DEAN WHITLOCK

The Million-Dollar Wound

Here’s an unsettling look at an uncomfortably near future society where they’ve taken the idea of cost-efficiency a bit too far, and given an ugly new meaning to the old slogan, good to the last drop.

This was new writer Dean Whitlock’s first published story. He has subsequently sold several more stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Aboriginal SF. You will be hearing a lot more about him in the future, too. Whitlock lives in Post Mills, Vermont.

 

THE MILLION-DOLLAR WOUND

Dean Whitlock

“Hell,” Billy said, “it’s only a year. I can make it through a year.” He killed his beer and threw the can at the box of empties. “Besides, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the million-dollar wound.”

He grinned at Frank and me, expecting agreement. We looked at each other and looked back, faces blank. He looked amazed.

“Shit. What the hell do they teach you in medic school? The million-dollar wound is your ticket home. A clean shot through a thigh muscle, a little blood, a little hurt. Keep it clean and it heals right up, but first they give you a Purple Heart and send you Stateside. My grandfather got one in Viet Nam. He was drafted, too, same as us.”

He popped open another warm beer, drank the suds off the top, and grimaced. “This pedro beer is real piss.”

Frank and I finished ours and took more. “Help if it was cold,” Frank said. He went back to his book, and I put a couple of cans in the freezer with the blood.

“Shit, nothing would help this crap,” Billy replied. But he kept drinking it.

Billy was the kid of the unit, or looked it. Small, blond, big grin, bright eyes. He took a lot of crap in boot camp and learned to give it back. Drink hard, swear hard, punch a few shoulders to show you’re tough. He was a draftee, too, and that didn’t help in a platoon full of volunteers. When our medic unit got attached to his group, he started hanging out with us off duty. We drank a lot of that warm Bolivian beer together.

Frank and I weren’t really draftees. Frank was premed, as he used to call it. He couldn’t afford college, so he was getting his training the hard way. He was thin and dark, with blue growth on his chin two minutes after shaving, and he spent a lot of time reading textbooks. I was a CO. I came out of college with an English degree and a choice of immediate employment: war plant, nuke plant, medic, or jail. No Canadian refuge, this war. I took medic, I guess, because I thought somebody had to balance the killing. Anyway, we weren’t volunteers, and that suited Billy. We got to be friends, even.

“So Grampa got out whole,” Frank said.

“Yeah. Spent the rest of his tour in Germany. Drinking real beer.”

“How long was he in ’Nam? Before he got the million-dollar wound, I mean.”

“Six months.” Billy laughed. “Hell, he was halfway home, anyway, wasn’t he? I got eleven months and three days to go, and I haven’t even been shot at.”

“They had shorter months in ’Nam,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“R and R counted,” I told him. “When Gramps went down to Saigon for a week, it was still combat time. He could go for a month to Tahiti and it was still part of the year.”

“Shit,” Billy threw his can at the box. “Figures the army would nix that one. I gotta spend 365 days on the line.”

Frank nodded. “And we’ve got 730 each.”

“With ten sick days,” I added.

“Shit. And you guys can’t even shoot back.”

*   *   *

Patrol was hard work. We were northeast of La Paz, in the foothills near the Mamoré. The terrain was rough and broken, high fields separated by forest and deep ravines. It was hot during the day, cool at night. It rained a lot for weeks and then baked for weeks. The people lived in small houses, raised potatoes, mined copper and tin, and soon enough they started shooting at us. Sometimes it was guerrillas and sometimes it was coke farmers, but the bullets did the same thing. Billy and his unit kept busy shooting back, and Frank and I cleaned up after them.

We were in a quiet area, at least. Short bursts of fire. A few flesh wounds, mostly Band-Aid stuff. One guy tripped, rolled down a hill, and broke his leg. Frank and I slapped on the plaster and carried the dumb ox four miles up to a flat place where a chopper could land.

The first bad one stepped on a blender. That’s a spring-mounted trap that closes on your leg and shreds it from the hip down. He screamed, and somebody else shouted “Medic!” and Frank and I went running up to the head of the column. There was a lot of blood and a lot of pain, and the rest of the unit stood around watching with sick looks while four of them held him down and pried the damn thing open. Then the sergeant shouted them into a defensive formation, and Frank and I tried to stop the bleeding. Frank got real businesslike, pumping in morphine and plugging holes like it was a plastic dummy in training. He had good hands, Frank. He would have made a good surgeon. I just poured on gel and handed him staples and tried not to throw up.

