The Phantom Blooper (26 page)

Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown finishes up with the quadriplegic Seabee and stops by your rack for a moment and fluffs your pillow like a moonlighting angel. She's very sweet to you, considering that relatively speaking you are hardly even wounded. You've got shrapnel lacerations and a slight limp.

At Charlie Med back in Viet Nam they dumped your naked carcass onto a canvas stretcher laid across two sawhorses and surgeons dug a hundred pieces of pressed steel wire hand-grenade shrapnel out of your body. You're serviceable now and won't be surveyed back to civilian life as a circus freak or singing paperweight. Only now when you try to squeeze your pimples they don't come out white--like maggots--but are bits of black flaky charcoal with gray metal inside.

You've got what the doctors call "proud flesh" all over your face. Proud flesh is a special kind of scar tissue, the doctors say--the toughest kind.

First they tried some skin grafts using skin from a white Yorkshire pig. They found shrapnel. They gave you the shrapnel in a plastic vial. But the pig skin refused to graft, and that was okay with you. Then they took some cuttings from your buttocks, sewed them on, stuck an I-V in your arm, hung a bottle over you, and waited.

While you slept, you had a dream in which you could hear the clicking of surgical tools. Scalpels sliced off your face and the medical staff made sandwiches. Then they wheeled your gurney over to the new economical do-it-yourself amputation ward--for sergeant E-5s and below--where you were issued a rusty hacksaw and a bullet to bite on.

You have no complaints. You don't look so bad for a dumb grunt with his ass grafted onto his face. You look a little bit like Errol Flynn if Errol Flynn had ever played Frankenstein.

Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown smiles at you and her smile makes your shorts too tight. You think maybe you might love her a little bit if she were a little younger and not quite so strict. She makes you eat green beans. You hate green beans. She puts giant Popsicle sticks into your mouth and looks into your mouth with an expression on her face like she's poking into a hole full of pond scum and rotten chickpeas.

Nurse Brown dominates you with needles and with big soft white tits that smell like talcum powder and fresh bread. Back when you wouldn't eat your solid food she leaned down and let you look at them as long as you would allow her to spoon-feed you. Those were the good old days.

Now you are sorry when Nurse Brown's warmth moves away. She stops at the next bed to readjust the oxygen tent over the Crispy Critter.

The Crispy Critter to port is a tanker, an overflow from the burn ward. Somebody RPG'd his ride. He was trapped inside a burning tank. Ammunition cooked off in the storage racks and the tanker was thrown free by the explosion. They couldn't find a vein in the Crispy Critter tanker's charred arms, so they stuck the I-V needles into the tops of his feet. At night you can hear him plea bargaining with God.

They segregated me for a while, until the military intelligence pogues in S-2 got the story down pat the way they wanted it in the newspapers. Then I was transferred to the recovery ward.

In the recovery ward we get to eat nonliquid eggs for breakfast.

I bring six metal trays of food back from the galley and pass them out to the gimps. The walking wounded and the wheelies bring the nonambulatory wounded and the gimps hot chow and horse pill tranquilizers.

The snuffies hang tight together here in this forgotten place, and we take care of one another, every night, just as we took care of one another in Viet Nam, because there's nobody else we trust. God loved us, but he died.

Skillful surgeons and tireless nurses tend us by day, sewing up the wounds they can see. But at night we return to Viet Nam and wake up screaming. We piss napalm and cough up spiders. Nobody here but us vegetables, legless, ball-less wonders, more gargoyles for the museum, hire the handicapped-- they're fun to watch. Every night we fight to keep our brothers alive. Every night we suture up our gaping invisible wounds with black-light needles. Although we have malaria, we still maintain our area.

I do my impression of Mort Sahl, the political comedian. I hold a newspaper as a prop and I tell the story of how America was invaded by Eskimo Commandoes.

"So they were chubby little troopers, wearing fur hats with red stars on them. Rawhide parkas. Combat boots. They came in for a beach landing in battle-gray kayaks. They had scrimshawed bayonets of walrus bone, government-issue. And a K-9 Corps of penguins in flak jackets. They had rawhide bandoliers loaded with snowballs."

I get a few mild chuckles as I pace up and down the center aisle of the recovery ward. Wounded people who think they might be dying are a tough audience.

