Me and Vietnam               wds 2,888                                   

   I pretended to have an earache so severe i couldn’t go to school. I was fourteen. I winced, i minced, i fidgeted, i flinched, i put my hand to my ear and moaned. I looked in the bathroom mirror and contorted my face; this is what agony looks like. My mother agreed.

“Stay in bed,” my mother said. “Rest up, it will go away.” 

Sitting up in bed, i read my favorite book, The Red Badge of Courage. Even though this novel was required reading in school it was good. When i heard my mother coming down the stairs i lay the book on my chest, closed my eyes and contorted my agony mask.

She came into the room and said, “Get up and get dressed, i got you an appointment to look at that ear.”

“It really hurts.”

“I know. There’s only one way to get better,” she said. “Let’s get going, the bus leaves in an hour and we can’t be late.” 

“The bus? Where are we going on a bus?”

“From the Warren hospital we’re taking their medical shuttle to Fitzsimmons medical center.”

My mother was calling my bluff. She was a registered nurse with a reserved personality unless she was with other nurses. She knew i was faking the ear ache so she was using this day, one of her days off, to get us on a bus from the F E Warren AFB hospital in Cheyenne, Wyoming to the Fitzsimmons Army medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, a hundred miles south, near Denver. 

I’m certain two thoughts motivated my mother; first, she thought i would want to avoid a hospital more than school and admit to faking the pain. Or second, she simply wanted to visit that Fitzsimmons medical Center. 

I was faking pain from boredom with school and a trip to Denver was an adventure and more exciting even than The Red Badge of Courage. 

This was my mother’s scheme; not wanting to be examined by an old man with bad breath smelling like tobacco smoke who would know and call me out for a liar, my earache would miraculously disappear. If i kept up the sham, she would still be able to go to Fitzsimmons. 

Later i understood, long after she was gone, why she wanted to go to that hospital. My mother had memories of the Fitzsimmons medical Center which our father called ‘mindlessly, morbidly fond.’ She never mentioned it, but a few years after i was born she had a child there who died soon after birth, a baby girl. After losing her our mother had no more children. 

One family afternoon in Denver, where we went frequently for entertainment, she asked our father to drive out of the way and go by the medical center. He objected, as there was no reason to go, no one was sick, but our mother insisted, “just so i can see the place.” My older brothers and sister knew about the lost baby girl; that day was the first time i heard of her. 

There and back our father berated our mother for “clinging to the past.” We understood what had happened, not why she wanted to return. Dead people don’t come back, why care about a dead baby? In school a joke went around; “How do you load a truck with dead babies? Use a pitchfork.” That’s funny to a fourteen-year-old. 

F E Warren was (probably still is) an air base on the edge of Cheyenne. We often shopped there. Our father, a retired officer, was a member of the golf club, we shopped at the commissary, the post exchange and went to the doctor and dentist there. 

Our oldest brother, Jerry, had been drafted the year before and although they detailed him to work on trucks and tanks, a job he loved, he hatred everything else about the army. It surprised us, our father was most upset, but we believed in Jerry. To my other brother (also older) Jerry was an authority on all things cool. Until that time i thought and hoped that if Jerry was called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice he would be valiant. I imagined him fighting with a bandage on his head with a little spot of blood on the side of it. That was the year public opinion turned against the Vietnam War. 

At the entrance to F E Warren AFB a guard, seeing the bumper sticker indicating the vehicle approaching was driven by an officer, straightened, motioned us to enter the facility and snapped up a salute.  Mother drove in without acknowledging the man; i indicated my disapproval of the “Military Industrial Complex” by saluting with my left hand.  

We walked from the visitor’s parking lot to the bus at a rear entrance of the hospital. A group of men who looked healthy to me stood waiting while a man on a stretcher accompanied by a nurse was lifted by four men into the rear of the bus. The man n the stretcher who had been in a motorcycle accident was suspended above empty seats from the luggage rack in the middle of the bus. He groaned. An intravenous line ran into his arm. The nurse who was very short stood on a fold out ladder/stool to attend him. My mother said, “He’s very bad.” All the way to Fitzsimmons the man moaned and at times cried out. 

