Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

Book by ONeill Susan Kramer

The Boy from Montana

Smoke hung like a curtain in the dying light, softening the lines of Agnes Reedy’s face. It was a worn face, square, heavy. She squinted as she took a last drag on her cigarette, dropped the spent butt, and ground it out with her sneaker. Then she picked up the crushed filter and slipped it into the pocket of her bloodstained operating room scrub shift, a strange gesture of tidiness amid the stark disarray of the dirt-bound hospital compound. She leaned against the picnic table.

“I’m sorry you had to go through something like that so soon,” she said. “You’ve been here what—two, two and a half weeks? It’s a hard lesson.

“Back home, you get used to people dying, but usually they’re old. Cancer, heart failure. Yeah, once or twice you’ll see a kid—leukemia or maybe a car accident. But it’s different—

“Nothing prepares you for this.

“The fights, the losses, all the healthy, good-looking young men. It’s hell. Even now, even now—with more than six months down. It’s still hell.

“Let me tell you about my first time. I hope you don’t mind. After what you’ve just been through.” She smiled briefly, ruefully. “You know, I’ve never talked about it, really. I just feel like now, right now, it’s time—I’ve had it in my head so long, and I’ve got to tell somebody about it before I go back where nobody’ll understand, nobody’ll want to hear.”

She glanced across the compound, over the rubber quonsets, green touched with soft pink from the sunset. A jeep rumbled by, kicking up dust.

On the other side of the dirt road, a man in fatigues hauled on the ropes of the hospital’s flagpole as a clutch of soldiers stood to attention. A twilight ritual, putting the flag to bed. Agnes watched them, her eyes dark and private. She was twenty-five; her eyes were ancient.

“I met the boy from Montana about three weeks after I came here. He was lying on a gurney outside, like usual—” She nodded toward the OR unit behind her. “—and he was awake, squinting up into that god-awfully bright sun—it was the middle of the morning. I pulled his chart out from under the mattress and checked his name and where he was from. I always did that, back then, when I was new—I was always looking for someone from Iowa back then.

“The chart said Montana.

“So I said, ‘Montana, huh?’ I looked him over—he was good-looking, even with all that red mud all over him—blond, blue-eyed young guy. And he didn’t seem to be in any pain. I said, ‘I didn’t know anybody lived in Montana.’ Joking, trying to, you know, make him smile.

“And he did. A little smile, and he said, ‘Well, I do.’ Then he kind of nodded off to sleep.

“I wheeled him in through the air locks, into the first operating room. Where we were today. Toby Stewart and I scooted him onto the OR table; I cut off the front of his shirt. There was this little round bullet hole on his chest, right above his left nipple. The anesthetist started his IV and gave him some sodium pent, and I soaped up his chest and started to shave him. All very textbook.”

She sat down heavily on the tabletop and drew out her pack of Salems, held it out. “No? Sure?” She shook out a cigarette, slid the book of matches from the cellophane sleeve, and lit up. Waved the match out, set it beside her on the splintered wood.

“Steve was first-call surgeon that day. You’ve seen what a good guy he is—really sweet, quiet. Polite Southern boy. Well, he steps up to the table, takes one look at the kid, and shoves me aside with his elbow. He yells at me—‘No time for prep; get me some gloves. Now!

“Steve never pushes people around. And he never yells. So when he did, it kind of jump-started the whole place. I dropped my razor and ripped open a pack of gloves for him. Toby threw a gown over himself and dumped a bunch of sterile instruments onto the back table. He gave Steve a scalpel, dropped a handful of clamps on a Mayo stand, and dragged it up. Jim came in just as Steve cracked the kid’s chest; I gloved him up, and he crammed retractors into the incision. You know—” She took a puff on the cigarette. “—Jim was new back then, too. I don’t think he’d done more than a couple of cases. He’s really an orthopedic surgeon. Not that that matters—as you know by now, all the guys do just about everything here, specialties be damned.”