We developed that into a pattern. Frank played doctor and I played nurse and the unit played soldier. Frank took it real seriously, treated each man like he was the only patient we had. Then the fighting got serious, and two weeks later, with nine months and thirteen days to go, Billy got his million-dollar wound.

Frank was doctoring at the other end of the line, so I hauled my kit over to Billy. What could I say? He was lying there with a dark stain spreading down his pants and a big grin on his face. I cut the cloth away and wiped off the blood. There was a pair of holes in his thigh, the front one small and tidy, the back one big and ragged. But it had missed the bone and the artery and he knew it.

“Gramps would be proud,” I told him. “Do you need morphine?” His smile was getting strained.

He nodded. “Might as well celebrate.” I pumped him up and sprayed on some gel, and we sent him off with the rest of the wounded.

*   *   *

Three weeks later he was back, with a Purple Heart and a pair of tiny scars on his leg. No limp, no pain, no Germany. And no more sick days. He had nine months and three days left.

He told us a little bit about it one evening over some beers.

“They took some muscle and skin from my other leg and stuck it in the hole. Then they soaked me in some kind of soup like that shit you guys are always spraying around and shined these big blue lights on my leg.”

Frank was real interested. “What did they give you to eat?”

“Mostly crap. And pills. All the time pills. But no morphine. Not even aspirin. Bastards.”

“Did they use massage?”

“Shit no. They made me lift weights with my foot.”

“What did it feel like under the lights?”

“Hot, I guess.” He took another drink. “Mostly it just hurt. Can’t feel a damn thing now, though,” He rubbed his leg as though he wanted it to hurt. “Shit, it’s like it never happened.”

I handed him another can. “Looks like you’ll have to go for the two-million-dollar wound.”

He laughed sharply. “Right. Next time I’ll ask the pedros to blow my whole leg off. Then the army can send me home to grow a new one.”

We all laughed a little and started making jokes about the wrong size leg, and what else they could grow back. It wasn’t all that funny, but all we could do about it was laugh. The soldier who’d stepped on the blender came back a little later, too, and more of the wounded. The once-wounded. They went back out on patrol and they were a lot more careful. And Frank and I got to work on some of them again.

Billy took his second hit about a month later. Just shy of seven months to go. I remember because Frank and I had scraped the big red crosses off our helmets the night before. Frank started carrying a rifle about then, too. The guerrillas had started shooting medics. Maybe they recognized all the rebuilt GIs and thought we were doing the fixing. What did we know? We just poured on gel, pumped them up, and tried to keep them alive until the chopper came.

We had moved farther to the northeast, still near the river, where the hills were less rugged and ravines more forested. We started using napalm on the guerrillas, too, and they started using it back. Probably our own stuff. They didn’t have planes and choppers to drop it from, so they canned it and lobbed it in with skeet throwers. The guys called them Frisbees. If you were good, you could hit them in the air, but they splattered fire on anything underneath. If you let them hit, they burned less territory.

Billy was at the front of the line—God knows why, because he never volunteered for that kind of duty. The pedros were above us and started firing down on the trail. Luckily, they started shooting as soon as they saw the lead man. Lucky for the rest of us, at least. Billy hit the bushes and started firing back, while the rest of us went into the trees and gave cover. Then they lobbed in the napalm. Two Frisbees, maybe three, they put a pool of fire right on Billy. We heard him screaming, and then he came running out, the right side of his body and both boots on fire.

You can’t stamp out napalm. It sticks to you. We had special blankets and a spray that foamed, and we smothered Billy as fast as we could. His clothes saved most of him from real damage, but his hands weren’t covered, and neither was his face. His right hand was charred to the bone, and three fingers gone. His right cheek started to flake away, and the ear, too, and he had third-degree burns from his neck up into his hair. When we took his helmet off, part of his scalp came with it. There wasn’t much we could do but give him morphine, cover him with gel, and get him out fast. He kept his eyes shut—they were both still there, thank God—and held his left hand in a fist up under his mouth, muttering to himself and crying. I thought he was praying at first, but he got louder whenever we jolted the stretcher or touched him. I could hear him moaning, “Oh Shit, oh shit, oh shit.” over and over again. Even Frank was shaken.

