rode down to the ground floor. “You can do it, Ronnie! You can do it. Careful, Ronnie. Careful now!”
I had only a little farther to go before I reached the SCI parking lot where my brand-new hand-controlled Oldsmobile was parked. I struggled, dragging myself across the gravel lot, growing more and more determined—doing my best not to fall . . . trying not to lose my balance.
“A little bit farther. A little bit farther! Keep going, Ronnie! Almost there, Ronnie!” shouted Dick. “Only a little more to go.”
When we finally reached the car I leaned forward, still balancing myself on the crutches, and unlocked the door, and after opening it slowly I spun around, swinging myself into the seat. “I did it, Dick!” I shouted. “I told you I was going to walk out of this place.” I had triumphed. I had done it.
After returning home to Massapequa, Long Island, I continued my rehabilitation, putting on braces every day, and just as I had dragged myself around the hospital, I now began to drag my body around the yard each day, seeing how far I could go, determined to continue my struggle to walk again.
It was great to be home and as I progressed each day I would sometimes notice the neighbors staring over from their front lawns or out their windows at the neighborhood boy who had returned from the war with the terrible wound, desperately trying to walk again. I did my best to put them at ease, waving to them and smiling as I awkwardly struggled to keep my balance and not fall. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. As difficult and frustrating as it was for me each day, I chose to see it as a great physical challenge rather than a burden. Even back then I was trying hard to see things in a more positive light. I was still the great athlete striving to win the championship, to be my very best and make the Olympics and win a gold medal.
And although I fell several times in my yard that summer, each time I was able to get myself back up and continue on.
One afternoon, just as the summer was ending, I remember my mother peering through the dining room window with the saddest look on her face I had ever seen, as I once again struggled to drag myself around the yard. She had watched me try to walk in my braces many times before, encouraging me and telling me how proud she was, but on this afternoon she was no longer able to hide her sorrow.
Years later, my mother would confide that seeing me for the first time attempting to walk with my braces in my backyard, occasionally losing my balance, falling and picking myself up, reminded her of Jesus Christ and the Stations of the Cross.
I would try to smile, lifting one of my crutches above my head and shaking it in a show of triumph to let her know everything was okay, but my mother just kept staring at me, seeming as if she was about to cry.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked her when I got back into the house later that day, but all she could do was continue to look at me with those sad eyes, telling me how it hurt her to see me struggling each day, my body all twisted and atrophied, dragging myself exhausted around the yard.
“It really hurts me to see you out there. It’s too much, Ronnie. It’s too much. Maybe the doctors were right. Maybe you should just accept the fact that you’ve got to be in a wheelchair. It’s not good for you. It’s too much of a strain on your heart. I watch you, Ronnie, and it hurts me. I love you, Ronnie. I just don’t want to see you suffer anymore.”
I had hoped that my mother would continue to be encouraging and supportive of my attempt to walk again. Didn’t she and the others understand what I was trying to do? I tried not to let the neighbors’ uneasy stares and my mother’s sadness and doubts bother me, but by the end of that summer I was putting on the braces and dragging myself around the yard less and less, feeling depressed and spending more time getting drunk at Arthur’s Bar.
One night in late August I came home very drunk and pushed myself back into my house, up the wooden ramp my father had built when I was at the hospital. I pushed my wheelchair down the hallway to my room, trying not to wake my mother and father or any of my brothers and sisters. When I got there, I sat in my wheelchair staring at myself in the mirror for a long time, thinking back to the promise I had made to myself and the others in the Bronx VA hospital that I would walk again.
I had not taken my braces out of the closet or tried to walk in several months, but on that night I was determined to get up again. Sometime after midnight, I took the braces out of the closet, transferred into my bed, and put the braces on, locking them in place. I then transferred back into my wheelchair, grabbed my crutches, and lifted myself slowly out of my chair into an upright position. After taking a deep drunken breath, I began to stubbornly drag myself around the room. I had only gone a few steps when I found myself facing the mirror once again. I remember staring at my twisted and atrophied body and with one last superhuman effort, refusing to be defeated, I spun around angrily, dragging myself across the floor of my room. After several steps I lost my balance and went crashing to the floor. I thought for a moment of getting up again, of making one last vain attempt to walk, but I was too tired and drunk and instead I began to cry, tears streaming down my face, hoping my mother and father wouldn’t hear me. A few minutes later I pulled myself back into my wheelchair where I slowly unstrapped my braces and threw them into the closet.
I know the truth is that someday they will find a way to fuse the spine together, but not in my lifetime or the lifetime of the others around me. Our job here is to keep on living, to keep getting up and making it through each day any way we can.
It’s Fucking Scary in Here
My new group of friends at the Long Beach VA and I start getting together almost every day in back of D ward, sharing our thoughts and feelings about the war and the treatment we’re receiving at the hospital. Many speak of outright patient abuse, while others, like Marty and Willy, say they were punished for complaining about their treatment. I have been told that several patients have already been sent to the psychiatric ward because they complained. Marty says this is common practice by the staff to keep everyone in line.
“There are a lot of things that happen here that no one ever talks about,” Marty tells me, taking a swig from his whiskey bottle hidden inside a paper bag. “Accidents that no one will ever report.”
Marty Stetson is by far the most sarcastic and cynical of us all. Whenever Jafu brings up the subject of walking again, Marty goes crazy. “You’re never going to fucking walk again!” he scolds. “You gotta just accept your fucking injury, man. This fucking thing’s never gonna change.”
With his long hair and wispy Ho Chi Minh beard, his emaciated body lying naked on his filthy sheet, he looks more like a survivor of Auschwitz than a Vietnam veteran. Marty is haunted by the war. His sad, mournful eyes say it all. A former Army Airborne Ranger who was shot and paralyzed in Pleiku in 1968, he seems to have given up on life. He speaks listlessly and without emotion, a scratchy whine that is both pathetic and stirs great compassion at the same time. It is a desperate sort of crying out for help.
He once showed me a photograph of himself in his Ranger uniform with a parachute on his chest from when he was at jump school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was just before he went to Vietnam. In the photo Marty looks really confident.
Marty’s been drinking a lot lately, Jim Beam whiskey. It’s his favorite. He used to ask me, when I was still in my chair, to go across the street to the liquor store and pick him up a bottle. I’d return it to him in a paper bag but I had to be careful; if they caught me bringing alcohol into the hospital I could get in a lot of trouble. I know it’s not good for Marty but who am I to judge? He has been trapped in his bed for nearly six months now with a terrible bedsore on his right hip. Ever since I met him he’s been in bed trying to heal that sore. It occurred when one of the aides dropped him in the shower room.
