Authors: Greg Dinallo
I
’m standing in front of a mirror in our bedroom knotting my tie. It’s pure silk, elegant and expensive, but I rarely wear it on weekdays because the avocado, black, and cream print with red accents is a bit loud for business. Nancy bought it for me; and I’m wearing it today as a subtle signal, an apology for behavior that was, at the least, inexcusable. I feel guilty and remorseful. I was out of control, I had turned back the clock, I did lapse into one of the paranoid rages that marked my return from Vietnam. Nancy I was right about all of that. However, after a night of soul-searching, I’ve decided she was more right about it’s being irrational to imagine that people are trying to kill me, than about going to Denver. Despite recent events, my commitment to learning the soldier’s identity remains unshaken.
Nancy comes out of the shower. She hasn’t said a word to me since yesterday’s incident and continues to ignore me as she towels off and dresses for school. The tie isn’t working.
“Come on, babe. I don’t want to leave like this.”
“Taking your car again?” she asks curtly.
“What do you mean?”
“I was planning to have the Rover serviced when you went to Vegas, but you drove yourself to the airport.”
“Stop trying to pick a fight, okay? You know I had to leave from the office.”
“You still could’ve used a company driver.”
“I didn’t think of it. I told you I arranged for one this morning.”
“You tell me a lot of things,” she snaps as she brushes her hair, using short, quick strokes to communicate her anger.
“Look, I’m sorry. I said I was out of line. I really don’t want to leave like this.”
“Then don’t go.”
“Nance . . . You know I have to. I get in tonight at seven-fifty-five. Will you be at the airport?”
“I’ll be at the theater with the Grants.”
“Yes, well, I guess I should’ve mentioned the bottle wasn’t the only thing I broke yesterday.”
Her brows go up.
“I called Gil and cancelled.”
“You what?”
“I made an excuse about Laura coming down unexpectedly. I’m having the driver deliver the tickets to his office.”
“All of them?”
I nod contritely. “He’s taking an associate and his wife. I’m sorry. I wasn’t myself when I did it. I can’t take them back now.”
She glares at me, fuming. “You’ve got a lot a gall, Morgan.”
“A is for acid indigestion,” I quip in a last-ditch effort to loosen her up.
“Not the phrase I have in mind.”
“Besides, I know how much picking me up at the airport means to you.”
Her eyes are burning with rage. Finally, they cool, slightly, and she emits an exasperated groan.
“Well, what do you say?”
“You’ve been doing this to me since high school, haven’t you?”
“A is for always,” I reply, grinning.
“All right,” she snarls grudgingly. “I’ll be there.”
“Thanks. Maybe we can talk this out.”
“Maybe.”
I want her to smile but she doesn’t.
United’s 9:15 flight to Denver is scheduled at two hours, eighteen minutes. Due to the change in time zones, I arrive at Stapleton Airport just after 12:45
P.M.
It takes a half hour to pick up a rental car and twice that long to make my way through the downtown area to Fort Logan just off Route 285 near Sheridan, a picturesque rural area near Lake Marston, fifty miles southwest of the city.
The road that leads to the VA hospital is lined with budding trees and manicured landscaping. At first glance it looks more like a resort than a government facility. But once inside, I’m quickly reminded this is a place where once-proud men, crack combat troops who stormed enemy positions, fighter jocks who flew super-sonic jets, now shuffle aimlessly about corridors—if they have legs that function, if they have legs at all. The thought of how close I came to being one of them sends a chill through me. I feel more than a little conspicuous in my Armani suit and doeskin wingtips. I’ve certainly worn the wrong tie.
A woman at the reception desk directs me to the Immunodeficiency Unit. I’m stunned by this confrontation with the walking dead. The blank, sunken eyes. The skin drawn like parchment over bones. The ghastly sense of hopelessness. These aren’t concentration camp inmates, but they could be.
A nurse shows me to a room where a man in a wheelchair is sitting in front of a window. His back is to the door, his head is tilting slightly to one side. An oxygen bottle rides in a holder beneath the chair. An IV stand, affixed to one of the armrests, towers over him like the grim reaper’s scythe.
Though it’s not an airborne virus and I’ve never been homophobic, I stand there for a long moment, anxious about approaching a man who’s dying, anxious about
it,
about AIDS.
