How Can You Mend This Purple Heart (2 page)

It was here I met the person who would become the closest friend of my life: William Otis Johnson, Jr., handsome, tall, thin, and black.

Our common bonds were our age, our uniforms, and our very poor childhoods. He was the first black person I had ever known. Howell County, Missouri, was just another road sign for black families on their way to St. Louis or Little Rock.

By the grace of my mother, I had been taught we are all God's people. We are all equal. No one is better than anyone else. She had given me freedom from bias, prejudice and bigotry. I really had no understanding of those concepts when Bill and I met. I had never even heard the words until years later.

Our friendship was immediate, and for the first time in my eighteen years of life, I felt closer to someone other than my older brothers. We were known as “Salt ” and “Pepper ” by everyone, and we were seldom seen without each other. It's hard to explain, or maybe it doesn't have to be explained, the way our friendship was so instantaneous and so easy.

Radio school was three months of studying, marching to class, weekend fire watch duty, and lots of socializing at the enlisted men's club. Winter turned to spring and we prepared for graduation and our next duty assignment.

The graduation ceremony for Navy Radioman Class #6906 was held in one of the old converted World War II school buildings with little fanfare. Diplomas and secret clearance papers were simply handed out in alphabetical order and we left the classroom on a warm afternoon in late May for the last time.

Most of us already had our orders for our next duty station, but we were to stay on base for another week or two. It was typical of the old phrase, “hurry up and wait.”

Bill and I were the only two in our class of sixty-one sailors to get the same orders. We were ecstatic. We were going on a goodwill tour from Norfolk, Virginia, to the British West Indies, over to the Ivory Coast, down around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, sail along the east coast of Africa, and up through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea. Eight months on board a destroyer escort ship with stops in all the major ports. It was every sailor's dream, especially with a war going on halfway around the world.

I never made the launch of that tour.

Every graduation deserves a big celebration, and when it came to celebrating, I was never one to hold back. That, thank God, was one major difference between Bill and me. His discipline and maturity had kept me out of trouble more than a few times. This time, however, I hadn't listened to his pleading and advice. This time he wouldn't be there to temper my joyous side. This time, thank God, he wouldn't be with me.

The Amber Wall

THE CELEBRATION STARTED
around four-thirty at Fiddler's Green, the enlisted men's club on base. The music was loud, the conversation louder, and the laughter was flowing like the cheap pitchers of beer bolstering our invincibility. The crowd at our table grew as the late afternoon passed into early evening. With every new face came a new round of beer and another level of lost sensibilities.

It was around seven o'clock when six of us decided to take the party off-base. We jumped into a car to head for a nearby town where we had met a couple of girls weeks before. We had seen them several times over the past few weeks and had been to their shared apartment for parties and weekend overnight stays. Bill tried to convince me not to go, but I didn't listen. He followed us outside Fiddler's Green and just shook his head as we sped off.

We stopped at a nearby gas station, filled the tank, and managed enough money between us for a case of beer and a couple packs of cigarettes. It was typically a forty-five minute drive, but we were sure we could make it in less than thirty. We knew the roads well.

We left the girls' apartment sometime before midnight with the case of beer gone and nearly all of what they had in the fridge. Our two friends were unable to get up from the couch to see us out.

The '63 Chevy convertible was speeding along the narrow blacktop road just two miles from the base entrance. I was sitting shotgun, front seat, next to the passenger-side door. Smitty and I had flipped a quarter for the shotgun seat; he lost the coin toss and was sitting between me and the driver. Our three buddies were passed out in the back.

No one was awake the moment the car hit the bridge abutment head-on.

The car had gone off the left side of the road and smashed into the two-foot-wide, four-foot-tall concrete span dead center of the grill. The engine slammed through the firewall and into the front seat. We were told later the car had gone from sixty-five miles per hour to zero in less than two seconds.

