There was this man, naked except for a diaper, rolling and twisting on the hospital bed.
I was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for two months in 1965 as part of my U.S. Army medical/psychiatric training prior to my assignment at Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
I remember changing the diaper of this young man, a newly commissioned 2nd lieutenant. He had been out on the town, celebrating his commission, when he got in a car wreck that left him with an inoperable brain injury. He couldn't feed himself. He spoke only gibberish. He had no control of his bowel or bladder. I was told he'd be that way the rest of his life.
I remember washing down the colonel in the showers. He had shit the color of yellow mustard over the lower half of his body. Today he'd be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
I remember talking with another colonel who had been admitted to the psychiatric ward for depression. He was quiet, soft spoken. Neither of us could ever quite get a handle on the reason for his chronic depression. I remember feeling intimidated due to the man's rank, although he never gave me cause to feel that way. (I later experienced depression at the age of 40. I too, never got a handle on it. Best way to describe it is to ask you to picture that brief scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is at the bottom of the swimming pool, totally disconnected from the guests chatting poolside.)
I remember the day I turned 19. That night I hoisted a few at a bar across the street from Walter Reed. The place was dimly lit and smoky. I remember the beers were very good.
I remember the lady, a captain, who'd been committed to the psychiatric unit. She scared me. I hated working that ward, dreaded going there, because she always scared me. Her right leg had been amputated because of cancer. The operation saved her life, but she lost her soul. She was verbally abusive to everyone she came in contact with, patients and staff alike. She was the only patient who ever truly frightened me during my three years in the Army. It was like she was dead inside. She still scares me.
I remember being taught how to properly change bedsheets. The Army way. I remember being taught the proper procedure to administer an enema. We practiced on a pliable plastic dummy. (I remember hoping the day would never come when I was called upon to give an enema, unless it was to a pliable plastic dummy.) I remember learning how to give three different types of injections. Learning the time-saving method of checking a ward full of patients' pulses. (15 seconds, then multiply by 4.) How to take blood pressure. (Blood pressure was always one of my favorites. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I got to use a stethoscope so I could listen to the woosh-woosh of blood.)
I remember the young catatonic soldier back from Vietnam. I remember goofing on him as a way to shock him out of his catatonia. I remember him telling me, after he had recovered sufficiently to speak to me, that he was aware that I was goofing on him and that he thought it funny. But that wasn't enough to shock him out of his frozen state, and so he could only observe me, but not react in any way.
I remember Private Borkowski, a patient on the psychiatric ward. He could have been the model for Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I remember the soldier on the orthopedic ward. He was a big, muscular man. A sergeant. His right femur had been shattered by a bullet. He was always complaining about the pain. The white bone stood in marked contrast against his black skin. He could have been a linebacker, once.
I remember the triple amputee on the other side of the same ward. A mine had blown off both legs and an arm. Shrapnel pocked his face. The explosion left him partially deaf and partially blind. His mother visited him every day. He hoped to eventually go to college.
I remember the nurse I should have dated.
I remember the soldier, recently deemed fit for psychiatric outpatient status, who one day grabbed an MP's pistol, fired one shot into the wall, and, with the second shot, blew out his brains. We washed down the walls.
I remember the sergeant, Sergeant Glen McCabe, taking me on my first coon hunt with some other wardmasters. I remember their look of astonishment when my first shot brought down a coon treed high up a tall pine. The spotlight caused the coon's eyes to glow as I took a deep breath, let out half, and squeezed off a round. I thought I'd missed. Seconds later we heard a rustling where the coon's eyes had been. Small limbs floated to the ground. The coon followed, crashing to the forest floor. It landed with a thud, missing one of the sergeants by a few feet. Lucky shot.
I remember Lieutenant Swain, a blonde nurse with whom I spent some quality recreational time.
I remember assisting in the administration of ECT to a young woman patient, the wife of an Army captain. I remember my embarrassment as the nurse unbuttoned her blue pajama top, briefly exposing her breasts. I remember the instructions to hold her left wrist loosely when the electric current was applied. I remember how she appeared to be quite sane for an hour or two after each treatment, only to later descend into a depth of madness I could not begin to fathom.
