One more man died of his wounds as Tutuila headed back toward Leyte Gulf. We buried him at sea with a small ceremony. There was a hospital ship waiting when Tutuila finally pulled into the landing area, so we went directly alongside the much bigger ship, which was anchored a mile offshore. I supervised the transfer of the casualties from Tutuila to the hospital ship. I’d gotten used to my head-scarf bandage although there was a thin hot line of fiery pain where the bullet had grazed my skull. Thank God for the helmet.
When I came back topside from accompanying the wounded to the triage area, Tutuila was pulling away. Something urgent must have come up, which probably involved Bluto and his remaining hooligans needing fuel. For a moment I didn’t know what to do or where to go, which is when I realized I was probably exhausted. The hospital ship had a long promenade deck filled with reclining deck chairs. I walked past recuperating sailors until I found an empty chair. I sat down, pushed the back all the way down, and closed my eyes. The warm tropical sun for once felt wonderful, although the headache seemed to be getting worse. Thankfully, I fell asleep, to the accompaniment of visions of alien ships being torn asunder.
When I came to, I was in a brightly lit hospital ward. My “scarf bandage” had been replaced by a complex set of bandages that completely swathed my head. An IV set was stuck into the back of my right wrist and I stared at the tiny beads of liquid dropping into the tube for a minute as I tried to gather my wits. The headache was still there but numbed by some kind of painkiller. Those white lights hurt my eyes, so I closed them and tried to drift back off to sleep.
“You back with us, Doctor?” a female voice asked, and then I felt a soft hand pick up my other wrist to get a pulse.
“No,” I said, apropos of nothing.
She giggled and then told me to open my eyes.
“Hurts to do that,” I replied, but then I did what she asked. She was young, impossibly young, I thought, but she was wearing the uniform of a registered nurse.
“No surprise there, Doctor Andersen,” she said. “You have a linear skull fracture going across the top of your cranium.”
“Hairline fracture?” I asked.
“No, Doctor. Not huge, but not hairline, either. The surgeons cleaned it up, put some staples in, and sutured the scalp.”
“I thought the brain couldn’t feel pain,” I said, somewhat stupidly. My brain hadn’t been injured. Or had it?
“Correct, but the skull absolutely can. You’ll have a groove across the top of your skull once it heals. Now: they’ve asked me to check motor functions. Can you move your extremities?”
We went through a hands, fingers, and feet check. Everything moved when commanded to do so. Then I tried to move my head. My head informed me that was a bad idea. She saw me wince.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to put you in a neck brace. There’s nothing wrong with your neck but that bullet or whatever it was did a number on your skull-bone. Did a sniper get you?”
“Actually, I think a Jap battleship got me. Down in Surigao Strait.”
The blank look on her face told me that the hospital staff didn’t know much about what had been going on for the past forty-eight hours. Then a familiar female voice spoke up from behind the nurse. “Told you about that kryptonite, but would you listen? No, you would not.”
I looked over the nurse’s shoulder to find Helen Carpenter smiling down at me. I didn’t remember anything about kryptonite, but I was very glad to see her. She tapped the young nurse on the shoulder and then traded places with her.
I closed my eyes again, even though I wanted to keep them open. Whatever was coming down that IV was really working now. “I need to get back to the squadron,” I said, finally. “Chief Higgins can manage my wound and the bandages.”
She squeezed my other hand, the one without an IV line. “Your squadron days are over, there, Superman,” she said quietly. “We’re one day out of Leyte and on our way to Guam. Your hooligans will be all right.”
That got my eyes open, although my eyelids felt like they were made of lead. “We’re what?” I asked.
“You’re on the hospital ship Refuge. She’s taking wounded from the Leyte invasion and some from the carrier Princeton. We’ll stop at Guam, and then we’re bound for Pearl.”
“But I can’t just leave,” I said.
She touched the top of my head with the tip of one finger. Lightning ensued. “Yes, you can. And will. I do believe your war is over, Doctor Lincoln Andersen. It’s not like you didn’t contribute.”
My war was over? My brain tried to grapple with that idea. I vaguely saw her reach up to the IV bottle, and then I got my wish. My eyes closed like a trap and everything got better.