“Mr. Bartlett?” I finally say.
A few seconds pass before his hands lower to the chair’s push rims in response, then his fingers slowly grasp them and he wheels himself around to face me.
I introduce myself, explaining I’m a Vietnam vet, and ask if we can talk for a few minutes.
He nods imperceptibly, without looking up, and motions to a chair against the wall. I slide it closer to him and sit down. A clear plastic tube carries the steady drip of dextrose and sodium chloride to a vein just above his wrist. Another snakes over his shoulder to his upper lip, where bluish prongs dart up into his nostrils. His freshly shaven face has a waxy sheen that intensifies its hollowness. As he lifts his head and looks at me, his eyes narrow with what appears to be uncertainty, then they widen in shock, and he lurches backward in the wheelchair.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, assuming he’s having an attack or seizure of some kind. “You want me to call a nurse?”
He shakes no emphatically and cocks his head to one side, studying me out of the corner of his eye.
“You sure you’re all right?”
He nods warily, then reaches out and touches my face with a skeletal hand as if confirming I exist. I want to pull away but don’t, afraid I’ll offend him.
“You,” he says in a hoarse whisper, expelling a stream of stale breath, which nauseates me. “You’re—you’re dead.”
Is he invoking a curse, making a macabre prophecy? “What do you mean?” I ask with a nervous laugh.
“I saw you dead.”
“Obviously I’m not. I don’t understand.”
“Were you a twin?”
“No.”
“Well, then a grunt who looked a lot like you died in Nam,” he explains, in a voice illness has reduced to an eerie rasp. “I debagged him.”
“You remember the face of every GI you processed?”
“Of course not, but there’s no way in hell I’ll ever forget this one.”
“Why?”
“Because it was weird, real weird.” He pauses, taking a deep breath, which gives me hope that there is more to come. “It was—April? No, no, May. First or second week May of ’68. I was just starting my shift, we did twelve on/twelve off. This one morning, I come into the morgue and find bodies everywhere. On the tables, in piles on the floor, stuffed into the big walk-in reefer; they were in bags, wrapped in ponchos, even rolled up in tent flaps. Worst I’d ever seen it. I’m waist-deep in bodies. I start debagging this guy . . .” He gasps and pauses to catch his breath, using the time to study my face again. “Hell, if it wasn’t you,” he resumes, shaking his head in disbelief, “it sure was damn near your double.”
“I think I understand,” I say, my mind racing, as it begins to dawn on me that this case of mistaken identity may not have been a mistake at all. “You remember what killed him?”
“Shot in the chest.”
I remove the casualty report with Bartlett’s name and signature from my briefcase and show it to him. “Is this the man?”
He holds it with frail, trembling fingers and stares at it for what feels like an eternity. I’m starting to wonder if he hasn’t just quietly
expired when he rasps, “A. Calvert Morgan.” Then he shrugs, tucking his head down between bony shoulders that come up to the bottoms of his ears. “Could be. I don’t remember his name.”
“My double,” I say, gently probing, “he was never processed, was he?”
“That’s right,” Bartlett replies, clearly surprised by my certainty.
“Why not?”
He pushes against the armrests with his elbows, leaning back to get a better look at me. I sense he’s measuring me, measuring the significance of the moment as if he didn’t want to waste it. Then, decision made, he nods several times. “I guess it’s now or never, isn’t it?” he asks, as if he’s about to reveal a long-locked secret and is tremendously relieved. “Like I said, I’m getting this body out of the bag to log it in when the out-processing NCO who’s coming on duty walks by. He takes one look at the corpse and freezes, then gets this look on his face like he’s just been jabbed in the butt with a cattle prod. At first I figure it’s a close buddy or something like that because I sort of recall seeing the guy around. Then the NCO takes me aside and tells me to rebag him.”
“That why you remember what he looked like?”
He nods emphatically. “Like it was yesterday.”
“Why’d he want you to rebag him?”
“Good question.”
“You didn’t ask?”
Bartlett shakes his head no.
“It was an improper order. Wasn’t it?”
He nods.
“And you just went ahead and did it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come?”
“No choice.”
“You mean this NCO who was calling the shots outranked you?”
“No. The other way round.”
“Then why didn’t you refuse and report it?”
“The man had leverage, he didn’t need rank.”