*   *   *

Billy was back in three months, with new pink skin, and a hand that clicked a little when he moved his thumb in a certain way, and white hair in a patch on the right side of his head. And he still had seven months to go. He never talked about the hospital this time, and Frank didn’t ask him. We shared a lot more beer and a bottle of vodka Billy had smuggled back, and talked about sports and video and women and everything but war. But Billy kept rubbing his hand through the patch of soft white hair and clicking his thumb.

And finally, after one long time of silence and clicking and Frank turning pages, he seemed to notice his thumb. He stared at his hand curiously and said, “What do you think they can’t fix? I mean, what if the suckers had burned off both my legs and my balls, too? Would I be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life? Or would I walk around clicking, with a little pump in my pocket for getting it up?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “We’ve seen a lot of guys come back.”

“So who doesn’t come back? I mean, what the hell does it take to get out of this?” I shook my head and offered him the bottle, but he didn’t see it. He answered himself. “I’ll tell you what—you gotta be a goddamn vegetable, that’s what. I mean, you really gotta be maimed. ’Cause they sure aren’t gonna let a little mechanical damage get in the way. I mean, shit, that’s just a little pain. Just kiss it, make it better.” Then he took the bottle. Later that night, Frank and I had to put him to bed.

Billy was real careful for three months. He walked slowly, in camp and on patrol. His eyes moved left to right all the time, scanning. He got thin. Frank and I watched him go from being tense to being scared. It became part of him. He talked and moved and even told jokes scared. He acted calm, but it was fatalism.

Anyway, it was Frank who got hit next, just a month after Billy got back. It was a dumb thing, even for a war. The unit had a bunch of pedros pinned down in a farmhouse, waiting for a chopper to come up and douse them. We were back a ways in some trees tending the casualties. I was putting Band-Aids on a couple of guys who’d gotten nicked, and Frank was trying to stop all the blood from running out of another guy who’d been gut-shot. Suddenly somebody was shooting at us. The two walking wounded started shooting back, and things got real hot.

There wasn’t much I could do, so I crawled over to Frank and started working on the other guy with him. Frank kept his usual calm, plugging and stapling, and we were making headway on his stomach when the pedros shot him in the leg. The GI was past feeling, but Frank got mad. He handed me the stapler and picked up his gun and started shooting back.

The extra firepower seemed to help, because it got real quiet. Then four pedros came out of the woods with bayonets and knives. They got one of the GIs before he even heard them, but Frank and the other guy started firing. Two of them went down right then, but the other two took out the second GI and kept coming. Frank kept pulling the trigger and they kept coming, but then one dropped and the last one made a flying lunge and ended up on his face at Frank’s feet with the top of his head open. And his gun sticking up out of Frank’s foot. The bayonet went straight through six inches into the dirt.

Frank looked down at his foot and up at me. He put down his own gun, wiped his face, and pulled the other gun up out of his foot. Then he sat down and started treating himself for shock. I carried his kit over to him.

“You know,” he said. “That was really dumb.”

I didn’t know if he meant the pedros or his foot. I went over to the first GI and started patching. Billy and some of the other guys showed up just then, and I felt a little better. Billy knelt by Frank and helped him cut the boot away. They took a look at the foot, and Billy squeezed his shoulder.

“You’ll be back in a month, Frank,” he said.

*   *   *

It was only three weeks. Frank said they were getting better at it. He also said there was one thing they hadn’t worked out. Anesthetic. They couldn’t give you too much, because it slowed the healing. It was a long three weeks for him.

He smuggled in some more vodka, though, and brought some news from the States.

“No more draft,” he told us.

“You’re shitting me,” Billy said. He clicked his thumb, a nervous habit now.

“No. They say they don’t need it anymore. The volunteers are enough.”

“They can’t be getting that many,” I said. Half my graduating class had been against the war.

Frank shook his head. “They don’t need as many,” he said. “All they have to do is keep the old ones running.”

“You sound like a mechanic.”

“They gave me a tour of the surgery. They move ’em in, they move ’em out. There’s not much they can’t fix.”

Billy nodded, his eyes hard. Then he had a thought, and he smiled. It looked strange after all that time. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What about us suckers that got drafted already? They’re gonna have to send us home, aren’t they?”

Frank laughed. “Don’t bet on it, Billy boy. You’ve got miles of tread left.” He laughed again, but it was pretty flat.

