“We’re all dead over here, Monaco,” I said. “We re all dead and just hoping that we come back to life when we get into the World again.”
“Yeah…” He patted me on the arm. Somebody called my name and I looked up. It was the doctor. He came and started wheeling me into the operating room. Monaco held my hand until the doctor, rolling the gumey I was on, pulled it from his hand. I had never been in love before. Maybe this was what it was like, the way I felt for Monaco and Peewee and Johnson and the rest of my squad. I hoped this was what it was like.
I dreamt about the Apollo Theater. I dreamt that I was in the Apollo and the Shirelles were there. There were a hundred girls in the audience, and they were all going crazy over the Shirelles. Peewee was there, too. He was saying something about the Shirelles not being so hot. I told him he was crazy. He said they had better singers in the projects in Chicago. I told him he was a Chicago fool. We were having a good time, me and Peewee.
Then I heard my name. I looked at Peewee to see if he was calling me, but he had his back toward me. I stood next to him and looked at his face but he was watching the stage. And still I heard my name being called.
“Perry!”
I opened my eyes. There was a nurse. She wasn’t pretty. Her eyes were brown, tired.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hi, yourself, soldier,” she answered. There was more life to the eyes. “How you feeling?”
“Okay, how’s my leg?”
“You won’t be dancing on it for a while, but it’ll come around.”
She gave me something to drink that tasted like orange juice and castor oil. She fixed my pillow and asked me where I was from.
“New York,” I said. “Where you from?”
“Puerto Rico,” she said, smiling. When she smiled she was very pretty. “Santurce. You know where it is?”
I didn’t. She started to leave and I called her back. “Look, you see a guy named Gates? Harold Gates?” “Could be around here,” she said. “You get any pain in the leg, you call the nurse. Try not to ask for painkillers unless you really need them, though, okay?”
“Sure.”
My mouth was dry and tasted like gasoline residue. The nurse wheeled me out into a small room. There was another guy there, he was bandaged around his chest. He was staring at the wall.
“How you doing?” he said.
“Okay. How do my legs look?”
He looked down at them. “They’re there,” he said.
Peewee found me two days later. He was in a wheelchair and came up alongside the bed like gang-busters.
“I got full charge of the numbers racket in this hospital,” he said. “What you want to play?”
“How the hell you doing, Peewee?”
“What number you want to play?” he insisted. “How about 3-1-2?” I said.
“That’s too long for me to write down,” he said. “I’m out of here in two weeks.”
“Back to the States?”
“Where else I’m going to go?”
“How’s your wound?”
“Nothing to it,” Peewee said. “He cut enough to make me have to have another damn operation when I get back to the States, that’s all.”
“Is it serious?”
“Serious enough to get my ass home,” Peewee said. “I’m gonna say a prayer to Buddha for the boy who done it soon’s I get a chance.”
“They didn’t tell me anything yet,” I said.
“If they say you ain’t hurt bad enough to go home you got to play crazy. Tell them you keep seeing pink-ass zebras running around the room and vou want to catch one of them and eat him.”
“I’ll tell them something,” I said.
“They ain’t getting me back in this war. We been in this shit too long, man” — Peewee shook his head — “and it’s too damn heavy.”
The nurse from Santurce was named Celia Vilas. She got us some beer, and me and Monaco drank it on the night before Monaco had to go back to the boonies. Peewee couldn’t drink anything except plain water and a little warm milk. We did a lot of drinking and a lot of crying. Me and Peewee didn’t want Monaco to have to go back. Monaco didn’t want to go, either. But he didn’t feel it was right to leave the squad unless he had to.
Peewee got sick, threw up, and busted all his stitches. The doctors had to sew him up again, and I realized that Peewee was hurt worse than I thought he was. Monaco said he would come by in the morning before his plane left and say good-bye. He didn’t. He left a note at the desk, and Celia gave it to me. It said that I had to wear a tux to his wedding.
I got to sit up in a wheelchair, and the leg felt all right in spite of the cast. It felt good. I hoped it wasn’t. I could make it with a limp. I just didn’t want to go back to the boonies anymore.
We got a call from Lieutenant Gearhart on the ham radio network. He told us the other guys in the squad were all right. It was nice of him to call us, but it wasn’t true. Monaco wasn’t all right. Monaco was like me and Peewee. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren’t all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.
He also told us that Captain Stewart had been promoted.
It was two weeks before they took the cast off. The doctor looked at the X rays and then at the wound.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay,” I heard myself saying.
He examined the chart again, then went to the foot of the bed. “You’re Richard Perry, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was your stateside station?”
“Fort Devens.”
“Why were you in combat?” he said. “You’ve got a medical profile. Did you volunteer?”
A butterfly, maybe a moth, had gotten into the room. It flittered about the ceiling, then landed on the foot of the bed opposite me.
“No, sir. They said the profile from Devens hadn’t arrived.”
He looked at the record again. “It was here since, oh yes, the eighth of March. I guess it was late. You’re going to be sent home. This is your second Purple Heart, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hope it’s your last, Corporal.”
Peewee had another operation on his stomach for something called adhesions, but he was still scheduled to leave with me.
We kept up with the war in Stars and Stripes, but it seemed different in the papers. In the papers there didn’t seem to be any cost. A hill was taken, or a hamlet, and the only body counts that were given were for the Congs. Once in a while there would be mention of our own killed, but the numbers didn’t seem to even match the numbers I saw in the hospital unit.
President Johnson was saying that the United States was willing to stop its bombing if the North Vietnamese were ready to begin serious talks.
We looked for word of our own guys, of the squad, but it was as if we weren’t even there. The papers mentioned something about the Third NVA, a crack Cong regiment, being pushed out of the Nui Loc Son basin, but it was only that, a mention.
A sergeant I got to play chess with told me that the personnel sergeant would look up friends for you if you gave him a few dollars. I found him and gave him ten bucks to look up Judy Duncan. The guy, a tall red-faced spec four with freckles and a shock of red hair, told me he would look her up and that I could leave my name and come by later.
“You a relative, or just a friend?”
“Just a friend,” I said. “But I’m shipping out for the States and…”
He had already turned back to his papers, so I left.
Peewee stayed in his bed for a day and a half. He said he didn’t want anything to happen to the wound.