A Time Ago & Then - Chapter 1. Dry Dock

I was Twenty-two and my Navy enlistment would have been coming to an end in seven months. Laid up in a Foster frame with three vertebrae crushed and fused together by the Docs at Tripler Army General Hospital, I was in dry dock. My boat was also in dry dock at Pearl Harbor Shipyards after a Westpac tour but I wouldn’t be going back to her. My luck had run out over a shuffleboard machine at the Sub-Base EM club.

My luck had run out but not because I didn’t play well. I knew every warp on the board of that machine:  I played good alright… too slick for the squids off the Coral Sea. They met me on the way back to the barracks and worked me over real good: crushed my cheekbone and a few ribs. I’d flipped over a retaining wall to get away and discovered that it was at least twenty feet to the pavement below.  I remember shouting on the way down: “Oh, shit!” and thinking; it is over… this is all I have to show for my life. I hadn’t those thoughts while I was getting the crap beat out of me by the Coral Sea Skimmers. I was busy fighting for my hide. Had I known it would come to this I might have given them their money back. But I chose to make an unscripted exit: they took off, perhaps believing the fall must have killed me and that I could be more trouble than the few bucks I’d conned them out of was worth.

I lay there in that Foster frame after the Army surgeons knitted my vertebrae together, waiting to be carted off for another surgery to patch my crushed cheekbone.

One of the candy-stripers came by and gasped in horror: “My God, what happened to you?”

I didn’t really want to talk… I was a mess. The whole left side of my face was a swollen blob of black and blue, bruised flesh. I could see through my one blurry eye that she was young, cute and innocent enough, “Oh, I got jumped by some skimmers.” I made part of that up because I barely remembered the fall and, vaguely, a shuffleboard game.

“Oh no, were they black?” She had such deep brown eyes. Her sympathy was enough to stir me through the fog of morphine and pain. I hated to disappoint her… I couldn’t remember what race the skimmers were at that time either. Racial tensions were high. It was 1969 and Black Power was combined with anti-war sentiments that divided race and rank in every branch of the armed services.

“Naw, they were white.” I watched with my one good eye her expression sour.

“That is horrid, to think, they were your own kind!”

I could have laughed, had I not been so medicated, because she looked Hawaiian with a good amount of Africa in her Wahini blood… Like it would have been better had they been black.

And, horrid? Nobody used words like that except in old movies.

“Naw, I already told you, they were skimmers.” I was getting annoyed now and hoped she would go away without me having to explain that I’d earned my dolphins as diesel-boat submariner and that a skimmer (any surface ship or crewman) was an entirely different species… Hell, we were practically in a completely different Navy than even Nuke Boats.

“Oh, by the way, how long does it usually take to recover from something like this?” I was unaware that candy-stripers were just volunteers and not nurses.

She could only see my smashed up face, “I don’t know… a few weeks?” She must have been in the dark about my crushed vertebrae.

I added, “Oh, you do know my back is broken?”

“Oh, Jeeze,” her brow furrowed in deep thought; “how bad?”

“Three vertebrae, T-twelve to L-two: Crushed ‘em.” Oh jeeze? An Andy Hardy movie at that!

“Oh, Jeeze,” she said it again… knitting her penciled-in brows, “probably six to nine months.”

Whew, I thought; it is February and my enlistment is up in August… good, I won’t have to go back to the boat… hmmm; counting on my fingers, do nine months extend past my separation date?

Just before I was being prepped for surgery on my crushed cheekbone, a brass oak leaf Major came into my cyclopean view. I saw on the Major’s other collar a brass cross. Oh shit, an Army chaplain. The candy-striper was at the door watching. It was mildly embarrassing that she had to be a witness as the chaplain attempted to do his job. He picked up the clipboard from the foot of my frame, looked at my chart for a name, and slipped right into the topic of his visit.

“Hello, Max… er, Seaman McGee. Would you like me to pray for you?”

