of sleep, I begin to fight as I have never fought before in my life.
I awake to the screams of other men around me. I have made it. I think that maybe the wound is my punishment for killing the corporal and the children. That now everything is okay and the score is evened up. And now I am packed in this place with the others who have been wounded like myself, strapped onto a strange circular bed. I feel tubes going into my nose and hear the clanking, pumping sound of a machine. I still cannot feel any of my body but I know I am alive. I feel a terrible pain in my chest. My body is so cold. It has never been this weak. It feels so tired and out of touch, so lost and in pain. I can still barely breathe. I look around me, at people moving in shadows of numbness. There is the man who had been in the ambulance with me, screaming louder than ever, kicking his bloody stumps in the air, crying for his mother, crying for his morphine.
Directly across from me there is a Korean who has not even been in the war at all. The nurse says he was going to buy a newspaper when he stepped on a booby trap and it blew off both his legs and his arm. And all that is left now is this slab of meat swinging one arm crazily in the air, moaning like an animal gasping for its last bit of life, knowing that death is rushing toward him. The Korean is screaming like a madman at the top of his lungs. I cannot wait for the shots of morphine. Oh, the morphine feels so good. It makes everything dark and quiet. I can rest. I can leave this madness. I can dream of my back yard once again.
When I wake they are screaming still and the lights are on and the clock, the clock on the wall, I can hear it ticking to the sound of their screams. I can hear the dead being carted out and the new wounded being brought in to the beds all around me. I have to get out of this place.
“Can I call you by your first name?” I say to the nurse.
“No. My name is Lieutenant Wiecker.”
“Please, can I . . .”
“No,” she says. “It’s against regulations.”
I’m sleeping now. The lights are flashing. The black pilot is next to me. He says nothing. He stares at the ceiling all day long. He does nothing but that. But something is happening now, something is going wrong over there. The nurse is shouting for the machine, and the corpsman is crawling on the black man’s chest, he has his knees on his chest and he’s pounding it with his fists again and again.
“His heart has stopped!” screams the nurse.
Pounding, pounding, he’s pounding his fist into his chest. “Get the machine!” screams the corpsman.
The nurse is pulling the machine across the hangar floor as quickly as she can now. They are trying to put curtains around the whole thing, but the curtains keep slipping and falling down. Everyone, all the wounded who can still see and think, now watch what is happening to the pilot, and it is happening right next to me. The doctor hands the corpsman a syringe, they are laughing as the corpsman drives the syringe into the pilot’s chest like a knife. They are talking about the Green Bay Packers and the corpsman is driving his fist into the black man’s chest again and again until the black pilot’s body begins to bloat up, until it doesn’t look like a body at all anymore. His face is all puffy like a balloon and saliva rolls slowly from the sides of his mouth. He keeps staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. “The machine! The machine!” screams the doctor, now climbing on top of the bed, taking the corpsman’s place. “Turn on the machine!” screams the doctor.
He grabs a long suction cup that is attached to the machine and places it carefully against the black man’s chest. The black man’s body jumps up from the bed almost arcing into the air from each bolt of electricity, jolting and arcing, bloating up more and more.
“I’ll bet on the Packers,” says the corpsman.
“Green Bay doesn’t have a chance,” the doctor says, laughing.
The nurse is smiling now, making fun of both the doctor and the corpsman. “I don’t understand football,” she says.
They are pulling the sheet over the head of the black man and strapping him onto the gurney. He is taken out of the ward.
The Korean civilian is still screaming and there is a baby now at the end of the ward. The nurse says it has been napalmed by our own jets. I cannot see the baby but it screams all the time like the Korean and the young man without any legs I had met in the ambulance.
I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. The corpsman is telling the baby to shut the hell up and there is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him where the black pilot has just died, right next to me. He has thick bandages wrapped all around his head till I can hardly see his face at all. He is like a vegetable—a nineteen-year-old vegetable, thrashing his arms back and forth, babbling and pissing in his clean white sheets.
“Quit pissin’ in your sheets!” screams the corpsman. But the nineteen-year-old kid who doesn’t have any brains anymore makes the corpsman very angry. He just keeps pissing in the sheets and crying like a little baby.
There is a Green Beret sergeant calling for his mother. Every night now I hear him. He has spinal meningitis. He will be dead before this evening is over.
The Korean civilian does not moan anymore. He does not wave his one arm and two fingers above his head. He is dead and they have taken him away too.
There is a nun who comes through the ward now with apples for the wounded and rosary beads. She is very pleasant and smiles at all of the wounded. The corpsman is reading a comicbook, still cursing at the baby. The baby is screaming and the Armed Forces radio is saying that troops will be home soon. The kid with the bloody stumps is getting a morphine shot.
There is a general walking down the aisles now, going to each bed. He’s marching down the aisles, marching and facing each wounded man in his bed. A skinny private with a Polaroid camera follows directly behind him. The general is dressed in an immaculate uniform with shiny shoes. “Good afternoon, marine,” the general says. “In the name of the President of the United States and the United States Marine Corps, I am proud to present you with the Purple Heart, and a picture,” the general says. Just then the skinny man with the Polaroid camera jumps up, flashing a picture of the wounded man. “And a picture to send to your folks.”
He comes up to my bed and says exactly the same thing he has said to all the rest. The skinny man jumps up, snapping a picture of the general handing the Purple Heart to me. “And here,” says the general, “here is a picture to send home to your folks.” The general makes a sharp left face. He is marching to the bed next to me where the nineteen-year-old kid is still pissing in his pants, babbling like a little baby.
“In the name of the President of the United States,” the general says. The kid is screaming now almost tearing the bandages off his head, exposing the parts of his brain that are still left. “. . . I present you with the Purple Heart. And here,” the general says, handing the medal to the nineteen-year-old vegetable, the skinny guy jumping up and snapping a picture, “here is a picture. . . ,” the general says, looking at the picture the skinny guy has just pulled out of the camera. The kid is still pissing in his white sheets. “. . . And here is a picture to send home. . . .” The general does not finish what he is saying. He stares at the nineteen-year-old for what seems a long time. He hands the picture back to his photographer and as sharply as before marches to the next bed.
“Good afternoon, marine,” he says.
The kid is still pissing in his clean white sheets when the general walks out of the room.
I am in
