Chapter 4 - The Mud of Sixty-Eight
He didn't want to sit. You could see the muscles in his thighs twitching, his instincts telling him to run for the door and never come back to this dining hall again. But Holloway gave him a look that brooked no disobedience, pulled the chair back with one foot, and pointed at the seat.
Reese sat. He sat on the very edge of the chair, his hands flat on his knees, his back straight as a broomstick.
The rest of the dining hall had resumed eating, but only in theory. Nobody was chewing. Nobody was talking. Every eye was locked on our table.
Holloway came back with a white plastic bowl full of dark, steaming chili and set it down in front of the boy, along with a metal spoon.
"Eat," I told him.
"I’m not hungry, ma'am."
"Eat it anyway. It builds character, especially when the cook forgets to drain the beans."
He picked up the spoon with fingers that trembled just a fraction. He took a mouthful, swallowed it without chewing, and stared down at the red sauce.
"You asked me where I got this pin," I said, touching the darkened brass on my lapel. "You said men bled for it."
"I... I was out of line, ma'am."
"You were loud," I corrected. "There is a difference between being out of line and being loud. You were both. But you weren't wrong about the bleeding part. A great many men bled for this piece of brass. Most of them didn't get to come home to Dyersburg to talk about it."
I looked out the window. Fort Campbell was cold that day, the November wind whipping across the parade fields, stripping the last brown leaves from the oaks outside the motor pools. But in my mind, the air smelled like wet red clay, burning diesel, and the sweet, rot-sick stench of the jungle after a three-day downpour.
"May of 1968," I told him, my voice falling into the rhythm of memories that I had kept locked in the yellow house in Clarksville for far too long. "We were at an auxiliary aid station five miles south of the A Shau. We weren't supposed to be that close. But the 502nd had taken two companies into a horseshoe ridge, and the North Vietnamese had three anti-aircraft guns dug into the limestone caves. The Hueys couldn't get in to pull the casualties out. Every bird that dropped below the canopy came back looking like a cheese grater, if it came back at all."
Reese didn't take another bite. He was looking at my hands now.
They are spotted with age, the veins blue and twisted like old wisteria vines, the nails clipped short.
"They brought thirty-four boys to us on ponchos in the first four hours," I said. "We didn't have doctors. We had two medical corpsmen who were nineteen years old and had three months of training at Fort Sam Houston, and we had me. I was twenty-three. I had a pair of bandage scissors, four crates of morphine, and two dozen rolls of three-inch gauze."
I leaned forward.
"The mortars started at five in the afternoon. When the first shell hit the surgical tent, it blew the generator apart. We worked in the dark, with two boys holding angle-head flashlights until the batteries died, and then we worked by the light of the perimeter burning."
The dining hall was entirely still now. Even the cooks had gathered at the serving hatch, their aprons white against the stainless steel, listening.
"Around midnight," I continued, "they brought in a staff sergeant. He wasn't much older than you. His squad had been ambushed on the creek trail. He had taken a piece of a mortar fin through his left shoulder, and his arm was hanging by the muscle. But that wasn't what was killing him. He had two holes in his gut from a machine-gun burst, and he was bleeding into his belly."
Reese swallowed hard. His throat made a clicking sound.
"He was crying," I said softly. "Not because he was hurt. Because he had left two boys from his squad behind in the elephant grass, and he thought they were still alive. He kept trying to roll off the litter. He kept fighting me, swinging with that one good arm, calling me every name in the book. He called me things that would have made my Baptist grandmother drop dead on the spot."
A faint, sad smile touched the corner of my mouth.
"I didn't have any more morphine. I had used the last syrette on a boy with both legs gone. So I put my knee on that sergeant’s chest, took a handful of his shirt, and I slapped him across the face as hard as I could."
Reese's eyes widened.
"I told him," I whispered, "that if he died on my table, I was going to find his mother and tell her he was a coward who gave up before the fourth quarter. He stopped fighting then. He looked up at me through the mud on his face, took off the pin from his collar, and pressed it into my hand."
May you like
I reached out and lightly tapped the little brass shield on my coat.
"He told me, 'Hold this for me, Nurse. If I don't make it to morning, throw it in the river. But if I live, I’m coming back to get it.'"
