A COLD HEAT, a short fiction

© 2009 Craig Chereek, all rights reserved

The hospital that I woke up in pulsed with noise, bright light and waves of controlled chaos. Zippy had told us about this place, he’d raced here with his last two dying men, once.

Eyes still closed, I wasn’t dead, I only had a headache. Cracking my eyes, I checked the rest: all present and accounted for. I found myself in a bone-white ward, laying on a white bed at the end of a row of beds, between two walls of windows. The lights had been dimmed. At my feet, another row of beds mirrored mine, few were empty.

The sun was about to rise. To the west, on the plain below, I had a commanding view of the whole familiar airbase carnival running all its rides at once, landings at one end, launches off the other. I knew the biggest things on the base were the fuel bladders, huge, thick rubber bags, swollen like overfilled waterbeds, maybe 50 feet square, and 20 feet high. It turned out they were much faster to replace than the fuel tanks that preceded them: fly ‘em in, unroll ‘em, fill ‘em up, and your air war is back in business. I could just make them out.

I closed my eyes, maybe slept. A little later I noticed they were open, I lay still, looked out the window.

The airbase was a decade old, aging quickly in a hostile terrain, but the fuel-bladders were new. Zippy had told us, the shoulder-fired rocket-grenades now coming down from the north meant those particular waterbeds were recent replacements. The scorched and pockmarked concrete they now held down gave mute, but compelling, testimony. RIGHT HERE, it says, is THE obvious target for a brave Vietnamese lad with a mortar and a death wish, and it only takes one lucky shot to stop the whole movie.

It looked like the Sea-Bees and Engineers were expanding the perimeter, again, here comes two khaki flatbed trucks full of men, a gray one full of fence stakes, and another behind it, this one bouncing an improvised mountain of loosely-secured coils of concertina wire, as they crossed the last ditch, like segments in an elastic caterpillar and then slowly climbed the new grade up the far hillside.  Halfway up, the trucks ran out of road and half men jumped down and started climbing on foot with their shovels and sledges. Some trailed ropes. The other half started unloading the other two trucks.

I was thirsty. This time, I know I slept, because a corpsman woke me up, with four APCs and a cool glass of water. I sat up on my elbow, choked down the pills, drank half the water, lay back down and looked back out the windows.

With an airport, a target, that big and important, VC sappers, solo infiltrators with explosives, were a constant problem. Enter the base with false documents, or come under the wire, leave us a present on a timer and scoot, you might get away with it. Outside the base, if you crawled to within range, fired once, and ducked back out, you might get away with it. But if you fire more than once, somebody will see you for sure, somebody puts out your fire. Didn’t stop it completely, solitary mortar fire and brief rocket attacks were fairly common. In my short visits to that base, I couldn’t help but notice that keeping the old perimeter around the base empty was a full-time three-shift job for hundreds of men and machines. When the new wire was complete, it would be miles longer, and enclose many new rugged ridges, ravines and defensible positions. That job was about to get harder, so more boots are on the way. Mr. Nixon.

The Base Security detail was already three companies strong, with their own Armory. Those were just the eyes on the inside of the base, not counting the MP’s manning the checkpoints and gates. Between the base and the wire, both the Army and Marines patrolled constantly. There were men with binoculars on the warehouses. Outside the wire was no-man’s land.

After dark, a Marine Corp UH-1E helicopter, with a big blister on it called a FLIR pod, used to circle about, chasing moonshadows and gusts of wind through the grass (until the last one was dissected during an attempted emergency landing by an unlucky dogfighter flying an A-6 Avenger). On occasion, a modified C-130 gunship named Spooky flew the truly brilliant “Night Sun,” and if they thought they saw movement, the boys aboard were not at all shy about using the electric mini-gun hanging out its right door, uncorking a continuous pipeline of glowing jacketed lead, like they were force-feeding a volcano to a fire hose. I’d watched them work it on many a night, they could write their names with it, or put a round in every square foot of a football field in one and a half seconds, if you like. If that wasn’t enough, Spooky offered a new fully-automatic 30 millimeter cannon. The hillsides around the airbase were well plowed on a regular basis, yet the tropical sun was undeterred, and the new grasses it commanded were defiant.