“No Padre… no thanks.” I was kinda playing for the candy-striper now but I meant it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk or anything?” the Padre was not used to being shunned, “A short prayer helps before surgery.”

“Helps what, Father? I don’t need help.”

I swear he winced, “I’ve seen many healthy young men think the same as you, and sometimes…”

I’d heard this ministerial tone before, “I’ll take my chances.”

Now he was pissed, “… And sometimes they don’t make it.”

“Well, Padre, I don’t believe in your uniform or your God. Let me go to the grave on that!” On that I saw the girl in the candy-stripes turn away. The Major hesitated a minute, as though he was going to say something, but turned to go pray with someone more receptive on the ward.

I came out of the surgery alive despite my curses. It might have been worse. You never know when you go in for surgery… especially in an Army Hospital at a time when battles like Hill 937 were sending planeloads of 187^th Infantry and 101^st Airborne to Ward Ten in far worse straits than I was in. A little meat-grinder in South East Asia called Hamburger Hill was chewing up soldiers, young men like me, in ways that made me feel like my problems were insignificant.

The candy-striper was there when I came out from the anesthesia. I hadn’t expected her to be anywhere near me after my outburst with the chaplain. My vision was still blurred and a patch of thick gauze covered my left eye but she looked like a bronze angel, “They call me Max, what’s your name?”

“Glenda.”

“I expected something more exotic, like Leilani or something.” I wasn’t in pain… I wasn’t in anything… I was there and that was all there was to it. She was there too and that counted for something.

“It’s just plain Glenda. How are you feeling?”

“Huh, a little fuzzy…”

“You’re in a better mood than when I last saw you.”

Oh shit, I thought, more mawkish concern, “Thanks to the morphine.” Then, after a pause of more than a few uncomfortable minutes, I spoke through a thick anesthetized tongue, “My mood is cheerful enough… what do you mean?”

“You tore into the chaplain…. He was just trying to be helpful.”

“How’s it helpful to tell me I might die?”

“Don’t you think about what will happen to your soul, Max?”

“You tell me what a soul is, Glenda, and I might get concerned about it.”

She turned to walk away and, over her shoulder added, “We’ll talk about it when your mind is clearer and you are in a better mood.”

“My mind’s clearer than it will ever be. How am I in a bad mood?”

“It could be better.” She smiled and walked out of sight from my one good eye.

Ward Ten was the orthopedic ward where all the broken bones, shrapnel wounds and amputees went. There were Marines, Army, Navy and an assortment of military dependents and veterans in the ward. Our section had a kid in the bed across from mine, a dependent of a Navy NCO barely sixteen, who suffered some form of deterioration of his bones. Billy’s head was held with pins through a halo attached to titanium rods that continued down to reinforce his spine. The Kid (that’s the name we gave him, Billy the Kid) was dying and he knew it. He’d suffered a series of heart failures and each time they wheeled him to the E.R. seemed like it would be his last. 

I was intrigued with him because the Kid was always so damned cheerful. Even though he was sixteen Billy looked more like twelve. Still, he joked and goofed off with the best of us and he was considered one of the men in the ward.

….. All the while I hungered for meaning in my life.

And now I know I must lift the sail

And catch the winds of destiny

Wherever they drive my boat.

To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness

But life without meaning is the torture

Of restlessness and vague desire ---

It is the boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

- Spoon River Anthology -

By

Edgar Lee Masters

A TV program played one evening that the Kid insisted we watch. There were eight beds in our section and the viewing fare was picked by consensus: mostly cop-buddy shows like Hawaii Five-O or Combat reruns. But this particular night everyone ceded and allowed the kid to watch his show; The Spoon River Anthology, from an adaptation of the book of poetry written by Edgar Lee Masters. I wasn’t sure why but I looked forward to the show myself. The theme was somewhat dour as far as I was concerned and I wondered whether it might be too much for the kid. The subject of the anthology was the lives of those buried in the Spoon River graveyard speaking from their graves. After it was over was over Billy asked me; “Do you believe in life after death, Max?”

