365 Days (3 page)

Peterson nodded, a bit too soberly.

“No,” Kurt said, “don’t get the wrong idea. They saved my life. Any other unit, and I’d be dead now. I mean it. I’m glad I was in the 101st.”

Peterson didn’t look convinced.

“It’s the truth. We get hard-core lifers, E-8’s and E-9’s, captains with direct battlefield commissions, who know fighting. It’s their life. When things get hot, they just step in and take over, tell you to get down and wait, this is what’s happened and that, and this is what to do. They’re calm, and so nobody panics. It’s not some storybook thing.” He looked down at his leg. “I know I’d be dead now, we’d all be.”

Peterson just stood there and let him talk. Apparently Kurt needed to talk, and he let him.

“We got caught—three companies. It must have been an 800-man ambush. They just waited on both sides of us and closed the door on each company—just cut us off from one another. The fire was coming into each company, from all sides, front and back. They really had us. It happens....” He paused, seeing the look on Peterson’s face. “And it’s going to keep happening. The thing is what happens after you get caught—that’s what counts. I was in B Company. If we broke through the gooks in front or in back of us, we’d be running into fire from our own companies, and they were too strong for us to move out to the flanks. We had three artillery batteries of our own working with us, and some of the 1st Air Cav’s. No one panicked. We just dug in, found out where we were, and started calling in blocking fire. We were calling it in fifteen meters from our positions. We’d call in a salvo to keep ’em from coming through and one or two rounds farther out to keep ’em from coming around. All the FO’s and RTO’s from A, B, and C Company were in touch with one another; there wasn’t any time to clear the grids. We were calling in shells on each other, but when an RTO heard another company calling rounds into the grids they were in, he had enough sense to pull in his own unit and call back their location.

“At one time, we were calling rounds ten meters from each other’s positions. That’s tough shooting. No one blew. If we’d panicked...I’d be dead. They had us cold for four hours, but we beat ’em.

“When I got hit, the med evacs couldn’t get in. The colonel just got on the horn and told one of the gunships to come in and get the wounded. I was bleeding like a pig. They came in, firing the whole time, picked us up, took us right in to the TOC CP; they were getting hit too, but the 101st always carries a surgeon along with them at the TOC. The gunship must have blasted half the CP apart to get us in. The Doc clamped my leg and gave me blood and sent me off again.

“That’s the difference, see,” Kurt said. “I mean support, not panic, knowing what you’re doing, good officers and NCO’s. The 4th and 25th Divisions would have been shooting at each other, breaking out into each other’s lines of fire, calling in artillery and gunships all over the place, and there wouldn’t have been a colonel around to give a shit.”

Peterson shook his head.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kurt said. “But once you’ve hit a village where Charlie’s gotten no cooperation, you sort of get a different view of things. They really kill ’em, the kids and the old people. No, I’m not kidding. We hit three like that. They hang the bodies from the main gate. It makes you think after a while.”

“See you tomorrow,” Peterson said politely and left. He’d heard it all before, all the reasons. To him it seemed that those in the government had gotten us into a war and then, finding themselves in a bind, not quite sure of themselves, had simply abandoned the problem and left each person to decide for himself. Well, since the options were out, he would use his.

The next morning, he took out half of Kurt’s stitches. There was some pus oozing out from the edge of the incision. While Peterson probed the wound, squeezing out the pus pockets, Kurt talked. As Peterson plunged deeper, Kurt gritted his teeth but kept on talking about a trooper who’d frozen on a pull-release bouncing betty.

“But why didn’t you help him?” Peterson interrupted as he put down his probe.

Kurt looked up at him, obviously offended. “How?” he said flatly.

“Get him off it,” Peterson said, as he put a new dressing on the wound.

Kurt shrugged. “If we could have, we would have. Look,” he said seriously, testing his leg, stretching it out a bit more on the bed, “it was a bouncing-betty booby trap. They’re all pull-release: you step off it, and then ‘boom’, the lifting charge goes off and throws the explosive charge up into the air.”