There were black patients on the bus; at that time in my life i had seen few black people. 

During the two hour drive south i stopped wearing my mask of agony; the act was too hard to keep up. I said i had an ear ache, if asked. The mood in the bus was grim all the way there because the motorcycle patient cried out several times and the nurse rushed to help him, having difficulty getting up on the unfolding ladder. I was afraid he would die and spread blood all over on the bus. Otherwise it was a beautiful sunny day, like the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. 

We checked into the hospital and waited in an enormous room. My mother gave me ten dollars for food from a solid wall of vending machines on either side the entrance. We looked them over coming in; everything from candy bars ro coffee to complete meals shucked out of a machine and cooked in an oven. There were ten ovens on a long table.  

I was not hungry, nor could i focus on my book. 

The enormous lobby with tall windows on two sides smelled of medicines and ointments and a rumbling moan and gabble of busy talk crowded the air. All around on folding chairs, couches and in wheel chairs were wounded soldiers. Some in wheel chairs had bottles of fluid on rods attached to the side of their chairs and IV lines in their arms. One man had no legs, another was half covered with white cloth bandages but i could see by his general shape he had no left arm and some of his shoulder was gone. Another man also in a wheel chair had his head wrapped in white cloth and his head was shortened. I didn’t want to look close but he had no jaw and a tube ran down from the front of his neck into his chest. In The Red Badge of Courage many similar wounds are described without bandaging on them. I was too busy looking at the wounded men to read. I tried and failed to focus n the words.

We waited for an hour and a half before i was called to see the ear specialist. My mother told me to stay around the lobby or sit outside in a place where she could find me after my examination. She said she was going for a walk while i was being examined.   

The Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat doctor was a skinny man about thirty with a long face and nose. 

He asked me what the problem was and i told him i had an earache that was so bad this morning i couldn’t go to school but it was pretty much gone now. I thought he would say, “Well then go on back to your mother,” and it would all be over. 

Instead he had me sit in a chair like a dentist’s chair and looked into my ear. He yanked hard on my ear to straighten the ear canal. He also looked into my eyes with a flashlight with a black funnel attachment that directed the light. His breath was too close. He looked in both ears and both eyes and said he could see nothing that looked worrisome. I told him the pain had been going away steadily, what did he think happened? He said, “Maybe you picked up something from school and needed a day off.” 

He gave me a long, direct, dry look. “Come back if you get another bug from school.”

I started to get out of the chair when i noticed a clear glass container on a stand beside the chair, the fluid in it labeled ‘cocaine.’ 

 “Hey, i heard of that stuff,”  i told the doctor. “Can i have some?”

“No,” his expression was startled. “Why do you want it?”

     “I saw this really nifty spy show, Secret Agent on tv and they messed up these blood hounds following them off by sprinkling the trail with dried blood and cocaine. It drove the dogs crazy.”

The doctor said, “That would drive a dog crazy, yes. No, we can’t give that stuff away. Talk to the nurse out there at the desk; she’ll give you a toothbrush and some eye drops.”  

We had to wait three hours for the bus back to Cheyenne and during that time i got very hungry, but i didn’t want to eat.  There were too many wounds, too much well bandaged raw meat and the air full of the odor of cleaning fluid and salves. My appetite died. 

My mother said i could sit outside on one of the benches under a tree and she would bring me something. We sat together and she wrote a few letters. She loved to write letters and i think she carried a note pad and envelopes in her purse even when she wasn't going anywhere. 

I tried to read. Maybe my other favorite book Ball Four, about baseball, if i had it, would be easier to read. 

At last hunger forced me to act. I knew a candy bar would only make me shaky and salty chips would hang in my gut like lead. I settled on a cheeseburger vended from a machine and cooked in one of the ovens that used a new kind of electric wave.  The cheeseburger was cooked in a plastic bag that didn’t melt. A passing nurse showed me how to use the oven. The plastic wrap swelled up and looked ready to pop and it was done. I took the hamburger on its paper saucer outside and sat beside my mother.

The plastic parted and i smelled the burger and was instantly crazed. It had a meat and cheese odor slightly flavored by the wrapping. The burger bun and meat had the same texture; no grit and all only a little heavier than air. I sank my teeth into it without resistance.   

