365 Days (6 page)

Chopper pilot

En route Vietnam

Travis Air Force Base, California

A
T ZAMA WE READ
in the stateside papers that America was going to hell, that it was almost impossible to get an American teenager to act responsibly, listen to an adult, or, for that matter, even to care. You’d think, then, that it would be impossible to get them to kill themselves for something as vague as duty or run through claymores for anything as subtle as concern. But during the first five hours of Hamburger Hill, fifteen medics were hit, ten were killed. There was not one corpsman left standing. The 101st had to CA in medics from two other companies, and by nine that night, every one of them, too, had been killed or wounded.

Graham was eighteen years old when a tracer round skidded off his flack vest and triggered a grenade in his webbing. He struggled for a moment to pull it off and then, according to the other medic working with him, he jumped out of the aid station, and kept running, with the grenade bouncing against his chest until it went off.

Pierson, nineteen, was at the rear of his squad when the buried 105 blew. He hit the ground with everyone else, but when the explosion wasn’t followed up with small arms fire, he got up and began running toward the settling dust. The smell of cordite still stung the air. Three troopers had been blown off the track. One had the whole bottom half of his body sheared off; the second lay crumpled against a tree, a huge gaping hole in the very center of his chest; the third, half of his bottom jaw blown off, lay flapping around on the ground, blood gushing out of his neck and spilling into what was left of his mouth.

Pierson wrestled him quiet. While the rest of the squad hurried by, he took out his knife and, grabbing the protruding piece of jaw bone, forced back the soldier’s head and calmly cut open his throat, then punched a hole into the windpipe. A sputtering of blood and foam came out through the incision, and as his breathing eased, the soldier quieted.

There was another explosion up ahead and the rattling of small arms fire. Taking an endotracheal tube out of his kit, Pierson slipped it in through the incision and threaded it down into the soldier’s lungs, listened for the normal inward and outward hiss of air, then reached for the morphine. One of the troopers who had come up from a trailing squad was checking the other bodies. “Hey, Doc,” he said, “these two are dead.” Without looking up, Pierson shoved the needle deep into the soldier’s arm and drove the plunger smoothly down the barrel of the syringe.

Webb had been in Nam only three days when he got into his first fire fight. The 3rd Platoon working out ahead had killed three dinks near a bridge. A few hundred meters farther they found a small arms cache with four AK-50’s, a couple of RPD’s, and a Smirnov attack rifle. They waited for the rest of the company and then they all moved out through the waist-high grass. You could feel trouble coming; up and down the line the troopers switched their weapons to automatic and shifted their rucksacks so they could drop them more easily. The machine gunners began carrying their weapons at port arms instead of across their shoulders. The grenaders loaded their M-79’s with cannister rounds. Up ahead, fifty meters away, was a thick tree line. The only sound was the company moving through the grass and an occasional tinkle of loose gear. Webb was walking with the Sergeant.

“Thirty meters,” the Sergeant said softly. “We’ll get hit inside of thirty meters.”

“Sooner,” a trooper offered drily. Twenty meters farther the firing began. Even as he hit the ground, Webb saw three figures tumble over in front of him. Within seconds the whole field was exploding. Automatic fire cracked and snapped through the dry grass. An RPD hidden off to the right began firing and caught a squad trying to move off that way. Two other machine guns opened up on the left. Seeing where they were falling, the gooks began skipping rounds into them.

Behind and overhead, Webb could hear the gunships thumping their way toward them. The VC stopped firing as the first loach, small and agile, swept in over their heads. A moment later a cobra swung in. Everybody was popping smoke grenades. Webb got to his knees and, seeing a trooper dragging a body toward a nearby rise, shook off his rucksack. Taking his helmet off and leaving it on the ground with his M-16, he got to his feet and began running toward them with his aid kit. He made ten meters before they got him: a clean straight round that caught him under his swinging left arm and came out the other side of his chest.