I remember Captain Dinoff, a psychiatrist from New York City. He appeared competent but somewhat detached, as if he'd rather be at some party in New York City instead of doing a tour of duty in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. I remember him ignoring complaints voiced by a young patient of pain in the knee. Captain Dinoff dismissed the soldier's complaint, contending it part of the soldier's psychological disorder. The soldier kept complaining of the pain until, weeks later, Captain Dinoff finally relented and sent him off to be looked at by a medical doctor. The boy's leg had to be amputated just above the knee due to cancer. The rest of the patients soon came to believe this was Captain Dinoff's fault. Some of the staff felt the same way.
I remember Private Borkowski loudly belittling Dr. Dinoff whenever he walked on the ward. The young man whose leg was amputated was Borkowski's friend. Borkowski publicly (and quite loudly) declared Dr. Dinoff unfit to be a doctor. Borkowski rallied the rest of the patients, turning them against Dr. Dinoff.
I remember the running joke on the psychiatric wards at Valley Forge General Hospital. That the only way to tell the patients from the aides was that the patients wore blue and the aides wore white. To some extent this was true.
I remember so much. That's why it hurts me to learn of the mess at Walter Reed, and it angers me when the incompetencies of our nation's leaders are exposed for Americans to see, and yet they continue to sit on their hands and do nothing.
Sometimes I read, or I hear, that the American people are not stupid. I strongly disagree. The great majority of this country's citizens are either incredibly, pathetically stupid, or they are simply out to lunch. If this were not so, the American people would have long ago demanded impeachment of those responsible for the ever lengthening list of moral tragedies following September 11, 2001.
America, you are like the lady captain who gained her life but lost her soul. You're beginning to scare me.
Whenever you can, please give to the Disabled American Veterans.
One Black Soldier
Summer, 1966.
I am trying to take
a Polaroid picture
of one black soldier
doing the Ali shuffle
outside the barracks
at Fort Sam Houston
in San Antonio, Texas.
He will not hold still.
"Viet Nam, here I come!"
He is 19 years old,
bobbing and weaving
up and down
the barracks' steps,
smile as wide as Texas.
Hey! Hold still a minute wouldya?
Okay... Now!
The print slides from the camera.
A minute later he is grinning at me,
fists frozen in air,
the world's greatest.
"Yeaaahhh! We gonna whip old Charlie's tail!"
Pop! Pop!! Pop!!!
His fists smack the air as he
ducks and dodges
through the jungles of Viet Nam.
He is 82nd Airborne.
He is my friend.
One year later -
I'm stationed at Valley Forge General Hospital at
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
I work nights on orthopedic ward 5.
There are strange, sucking noises
coming from the ward
as I
sterilize the medicine carts.
Broken femurs.
Maggot-eaten men.
I keep my distance.
One morning,
one black soldier
wheels himself along the
polished wooden hallway.
His stumps end
high on boxer's legs,
six inches above the knee.
Our eyes touch.
I want to disappear.
We shake hands.
Smile still as wide as Texas,
yet,
(we both silently understand)
not the same smile.
He tells his story.
As he speaks my mind begins to wander...
those two white-bandaged phantoms are
waving the air,
waving at me?
telling a different story,
speaking the body's agony of being
blown
apart
while on night patrol in the
jungles of Nam.
Ascuncian,
the Hawaiian GI
who bunked on the cot
under me
at Fort Sam,
(whom I never liked
because,
one day,
for no apparent reason,
he threatened me,
and then he slammed me,
hard,
against the latrine wall)
was ripped into
two pieces,
machine gun fire
raking across his back
from an unseen enemy
embedded in the jungle.
A year never seemed so far away.
My friend
has brought the war
home.
I grudgingly accept it.
I take it to
my barracks' room
and sleep with it.
I wake up with it
that afternoon.
I strap it to the back
of my motorcycle.
I ride the back roads of the
Amish countryside.
I bury it beneath a
dying
red sun.
Summer's greens turn gray,
as a Polaroid picture
of one black soldier
burns a hole in my heart.
