August 2, 1945
“Give me my gun!”
Ben looked up from notating the vital signs of his last patient. The panicked voice came from the tent next door, where a makeshift ward had been set up.
No enemy fire was downing soldiers now that the war was over, but plenty of men still showed up at the medical tents due to various and sundry other ills and accidents.
Ben ran toward the ward. In between the man’s yells, he could hear a nurse trying to defuse the situation. A loud crash indicated the soldier was having none of that.
“I’m not dying without my gun,” the man screamed. More crashes and the sound of broken glass.
A couple of patients pushed out through the tent opening. One of them grabbed Ben. “Nurse Bertram ordered us out, but you gotta help her. It’s Jeffries. He’s gone bonkers.”
The tent sides shook. Ben pulled away from the man and ducked inside. He knew the soldier. Private Jeffries had come in with a fever caused by an infected cut left untreated too long. His sergeant reported that the man showed signs of shell shock. Now the fever must be pushing him over the edge.
The nurse was scrambling up from where the man had knocked her against one of the tent poles. Nurse Bertram was tough, but Jeffries was a bear of a man. Way bigger than even Ben. No way could he physically subdue him without help.
Ben stepped up behind Nurse Bertram. “I’ll try to talk him down, but you better get a sedative.”
“Right.” With a curt nod, she slipped past Ben. Jeffries turned on Ben. The soldier’s face was flushed and he was trembling all over.
“Stand down, Private.” Ben barked the order like a sergeant might.
It almost worked. The soldier went ramrod straight and raised his hand to salute. But then a truck backfired outside the tent and pushed him back into the war zone in his head.
“The Krauts are out there.” The private’s eyes went wide as he stared at Ben. “You’re not Sarge.”
“You’re right, Private Jeffries. But your sergeant brought you here. You’re in a medic tent. The war is over.”
“You’re lying. You’re one of them.” The man made a sound something like Ben had once heard from a wildcat caught in a trap back home.
“Watch out, sir!” a soldier in the bed beside Ben warned. A full cast on his leg must have kept him from escaping the tent with the other men. “He’s about to blow.”
“Keep your mouth shut!” Jeffries lunged up the narrow aisle toward the kid who spoke up.
Ben stepped in front of Jeffries and gave him a hard push backward that barely slowed the man down. Nurse Bertram needed to hurry with that sedative.
“Come on, Private. I’ll help you look for that gun.” That slowed him better than the shove but only for a moment.
“You’re trying to trick me. That’s what the enemy does. Tricks you. Then they shoot you.” His face changed, looked tragic. “They killed all my buddies. My brothers. All of them.” The anger came back. “But they won’t get me without a fight.”
He roared like an enraged bull this time and came at Ben. The beds crowding in on both sides of the aisle left little room for escape. Besides, he couldn’t scoot out of the way and let the big man change his focus to the kid in the bed again. One messed-up leg was enough.
Ben blocked the man’s way. “Easy, Private. We’re on your side.”
The man wasn’t hearing anything except the battle in his head. He lowered his shoulder and banged into Ben.
Ben couldn’t keep his feet. The man was too heavy. He tried to catch himself as he fell, but then Jeffries came down on top of him. It didn’t help that the bone snapping in Ben’s arm sounded like a rifle shot.
Nurse Bertram was back with her syringe. Ben squirmed out from under the big man as the nurse found a place to stab the man with her needle.
Even before the drug had time to take effect, the soldier went from enraged to crying. “I never wanted to kill nobody. Not even those Krauts. I’m sorry.”
The nurse got him up and, with the help of a doctor who appeared on the scene, led him back to his bed. “It’s all right, Soldier. You’ll be going home soon. Things will be better then.” Nurse Bertram’s voice trailed back to Ben.
Ben wondered if that was true. They all said the word “home” like it was a cure for everything. Home. If they could only get home, everything would be good. But Private Jeffries would still have those memories lurking below the surface. Ben too. The things they’d been through couldn’t be brushed aside.
Holding his injured arm to his chest, Ben leaned against the foot of an empty bed and looked across at the young soldier. “You okay, kid?”
