Doctor, one-sixty-seven is regaining.”
I tried to open my eyes. They seemed to be glued shut to just a bare crack, but there was truly bright light in those cracks. Then there were hands doing things around me as I tried to rise up out of that chemical fog. There was a thing in my mouth and my arms and legs were restrained. I felt a moment of absolute panic until a woman’s voice said: “Easy there, Captain Bishop, we’ve got you, we’ve got you. You’ve got a breathing tube in your mouth; we’re gonna take it out. Can you open your eyes?”
I tried to say, no I can’t, somebody’s glued ’em shut, but speaking with a tube in wasn’t possible. She should know that, shouldn’t she? I thought. I made an unh-unh sound.
“Okay, relax, lemme irrigate.”
A wet cloth pressed down on my sticky eyelids and then I could open my eyes. All I could see were the silhouettes of three or four figures standing around me against a blaze of painfully white light. I quickly closed my eyes and tried not to cough, then tried to see again.
Someone was fooling with what felt like a paper tag attached to my neck. “Okay, I think we can pull it,” a man’s voice said from somewhere. “It’s been five days. Remember, slow but steady—don’t stop.”
“That’s what all the girls say,” said another man’s voice.
“Really, Doctor,” the nurse said in an annoyed voice, as someone put what felt like a stethoscope on my chest, which I realized was really sore. I still could see them only as silhouettes so I just gave up and closed my eyes. But then that thing came up out of my throat from somewhere down in my chest like a big, warm snake. I took a breath and then another. That hurt, too, but I could talk now.
“Where am I?” I croaked. Even croaking hurt. Shit, everything hurt.
“You, sir, are aboard USNS Solace, a US Navy hospital ship. We’re somewhere to the west of the island. They brought you aboard five days ago, with a crease bullet wound to the skull and another in your right side that lodged in your right lung, stopping just short of your aorta and heart. God was with you, I’d have to say.”
“Not when all those Japanese showed up, He wasn’t,” I grumbled. “Is Goon here? Twitch? Monster?”
“Um, it’s possible,” the voice replied, sounding puzzled. “We’ll be sure to go check that out in a little while. But right now, we’re kinda busy, okay, Captain?”
Why were they calling me Captain, I wondered. A strange sensation bloomed in my right forearm. I guessed that the effort of talking had invited that mist back to my head, and I began to feel really sleepy again.
“Okay,” the voice I associated with a doctor said. “I’m putting him back down for another twenty-four hours.”
“The restraints?” the nurse asked. I could hear, even as I started back down.
“Leave ’em on while he’s out. Remove them when he resurfaces. Keep those other two IVs going. Give him a little ice water to loosen up his throat when he resurfaces, and then start him on some liquid sustenance. He’s way underweight, just like all the others. Check the lung drain once an hour for bleeding. Call me, even if it’s just a tincture, but I think he’s good for now.”
I wanted to ask a million questions right then, but that mist was insisting that I go to sleep like a good captain. My last thought was that I’m a lieutenant, not a captain, dumbass. Tell ’em, Goon.
The next time I woke up the bright white lights were gone. I tried to sit up but my legs and arms wouldn’t move. I looked around. I was in some kind of ward. There were portholes along the bulkheads and sunlight coming in. The ward was overcrowded. There were three rows of beds instead of two, with the third row where the central aisle should have been. A hospital corpsman in whites came by, saw that I was awake, and wormed his way through the beds. He glanced at the chart hanging from the foot of my bed. He was wearing the chevrons for an E-5, but looked much too young for that rank.
“Morning, Captain Bishop,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Shot at and missed, shit at and hit,” I said, weakly. My voice still wasn’t ready to go back to work.
He grinned. “That’s good,” he said. “I’ll get somebody to get those straps off. Let you sit up.”
“Why the straps, anyway?” I asked. Other patients were looking over with interest. Apparently, someone coming-to was an event. I guessed not everyone on the ward came to.
“Sometimes patients under induced sedation start flailing around; pull out IVs, disturb bandages, open surgical wounds. It’s standard procedure. But your orders say to pull the IVs when you wake up—get you sitting up and becoming human again.”