I adamantly did not believe in any such nonsense but I understood that the Kid was asking because he was preparing to die. Of course, I lied; “Yah, I guess so. What do you think?”

“I don’t know but I’m gonna find out real soon.” He shrugged.

“You mean heaven and hell?” our section was quiet… everyone in earshot was listening. “Whatever; just doesn’t make much sense does it?”

“No, but I’m gonna miss my folks and friends if I’m there and know it.”

“Good point,” I was hesitant but, what the hell, the kid would know soon enough, “it does seem a bit morbid when ya think of it.”

“Anything’s better than this.” He gestured at his halo, monitor and oxygen tanks. I didn’t know what to say and the other GI’s in the room had nothing to say either. Finally, the kid spoke. “Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t so bad that I don’t want to live.”

I was thinking, Shit, he hasn’t even had a chance to get laid yet. Next thing I knew I was making things up. I heard myself saying, “Hey, maybe all this will work out for you.” I knew I was lying and I knew the Kid knew it too.

“Yah, maybe it will work out,” he admitted without a hint of cynicism.

That would be our last conversation. The alarms on the monitors went off around two a.m. That had happened several times before but, as the Docs and nurses wheeled him out to the E.R., the finality of it sank in.

The next day at lunch Glenda wheeled-in the meal cart and passed out the trays to our glum lot. Usually the battle-hardened Grunts and Screaming Eagles would cheer up when a skirt like Glenda walked in the door but there was none of the usual banter.

As she set-up my tray she asked about the kid. Of course, she already knew but it was more to break the silence, “Were you awake when it happened?”

“Yah, we all were. There was a lot of the usual noise.”

“You okay?”

I had been biting my lip and I’d hoped she hadn’t seen it. “Yah, I’m fine.”  A lump the size of a golf ball was lodged in my throat. I didn’t know why but her concern stirred up something deep within me. I wanted to cry but I could not: not here in front of these other men but perhaps… just perhaps, if I were alone with Glenda… far away from the ward… perhaps I could cough up that golf ball and let the dam break. I turned my head into my pillow so she  wouldn’t see the tears. Hell, I didn’t even know the Kid. He was just another bed on the ward. A nuisance… with his monitors and alarms! Damn it all to hell. The nation was at war and so was I. I was at war with myself and I was at war with God. What kind of God would make this mess?

“Glenda,” I called out as she was almost to the door, “You still concerned about my soul?”

“Well… er… yes?”

“Don’t be. I don’t have one.”

“I think you do… and a good one at that.” Thankfully she left. I watched her bronze-toned legs under the candy-striped skirt push her stainless-steel cart of trays down to the other end of the ward.

Ah, I thought, I wonder if my back will be able to manage the ole In and Out with a girl like that when I’m out of here.

My mind must’ve been easy to read because the Jarhead in the bed next to me fended-off his grief by saying, “Yah, I think I’d like a taste of that too.”

I spent my first three months at Tripler Army General Hospital on a Foster Frame. The Foster Frame is a contraption designed to keep one’s spine aligned while it heals. It is a sort of cot that can have another part of the cot attached, like hot-dog buns, so that I, the wiener, can be flipped over without causing problems with the alignment of my vertebrae.

In other words, I lay completely prone for ninety days. Being flipped once every four hours was made tolerable with a steady flow of pharmaceuticals prescribed, traded, swapped, donated or bought from each other. The first week I had a Demerol-drip but caps or tabs of it and Darvon were my regular fare from then on. Besides that, the men back from Nam were rationed two cans of beer a day with their meals. There were enough GI’s who didn’t drink to pass on their ration to me and the other stoners. That kept us in good supply. We learned to open-up a Darvon cap and empty out the Tylenol to ingest only the little red B-B heart. A can or two of beer and six of those little red B-B’s provided a pretty good buzz. Those were my distractions but; most of all, in those first three months, I read.