In the Ashau, an RPG landed next to the CP and buried itself in the ground before it exploded. Ignoring the explosion, the medic was reaching up over the trooper to open the albumin can he had just hung when an RPD swept the area. The first burst shredded through his flack vest, lifting him up and spinning him around before it dropped him back to earth five feet away.

Watson had been a troublemaker since he was six. He was a bitter, imaginative, hate-filled kid who had been drafted and somehow had survived basic training without ending up in prison. He was assigned to the medics at an evac hospital and then to the field. When he went on line, the hospital personnel gave him a week to be busted and sent back to the States in irons.

When I met him he had been up front with his unit for almost five months. He was soft-spoken, but marvelously animated and alert. The old abusiveness was gone; even the adolescent arrogance I’d been told had for so long been the central pillar of his personality had disappeared. He was perfectly at ease and open. Those who had known him before were pleasantly surprised, if still a bit leery.

Watson didn’t mind talking. “Why not go all out, man? They need me, and I know what I’m doing out there. Hundreds of cases—fucken hundreds. The big-shot dermatologists, they come down once a week. They look at all that rotting skin and shake their heads and leave. Know what we done? We got a mix-master, threw in a couple of quarts of calamine lotion, a few kilograms of mycolgue for the fungus, and figured some tetracycline and penicillin couldn’t hurt, just in case there was any bacteria around. Called it jungle mix and bottled it and handed it out. Fucken dermatologists couldn’t believe it. Wanted to know where we’d read about it, what medical journal. Sure, I take chances. That’s my job—to save lives. The VC—well, I ain’t got nothing against ’em. Guess they’re doing their job, too.”

On a routine sweep through Tam Key, a squad of the Americal Division was ambushed. Watson was hit twice, both rounds shattering his leg. He kept helping the wounded, dragging himself from soldier to soldier until he was hit in the neck by a third round and paralyzed.

All the medics talk the same and they all act the same, whether they come from the ghetto or from the suburbs. No one planned it this way. It was the kids themselves, caught between their skeptical seventeen or eighteen years, and the war, the politicians, and the regular Army officers. Growing up in a hypocritical adult world and placed in the middle of a war that even the dullest of them find difficult to believe in, much less die for, very young and vulnerable, they are suddenly tapped not for their selfishness or greed but for their grace and wisdom, not for their brutality but for their love and concern.

The Army psychiatrists describe it as a matter of roles. The adolescent who becomes a medic begins after a very short time to think of himself as a doctor, not any doctor in particular, but the generalized family doctor, the idealized physician he’s always heard about.

The excellent training the medics receive makes the whole thing possible, and the fact that the units return the corpsman’s concern and competence with their own wholehearted respect and affection makes the whole thing happen.

Medics in the 101st carried M & M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the young.

A tour of Nam is twelve months; it is like a law of nature. The medics, though, stay on line only seven months. It is not due to the good will of the Army, but to their discovery that seven months is about all these kids can take. After that they start getting freaky, cutting down on their own water and food so they can carry more medical supplies; stealing plasma bottles and walking around on patrol with five or six pounds of glass in their rucksacks; writing parents and friends for medical catalogues so they can buy their own endotracheal tubes; or quite simply refusing to leave their units when their time in Nam is over.

And so it goes, and the gooks know it. They will drop the point, trying not to kill him but to wound him, to get him screaming so they can get the medic too. He’ll come. They know he will.

“We get a distorted picture over here in

Japan. We see the guys after they’ve been

fixed up a bit and acclimated to their

injuries. Over there it’s a kid suddenly

full of holes. You’re faced with the stark

reality of it—not just a sick patient, but

a dying healthy kid who’s just been blown apart.”

Chief of Surgery

Staff meeting

U.S. Army Hospital, Camp Zama, Japan

T
HE CHICOM MINES THE
VC and NVA use are plastic. They hold ten pounds of explosive charge and three pounds of fragments. They can be pressure-detonated, and the explosive charge can be set for whatever pressure is wanted—a tank, a jeep, a truck, or a person. If the mines are placed right they can blow an engine block through the hood or turn over an APC. Since the bombing halt, though, there have been enough to waste a few on recon patrols.