“Don’t feel human, though,” I said.
“Take your time,” he replied, making some notes on my chart. “Then look around. It’ll make you feel better, I promise. Rounds are in one hour. Docs will tell you more. In the meantime, lemme find some scissors.”
“One question, Corpsman?”
“Sure.”
“Why’s everybody calling me captain? I’m a Navy lieutenant, from the Nevada.”
He seemed surprised, and again consulted my record. “Says here you were brought in with a bunch of Marines, what, six days ago? Dog tags gave us your name. O-3 stamped on the tags. Were you on the island?”
“I certainly was,” I said. It seemed so long ago. “Are we still here? I mean, at Iwo?”
“Yes, we are, but not for long. Another hospital ship is due in five days. Then we’ll head for Guam and then, eventually, Tripler. Back in Pearl.”
He went to find scissors, came back, and cut me free. Physically it didn’t feel all that much different, but knowing I was free to hit the deck and start digging in made a big difference. Then I realized how ridiculous that thought was. Still. Free was better. I had to force myself not to look around for my typewriter. He helped me sit up on some pillows and then left.
I did look around and pretty quickly understood what he’d meant about feeling better. My chest wound was serious, but some of the other men on that ward had been maimed beyond belief. Hideous burns. Missing limbs. Heads completely swathed in bandages, with only small holes where their noses and mouths should have been. Legs elevated on slings, but with nothing below the knee. Or thigh. Two guys with no eyes, shuddering as they tried to cry.
Then I got a tiny whiff of what had been that overwhelming stench of death on the island. Gangrene. One guy two beds over who looked dead to me. Eyes partly open but unseeing; no breathing movement under his blanket. A nurse came by, saw him, and quietly pulled the blanket over his head. The guys on either side of him blinked a couple of times and then pretended not to notice. Those horrific casualty numbers began to take physical shape around me, and I found that I could weep, too. I went back to sleep. It seemed the safest thing for me to do just then.
Four days later I was in a different ward, where men who’d been wounded but were on the mend were berthed. I had to admit I was glad to leave that other ward. I was walking by then, learning how to breathe with one point three lungs. It was such a relief to be clean and breathe fresh sea air. They’d taken out the drain and now the thing that hurt the most was the wound that had been the least serious, that eighth-inch furrow across the top of my scalp. A tiny bit of hair had started to grow back, and it was snow white. I was eating two times a day and spending far too long in the shower, gently but firmly scrubbing the death-stained grime of Iwo Jima off my skin long after that was really necessary. I found out that hot water and all the soap in the world couldn’t get Iwo Jima out of my soul, though. And I was homesick for my ship.
That afternoon a buzz went around the ship. We were leaving the next morning around noon for Guam and points east. Two, not one, hospital ships were coming in that night to absorb the still-sobering number of casualties coming out of Iwo. There was some place called Bloody Gorge where the battle had finally, really ended. I wondered if that was my canyon.
My canyon. Jeezus.
We got teletype-printed daily news bulletins from home. The Japanese had stood true to their orders, to take ten Marines for every one of theirs. The generals had been declaring increasingly large parts of the island “secured,” but had forgotten to inform the Japanese, who had apparently died to the last man. There were times that the sadness of Iwo Jima overwhelmed me, and I wasn’t the only walking wounded on that ship who suddenly sat down on a topside bench and wept. And yet, strangely, I didn’t want to go back to Pearl Harbor, or even the States. I wanted to go find Goon and the guys, Sitting Bull, and even Wrecked. I’d never be able to do that from here on a hospital ship, especially one that was going to leave the active war zone. What I really wanted was to get back to Nevada. They had a good sick bay. They’d take care of me better than some Army hospital, I was sure of it.
Then I had an idea. I made my way up to the bridge of the ship. There was an officer of the deck and a couple of lookouts, but nothing like the crowds of people I’d seen on warship bridges. They were apparently used to having walking wounded come up and look around. The view forward was expansive. The sea was slate gray with tiny lines of whitecaps. I hadn’t been aware of how big a hospital ship was. The deck forward was emblazoned with a giant red cross. I wondered if this particular enemy would respect that. As if to make that point, there were two destroyers patrolling ahead of us. I wasn’t just a tourist, however. I was, once again, in search of a radio.