The first challenge was getting my eyes to work together. After the gauze was removed from my left eye I found that the right eye focused faster, but the left was cacky-wampus, causing me to see double. To read I had to close my left eye. This was more than I was willing to tolerate. I practiced every free minute, getting the railings on the ceiling that held the curtains around my cot above me to align. Seeing double at first, I could only get them to align for a second or two. But, as days passed, I could hold the lines together for longer periods until, after a week or two, they stayed that way.

Once I managed to read with both eyes a whole new world opened-up. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; the Hobbit and the Tolkien Trilogy; Norman Mailer’s American Dream; John Hersey’s The Wall and Hiroshima; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. What the Hospital library didn’t hold momentous events; live on TV, such as the Neil Armstrong’s, giant-steppin-leap-for- man-and-mankind, moon landing occurred. These readings and events stirred my soul toward adventure… an adventure that I’d given up on. For all practical purposes I’d given up on adventure when I dumped my wrap-around sunglasses in the contraband bin upon entering boot camp. I did manage to keep a leather-bound collection of Keats in boot-camp. I had to convince my Company Commander there that it was a Bible: the Bible being the only book that was not contraband. Because it was leather bound and looked like a bible, he approved it.

Sadly, Glenda graduated from high school before I could have any of that. She bid me adieu and thanked me for the experience as she was moving to Davis, California to study veterinary medicine. I ordered a dashiki for her, from the back of a Playboy, as a parting gift. The dashiki came just in time and she wore it to the ward on her last day as a gift to me.

“Thanks,” she turned to model it for me.

“It looks better on you than a Mu-Mu.”

“I promise I will write you often and let you know how I’m doing. Maybe we will see each other when you get out.”

I got a few letters from her after that but they stopped coming by September. I neither saw nor heard from her again.

Finally, my three months in the Foster Frame were up and I would be fitted into a body cast the next day. It was the middle of the night when I nearly sabotaged my recovery by attempting to get up and walk around a bit before being confined to the heavy, full-body, plaster-cast. After all, ninety days was plenty, as far as I was concerned, to mend a few crushed vertebrae. I thought I was special and I didn’t accept Dr.’s Orders, laws of physics or any other law.

First off, I gradually propped myself up on both elbows, keeping my back as straight as I could. As soon as my head was elevated a few feet the blood rushed from the brain and I passed out, falling back flat on the frame.

Whew! I thought. This could be serious trouble.

I lay there for about fifteen minutes and tried again. This time I was able to stay upright without passing out but was still dizzy. I swung my feet off the cot and noted the sensation of the legs filling with blood. Three months of being off one’s feet causes more than a few physical changes. First off the thick skin on the heels and pads of the feet peels off. I hadn’t given much thought of how much padding normal feet have until it all started coming off as those first weeks laid up passed. Then the cartilage in the joints becomes atrophied. As I set my feet on the floor I found out how much cushion the joints of the ankles and knees are needed. Searing pain shot out from my ankles and knees as I stood. I realized then that I might have made a serious mistake as far as my recovery was concerned and lay back down on the frame. It was a hard pill to swallow. I’d never understood until that night that there were physical limitations that even I had to accept.

It was too painful to walk very far at first but I could get around in a wheel-chair. I joined a roving gaggle of amputees and paraplegics who raced about the wards. We were usually stoned or drunk, seeking anyone who might part with a few of this or that to redistribute to ourselves and bed ridden friends back in the ward. I soon was doing wheelies and balancing perfectly with the best of them. I could even negotiate the stairs that way. It was high risk behavior but I didn’t see it that way at all.

I was passing time as the end of my enlistment drew nearer. I was allowed to go into town on a day-pass around the first part of July, even though I still wore the cast that covered my torso. I got down to the Jungle in Waikiki and scored pot to bring back to my pals on the ward. A couple of times I went to Hotel Street massage parlor where I knew one of the girls that would give me a hand-job for an extra ten bucks. But most of all I simply went to the bars and got good and wasted before coming back to the Hospital at night.