than Ski. Our conversations to this point had been mere blobs of slurry fuzziness and bits of semi-conscious chatter.

  “Jeremy Shoff,” I said. “All my friends just call me Shoff. You look like shit,” I joked.

  “Thanks, you sawnoffabeetch,” he said with a grin.

  His two front teeth had been knocked from his face by flying shrapnel. The trinket-sized piece of metal had cut through the back of his mouth and rested just below the base of his brain. If his teeth hadn’t slowed it down, it would have severed his spinal cord and we never would have met. He would be two floors up on 4A.

  “He’s a non-combat motherfucker.” Half sitting up in the bed to Ski’s left, and glaring a familiar look of hatred at me, was Earl Ray Higgins.

  Earl Ray was a handsome, older-looking eighteen-year-old with thick blonde hair and a great cleft in his chin. His steel-blue eyes had a look of constant suspicion and anger. His broad shoulders and muscular right arm portrayed his persistent weightlifting and constant squeezing of a fist-size ball. About five months ago, the ground had literally exploded underneath him, leaving him with only one full limb, his right arm. He had returned to Ward 2B from the rehab wards a couple of days ago and was anxious to establish his role.

  Everything on 2B was measured from a bone joint. Earl’s left leg had been blown off above the knee, his left arm above the elbow, and his right leg below the knee. He had bandages covering wounds still on the mend and from the countless skin grafts that wouldn’t heal. And like Ski, he had danced at a senior prom just over a year ago.

  “Okay. Let’s get it over with. No sense dragging this out. I’m Jeremy Shoff, radioman, U.S. Navy. I’m here ’cause of a bad car wreck,” I said, trying not to look at my legs.

  “Aleex Dawntay Dyavoshkee,” Ski firmly repeated, offering his hand again. “Lance dCorporal, U.S.M.C., first battalion, fourth dMarines. A bad land mine.”

  “Why don’t you just give him your fucking serial number while you’re at it? Shit, you don’t know what a fucking bad land mine is,” Earl Ray sniped, defiantly raising the thick wrapped stump of his left thigh.

  “Just geeve eet a break,” Ski said.

  “Bad fucking land mine, my ass,” Earl Ray said, getting in the last word.

  As a triple amputee, Earl had made the greater sacrifice of all the combat-wounded currently on the ward, and Ski relinquished to his fellow Marine with higher respect. It was never spoken but wholly understood: the more severe the wounds and the greater the amputations, the greater the respect. The pride of being a Marine overpowered any frailties of being human. Earl Ray Higgins knew the feeling well.

  Earl Ray had developed a twitch of squeezing his lips together and blowing air up from the left corner of his mouth, as if to get hair out of his face. I was sure he had no idea he was doing it. It was never annoying; it just made you focus on his face.

  He was constantly doing one-arm chin-ups with the trapeze bar. His right arm was going to be his primary means of survival: one arm to propel the wheelchair, the same arm to support his half body when he got his new legs, and this one arm to kick ass, not if, but when, needed.

  Earl Ray looked over at me with a smirk, blowing a puff of air up from the corner of his mouth. “Hey non-combat motherfucker, do you know what it’s like to kill somebody?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I didn’t think so. I can’t believe I’m in here with this non-combat sissy motherfucker,” he prodded. “Of all the bullshit fucking things to happen to me. You even smell like a non-combat motherfucker, Shoff. Somebody get me some non-combat motherfuckin’ air freshener.”

  “Geeve eet a fauwcking break, Earl,” Ski jumped in.

  “It’s okay Ski,” I said. “Let him go. Maybe it makes him feel better. Just like his insult to my friend.”

  “The only thing that would make me feel better is your non-combat ass out of my sight, just like your non-combat motherfucker friend is out of my sight.” Earl snapped.

  “Then have them move you over to 2A,” I snapped back.

  “Why, you smartass motherfucker!” Earl yelled.

  “No more than you, Earl.”

  “Okay. Okay. Geeve eet a break.” Ski said. “Why don’t dyou two just keese and make up?”

  “He can kiss my ass,” Earl Ray snorted, lying down with his back toward us.

  The rest of the day passed with routine, with Earl Ray giving me the occasional badass stare. Doc changed Ski’s dressings two more times with Ski gasping for air and cramping up his back. Dr. Donnolly ordered muscle relaxers and it helped Ski sleep off the time between the wound cleansings.