Testing my headache, I went back for another sip of the water, and found my old home, the Transient Barracks, small from this distance, by its location right next to the ruins of the burnt Officers Club. A big guy with a big dog on a short leash was letting it nose through the cold ashes. I closed my eyes and rolled over. I laid back down, facing the other way.

This hospital sat on a completely different base, just a half-mile from the airbase, but a thousand feet higher. Growing from just an LZ with a tent and a couple of corpsmen, after ten years of war, it had morphed into a sprawling complex centered around the most useful parts of a standard-issue stateside Surgical Trauma Center. Wrapped around it on three sides, there was the whole damn 2nd Marine Division and all their facilities, including the 2nd Marine Air Wing’s helicopter assets. There was a lot of concrete, and even more asphalt. Another farm of fuel bladders bordered a motor-pool that covered acres, all flanked by a mile of hooches on one side and a mile of warehouses on the other. According to Zippy, the Pentagon had spent the men of the 2nd MarDiv headquartered here like water over the years, and they had kicked ass anyway. The headache was easing up, I opened my eyes again, a little.

Through the east-facing windows in my wing, I had a Technicolor view of their comings and goings. A steady stream of wounded arrived by chopper from all over I Corps. Within seconds of touchdown (and sometimes before), a wind-blasted Navy doctor in blood-splattered scrubs unbelted and unwrapped the relevant parts of each of the incoming wounded, quickly screened them, wrote his coded instructions  in black marker on any exposed skin and ran to the next arriving helicopter. He spent his whole shift in the downdraft of the spinning blades. Right behind him, a procession of Hospital Corps sprinters hustled wounded expertly off the incoming birds and did the 40-yard dash to Pre-op bent over like rickshaw drivers.  Each was but a link in an endless chain, one after the other, backing the stretcher through the swinging canvas doors, turning around a wounded man’s wrist or an ankle, sometimes a face, decoding the Doctor’s instructions. All day, all night.

Florence Nightingale and Sarah Barton would cry tears of joy. If you made it this far, odds were, you would live. Be you American, Canadian, Aussie, Kiwi, Thai, Filipino, Korean, Viet Cong, South or North Vietnamese, military or civilian, they treated anyone, and everyone the same. If American forces found you on the battlefield, until you were patched up or pronounced dead, your uniform was secondary to your humanity. It was a moral point of pride during the war. It said who we were loud and clear, and once you knew who we were, you knew how to behave as a soldier, whoever they were.

Usually.

Many, like me, would be treated for their minor injuries and sent back to the war. Some, like Zippy, would be rushed straight into surgery where their immediate life-support needs were met and all sharp objects and leaks addressed. Just as soon as the  survivors stabilized enough, they would either be choppered out to the Navy Hospital Ship USS Repose circling off Dong Ha, for additional surgery, or, if stable enough, Medevac’d straight back to the states.

Every morning, the rest were tagged and bagged, loaded carefully in a truck with no windows, and slowly driven down the hill to a big building with no windows, right on the runway below, for a trip in a refrigerated C-141 transport with no windows, home to their soon-to-be grieving next-of-kin. Home The Hard Way. On bad days, the truck made several trips down the hill.

Experience had taught that it was best not to transport head wounds for a week, so there was a ward for us. Half, like me,were just shaking headaches after a minor concussion received at the far edge of a blast zone. Data said a week of rest and aspirin, and you were good to go. Nobody stayed long. After a week, you were on the first thing smoking headed in the last known direction of your unit. It was the other half of our ward-mates who had the real problems.
They, with their tubes and bags, wires and blinking lights, would go home strapped to the floor in a stretcher, in a different C-141, one with windows, to a lifetime of nurses and attendants, wheelchairs and bedpans. I was just going back to the war.

