you have a bedsore like this, you have to be disciplined and stay in bed. You’re stuck there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You can’t get up. You become completely dependent on the people around you. It’s not easy. You start to go crazy. You feel trapped. Some of the guys like Marty can’t take it anymore and they start drinking or using drugs. Marty’s been seeing one of the dietitians from the second floor and she’s started supplying him with drugs—marijuana, cocaine, uppers, downers, LSD . . . you name it.
Some guys become impatient and get up into their chairs. This only prolongs the problem and the sore gets even worse. Eventually the bone begins sticking out, and infection, high fever, and septic shock can set in; many patients have already died from this. It is an overwhelming and constant struggle to stay on top of this thing.
Everyone has his own way of dealing with it. Sometimes you hear screaming and cursing. Others just lie silently on their gurneys—“doing their time,” as they call it, any way they can. Some talk to the chaplain, others the ward psychologist, but most just try their best to endure.
Marty’s been in for surgery twice already but he refuses to stay in bed. He keeps getting up and making excuses. The bedsore is getting worse and an infection has already set in. The doctors and nurses repeatedly tell him that he’s got to stay in bed, but Marty doesn’t seem to care. He’s tired of doing time and seems incapable of the discipline and self-control it takes to heal a bedsore. He doesn’t want to talk about it and he doesn’t want to think about it. Instead, he gets lost in his music and alcohol and drugs.
He loves Jimi Hendrix and listens to him a lot. He’s also a fan of the Animals’ song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” He plays it again and again and says whenever it was played on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam all the guys in his squad would start singing it.
“I love this fucking song!” shouts Marty, tears streaming down his face as he turns up the volume of his headset full blast, closes his eyes tightly, and dreams of the day he’ll finally escape. “We gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do,” he mumbles. “We gotta get out of this place ’cause girl, there’s a better life for me and you. Now my girl you’re so young and pretty and one thing I know is true, yeah. You’ll be dead before your time is due,” he sings, slurring his words, his eyes still tightly shut, his head swaying back and forth, lost in another world, place, and time, far from the hospital and the paraplegic ward.
* * *
And then there’s Nick, another paralyzed vet I meet at the hospital. While Marty seems to keep much of his rage inside, getting high and losing himself in his music, Nick is much more expressive and outgoing. An army combat medic and Bronze Star recipient, Nick survived an entire tour of duty only to be shot and paralyzed during a liquor store holdup in Compton, California. From what I heard, he had been back from Vietnam a little less than a year when it all happened. He couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t hold a job, had a hard time concentrating, and eventually ended up broke and homeless, living in his station wagon in a parking lot near Venice Beach. He went down to the VA for a couple of sessions with one of the psychiatrists but it didn’t seem to help. Nick told me the guy fell asleep on him and started snoring just when Nick was telling him about a friend who died in his arms after being shot in an ambush. When Nick accused the guy of dozing off, the shrink denied it, claiming instead that he was deep in thought. Nick never went back to him again.
A few weeks later, Nick had a breakdown and ended up in a locked psychiatric ward at the Long Beach VA suffering from hallucinations, flashbacks, and severe insomnia. I’ve heard he was put in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened room where he was given psychotropic drugs and zonked out on Thorazine.
After several weeks he was finally released and returned to living at the beach in his station wagon. One thing led to another, and hungry, desperate, broke, out of gas, Nick hitchhiked to his old neighborhood in Compton, attempted to rob a liquor store with an unloaded gun he had picked up at a pawn shop, and was shot in the back by one of the clerks, paralyzing him for life. The judge, citing mitigating circumstances—his Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and heroic record as a combat medic in Vietnam—eventually dropped the charges. Nick did his rehabilitation at the Long Beach VA Spinal Cord Injury Center.
The first time I met Nick was in the back of C ward. They’ve got a pool table set up there. It’s sort of a recreation room for the guys donated by the local VFW. Everyone was crowded around the table in their wheelchairs and Nick was shooting pool. He loves being the center of attention. I remember he made this incredible shot using just one hand, holding the pool cue with no bridge. He was trying to sink the eight ball and nobody thought he could do it. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to make one of the greatest pool shots in the history of the world, and I will do it with one hand and both eyes closed. Would anyone like to bet against me?” Nick is a great pool player and quite frankly a bit of a hustler too. Betting’s not allowed in the hospital but Nick supposedly cleared over two hundred dollars that day.
Before the war, Nick was a struggling stand-up comic and would often perform on the Ocean Front Walk in Venice Beach with a dummy that he picked up one Sunday at a flea market. He named the dummy Edgar after the famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen who Nick says was his inspiration.
Nick hides his depression well. His moods swings are extreme and, when not hyperexcitedly talking about his latest scheme, he can often be found alone in his hospital room, staring out the window, looking like a frightened child. When I see him like this, I want to reach out to him, try to comfort him, but in the end I wheel away. He reminds me too much of my own horrors and torments, all the terrible guilt and shame I continue to suppress and keep well hidden.
Nick’s kindness and desire to be there for others is constantly on display. Forever the combat medic, he roams the SCI ward in his wheelchair most of the day looking to comfort his fellow Vietnam veterans. He is always ready to lend a helping hand, glad to assist his brothers in need whenever possible, whether it’s listening to their many problems or racing down to the PX in his wheelchair to pick up a much-needed item for someone stuck in bed. The busier Nick is, the happier he seems to be. For now, his demons and thoughts of suicide, always lurking just below the surface, can wait. In this swirl of frantic activity his tortured soul can find relief, at least for a while.
For all of Nick’s generosity and concern for his brothers, as he affectionately calls them, he has little time to care for himself. Deeply troubled and plagued by hallucinations and nightmares, he bounces from one frightening day to the next.
* * *
We continue to meet in the back of D ward and, as I get to know my new friends better, I also start sharing more of my own story. I tell them about the Bronx VA and the May 1970 Life magazine article, “Our Forgotten Wounded.” Several of them say they saw it. I tell them about the overcrowded conditions in the Bronx, the rats on the ward, urine bags overflowing onto the floor, the paralyzed men left lying in their own excrement for hours at a time, crying out for help that never comes. I tell them about Mark D., the quadriplegic Vietnam vet depicted in the magazine, sitting naked in his shower chair next to a garbage can with nothing but a dirty towel covering his private parts. I explain how it was Mark who had written a letter to Life telling them of the disgraceful conditions on the Bronx VA paraplegic ward and pleading with them to do something about it. Finally they did respond, with a disturbing photo exposé that shocked the public and infuriated the bureaucrats at the VA. There were numerous denials and letters to the editor attacking Mark and the magazine for “exploiting” our wounded veterans. After receiving threats against his life, Mark eventually left the VA and moved back to Chicago where he lived with his parents for a while before eventually taking his own life in 1971.
We meet in the back of D ward over the next few weeks, and it is during this period that I decide to begin my own one-man investigation
