Authors: Johnnie Clark
The soft voice sounded too pleasant to be anything but a dream.
“Wake up. Time for medicine.”
I opened my eyes slowly for fear of chasing away my sensuous illusion. Huge round blue eyes seemed to be staring back at me through a thick fog. What was that smell? Lilac, I thought. Benita George used to wear lilac, or was that Jody Abbott? Oh, what a body. Benita was blond. I blinked my eyes. Either some of the fog had cleared or I had perfected dreaming. Bleached-blond hair surrounding large white teeth. I blinked again. Huge, healthy, positively American breasts. Couldn’t be.
I slowly raised my right hand toward the lovely vision. I gave one breast two light pats. Hm. Firm dream, I thought. She smiled.
“I think you’ll live, Marine.” She reached for a tray beside the bed and hoisted out of it a bayonet, disguised as a needle. “Roll over.”
I felt like a beached whale. I quickly nodded off and into a world full of large, friendly blondes.
“PFC Clark?”
That is not a dream, that is a nightmare, I thought. I opened my eyes. A stern-faced major in dress greens looked down at me.
“Yes, sir.”
“I am presenting you with the Purple Heart medal on behalf of the United States Marine Corps.” A young Red Cross girl handed him a purple box, then focused in on me with a camera. He opened the box and showed me the medal. “Would you like me to pin it on?” he asked.
I looked down to discover I was wearing blue pajamas. “No, I’ll just lay the box by me.”
“As you wish. This young lady is here to take a picture if you want. We suggest that you have the photo taken to send to your folks back home and let them know you’re okay. Marines will come to their door with a telegram informing your next of kin that you have been wounded in hostile action in Quang Ngai Province.” He turned and practically marched to the next bed.
“Smile,” she said, and I didn’t. “That will be one dollar.” She tore the Polaroid picture from the camera and handed it to me like a traffic cop.
“But I don’t have any money. We don’t get paid in the bush. I don’t even know where my wallet is.”
“Your belongings are in the medical bag hanging on the side of your bed. You will receive a one-hundred-dollar Military Payment Certificate today. I’ll come back later for the dollar.”
She never got her dollar, and I never got my hundred. Twenty-four hours later I was flying south toward an Air Force hospital in Cam Rahn Bay aboard a C-130. Vietnam looked so pretty from the air, a giant green quilt with each square piece a different shade of green. I envied pilots.
The giant snub-nosed plane bulged with wounded Marines. I couldn’t see Chan, but I figured he’d be aboard. I dozed off again and didn’t wake until we bounced down at Cam Rahn airstrip. The engines whined to a stop. As we were unloaded from the plane, I noticed a strange silence. No artillery! We had landed so far away from the war there wasn’t even the sound of artillery.
The Air Force hospital at Cam Rahn looked more like a cheap housing district in the U.S. But the Waldorf wouldn’t have looked any better to me. Paved roads led us to the hospital, and I thought I actually saw streetlights. Sidewalks and well-kept hedges linked all the little one-story buildings together. Army and Air Force people walked about, carrying soft drinks instead of M16s and towels instead of packs. Everyone looked clean.
They wheeled me into a hospital ward. The wonders continued to unfold. Cold air-conditioned air slapped me in the face. Television sets mounted above some of the beds just about took my breath away. Telephones rang, and women nurses strolled in and out of the building. “I don’t believe this!”
“Can you believe this?” a familiar voice said.
I looked right. Chan lay in the bed next to me.
“Chan! I’ve been wondering where you were.”
Before he could answer another voice interrupted.
“Just like downtown, ain’t it, dude?”
The voice was slow, deep, and monotonous, with a faintly nasal intonation. The face looked like a New York Italian’s. Definitely a New York something.
“It’s unreal!” I said. “I can’t even hear artillery.”
“You guys are Marines, no doubt. Da Nang must be overflowing again.”
“Yeah, it is. Are you a Marine?”
“No way, man. I just broke my arm playing volleyball down at the beach. I’m Air Force.”
“Volleyball?” I asked in disbelief.
“Beach?” Chan echoed my disbelief.
“Sure,” he said. “What do they do to you clowns anyway? Where have you been, another planet?”
“Yeah. It’s called the bush.” I rolled toward Chan, hoping to end the conversation.