She rolled her broad shoulders. “God, I’m beat. Where was I? Oh, yes. A nurse—Worthen, she’s gone now—she ran out and came back with a cooler full of blood bags. Another tech, Reb Orcutt, he came in and helped me start IV lines wherever we could—arms and legs—and we connected them all to blood. We pulled pump cuffs over the bags, hooked them onto poles, and opened the flow clamps all the way.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen a pump cuff, incidentally. I mean, who needs something like that back home, right? These were older ones than what we used today; the cloth was pretty chewed up. But they worked just the same way, like putting a blood-pressure cuff on a blood bag.

“Anyway, while I’m ripping open sponge packs, I get a look at the boy’s chest. There’s blood bubbling up, spilling out around the retractors, around Steve’s hands. You wouldn’t believe the blood, so much of it. It was just amazing.

“Besides Reb and Toby, there was a another tech in the room. He was this tall, skinny black kid, a new guy from some big city—Detroit, maybe, or Chicago. His name was Tewksbury. While the rest of us ran around, hanging blood, opening supplies, focusing lights, throwing sterile drapes on the kid’s belly and shoulders—” She took a drag on the cigarette. “—better late than never—Tewksbury was just standing there.

“Tewksbury considered himself a Black Panther. He wore this black beret. Even there, even in the operating room, with his scrubs and mask.

“What the heck—none of us were going to tell him not to. It wasn’t our place.

“He’d only been here maybe a week, at most. We tried to get to know him, include him in everything. I mean, I was so new myself, I went out of my way to try to make him feel welcome. But he didn’t want anything to do with us; he kept himself apart. He made it absolutely clear from day one that all of us—all us whites, and the black guys, too, guys like Sam, say, who cooperated with us whites—we were all The Enemy.” She lifted her hands—square, fingernails dark with blood—in a what-can-you-do gesture, trailing smoke.

“Frankly, we figured he was in ’Nam because some recruiting sergeant had wanted to break him. None of us wanted to give the guy the satisfaction, so we’d taken to letting Tewksbury stand in a corner where he wouldn’t get in trouble, and we just kind of went on with our business as if he wasn’t there.”

She paused to tap her cigarette’s ash on the table edge. The light was nearly gone from the sky; across the road, the flagpole stood naked and deserted.

“So.” She sighed. “Tewksbury’s in the room when we’re working on the boy from Montana. He’s just standing there in the corner, like usual, in his scrubs and mask and that black beret. But this time—Black Power be damned—we needed all the help we could get. So I pulled him up to the table and grabbed his hand—it felt just like a dead fish—and I wrapped it around the bulb to a blood-bag pump.

“We had four of the things going, like today. One on each arm and leg. We’re all pumping them up like crazy, flatten- ing those bags right out, squeezing pint after pint after pint of O-neg right into the kid’s veins—Reb’s running around, taking down empty bags, hooking up new ones; whenever he gets a chance to breathe, he’s pumping a cuff up. I’m doing two at a time. And now, Tewksbury’s working one. I mean, he’s really pumping that bulb, pumping up that cuff. His eyes are absolutely huge above that mask of his, like he’s scared to death, but he’s pumping. Really pumping.

“Together, we kept squeezing blood into the boy—and he kept leaking it right back out.

“Up at the chest, Steve’s up to his elbows in blood. Literally. We still hadn’t managed to get a sterile gown on him, but he had his hands wrapped around the boy’s heart and he was squeezing it, trying to get it to go on its own.

“You know that little fingertip-sized hole I’d seen in the kid’s chest?” She closed her eyes. “I was such a rookie. I hadn’t checked his back. All I’d seen was that little entry wound; if I’d checked his back, I would’ve seen the exit wound, where all the damage was. But he’d been lying on his back, on a sheet, and Toby and I moved the sheet with him onto the table.”

She dropped her cigarette, stood to crush it out, recovered the butt.

“So.” She climbed back onto the table. “Steve’s working on the kid’s heart. It was completely mangled, that heart, and he’s trying to make what’s left of it pump blood. Squeezing it. And every time, with every squeeze, the blood just bubbles out the holes. Everything was soaked—the kid’s chest, Steve and Jim, all those crumpled-up surgical drapes.

“We were all tense, all concentrated, hardly even breathing, none of us saying a word. Except Steve; he was begging the heart to beat, begging the kid to...