There was one radio circuit up on the bridge that seemed to be the general admin circuit for all the ships around us. We were in the Service Force formation, which contained oilers, cargo ships, transports, an ammo ship, and the hospital ships. It wasn’t much of a formation, by Navy standards, but there were at least two dozen ships out there, and more destroyers, too. They were using ships’ names instead of call signs, and when a call came in for Solace, the OOD picked up a handset on a center console and answered it. When he went back out to the bridgewing, the bridge was unattended. As was that radio. I saw my chance.
I picked up the handset. “Armageddon, Armageddon, this is Lieutenant Lee Bishop. I was Iwo, two-six Charlie, and now I’m on the Solace and I want to come home, over?”
There was no reply, not even an annoyed call from whoever was Net Control.
Well, I thought. I tried. I hung up the handset and went below. The OOD hadn’t even noticed that I’d done it. Service Force, I thought. Try that on a warship tactical or even admin net and someone would have been jumping down my throat.
I went back to my ward and took a nap. When I got up it was dinner time. I wasn’t hungry, but the docs had told me to eat. I sat on the edge of my bunk and wondered about Goon and his amazing sidekicks. How could I ever find out what had happened to them in that sudden firefight on top of the canyon? Had they been killed by that second bunch of bad guys? I prayed that one day I could track them down, although as a mere lieutenant in the Navy, that seemed like an insurmountable task. I missed those guys so much.
I left the ward and headed aft, where the mess decks for patients were. There were an unusual number of people in the passageway, all seemingly excited, all going to the outside hatches as if something was happening out there. I didn’t mean to but I got swept up in the crowd and ended up on one of the outside gallery decks, which were crowded. I looked out to sea and saw why.
Coming alongside, like some kind of floating mountain, was Nevada, in all her haze-gray glory. Her massive bulk, even at an almost stopped speed, nudged the hospital ship sideways. The ship took on a port list as more and more personnel, staff and patients, crowded out onto the weather decks to catch a glimpse of a real live battleship that loomed ever bigger as she came closer alongside. Those great fourteen-inch guns were laid flat, which made them even more menacing. I stared in absolute amazement.
Back on her starboard quarter a boat was being lowered. It was the captain’s gig, and it splashed down into the water alongside. There was a brief puff of smoke from its stern and then the boat cast off and headed for the hospital ship’s port quarter. The hospital ship’s general announcing system lit off and announced: Lieutenant Bishop, lay aft to the quarterdeck. There was a hospital corpsman standing next to me. “How do I get to the quarterdeck?” I asked.
He stared at me for a moment, and then said: “That you? I’ll take you.”
We made our way aft through the throng of spectators, went down two ladders, and then aft again along the main deck. I felt really conspicuous in my hospital PJs and slippers. By the time I got to the quarterdeck, there were several ship’s officers standing around, including the hospital ship’s captain. The Nevada’s gig was alongside, bobbing gently to the sea-painter provided by the Solace. The ship’s captain saw me. I caught a whiff of stack gas coming from the beast’s funnel.
“Are you Lieutenant Bishop?” he asked.
“I am, sir,” I said.
“Your chariot awaits, young man,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or impressed. The whole of the horizon was dominated by that castle of steel, waiting four hundred feet away. I didn’t know what to say, but he just smiled and pointed me to the accommodation ladder.
I went down the ladder, almost tripping over myself in my haste, then slowing down, rung by rung, grabbing the wire handrails, as my chest began to complain. A corpsman was right behind me in case I tripped and fell. At the bottom, an officer I didn’t recognize helped me aboard the gig and then down into the rounded cabin at the back. Captain Henderson was there, helping me to the leather bench at the back of the cabin, with a big, proud smile on his face. Commander Willson grinned at me from the other side. I couldn’t contain myself and burst into tears of gratitude as I heard the boat crew topside cast off the sea-painter and then rev the engine for the return trip. Here I was, going home, and bawling like a baby. I was going home. I only wished Goon and the boys were going with me.