CUE: Suicide is Painless, NICK DRAKE
I cannot be sure when I actually came around. I think my mind began transmitting messages to my conscious state sometime on the afternoon of the next day. The mental cobwebs suddenly retreated, and I found myself laid out on a narrow bunk in a hospital ward. Larry Vunak, the gunner on the Two Four track, was seated at the foot of the bed talking with me. It became obvious that we had been talking for some time, but I had no idea what had been said. I also had no idea where I was. I looked about me to see if there might be bars on the windows and NVA guards at the door, but all I found were wounded GIs in blue pajamas. Vunak was an exception to that. He was still wearing combat fatigue pants and an olive-green T-shirt. As he talked to me, I began to notice that his shirt was covered with tiny flakes of metal. It looked almost as if he were covered with glitter. There were even flakes of metal in his hair. I am sure I asked him to explain, but about that time the cobwebs closed in around me again and the luxury of memory was lost to the ages once more.
Later that night the mists had cleared, and I was once again cranking out my normally poor level of actual thought. I discovered I was in the evac hospital in Tay Ninh base camp. I was told, probably for the fortieth time, that I had a ruptured right kidney and almost every muscle in my body was strained from the force of the explosion. My response was, “What explosion?” This was information outside the realm of the medical staff. I would have to wait to find out what had happened to me, and what had befallen the rest of the company the next morning.
The medical types smiled and told me I should be quiet and not move around too much until the soreness went away. This prescription was easy to follow. I could barely move at all, and when I did, it felt as if my entire body and been pounded thoroughly by a huge giant with a sledgehammer. Actually, that was not too far from the truth. Vunak came back to see me later that night. He had changed into a new set of jungle fatigues and no longer wore the T-shirt bedecked with glittering metal shavings. When I asked him about that, he launched into a description of what had happened the morning after I had been dusted off.
At dawn on May 12, C Company was hit with a huge attack from NVA forces. They were mortared and hit with RPGs in the dim, early morning light. The fight was tremendous, and the company held out against huge odds until reinforcements reached them and the NVA once again melted into the forest.
My questions were many—about who had gotten hit and what shape the company was in—but Vunak was unsure about any of that. He had been dusted off from the attack site after being in the thick of the fight. It suddenly dawned on me that the glittering metal that had been clinging to his T-shirt was shrapnel and metal fibers from an explosion. It would be some time before I was able to piece together what had happened. When I did get the truth, it was not good.
On the morning of May 12, 1970, C Company faced what could have been a battalion-sized attack by NVA forces. Six APCs were lost, five men were killed, and over forty were wounded. Later, through the GI grapevine, I would discover that Lester Lorig had received mortar fragments through his lung and was dusted off in very serious condition. He was taken first to Tay Ninh, then was shipped to Cu Chi, and eventually out to Japan by way of Bien Hoa Air Base.
C Company had taken a tremendous hit. It had survived and fought back with a vengeance, but after the morning of May 12, it was battered, understrength, and not really a fighting combat company in the true sense of the word. This group, which had stayed in the field for so long without rest or actual repair, was finally going to be sent back for a stand down. Just as I had not been a part of the early morning attack, I would not be included in what happened at the stand down in Tay Ninh. I was a patient in the 12th Evacuation Hospital in Cu Chi base camp.
The hospital comprised a series of Quonset huts laid out in line. The ward in which I was a patient was filled with army bunks and wounded men in blue pajamas. It was a world of difference from what I had been used to as a soldier in a mechanized company. There were actual beds to sleep in, there was running water available, and there was air conditioning. Such differences may not have affected every patient, but I must confess they did make a difference to me. I had slept so long on the ground that the hours spent in a bed were somewhat uncomfortable at first. The cool air coming from the air conditioner was a bit of a shock. I had spent all my time out in the Asian heat, and it took me some time to acclimate to refrigerated air. The same shivers must have hit quite a number of the combat wounded, because the medical types were ever ready with a blanket for those new patients who came in and lay shivering under the sheets.
I had often heard about army nurses, and I was looking forward to seeing a female or two. The sad fact was that I never laid eyes on a single female nurse the whole time I was in the hospital at Cu Chi. I don't know where they were, but they weren't with us. Maybe officers got female nurses. We got Lou Crosby!
Crosby was one of the nurses who ran the ward I was in. He was well over six feet tall, weighed about two hundred pounds, and had a no-nonsense attitude when it came to the boys in his care. For such a big bruiser, he looked over the bunch of us like a mother hen. Others came in and took their shifts as the ward nurse, but Lou Crosby stuck in my mind. He was from San Antonio, Texas, and that may have helped raise him to a more personal level of thought in my mind. Anything that smelled of home was welcome.
The doctors seemed to come and go as faceless entities that held the power of going home over the heads of those who had taken one for the team. I don't mean to sound disrespectful in any way. What I mean is that these men of medicine had so much on their plate that they could not waste a minute of their time with bedside manner. They were shorthanded and overburdened and simply came into the wards to take care of business and get on to the next case. The truth is that the only doctor's face I remember was the one who saved me from losing a kidney.
The consensus of medical opinions was that my right kidney had received such a blow that it would never recover and it needed to be taken out as soon as possible. This was what everyone told me, except for one army doctor with a Spanish-sounding name and an accent to match. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but I think he was Peruvian and not a US citizen. This doctor decided I had a badly bruised kidney that would heal itself if we just left it alone long enough. As a rule, the army doesn't let GI types lounge around in a hospital bed long enough for this kind of treatment to become successful. I have no idea how he managed it, but under this man's care, I was allowed to do exactly that. I don't even remember his name, but because of his insistence that my body would heal if given enough time, I have two healthy kidneys more than forty years after the fact.
So I settled in as a long-term member of the 12th Evac Hospital. I began to enjoy air conditioning and a bed with clean sheets and actual meals that were delivered to my bedside. I played poker with the other patients and with Lou Crosby, and I wrote letters home, telling anyone who would listen that I was none the worse for wear. All the time I kept hoping someone would come in and slip me the good news that the powers that be had decided to send me back home as soon as I could walk fairly straight again. When someone did slip in and bring me some news, it wasn't good and it didn't have anything to do with my going home.