Smitty died on impact. He should have been sitting shotgun. He was the only one of us with a college degree. He was going home to get married to his college sweetheart, and he and his young bride would have spent their first eighteen months in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My head went through the windshield and into the crumpled metal hood; my legs were trapped and twisted under the dash. The recoil slammed me back into the car where I lay contorted on the floorboard; the engine next to my head was crackling from the burning oil. All the others had been thrown from the car and lay strewn along the creek and ditch. The moans seemed to come from everywhere in the darkness.

I tried desperately to shove the door open with my shoulder, but the crumpled door had been jammed by the impact. I knew I had to get out before the wreckage became engulfed in flames and the nearly-full gas tank exploded.

I pushed as hard as I could from my position on the floor, but the door would only open a couple inches. I fell in and out of consciousness several times. Someone came out of the darkness and managed to work the door open enough for me to crawl out onto the blacktop road.

I was lying on my back, pushing with my elbows, when I looked down and saw my left leg rotated and twisted backwards. The heel of my left foot was pointing skyward, my toes facing the back of my leg. My shoes and socks were gone. Blood was pouring from my head and down my face.

I rolled into the ditch on the other side, and as I did, I suddenly found myself floating, looking down at my body lying face up.

“That's me,” I thought. “What's happening?”

I reached toward my face and looked at myself with a sense of overwhelming sorrow. I couldn't see a single sign of what had just happened.

As I continued to rise higher and higher, my lifeless body slowly became more distant. From nearly forty feet above the ground, I floated calmly over the wreckage, the strewn bodies, and the events beginning to unfold below.

Bright red tail lights glared on the bridge and tires screamed as a car slammed on its breaks after nearly passing our burning car. Two young boys got out and ran back toward the flaming wreckage.

“There's nothing we can do here!” one of them shouted.

“Let's go for help!” the other one yelled as they climbed back in the car and sped off.

I saw a body on the bridge, one near the creek in front of the car, one body lying almost ten feet behind the car, someone blindly crawling on his stomach through the grass about ten yards down from the other two. I couldn't see Smitty anywhere.

The fire trucks were the first to arrive, then the highway patrol, followed almost immediately by three ambulances. People were rushing everywhere, one man shouting out directions and pointing to the bodies.

Everything was in slow motion. All sounds had faded to deafness. It was as though I was watching a silent movie about people I didn't know.

I watched as two ambulance attendants rolled my limp body onto a white sheet and twisted the ends like a taffy wrapper.

“This one's gone!” I heard the one holding my head shout to the other one as they lifted me onto the gurney and rolled me into the back of their ambulance.

It was at this point I became aware of a bright yellow wall of light behind me with dozens of gray-silhouetted people casually walking past. I sensed that I knew some of them; all the others were total strangers. They were all ages—men, women, and children—and some of them were holding hands. A small group was walking very close to me, others back in the distance. They never spoke and never reached for me; they just slowly—and with no real purpose or destination—walked by and disappeared as others came out of the bright amber wall, walking in all directions.

The chaos below was of no interest to me now. The entire scene had faded away into the darkness of the night and I was being drawn toward these “people” walking ever closer behind me.

There was no fear, no anxiety, no bright light at the end of a tunnel, and no flashing of my life before me. I was filled with a total singular sense of choice—a decision that was mine and only mine to make. It was being “given” to me by the silhouettes that had gathered and stood silent behind me.

My choice was simple and ultimate: turn completely around and I would join the shadow-people in the amber glow world, or do not turn around and remain in this world.

I hesitated only briefly, refocused with absolute certainty on the scene below, and the wall of amber light and its shaded forms of inhabitants disappeared.

Three of us were transported to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half away. I never saw the other two again.

I lay in the hospital unconscious for three or four days. Once awake, it didn't take long to know the extent of the damage: left femur broken in three places, skull fracture, brain concussion, both ankles broken, three fractured vertebrae, broken shoulder blade, kidneys bleeding, facial bone fractures, and deep cuts and other lacerations that had been “rough-stitched,” along with miscellaneous burns and bruises.