My last night there, I asked the corpsmen who came on at 00:00 if I he could spare a smoke, and could I go outside for a walk? I went out the end of the wing and down the wooden stairs, then just a few steps to the steep edge of the plateau, sat down and lit a Pall Mall. Rows of concertina wire uncoiled across the hill below the Hospital were poorly lit by floodlights mounted on the peaks of the roofs behind me. beyond, two miles of blackness. Beyond the darkness, the huge 14th Aerial Port, Danang, and its support bases lay spread out below me like a kid’s train set in a basement. The widely spaced twin runways were lit up like Christmas at the Fillmore, with their rows of red and blue strobes flashing greetings to a wave of fighters landing at one end, and others taking off on full afterburner at the other. That looked like fun.

On one end of the far runway, a funny black C-130 taxied up to the line, stood on its brakes, revved up and left. A massive transport plane I’d never seen before landed at the other end and taxied to a stop. Fork lifts chased it down. On the giant helipad out beyond the second runway, two Chinooks landed tail-heavy almost simultaneously. After letting the turbines spin down, their crews climbed out and some started opening hatches while others chocked the tires and tied it down.  Two others from each of the big choppers walked towards a distant shed, carrying helmets and bags. From here, the men looked no larger than Ju-Ju-Bees. During the lull that followed, it got quiet, and I heard a distant groan. Then I heard it again.

Maybe 100 feet away, at the end of the next wing, a low stretcher lay outside, all by itself in the gravel. I could see a silhouette, and I could see it moving. I heard the groan again, looked around, saw nobody else, and started walking over, my lingering headache cautioning me not to run.

The guy was in trouble, starting to kick, only something about the motion wasn’t quite right: there was only one leg kicking. He was Vietnamese, dressed in bloody city-boy clothes, not yet twenty, and his missing leg was nowhere in sight. There was no coded instructions in marker written on him anywhere that I could see. He was in clear agony with wide, anguished eyes, moaning and groaning, so he was still alive, but it was going to be too late for him pretty soon, the pool of blood he lay in was too deep. He looked right at me.

He had kicked off his blanket, and I could see no bandages, no stitches, just a green web-belt tourniquet wrapped a few inches above the frayed middle of what had once been his thigh. It looked like it had been loosened. I bent over, gritted my teeth, reached down with two hands and tightened it until the bleeding stopped, but I was afraid the flow had already started to lessen on its own. He groaned again.

I went up the short flight of wooden stairs behind him, stuck my head in the door and found a darkened corridor. From the outside, this wing had looked just like the one I was staying in, but instead of an open ward, this one had been divided into semi-private rooms. I moved on down the corridor. All but two of the doors were open, and the rooms behind them dark. Seven, maybe eight doors down, one door was shut, light leaking out from under it, and a low voice could be heard, mumbling. I opened the door and peeked in.

Two Corpsmen we sitting in chairs facing each other, and the one with the spittle trailing from his open mouth was slumped so deep in his that the back of his knuckles were almost on the floor. His chin rested on his chest and his eyes were closed. The other was sweating profusely, had a cord tied around one arm just above the elbow, and had something shiny palmed in the hand of the other, which he was using to flick at a vein with his fingernail. He looked up when I entered.

“What do you want?” he said.

“There’s a badly injured guy on a stretcher bleeding out just outside your wing, could use some help.” I showed him my bloody hands.

“What’s it to you?”

“You’re the corpsmen, doc, I’m just a grunt. What’s it to you?” I answered.

“It’s eight hours of morphine, that’s what it is. He’s dying, why waste it on a dead dink?”

“He’s not dead yet.”

“And he won’t be, either, until all his meds are charted and my watch is over.”

“Somebody doesn’t help him soon, he’ll be dead long before that”

“Not according to his chart.”

He returned his attention to his vein. I shut the door behind me. The guy on the stretcher was unconscious when I walked past him. I did not get back to sleep, and the tropical sunrise was a very long time coming, bringing lots of heat, but no warmth, none at all.

 

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