“Hey listen, man. I wanna quiz ya about the war when I get back from the latrine, okay?”
I ignored him. “How you feeling, Chan?”
“A lot better now that she’s here.”
His eyes led me to a beautiful red-headed Red Cross girl doing her best to maneuver a cart full of books and magazines through the swinging doors of our ward. She pushed the cart to the foot of my bed and stopped.
“Hi, fellas.” She smiled. “See anything you’d like?”
My heartbeat picked up a couple of extra thumps. All we could do was stare. I felt like a country boy visiting the big city. Before either of us gained our composure, she dropped a pencil. The pencil bounced between our beds. She seemed to pay no attention to the pencil; she grabbed two magazines, walked between our beds, and handed one to each of us. She then turned around and bent over from the waist to retrieve the pencil.
Though normally Chan’s manner conformed to an accepted standard of propriety and good taste exceeding that of most Marines, with the combination of combat fatigue, pain, short dress, long legs, exquisite rear end, and generous view, the strain was too much. He succumbed and leaned so far out of his bed that his head banged into mine, which coincidentally had drifted into approximately the same area. Naturally, she turned around in time to see us gawking.
Chan winced slightly, closed his eyes, and grimaced as if in great pain. I had never seen him more embarrassed. I decided to come to our weak but nonetheless hopeless defense.
“We’ve been in the bush a long time, ma’am, and you’re our first mini-skirt.”
“I would like to apologize …” Chan began.
“You haven’t seen a mini-skirt before?” she asked unbelievingly.
“They were coming in just as we were going out,” Chan said.
Chan spoke the painful truth, undoubtedly the single most atrocious crime against good timing I had personally committed.
“You have to be Marines.” Her smile let us know she understood.
“Are you wounded badly?”
“No, just shrapnel,” Chan answered.
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Mine hurts!”
“I suppose you’ve been on R&R by now?”
“No,” we said in unison.
She looked pleased with our answer. She looked around secretively before continuing.
“If you two want more than a look, it’ll cost you fifty each. Make up your minds. I’ll be back later.”
With that she pushed her little cart away, leaving me thoroughly jolted.
“That’s a shame,” Chan said quietly, as much to himself as to me.
“What is?”
“That a beautiful young lady, who very likely began her adventure as a Red Cross girl in Vietnam with humanitarian and patriotic ideals, has become no more than a prostitute.” He looked at me seriously. “I think we should pray for her.” He stared at me, then broke into a smile. “You look like I just stole your candy.”
He was right, that’s the way I felt.
“Look, Chan”—I suddenly felt angry with him, but I wasn’t sure why—”I don’t want to pray.” I stopped myself from going on with some angry comment on how I just wanted to lust in peace.
“Sorry,” he said. He knew how I was feeling.
I was almost happy to see two solemn-looking characters dressed in white appear at the foot of my bed with a wheelchair. A half-dozen examinations later, a bespectacled physician informed me that I had managed to catch four or possibly five strange little jungle diseases ranging from a touch of malaria to worms.
“According to your records, you’ve lost forty-two pounds.”
That hurt. I hated losing weight. I hadn’t realized how skinny I’d become. One of the strange ironies of war was how all the trivial concerns, like worrying about my physique, had not entered my mind once in seven months. In a bizarre kind of way it felt good to forget all the trifles.
A few shots later I was wheeled back to bed.
“I reconned the area in a wheelchair I confiscated,” Chan said as the two medics lifted me into bed. “You won’t believe who is occupying a bed in the ward at the end of the hall!”
“Who?”
“Staff Sergeant R. C. Jones!”
“Senior Drill Instructor R. C. Jones? I don’t believe it.”
“Hello, men.” I knew that baritone voice. That voice had given me nightmares. It was true. There he stood, big as life, hanging on to crutches for balance.
“Sergeant Jones? What are you doing here?” I hesitated ending the question without a “sir.” There was a time when I swore I’d nail this sucker if I ever met him off Parris Island.
“They can only refuse a transfer so many times. I had to get into this war. Been with the Ninth for about three months now. My gunner got killed and I had to jump on the M60. Got about fifty rounds off, and next thing I knew I was on a medevac. Thank God I made it over here before the mother was over!”