I have never forgotten that first moment of consciousness. I craned my neck to look around, trying to understand where I was, what had happened.

I gradually took in my surroundings, the rows of beds filled with young boys lying up and down and across from me. I saw kids my own age with raw muscle and bone protruding from where legs and hands and arms used to be, faces lacerated and swollen, bloody eye sockets and bodies burned and charred.

The overwhelming sense of choice that had been given to me at the Amber Wall rushed through me like a burning fire; in an instant, it was gone.

I was confused at first, and then my entire being was hollowed by an urgent and intense fear—a fear that I had died and gone to Hell. The fear was suddenly flushed over by a deep and profound sense of shame and guilt.

These were Marines wounded in Vietnam. No one had to tell me. I knew it in my heart and soul. The irony and the reality lying around me were smothering me, sucking the breath from me, and I felt ashamed. Ashamed for taking an easier way out, ashamed for not being there with them. Ashamed of what these guys, these men, would think of me. Ashamed of the choices I had made.

Someone appeared through the nighttime darkness and stuck a needle in my arm. The soothing warmth of the chemicals washed over me with a temporary relief from the pain, shame, and guilt, and I slipped into the darkened nowhere land of unconsciousness once again.

Sometime late into the sloth-like sleep, I was awakened by two Navy corpsmen wheeling a new arrival onto the ward. He lay immobile in the hospital bed just to my left. The only thing between us was a small beige cabinet with a black countertop at eye level. The corpsman placed all of the Marine's belongings, given to him by the Red Cross, in the top drawer: a shaving kit, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, a black comb, a small transistor radio, and a carton of Winston cigarettes.

“Ski, we've put your legs back together,” the corpsman quietly assured him. “Dr. Donnolly is the best there is. He'll be in to see you in the morning. We'll get you another needle to help you sleep.”

The kid responded with a tight grin and nighttime on Ward 2B fell back into its darkened loneliness and drug-induced calm.

All too often the restless ghosts of war shattered even the deepest morphine-induced silence. The cries of endless nightmares cursed the pitch black air like screams for help from a darkened cave.

Mornings never came soon enough.

Ward 2B

A POWDERY HAZE
floated into the square of sunlight hanging over the bed on the opposite side of the ward. The early morning morphine clogged my senses as I looked up and down and around in a slow-motion gaze. Blurry forms emerged through large brown double doors, swinging inward and wide, as if to make way for an important guest. The doors would swing in the opposite direction, the faint, busy forms blending into the darkened corridor on the other side.

The ward and its occupants blurred in and out like fog-swept silhouettes, but even the heaviest doses of morphine couldn't block out the sounds and smells of war's aftermath.

Ward 2B was entrapped with the stench of open seeping wounds, layered with the sweet, persistent odors of rubbing alcohol, iodine, and antiseptics. Stifling doses of aerosol freshener couldn't spray down the ever-present fog of hospital chemicals, burned flesh, open wounds, and the endless flow of blood and pain.

Bandages, cotton swabs, gauze, and miles of white tape were replenished three times a day, like custodial supplies used for cleaning and mopping up this man-made horror.

A half-dozen plastic trash bags, overstuffed with the medical waste of blood-soaked and flesh-laden bandages, sagging IV bags, and empty blood bags were piled near the storage cabinets against the wall, out of the way. Late in the afternoon, the bags were hauled out on a wagon, taking with them pieces of suffering and the promise of one more day of healing.

“What do you do with that stuff?” someone asked.

“Gonna burn it,” the guy in blue coveralls shrugged.

Just to my right was a cabinet the exact same size and color as all the others. It was slightly wedged toward my head, a short reach to an assortment of necessities: a pitcher of ice water, a vomit tray, a small radio, a few loose packs of Salems, and a picture of a girlfriend who had long forgotten about me.