“You mean besides having a broken leg?” The kid smiled a little. “My leg bone made an even bigger crack than your arm.”
“Lucky no shell-shocked guys were around you at the time then.” Ben tried a smile back at the kid but couldn’t quite push it out on his face. He felt dazed. He started to reach up to see if he had a lump on his head, but he didn’t want to turn loose of his arm.
He pushed away from the bed and the tent started spinning. War was a funny thing. He had gone through almost four years of stepping around land mines, diving for cover when the bombs started falling, and dodging bullets and shrapnel to pull wounded men back to safety without much more than a scratch. Not one battlefield wound, and now he’d been taken down in the middle of a hospital tent.
The kid kept talking, but Ben couldn’t make out any words. He sat down on the bed. They’d get to him when they had time. Hadn’t he done enough making one man wait with no more than a broken bone to stop another man bleeding? That’s how you did things. Took care of those in the most need.
He had a banged-up arm, but he didn’t have a broken mind like Jeffries. Like so many other men he’d seen in the field hospitals, tormented by seeing their friends die in front of their eyes and by the noise of death. Ben had heard it too. Death waiting in every explosion.
Nothing like the peace at home. He shut his eyes and let his mind drift to keep from thinking about the pain starting up in his arm. He was on the wooden porch in front of his father’s house. His home. He had known no other except for those months he’d spent in a dorm on the Richmond college campus before the war. And then his home, if you could call it that, was the army, among his brothers in arms.
He didn’t want to think about arms right now. Not his broken one. And not the arms that killed. Home. Better to let his mind drift to home.
He shut out every thought of war and imagined the cool mountain breeze on his face. Dawn was pushing back the shadows of night. The house perched high on the mountain like a bird on a branch. The morning sun bathed the porch in light when it slid up over the neighboring mountain. A mourning dove cooed and then a cardinal added its trilling song. Ben pulled in a deep breath and could almost taste the green pushing in on him from every side. From the open door behind him came the smell of biscuits in the oven and the rustle of his family coming awake like the morning. His father stepped out on the porch behind him.
His imaginings crashed down around him. Even after he did finally make it home, his father would never step out behind him. Instead he had stepped ahead of him into heaven.
But his last words to Ben before he climbed on the train to go to the army camp rang in Ben’s ears. “A man does what a man has to do for his family. For his country. You do that and make me proud, son.”
“Ben, talk to me.” Nurse Bertram’s voice brought him back to the hospital tent. Her cool hand touched his brow. “Did you hit your head?”
“I don’t know.” He tried to remember, but everything kept slipping away. “My arm hurts.”
“Your arm is definitely fractured, but let me check your head.” Her fingers explored through his hair on the back of his head. “Nasty lump there.”
He winced. “Easy.”
“Don’t be such a baby.” She pulled her hand back and flashed a light in his eyes.
“I’ll just lie down here and rest awhile.”
She put her hand under his arm. “Nope, Soldier, come on. No sleeping for you. You’ve got a concussion and we need to find a doctor to do something about that arm.”
“If it’s all right with you, I’ll just go on home and see about it.”
She laughed as she got him up on his feet. “This may be your ticket home, but we better work on you here. Are you sure you even have doctors back in the hills where you’re from?”
“Doctors are kind of rare, but we have nurses. Frontier nurses. They ride horses to your house.” Ben bumped against the bed. Everything was spinning again.
“Horses, huh?” She guided him past the beds. “Maybe you can go home and be one of those nurses.”
“No, that won’t work. They’re all women and right now I don’t think I could stay on a horse.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d been into that moonshine they say you have in the hills.”
Ben tried to shake his head, but that made the room spin more. He shut his eyes and stayed still a second until the nurse eased him forward. “Nope. My pa never had a still. Never made any moonshine. Didn’t believe in it.”
“I see. And what do you believe in, Soldier?”
Her question circled in his head, spinning like the tent was spinning. He wasn’t sure what to answer. He wasn’t sure she even expected an answer. “The Lord” would have been the answer his father could have given without thinking twice. Ben could echo his pa, but shouldn’t a man have his own words?
“Home,” he finally said, barely above a whisper. “The hills of home.”