One thing I learned from Frank getting shot: As far as they were concerned, I was a gringo and I had no right to be there. I agreed with them, but I wasn’t leaving in a box if I could help it. Nonviolence doesn’t preclude self-defense, not when the guy who wants to kill you won’t stop to hear your side of it. That’s what I told myself, at least. I picked up a .45 in exchange for some pure grain alcohol, practiced a few hours, and started carrying it on patrol. It made me feel a little safer. And it wasn’t as blatant as a rifle.

Meanwhile, Billy let his hopes get up about going home. The news came about the draft, and he started waiting for the word. He was still waiting a month later when the pedros got him again.

It was short and dirty, a quick burst of fire from the bushes. Then the pedros took off. The squad went after them and left Frank and me with Billy in the middle of the trail. It was a bad wound. They’d opened his stomach with a shredder and left it and half his intestines lying out on the ground with hundreds of little needles stuck in them. Billy was conscious, beyond pain, watching the organs move as though they were the most interesting thing in the world.

I called for a chopper. Then we clamped the big veins and arteries, pulled out all the needles we could see, poured in some gel, and poured the entrails in with it to move him. Billy stayed awake, watching, and finally I had to walk up the trail to get away from his eyes.

When I looked back, Frank had his rifle up against Billy’s head.

I shouted “Frank!” and ran back toward him. He looked up at me and I stopped, kicking up dust that drifted over him and Billy. “Frank, what the hell are you doing?” He looked down at Billy and then back at me. He kept the gun aimed at the white patch in Billy’s hair. “Frank?”

He cleared his throat and I waited, sweating. The sun glared. Finally he said. “He asked me to do it.”

I looked at Billy. His eyes were closed. “And you were going to?”

He nodded.

“That’s murder.”

He laughed. “You can’t murder a dead man.”

“He’s not dead.” He wasn’t. I could see him breathing.

Frank shrugged. “Brain death. That’s the only thing that will kill him. That’s why he asked me.”

“Frank, a doctor’s got to save lives, not take them. You don’t have the right to make that decision.”

“How many times do I have to save them?” But he put down his gun.

The chopper came and took Billy away, and we went back to base. The next day the Major called me in on the floor to ask what had happened out there. Apparently Frank had come in yelling about zombies and throwing his textbooks at anyone with brass. Somewhere in there he threatened to shoot every wounded soldier on the front. They sent him off, and I heard later that they had him in an institution Stateside. Mentally incompetent. I stayed in the woods with the squad, and eventually Billy came back.

He was down to four months, but he looked like he wasn’t going to make it. They all looked like that now, even the lucky ones who’d never been hit. Hell, most of them were volunteers. They’d come in ready to give their lives for their country. Well, they’d done that. And then some.

Two weeks later Billy got it again, another gut wound. I plugged up the holes in his new stomach and looked at the piece of Teflon tubing or whatever it was that ran out of it. My own stomach twisted. The plastic was worse than blood.

His eyes were closed, and he was breathing unevenly. I’d done all I could with my kit, so I took his hand and held it. I thought he was out, but he opened his eyes and looked at me. He squeezed my hand, and I felt his thumb click in my palm.

“How many times are you going to let them kill me?” he said.

Then he went out for good. I checked for a pulse, but it was gone. I closed his eyes and sat back on my heels and thought about how many times I’d sent him off on the chopper. And how many times he’d come back. And then I remembered that he still had three months and two weeks to go.

That’s when I took out the .45 and shot him in the head. It’s a big bullet, big enough to break your arm with a near miss. No one asked any questions.

*   *   *

I waited for him to come back. I waited three months before I began to believe that Frank was right. And I began to see more head wounds, always in the worst guys, the guys like Billy who’d been hit the most. The guys who had close buddies who’d help them out. Getting out was all they talked about anymore. I did it for one other GI. Like Billy, he asked me to.

And I got a letter from Frank, with a clipping about a peace rally. He was out of the institution and working for some vet agency, writing letters to Congress and to newspapers. He said it was hard, because there was no draft so there was no pressure on anyone at home to save their own butts. But he said it was working. They were going to change things.

I hope to God he’s right. I hope they change the regs tomorrow, or end the war so these guys really could get out. Frank’s the kind of guy who could make it happen.

Me, I’ll do what I can here. I’ve still got six months to go—six real months. I figure I could still help out a lot of these guys. And you do help out. When they ask you, you do it. They’ve got a name for it now. They call it the million-dollar wound.