the hospital PX, with batteries and extra cassettes, and begin to formulate a plan. I will hide the tape player under the pillow on my gurney. I have to be careful. If they find out what I’m doing, there could be severe repercussions. They might try to punish me like some of the others who complained. No one must know what I’m up to.
At first I visit only patients I can trust—some are the guys I’ve been meeting with in back of D ward. Marty, Nick, and Willy Jefferson are the first to be interviewed. I then begin to branch out to other wards, expanding my investigation to more patients, including some of the aides and one doctor who I know is on our side.
Many complain of overcrowded conditions while others say that something must be done before another patient dies. “It’s fucking scary in here,” a patient from D ward tells me one afternoon as he leans forward to whisper into my microphone.
Some talk about the failure of medical devices: Hoyer lifts that suddenly stop working during the transfer of a patient, and IV pumps and blood pressure machines that are constantly breaking down. One veteran, a quad from C ward, begins to cry while telling me he and several others have been threatened numerous times by one of the aides for refusing his extortion demands. The aide knows that as 100 percent service-connected combat veterans, we receive a substantial tax-free check each month from the government, and he makes it clear to the guys that if they refuse to pay and don’t give him a little “gratitude” each week, they will not get the care they deserve. This goes on here all the time but no one ever talks about it. Don’t get me wrong, there are some decent aides and nurses who really do care, but they are few and far between.
I continue taping as many patients as are willing to talk to me. One tells me that he was slapped by a nurse when he complained, and another that he was dropped onto the floor when two drunken aides tried to drag him from his bed onto a gurney. Some speak of what they will do when they finally get out of the hospital. I distinctly recall one young paralyzed ex–marine lieutenant named Miller describing in great detail how he planned to get on top of a building and start shooting everyone he could with his M16 rifle.
Many are tormented by nightmares and anxiety attacks and some have simply given up—surrendering to their despair and paralysis. The look of permanent defeat is etched across their faces. Young boys of nineteen and twenty, guys like Marty and Danny and Willy Jefferson, old before their time. They are weary men in every way, seeming to have lost all hope. Their lives are over, their youth has been crushed, defiled, and destroyed. Unlike myself, they do not rage. They do not protest or dream of revolt. They simply surrender to their defeat, to their paralyzed bodies.
I listen to one horror story after another and promise myself that someday people are going to know what is happening in this place. If it is the last thing I do, I will somehow find a way to expose it.
By the end of the second week, I have filled up nearly half a dozen cassette tapes. Doing the interviews and acting as an investigative reporter on my gurney has kept me busy and I have begun to feel less alone.
The Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee
By mid-April the situation on the Spinal Cord Injury ward has become intolerable and it is during this period that I decide to start organizing a group called the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee. We begin holding meetings every Thursday night in back of the wards. Most of our discussions have to do with the poor treatment we are receiving at the hospital and what we, as a group, can do to change it.
At first we have only a few patients, but soon our numbers begin to grow until there are over a hundred patients coming to every Thursday-night gathering. Many of those who show up are from the SCI ward, but quite a few come from other parts of the hospital. There are the World War II vets, the guys with tuberculosis wearing those yellow masks over their faces, a few Korean War vets, and several aides and nurses who have their own reasons to complain and protest. Even one of the SCI doctors shows up one night, telling us he sympathizes with us and supports what we’re trying to do, but he has to be careful.
The larger we grow as a group each week, the more anxious and uncomfortable the powers-that-be at the hospital seem to become, not to mention quite a few of the more irate WWII veterans. Some despise me, calling me names as I wheel past them in the hallway: hippie, radical, fucking Communist. But I say nothing. The country, and even the hospital, feels terribly divided between those who still support the war and those who oppose it. Arguments often break out and emotions are raw. Many have seen me on TV or read about my previous activities as an antiwar protester in the newspapers.
Joe Hayward, who will become one of my closest allies, only to later betray me, shows up at one of our meetings, telling me that he was recently hired by the VA as a “chaplain’s assistant,” giving him access to many of the hospital wards. He will be helping the chaplain to write a weekly report pertaining to patients’ needs, attitudes, and behaviors. He promises to share his information with us and soon he is taking an active roll in our organization.
* * *
Late that spring, we decide to hold a press conference and invite everyone from the media to attend. I even invite the actress Jane Fonda, having heard that she would be speaking next door at Long Beach State University later that same day. I am thrilled when I’m told by her representative that she can attend, and I begin making plans to let everyone in the hospital know she’s coming. Jane and I had already shared the stage at several antiwar demonstrations and I know that her presence at our press conference will create quite a stir, not to mention all the additional media attention it will bring.
With an old mimeograph machine loaned to us by one of the volunteers, we set up our own printing press on one of the empty hospital beds in the back of the ward. We churn out nearly five hundred copies of a flier inviting everyone in the hospital to a press conference with Jane Fonda and the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee, to be held the following week on the grass behind the SCI ward, where we will present our complaints gathered over the last several months.
On the pay phone down the hall, we call every local newspaper and network, alerting them to our press conference, which we say will expose the scandalous conditions at the Long Beach VA and VA hospitals all over the country.
We are surprised at the response we receive. The press seems to be interested. Some reporters want to come down right away but we tell them to hold off and wait for the press conference when we can fill them all in at once. Everyone on the committee seems excited. I plan to play some of the cassette tapes of the interviews I have done with dissenting patients to any reporters who are willing to listen. Other patients and a few aides have also volunteered to be interviewed. Nick, Woody, Bobby Mays, and I begin handing out leaflets to everyone we meet in the hospital. By the end of the week everyone at the Long Beach VA seems to be talking about Jane Fonda’s impending visit and the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee’s press conference in back of the SCI ward. A small group of disgruntled World War II and Korean War veterans, incensed that Fonda is coming, make it clear that they plan to stage a counterprotest.
* * *
When the day of the press conference finally arrives, we are stunned at the number of media that turn out. They seem fascinated by it all: Actress Jane Fonda attending a press conference with severely disabled Vietnam veterans. Men who have sacrificed nearly their entire bodies, being abused and neglected at a VA hospital. What a story!
The place is packed. Everyone in the hospital seems to have shown up that day, including the small group of World War II and Korean War veterans in wheelchairs determined to disrupt the press conference. At around eleven fifteen a.m., with the press in full attendance and members of the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee by my side, I announce that Jane Fonda is running a little late. “Miss Fonda should be here in a few minutes, and as soon
