let’s get him down to the LZ.”
Mike, Lee, and a new guy pick up the stretcher while Doc holds the I.V. bag. Pain shoots through my wounds as they double-time me to the landing zone.
“I will not die here!”—but my voice is drowned out by the whirr of the rotor blades.
We rise slowly above Firebase Pershing, the olive drab entrails of the chopper like a cocoon around me, and out the doorway, the sparks of distant flares.
I know I need to stay conscious to survive, but my eyes slowly close, and the dark washes over me like black blood.
All I want to do is sleep, to let my body go.
Rotor blades chop through the heavy air. In the distance, I hear B-52’s carpet-bombing the Ho Bo Woods—boom! boom! boom! boom! as the thousand pound bombs thud and explode against the wet earth.
Through the rotors’ whirr, I hear the pilot’s muffled voice talking to someone at the Army hospital in Chu Chi.
“Affirmative. One W.I.A. Multiple shrapnel wounds. That’s affirm. Head, neck, chest, left arm, both legs. Grave. ETA about fifteen.”
“Hey! Wake up, soldier! What’s your name?”
The medic crouches over me and holds my face in his thick hands.
“Wha…?”
“I can’t hear you! What’s your name?”
“Radio.”
“Okay, Radio, what’s your mother’s name?”
“What?”
“Your mother? Your mother? Open your eyes!!”
“Lil…Lillian.”
“Where you from?”
“L.A.”
“Alright Radio from L.A., you’re not going to sleep on me are you?”
No answer. I’m back in that secret room behind my eyelids where the chopper’s whirr and the medic’s voice fade away.
No tunnel of white light to go through, no dead buddies and relatives waiting to greet me on the other side—nothing but a silent, dreamless sleep.
“I will not die...”
“I will not…”
“What company are you from?”
“How old are you?”
“How long have you been in country?”
His questions are staccato now, a rapid fire of question after question—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat like a fifty caliber machine gun—meant to pull me back, to open the door to my secret room and pull me out.
“Wake up, Radio!”
I want to stay where I am, but I know if I stay here too long I will not return—“I will not die here.”
I open my eyes to see the medic’s face leaning over me, his green flight helmet starring down at me like a gigantic fly.
“Nineteen.” I mutter. “Bravo.”
There were no brain surgeons in Chu Chi.
The doctors and nurses who hovered over me with their tubes, clips, gauze, tape, and sutures stopped the bleeding from my neck, and the artery in my left arm.
They stabilized my heart rate and blood pressure and got me off the border between life and irreversible shock, but the more severe wounds, the shrapnel lodged in the membrane around my heart, repairing the vein severed at the juggler vein takeoff, and the two pieces of shrapnel somewhere inside my frontal lobe would have to wait.
The light where the horizon ended glowed like a red-hot machete’s blade as I was wheeled out of the hospital doors and into another medevac.
I wanted to sleep now, to fall depthless into darkness, to slip out of my body, but the new medic wouldn’t let me. He kept asking me the same tired questions as the chopper ascended into the lightening sky.
“What’s your name?”
“Where are you from?”
“What company are you with?”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
The Earth’s far edge was on fire, a slow burn eating the sphere’s dark shadow as we rose above the hospital and then beyond the surrounding rice paddies and farms fringing the city.
We flew east into the blade of light, the chopper’s whomp, whomp, whomp a comforting mantra as the flickering bursts of fire beneath us told another story, a story I would never be part of again.
And then I rose.
Above my body.
Above my life.
Is this my soul parting from my flesh, my spirit rising toward eternity, flying through the tunnel of white light toward people I loved?
I rose in darkness, in shadow, the body below me—my body—graying to a shade, the medic slowly dimming to a hazy silhouette.
I rose, but my wounds did not fly away on angel’s wings, nor did I see my mortal life bleeding into light as if I were eternal.
I merely slipped in and out of a world filled with fire and burning pain—
--and then I fell.
Through the stretcher where I lay.
Through the olive-drab floor of the med-evac.
Through the black, night sky glittering with muzzle flashes and fiery explosions. Through the elephant grass and rice sprouts into the darker, moist earth below.
A silent falling, bodiless, weightless, like falling through the depths of a calm sea, like falling in a falling dream.
No sounds. No colors. No smells.
No faces of loved ones who’d passed on.
Nothing.
Just falling,
falling,
falling…
I fell as if I would fall forever, as if this life--our lives--from birth until death--was surrounded by this endless dark matter in which we all must fall.
Perhaps there is no heaven for soldiers, no realm beyond this world of blood and bone, no kingdom where the dying warrior rises into light.
Perhaps God departs from the battlefield as a spirit might depart, the air vibrating with His absence, the red rice