  Around seven o’clock, a new guy was brought up and rolled into the slot just to my right. Pocks of shrapnel peppered the entire left side of his face. The fingers and muscles of his left hand were shriveled and spindly, shrunk to the bone. The hand and wrist were strapped with a metal wire bracket laced with large rubber bands looped around his fingers, keeping them from curling under.

  Where his right hand should have been was a round surgical dressing about the size of a softball. I couldn’t tell if he had a catheter; the bags were always strapped to the right side of the bed.

  His jet-black hair was much longer than a Marine’s should be, except where a two-inch swathe just over his left ear had been shaved out and a furrow of stitches zigzagged through its center.

  A large marshmallow-looking patch covered his left eye; blood had seeped into the cotton near the bottom of the bandage.

  His face was a deep, reddish-brown clay color, like kiln-dried brick, and his right eye was dark black-brown with a stare of constant vigilance.

  Doc Miller was at his bed almost out of nowhere with the clipboard, stethoscope, oral thermometer, and blood pressure pad.

  “Let’s see,” Doc said. “Not too bad for what could have happened. Says here you jumped on a live grenade to save your buddies. You could have lost your head,” he said with a smile.

  “What makes you think I didn’t?” the new guy laughed.

  “Randy Miller,” Doc said, introducing himself as he shook the mercury down the thermometer. “Everyone calls me Doc.”

  “Bobby Mac Joyce. Nice to know you, Doc. I’d shake your hand but you’d have to go to ’Nam to get it!” he laughed out loud.

  “Well, you’re in luck, Bobby Mac Joyce,” said. “You still have your thumb. The whole thing.”

  “Well, ain’t that some shit. They told me on the chopper I lost my whole arm. Must have been that green-ass lieutenant hoping I’d lost both of ’em. Guess I got the last laugh on him, he’s still there!” he sneered, laughing even louder. He raised his right leg under the sheet and let out a loud, long fart.

  “Keep talking, lieutenant, we’ll find you!” he snorted. Every guy within earshot howled.

  “I’ll come back when the air clears,” Doc said.

  “Shit, Doc, I know you’ve smelled worse than that,” Bobby Mac quipped.

  “Yeah, but not anything I didn’t have to.” Doc walked away, fanning the air with the clipboard.

  “Hey man, I can tell you ain’t combat. What the fuck happened to you?” Bobby Mac
pointed his one eye and short attention span right at me.

  “The name’s Shoff,” I said. “A bad car wreck.”

  “You fuckin’ got that right!” he laughed. “It kicked your ass.”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking in a deep breath. “But it ain’t shit compared to you guys.”

  “Yeah, well, ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it now. They let you smoke in here?” He fumbled with a pack of Kool Menthols with his half-dead fingers.

  “Need to put ’em down, Bobby,” Doc Miller said, returning with the fanning clipboard. “I gotta get your vitals. Can’t have the smoke messing up the numbers.”

  “Shit, Doc, just fill in some numbers. I’m breathing, ain’t I?” he chuckled.

  “No can do, Bobby Mac. Give me your right arm. Need anything for pain?”

  “Shit, yeah! You think I’m gonna turn down a good thing like that? And it’s on Uncle Sam. Not like I didn’t fuckin’ earn it!” he laughed, his one eye gleaming.

  “Car wreck, huh? Looks like the car won,” Bobby Mac laughed.

  “No, but the bridge did,” I said.

  “You hit a fuckin’ bridge? I’d rather take my chances with a grenade any day!” he cackled.

  Doc Miller came over with the syringe and swabbed down Bobby Mac’s bulging right arm and eased the goo into the muscle.

  “Better get a couple more of those ready, Doc,” he laughed. “I used to have two or three for breakfast in ’Nam.”

  “Brag all you want, but I can tell you’re not a junkie,” Doc replied. “You’re in great shape and it’s probably what kept you from being any worse.”

  “Any worse? Shit, this is heaven! Got me a hotel room, a bed with clean sheets, and somebody bringing me drugs all day and night. Don’t get any better than this, man!”

  Dr. Donnolly was standing at the bottom of Bobby Mac’s bed looking over his chart and glancing down toward Earl Ray. Earl had been noticeably quiet through all of Bobby Mac’s banter. Dr. Donnolly put the clipboard back on the heavy ring and stepped between Bobby Mac’s bed and mine.