My mother smiled. “I’m glad you finally got something.”

“I’m still hungry.”

“Go get another one.”

The burgers only cost a dollar. I hurried into the strange kitchen and fixed another. This one i consumed standing by the machine. Then i bought and fixed another and consumed this one as fast. 

My hunger was long gone, but something else was happening inside. I thought i better get away from the smells of the place and into the fresh air. I left the building through the two big glass doors and was headed for my mother on a bench by where we would catch the bus when i got so dizzy. Spots appeared in my vision and my stomach began to rumble and cramp. At the moment when i suddenly knew what would happen i knew what i had to do. I dashed into some bushes by the door. There between the bushes and the building, holding onto a branch, i barfed up the three cheeseburgers. They all came out in a liquid stream. I stayed in the bushes until i was sure nothing else would erupt from my wounded guts.  

A hand offered me a handkerchief. It was white, the face and body behind the hand holding it was a man in fatigues, a rough, smiling face.

“It can really git to ya,” the smile said. 

I took the handkerchief and wiped my mouth, then handed it back.

“Keep it,” he said, “they give them out to everyone around here.”

“Thanks.”

Her turned and went into the building. 

I felt much lighter, much better. 

My mother asked me where i got the handkerchief. I was about to tell her i had vomited and a nice man gave it to me. I said, “They give them out to everyone around here.”

The bus was cleared for loading, it had been standing ready for over an hour, and as soon as i walked up the stairs and looked down the aisle i stopped; at the end of the aisle sat the stretcher the injured man attended by the nurse was carried in from Warren to Fitzsimmons. On the stretcher was the long bundle of bedding, blankets and pillow neatly tucked in. I thought it was a corpse. 

 I stopped. My mother stopped behind me. I turned and sat in the first seat i could find. My mother sat across the aisle and waited. 

In the window seat beside me sat a big black man playing solitaire on the folded down tray before him. 

As i said, i had not seen many black people. I lived in Wyoming. One upperclassman in my school was black and one day a man in a Cadillac stopped to ask my brother and me directions to a place we had never heard of. On the nightly news there were reports of black rioters burning cities all over the country; not in Wyoming. When Martin Luther King Jr was shot i was watching the news with my father and he said, “They’re going to tear the country apart. But not around here.” I felt safe. 

Expressionless, the card player paused, glanced at me, then continued flipping cards.

I turned back to look at the body, my mother, waiting, followed my line of sight and said nothing.

I looked ahead, glanced back again, looked forward. A corpse, i would have to ride on a bus for two hours with a corpse. 

The man stopped playing cards, saw me glance back. My mother looked at the bundle, the man looked in the direction of it. Looking at me, back at the bundled corpse, then at me, he raised a hand with a thumb extended, motioned and said, 

“It’s deeeaaad!” 

I trembled. 

The man smiled, a wide white smile in a big round face. 

My mother said, “It’s just his bedding.”

I said nothing. 

She stood up and walked to the back of the bus and poked the bundle with the tip of her shoe. “See? It’s his bedding.”

The black man chuckled again, “Wanna play cards?” 

We played poker for nothing until the bus began to leave. As we were seated side by side it was difficult to keep my cards turned to one side. I told him, “You’re not supposed to look at my cards” and he said, “You’re not supposed to let me see them.” I recall this as a lesson useful in dealing with people of all sorts, black or white. 

My mother and i sat together for the ride home. 

The bus started and we left the hospital grounds and when we were on I-25 and rolling to home she took my hand which is something i don’t remember her doing at any other time.  

She said, “You shouldn’t worry about Jeremy (we called him Jerry), he’ll be all right. He’s in the army but he’s a mechanic. He’s not in what they call the war zone, not now. He’s in a maintenance unit. You know what that is?”

  “Yeah, he repairs trucks and tanks and helicopters.”

“Yes, so he’s safe for now.”

“A lot safer than in Chicago!”

My mother laughed, also a rare sight

The sun was sinking behind the mountains. When we arrived at F E Warren in Cheyenne it was dark. My mother shook me awake. I had fallen asleep on her shoulder. 

End of “Me and Vietnam.”