This one must have been a pull-release. It blew after he stepped off it—throwing him ten feet into the air. When the medic finally reached him, his left leg was already gone, and his right leg was shredded up to his thigh. The blast had seared through the bottoms of his fatigues, burning his penis and scrotum as well as the lower part of his abdomen and anus. The medic gave him morphine and started albumin. A Dust Off was called in, which took him to the twenty-seventh surgical hospital near Quang Tri, where they took off his testicles and penis, explored his abdomen, took out his left kidney and four inches of large bowel, sewed up his liver, and did a colostomy and right ureterostomy. During the procedure he was given twenty units of uncrossed O-positive blood.

After three days at the twenty-seventh, he was evacuated to Japan via the Yokota Air Force base. From Yokota he was taken by chopper to the U.S. Army hospital at Camp Zama. His left leg was removed by a left-hip disarticulation, and his right thumb and left index finger were sutured. There was not enough skin to close his surgical wounds completely, so his stumps were left open. Despite antibiotics, his wounds became infected. The fourth night in the ward he tried to kill himself. On the sixth day his urinary output began to diminish, and the laboratory began culturing bacteria out of his blood stream. On the seventh day his fever hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit; he became unconscious, and seven days following his injuries he expired. His body was then transferred to the morgue at Yokota airbase for shipment back to the continental United States.

FINAL PATHOLOGICAL DIAGNOSIS

1. Death, eight days after stepping on a land mine.

2. Multiple blast injuries.

A. Traumatic amputation of lower extremities, distal right thumb, distal left index finger.

B. Blast injury of anus and scrotum.

C. Avulsion of testicles.

D. Fragment wounds of abdomen.

E. Laceration of kidney and liver, transection of left ureter.

3. Focal interstitial myocarditis and right heart failure.

A. Left and right ventricular dilation.

B. Marked pulmonary edema, bilateral.

C. Marked pulmonary effusion, bilateral (3000 cc in the left, 1500 in the right).

D. Congestion of lungs and liver.

4. Patchy acute pneumonitis (Klebsiella-Aerobactoer organism).

5. Gram negative septicemia.

6. Extensive acute renal tubular necrosis, bilateral.

7. Status post multiple recent surgical procedures.

A. Hip disarticulation with debridgement of stumps, bilateral.

B. Testicular removal bilaterally.

C. Exploration of abdomen, suturing of lacerated liver.

D. Removal of left kidney and ureter.

E. Multiple blood transfusions.

EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished, though thin, Negro male in his late teens or early twenties, showing absence of both lower extremities and extensive blast injuries on the perineum. There is a large eight-inch surgical incision running from the chest wall to the pubis. There is a previous amputation of the distal right thumb and left index finger....

“I liked it better in ’65 and ’66. Then it

was just you against them. Now you

just sit back and you get blasted away

or they do. That ain’t no fun.”

Special Forces trooper

Orthopedic Ward

U.S. Army Hospital, Kishine, Japan

M
ACABE WROTE HIS STORY
about Vietnam during the fall term of his senior year, two months after he’d returned from ROTC summer camp. It was not a very good story, but he liked it, and the school’s literary quarterly published it. They had published a few of his other things—lyrical little pieces about growing up—which had earned him a certain literary notoriety. It had caused a bit of a flap among the campus intellectuals when he enrolled in ROTC, but there was a war on and he wanted to have a piece of it. Hemingway had his Spain; Macabe would have his Vietnam.

But Nam was not at all like his story, nor really what he had hoped for. In the twenty-seven days he had been there, the only village he had ever come near was the one he blew away. Women, children, dogs, huts, rice, water buffalo—the whole thing. He just sat there on his track half a click away and blew it apart. He did it two weeks after he’d been in country, and the fourth night after his unit had been hit three nights in a row.