"The Communist Eskimo Commandoes were ordered to blow up the TV-dinner factory near Laguna Beach, California. The Eskimo political commissars figured that without TV dinners half of the male population of America would starve."

Somebody way down at the end of the ward says, "There it is." He gets the big laughs. I hate it when amateurs get bigger laughs than I do.

I continue: "But they saw some California girls. All California girls over the age of nine are gorgeous honeys. It's a state law. If a girl turns sweet sixteen in California and she's not well on her way to being a stone fox, the California Highway Patrol escorts her to the border and exiles her to Nevada.

"So the Eskimo Commandoes started rubbing noses with the beach bunnies and lost all of their military discipline and political indoctrination in less than five seconds. The beach bunnies were like pink frisky seals and promised to take off their bikinis if the Eskimo Commandoes would denounce Karl Marx. The chubby dupes of Moscow agreed, and then everybody sat down in the sand and ate corn dogs. The Eskimo Commandoes soon discovered that, unfortunately, the Laguna Beach sand angels were all deformed freaks. The good news was that they were biologically accommodating."

Someone says, "How were they deformed freaks?"

I say, "They all had breasts that were bigger than their heads."

Through the moans and the groans, someone says, "Okay, so then what happened?"

I say, "Oh, I don't know. The usual thing. They told Eskimo jokes."

Noon. The quadriplegic Seabee has visitors from back in the World. They come down the aisle through the ward with high heels tapping, looking neither to the right nor the left.

There's his mother, dabbing her nose with a paper napkin. And his father, who looks lost. And his girlfriend, all big ass and chunky legs and smelling like a graveyard for dead flowers.

They talk to the quadriplegic Seabee a lot but they don't say anything. The Seabee looks relieved that his jaw is wired together so that he couldn't talk even if he wanted to.

When the visitors from home leave, his girlfriend, sobbing, lags behind, savoring her big moment as the heroine in a soap opera on TV. She says, "Bobby, I'm sorry." She takes off her gold engagement ring with a diamond in it the size of a grain of sand and places it on the foot of his bed. She hurries away, reeking tragedy from every pore of her fat little body.

Later on that afternoon some pogue Admiral in a hat with gold scrambled eggs all over it comes in with about five hundred photographers and pins medals for heroism under fire and Purple Hearts on us while we are helpless to resist.

I get a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, but they don't say why. Probably some pogue made a clerical error.

When they come to the Crispy Critter tanker, the weight of the Navy Cross hurts his chest. They pull the medal off of his pajamas and pin it to his pillow.

"AH-OO! AH-OO!" says Ranks, announcing his arrival deep in his diaphragm with a traditional Marine Corps "bark" that is like the love call of a horny gorilla. Ranks is a Lance Corporal from Motor T. He pushes a gurney piled high with magazines and paperback books down the ward. He stops at each bed to chat and to proudly show off his rank insignias to any New Guys.

Everyone salutes him and he returns their salutes.

Ranks was blown up by a booby trap planted inside his truck's engine. Some VC sapper used fifty pounds of officers' metal rank insignias stolen from an American PX as shrapnel for a bomb. When Ranks opened up the hood of his truck to check his engine, he got a face full of brass.

A black grunt with a bandaged head is telling a cute Japanese student nurse a sea story about the first time he got hit.

"This is no shit," says the grunt head-wound.

Noting the confusion on the student nurse's face, Ranks translates: "This is a true story."

"The Six souvenired our herd a C-A op in a beaucoup number ten thousand hairy A-O."

Ranks says, "Our commanding officer assigned our military unit a combat assault in an unusually scary place."

"The cannon cockers checked fire on the arty prep and Huey gunbirds standing by hit a hot Lima Zulu."

"After an artillery bombardment, armed helicopters carrying Marine riflemen landed under heavy fire."

"A B-40 sucking chest wound wasted my bro."

Ranks translates: "My friend was killed when shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade hit him in the lungs."

"The Kid took A-K rounds B-K T&T."

"Rifle bullets went through my leg below the knee."

The black grunt head-wound says, "Payback is a motherfucker. "

Ranks explains, "What goes around comes around.