I knew he really meant what he was saying.
“If we don’t try winning, it may never be over,” Chan put in.
“That’s the bloody truth,” Jones replied. “Chan told me you two were put up for the Silver Star. That’s bleedin’ wonderful! You came out of PI Marines. Do you remember that fat-body that got the hernia in the squad bay?” His eyes got angry.
Chan and I exchanged glances. We remembered all too well chunky Private Peoples. Our three DIs made him do sit-ups, push-ups, and leg lifts in front of the platoon until he ruptured himself. Then they cursed him all the way to the ambulance, promising to drive his fat body out of the Marine Corps.
“Yeah, I remember him,” I said.
Jones let loose a chorus of curses before telling us why the uproar. “The little girl wrote his congressman and started another investigation.”
“Is that right?” Chan said, trying to act surprised.
“Do you remember that pantywaist that climbed up the water tower and threatened to jump? Maybe that wasn’t your platoon.”
“No, it
was
ours,” I said.
I remembered it like it was yesterday. One more character who should never have joined the Corps. He panicked when he climbed the tower. All the DIs in the battalion marched their platoons to the tower and made them stand in formation around it. Then each DI threatened him with various tortures if he didn’t jump. It was only about fifty feet, and he probably would have lived. He finally came down.
“That twerp got himself killed his third day in country, up at the rock pile. I tried to drum him out but he made it.” Sergeant Jones’s voice trailed off. In spite of his harsh language, he couldn’t hide his obvious regret over the boy’s death.
Before we ended our reunion I hit the sergeant up for a small loan. When he heard the reason, he acted happy to give it to me.
With loan in hand, nothing stood between me and the Red Cross girl. Chan confiscated another wheelchair, and I wheeled it to the head for a quick cleaning before the big date. Thirty minutes later Chan came after me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“How long has it been since you flushed a commode?”
“You mean you’ve been in here flushing that commode?”
“Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that apparatus.”
Chan started laughing. Then he laughed harder. He leaned back, clapping his hands and losing temporary control of his chair. It rolled right, banging Chan’s newly stitched leg into a hard porcelain sink. Dark red blood soaked through his blue pajamas.
Ten stitches and thirty minutes later Chan was back in bed beside me and groaning to the tune of taps vibrating through the hospital over a tinny-sounding intercom.
I requisitioned a pair of crutches from a patient who was not aware of his generosity. I was ready. Chan was asleep before taps finished. My palms started sweating
like they did before hitting a hot LZ. I knew she wouldn’t show up; it was too good, too much to hope for.
The fluorescent lights weren’t even cool when she appeared in the doorway at the end of our row of beds. When she sauntered toward me, carefully placing one foot precisely in front of the other to give her hips a smooth, sensual sway, the sweat left my palms and went to my forehead. She still wore her short gray Red Cross dress and carried something under one arm.
I grabbed my crutches and slid out of bed as quietly as a cripple can. I started to giggle but managed to swallow it. She led me out of the one-story ward with no difficulty and across a small asphalt parking lot where I felt sure everyone in Cam Rahn Bay could hear me plodding across the asphalt. She guided me to a row of trucks with big red crosses on the hoods. We made our way to one that was conveniently open and unoccupied. Once inside the back of the truck, she lit a small candle and produced a six-pack of American beer from the brown paper bag she had tucked under her arm.
The night looked to be proceeding along quite nicely. The war was an old dream. Her name was Linda. She came from Dallas, was twenty-two years old, unmarried, and physically luscious. Her ambition centered around making enough money to buy a house.
“I only need about twenty-five more guys,” she said with a bright, perky smile that came closer to a cheerleader’s than a harlot’s.
“A house! Can you make that much?” I asked naively.
“Oh sure,” she said matter-of-factly, her sky-blue eyes springing open wide with information. “The girl I replaced made forty thousand bucks in eleven months.”
I stupidly tried to divide fifty into forty thousand on ten fingers. Not enough fingers. I felt a bit upset, realizing she hadn’t been swept away by my charm, or at least my good looks.
She stood to remove her gray Red Cross dress,
stooping slightly to avoid bumping her head. I felt myself melting faster than the candle. Her dress fell lazily to the floor of the ambulance.