Christmas Day

by
David Avery

My ears were ringing after almost eighteen hours of flight coming from Bien Hoa, Republic of Vietnam via Camp Zama, Japan to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, DC with only one stop. It's Christmas day, 1969 and my war is over. The rear ramp of the C-141 is lowered and our flight nurses with the questionable help of some bored airman types unload the stretchers from the cargo bay into waiting buses. I see they are basically school buses painted air force blue, only there are no seats, just pipe stands to hold the stretchers. The bumper legend identifies the bus as property of the 318th materials handling squadron. Well, I suppose that's right; the bored EM's treat the stretcher patients more as cargo pallets than living humans. But then the year following Tet '68 has seen one or more of these planes arrive at Andrews each day. Lying on the concrete I see it takes four buses and a refrigerated truck to empty our Starlifter. The truck is for the pallets of aluminum coffins coming off the conveyor at the front cargo door and bound for delivery to Arlington. Sometimes it's better to ride in the back of the bus.

The kid driving the school bus looks like he's thirteen and drives with the enthusiasm, if not the skill, of a Sterling Moss. We circle Washington on the beltway, the capitol dome visible in the distance. Coming off the Georgia Avenue exit, we head south past red brick row houses. Black families are sitting on tiny urban front lawns, watching kids race up and down the sidewalk on new bicycles. On a park bench at the corner, several old men pass a bottle in a paper bag. We stare at them; they ignore us. We're just another blue bus in the daily parade past their corner.

Walter Reed is an imposing brick campus with white columns. A kid costumed in doctor's whites comes down the bus checking charts and giving delivery directions to the orderlies. He doesn't speak to the patients or make eye contact. At my stretcher he flips the foolscap back, says "thoracic surgery" in a bored voice and moves on.

The stretcher is strapped to a wheeled gurney and we set off on an endless journey down tile corridors. I say "down" because it's true - the floor of every hallway gently slopes, making transporting patients easier I suppose. We take an elevator to the top floor and then serpentine our way across campus. The orderly has the knack of aiming the gurney by riding it with his arms and steering it by dragging a foot - a bit like riding a skate board. He's clearly an expert - we shoot the 180 degree corridor reversals without touching a wall. Finally we push through swinging doors and stop at a nurse's station trimmed with worn crepe paper Christmas ornaments. Nurse Rachet looks up from her paperwork and says "Bed 18". A few moments of agony as the transfer from stretcher to bed is made, and I'm finally lying on clean sheets in a real bed, the first I've felt in almost a year. Nurse Rachet appears and I tell her I'm in pain, not having received any medication since somewhere over Montreal. She tells me I have to have new orders for medication from the resident on duty before I can have any drugs. "Wouldn't want to get addicted would we?" I think about the half kilo of stash  kept in the left sponson box and decide to say nothing.

The pain is getting really apparent, making it hard to think. I try to do the trick with meditation a girl from Sweet Briar taught me. Oni Mani Pade Home - was that it ? Oni Mani Pade Home. Oni Mani Pade Home. She said Hindu's using only the chant could have major surgery. Seemed exotic and quite possible lying on a rock in the sun in the Maury River with her. Now it seems a rather thin reed for pushing back the pain. Finally another kid in doctor's greens appears at the bedside and grabs my chart. "Hmmmm." Flips back the blanket, takes a stethoscope from his lab coat pocket and listens to my chest. "Hmmmm." "Nurse, call transport and have them haul this" (quick glance at the chart)" lieutenant over to the pit. We can't do any more for him here and he's going to lose that arm. The lung and heart damage will either kill him or it won't. They can take care of his chest drains over there". Then to me. "We're going to transfer you to orthopedic surgery where they can better care for you. They'll give you something for pain there" Another endless swooping ride on a gurney, but the pain is such that I can't appreciate the skill of the attendant this time. We crash through double swinging doors and screech to a halt in front of another nurse's desk. This one is young and pretty. "New meat for you.", the orderly says cheerfully. "Put him in 2 in the center pit", she says.

There was that word again - "the pit". I think back to stories from the civil war about the dying tents where terminal patients were put to await release. The pit sounds like that. We round a sharp right turn and there is music, an expensive Japanese tape deck playing the Animals anthem of Vietnam: "We got to get out of this place, if it is the last thing that we ever......" We push through a last set of swinging doors decorated with plastic holly and the music is now awesome, so loud the gurney rocks. The ward has eight beds in two rows of four. The second bed on the left is empty, well not empty, just it is the only one without a patient. Bed two has sacks of chips, Christmas candy, bottles of booze and soda, and incongruously, a set of handle bars from a Harley motorcycle. Two girls in starched nursing student's uniforms sit on the bed, holding each other up. In the middle of the floor, a tall blond man with one leg is dancing, one hand on an aluminum crutch, the other around a girl in a student nurse uniform. At the far end of the room is an enormous Sansui amplifier and two of the biggest speakers I've ever seen, all resting on the cardboard shipping crates they came in. The fellow in bed three has no hands but is drinking Jack Daniel's from a hospital glass through a bent glass straw. His prosthesis and harness hang from the bed. "Pour you a drink, lieutenant? Patty, pour a drink for our new member." Without quite realizing it, I've just joined a new unit. We're all back from Vietnam where we were lucky enough to leave behind only non-essential body parts but where unfortunately we couldn't leave our memories. Over the next year the gimps and crips and brothers of Walter Reed ward one, The Pit, will heal each other and each in our own way try to build a new life. One war is over, another battle with an uncertain outcome starts on Christmas day.