“Estep, James L., Captain.”
“Service number?”
“05322246”
“Unit… next of kin… home of record.” And so forth.
After giving me a general wipe down to remove most of the mud, they gave me another shot of morphine, covered my nakedness with a blanket, wrote up what they had done, and put me back on the helicopter.
It had all taken less than twenty minutes.
My next stop was one of the Corps’ evacuation hospitals, a major medical facility located at Hue-Phu Bai. Here things did not go nearly as quickly as they had at Camp Evans. After being hurriedly transported from my Huey into a spacious warehouselike structure, I was placed on a concrete floor—and left there.
It was a dark, dreary place, but there was still enough light to see that I was not alone. Stretchers such as mine, with wounded soldiers atop them, literally covered the building’s floor. Many of the men were in pain. Some of them moaned, a few called for their mothers or divine intervention, while one simply screamed over and over. There was one other who loudly cursed everything and everyone imaginable.
Taken together, these many expressions of pain produced an eerie, morbid “oversound” that Hollywood could never recreate in its most macabre horror films. I didn’t like it. I missed the security of my company. I missed sitting atop my mermite and discussing the state of the command with the Bull.
The hours passed. Oh, how my leg hurt! The pain began coming in waves, the crests of which brought tears to my eyes. Occasionally a medic would check my wound and vital signs.
“How’s it going, buddy?”
“I’m in pain. Lots of pain.”
“Sorry, buddy, can’t give you anything yet. Too soon. Hang in there.”
Don’t call me “buddy,” goddamn it! I’m a captain, captain of infantry, queen of battle! Address me as “sir.”
But he had already left.
They continued to hurry stretchers out one end of the building, while bringing them in the other just as quickly.
I know what we have here, I thought to myself, remembering my Special Forces training. This is the triage process, the process of determining priority of treatment when confronted with mass casualties. Those with life-threatening wounds, but who can be saved, go first. Serious but non-life-threatening wounds are treated next. Those so seriously wounded that treatment would probably be of no avail—well, you put them in the corner and call the chaplain. This is a good sign! I’m not in a corner, and I’m obviously not being treated as first priority in their sorting process.
Sometime later the medical attendant returned.
“How’s it going, buddy?”
“Are you gonna give me a shot?” I asked. You can call me buddy if you’ll give me a shot.
“Yes, but only if you feel you really need it.”
You pompous sonofabitch! Who made you keeper of Uncle Sam’s medicine chest?
“Yes, I really need it, goddamn it! And if you call me buddy again, if you don’t address me as sir, I’m gonna have you up on charges!”
I must have drifted off for a short while. Suddenly, I awoke to find myself being moved. It was my turn. Lifting me from the stretcher, they placed me on a gurney and wheeled me through the double swinging doors at the end of our “warehouse.” The next room was a brightly lit operating facility, a large one composed of several cubicles. I was wheeled into one of them.
“Okay, what do we have here?” someone asked.
“High-velocity gunshot wound, lower right leg. Compound fracture, tibia-fibula. He’s stable,” someone else replied.
Stable, my ass. I’ve never been so unstable in my entire fucking life.
“Roll him on his side. We can handle this with a spinal,” the first party replied.
As they rolled me over on my side, a third party said, “This won’t hurt at all, and it’ll take the pain completely away.”
He, or she, was 100 percent correct. It didn’t hurt, and, like magic, the pain disappeared! For the first time in the six to eight hours since Moseley had pulled me over that paddy dike, my leg didn’t hurt. I felt absolutely nothing from the waist down. Now, with the pain gone, I could feel the effects of the morphine, or Demerol, or whatever I was shot up with—and it felt good.
All right, Doc, let’s get on with this operation. Piece of cake! Like we say in the Cav, “Ain’t no big thing.”
A bit fuzzily, almost mindlessly, I watched as they did a quick prep and then went to work trying to clean up the mess Charlie had made of my leg. A modern high-velocity projectile, regardless of its caliber, destroys a lot of tissue as it passes through the human body.
An AK-47 round is no exception. Hence, the team’s first order of business was the debridement, or removal, of this dead meat, which they accomplished quickly and efficiently. A drain was then inserted in the open wound, the wound sutured around it, and the leg set and plastered around the drain. Then I was whisked away as one of the surgical team yelled, “Next!”
Later that night or early the following morning, when the effects of the spinal had worn off, I awoke in one of Hue-Phu Bai’s holding wards to find the searing pain once again attacking me in throbbing waves. A nurse gave me a shot and a sleeping pill, and I drifted off for another couple of hours. This was the first night of a sleep, wake, pain, wait, shot, pill, sleep again ritual that would be part of all my nights for weeks, indeed months, to come.
Sometime after the new day had dawned, a doctor came by to tell me of my postop prognosis.
“You lost a lot of bone there, Captain. About two inches. That’ll never come back, so we’ll probably be looking at footwear buildup and a leg brace somewhere down the line. You also have some nerve damage.”
“What about the leg, Doc? Am I gonna walk on it, run on it again?”
“I honestly think so,” he said, “but, of course, I can’t guarantee it. We’ll be watching closely for any infection in the coming weeks. You know, you really shouldn’t lie in a rice paddy with an open wound.”
He smiled at me a moment and then continued: “Although amputation… loss of the leg, or a portion of it, is within the realm of possibility, there’s no medical reason for worrying about that at this time.”
I could not have asked for a more honest or forthright opinion. I thanked him and never saw him again.
After he departed, a chaplain from the First Cavalry Division came by, to talk to me about those things that chaplains get paid to talk to wounded soldiers about, none of which interested me very much.
Instead, I wanted news of my company. How are the wounded? Did they take Xom Dong My? What did they find? Where are they now? Who’s in command? Of course, he was unable to answer any of my questions, but he did write them down and promised to get back to me just as soon as possible. I thanked him—and never saw him again.
That night many of us on the ward were loaded stretcher to stretcher on a C-141 StarLifter to begin our long flight home. As we went wheels up,” leaving Vietnam and the war behind us—or so we all thought—my thoughts remained with Charlie Company.
Let it go, Comanche Six; let it go. It’s over!
Indeed it was. I was no longer Comanche Six. Or Comanche anything. I was just another wounded soldier.
24. War’s End Walter Reed General Hospitaclass="underline" 11 March 1968
March’s cold damp air felt foreign, unfamiliar, as we were carried from our StarLifter to the awaiting ambulance buses at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. It was a clear, frigid night, and the temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing, manifest evidence that the Nam was indeed behind us and we were home!
But there was no celebration, no kissing of our native soil, or screams of joy, or tears of relief. There were no wives or girlfriends, no bands, no flag-waving masses, no grateful citizenry throwing flowers at our feet—those of us who still had feet. Nor did the government that had sent us forth to do battle have a single representative, uniformed or otherwise, there to greet us on our return. Only the bus drivers, standing by idly with cigarettes dangling from their mouths and hands in their pockets, waited planeside. Once our stretchers were unceremoniously strapped into their vehicles, we began the last leg of our twelve-thousand-mile trip home.