“What kind of leverage?”
“This,” he replies, gesturing to his emaciated body. “This thing that’s killing me. But he got his. Somebody fragged the son of a bitch.”
“You?”
“Wish to hell I had.” He grins wickedly at the memory. “You see
Murder on the Orient Express?
”
“Uh-huh. You saying the man had a lot of enemies?”
Bartlett nods emphatically. “Everybody hated his fucking guts. CID gave up trying to figure out who killed him.”
“You recall his name?”
He shakes his head no. “It was unusual, I remember that. Been a long time. I’m sorry.”
“He was blackmailing you because you were gay?”
Bartlett stiffens momentarily, then his expression softens with amusement. He rolls his wheelchair a short distance to a dresser in front of the window, takes his wallet from a drawer and returns. His fingers pull a snapshot from a yellowed sleeve and offer it to me. It’s a picture of a woman, three young children, and a robust man, whom I barely recognize as Bartlett. His long sideburns and clothes are right out of the seventies. They’re all smiling from behind a crack in the emulsion.
“Your family?”
“Uh-huh. I haven’t seen them in years.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed you were homosexual.”
“Hey some of my best friends are gay,” he jokes, gesturing to the corridor with an ironic laugh that turns into a loud, hacking cough as he continues. “Try as they might . . . they haven’t . . . cornered . . . the AIDS market . . . yet.” He waits until it subsides, then wipes some spittle from his chin with the sleeve of his hospital gown. His eyes lock onto mine and, with the matter-of-fact openness of someone who has spent time in chemical dependency programs, he rasps, “I’m a heroin addict.”
I nod with understanding born of firsthand observation. “Got hooked in-country.”
His eyes fall as he nods. “
A
person can take just so much carnage. Some guys handled it like it was nothing, just removed themselves from it. Most of us drank, fucked our brains out, and got into drugs.”
“You weren’t alone. We all did whatever it took to get through another day.”
“Trouble is, I couldn’t get off the shit after I came back,” he explains, biting his lip to control his emotions. “My marriage went to hell, lost my kids, my home, my job, started living in the streets, ended up on the business end of a dirty needle.”
An uncomfortable silence follows.
I stand and cross to the window, taking in the fresh spring air and natural beauty of the landscape that stretches to the horizon. “You spend much time out there?”
“Not lately,” he replies with a glimmer of hope.
“What do you say we go for a walk.” It’s a statement not a question. I remove my jacket and tie, toss them on the chair, and wheel him from the room.
Moments later, we are through the set of double doors at the end of the corridor and circling down a ramp that leads to a network of paths. I push him a short distance to a grove of aspen and pine that overlooks the lake. He sets the wheel lock and I settle on a boulder opposite him.
“That noncom. He threatened to blow the whistle on your habit if you didn’t cooperate?”
Bartlett’s face tightens into an angry mask and he nods. “You remember the penalty for possession?”
“Sure do,” I reply, hearing my CO’s voice drumming it into us as if it were yesterday. “Automatic court martial, huge fine, reduction in rank, a ninety-day pass to the stockade—”
“—And a better than even shot at getting a DD,” Bartlett quickly adds, using shorthand for a dishonorable discharge to complete the litany.
“Leverage.”
“Yeah, especially if you were a lifer like me. I mean, I couldn’t afford to get booted out. It would’ve cost me my pension, my VA benefits—just try getting a job with a piece of bad paper in your file. The son of a bitch had me by the balls and he knew it. He says, ‘Bartlett, that body goes.’ It goes. No questions asked.”
“What happened to it?”
“Vanished.”
That one word explains the lack of documents in the morgue file, the body-not-recovered entry on the master casualty list, and the MIA symbol on the Memorial. The body/no body mystery has finally been solved. “Did that happen often?”
“Just that once. We had strict procedures. The bodies came in by chopper, truck, sometimes plane. As in-processing NCO, I signed for them and recorded each one in a log. It sort of looked like an old-fashioned accountant’s ledger with all the columns and lines—name, rank, serial number, unit, date, whatever information
I had. We used ballpoint pens. No pencils, no erasers, and no computers. Each man’s remains was given a processing number and put into the reefer, a big walk-in refrigerator. No set of remains left the building until it was officially identified, embalmed, and put in a transfer case to be shipped.”