The grunt continues, "Phantoms pickled ordnance, snake and nape. Cobras peppered the treeline, want some, get some, here's a little money from home for yo' zipper-head mama, Mr. Charles."

"Our fighter-bombers dropped bombs and napalm on enemy positions effectively and then helicopter gunships strafed enemy military personnel and their mothers."

The grunt concludes his sea story by saying, "A dustoff
dee-dee'd
friendly Whiskey India Alphas to Charlie Med, most ricky-tick. Them chuck squid pecker-checkers were number one.

"A medical evacuation helicopter," says Ranks, "flew American battle casualties to a battalion aid station without delay and the treatment by Naval personnel was excellent."

The Japanese student nurse smiles at the black grunt, then at Ranks, shrugs, and haltingly says, "I'm very sorry. I do not speak English."

As the confused nurse walks away, Ranks and the black grunt head-wound laugh and say, "There it is, bro. Sorry 'bout that."

Stepping over to my rack, Ranks says, "Hey, joker, m'man, my bird is coming out!" He points to his cheekbone. A silver eagle with spread wings is embedded just below his left eye, a silver shadow just beneath the surface of his skin.

Ranks has got a brigadier general's star of glittering silver in his jaw and gold and silver oak-leaf clusters in his neck and silver railroad tracks embedded in his forehead. His whole body is full of metal. When they cut open his chest they found a ball of lieutenant's bars as big as a man's fist, miniature bullion, a pirate's treasure of silver and gold.

"Outstanding, Ranks," I say, saluting.

Ranks returns my salute and pushes his gurney on to the next bed.

"AH-OO!" says Ranks, "AH-OO! AH-OO!"

Now that I'm out of the recovery ward, every Thursday at 1600 hours I go get my head gear oiled by a shrink.

A Navy psychiatrist is to psychiatry what military music is to music. No fucking pogue lifer questions Command. Even the chaplains are on the team. The job of a milita psychiatrist in time of war is to patch over any honest perceptions of reality with lies dictated by the party line. His job is to tell you that you can't believe your own eyes, that shit is ice cream, and that you owe it to yourself to hurry back to the war with a positive attitude and slaughter people you don't even know, because if you don't, you're crazy.

Five minutes after I met my shrink I psychoanalyzed him as a weakling and bully who was always chosen last for baseball teams when he was a kid and who glories in the power he can exercise in the doctor-patient relationship, in which he is always the one who gets to be the doctor.

I hate his crisp clean khaki uniform. I hate his deep masculine voice. I hate him because he is everybody's counterfeit father.

Lieutenant Commander James B. Bryant drones on: "You are merely identifying with your captors. It's an old, old story. It really is not at all uncommon for hostages or prisoners to come to admire-"

I say, "Man, you are so out of date, even your bullshit is bullshit. "

Commander Bryant leans back in his blue-gray swivel chair and smiles. The smile is half smirk and half smug superiority and half shit-eating grin. "What are your gut feelings about the enemy, now that you're free?"

I say, "Who's the enemy?"

With either the patience of a saint or the arrogance of a saint--with saints it's always hard to be sure--he says, "The Viet Cong. Define the Viet Cong for me."

"The Viet Cong are scrawny rice-munching Asian elves."

The Commander nods, picks up an unlit pipe, and chews on the stem. "I see. And how do you feel about having done your duty to your country in your three tours in Viet Nam?"

I say, "Being young is the art of survival without weapons, but we had weapons, and we used them to burn Viet Nam alive. I'm ashamed of that. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but it was the wrong thing. In an unnecessary war, patriotism is just racism made to sound noble."

"But soldiers in all wars have "

"John Wayne never died, Audie Murphy never cried, and Gomer Pyle never dipped a baby in jellied gasoline."

"I see," says Commander Bryant, making a little note on his little notepad.

I say, "Why is it so important to you that I be crazy?"

The Commander pauses, then says, "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"Look, read my lips. I was a soldier in the Liberation Army. I lived in a Viet Cong village with Viet Cong people. I was never tortured. I was not brainwashed. They never even questioned me. They knew more about my area of operations than I did. I fought against the enemies of the people of my village and I'm glad I did it and I would do it again."

Commander Bryant smiles. "Of course you did." He makes a note.