“Couldn’t you have put something on it and let him step off it?”

“Who you gonna get to do it? The detonator’s no bigger than a tit, and you don’t know how much pressure you need to hold on it to keep it from going off. Some of them are really unstable. You don’t have to step off it to set it off; just shifting your weight can do it. Your foot goes first. You just have to leave them. You have to...”

The wound healed nicely, and toward the end of the week Cooper discharged Kurt from the ward and sent him to the medical holding-company barracks, where he could have his physical therapy three times a day without having to stay in the hospital. Peterson gave him the key to his house, and Kurt spent most of his time there, listening to the stereo, reading the magazines, but mostly just taking it easy. After two weeks, his leg was good enough for him to start some slow jogging.

The surgical evacuations were picking up again. Jogging around the hospital area, Kurt was out early one morning when the first med evac choppers began coming in. As they circled slowly around the rim of the fields he watched them, one after another, noting the Red Crosses painted on their noses as they moved in over him.

Peterson never mentioned the evacs to Kurt. They were mostly frag wounds. Some of the kids came in off the choppers with as much as fifty or sixty pieces of steel scattered through their chests and abdomens, and operations lasted five and six hours.

Coming home late one night, Peterson found Kurt sitting quietly on the bench on the front porch.

“Hard day?” Kurt asked, moving over a bit to make room for Peterson to sit down.

“Yeah, they can get sort of long.”

In the dim light streaming through the open door they could barely make out each other’s features.

“You know,” Kurt said quietly, “the only thing that really bothers me about going back—the only thing that really scares me—are those first few weeks.” He looked at Peterson. “I’ve gotten sloppy here; I mean, I’m not sharp anymore. I was running today, some kid came up behind me, and I didn’t even hear him. You know,” he said, turning back to the dark, “I was out on patrol one night. I heard something, I can’t even remember what, or maybe I didn’t hear anything, maybe I just felt it. I stopped the patrol and got everyone into a defensive perimeter. We just lay down head to head, and the gooks broke out all around us, must have been a company. They were moving right at us. We were in some deep shit. I don’t know why I did it, I did it without thinking. I sent off a round. The echoes screwed ’em up and they moved off again in another direction.” Kurt sounded very concerned. “I don’t know if I could do it anymore—takes a while to get back into things.” He turned to Peterson again. “They would have killed us...I’d be dead now....”

The next day, Kurt began pushing himself. In physical therapy they had been using weights on his leg. It was feeling better. He started with short wind sprints and timed miles. His leg kept improving.

Two days after he began sprinting, fifty-eight evacs came in, mostly from the 101st. They had gone back into the Ashau again. Kurt heard about it at lunch, and for the first time since he’d left the ward, he went to the admissions section to see who’d come in. All of them had been badly shot up. Some were already in the OR. A few had been taken right to the Burn Ward; the rest were on the wards.

“You really missed something,” one of the men said.

“Yeah?” Kurt said, moving closer to the bed. A corps-man hurried past him.

“Grade’s dead. Got drilled right through the head.”

Kurt didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

“It was some shit. We couldn’t see ’em. They came in behind us, too. Dusty got hit by an RPD, blew him apart. We couldn’t even find one of his arms.”

“Me?” another friend said, looking down at his own shattered arms. “You’re kidding, man. I’m out of it. Worry about yourself.”

That night Kurt called Peterson in his office and asked if he could have a sleeping pill. Peterson told him to come by and see him. When Kurt showed up a little past nine, he found Peterson working over his charts.

“Sorry to bother you, doctor,” he said apologetically.

“Sit down, sit down,” Peterson said, eyeing him keenly. “What’s the trouble?”

Kurt remained standing in the middle of the room, tense and withdrawn. “I guess the problem,” he said, “the problem is that I know what it’s like now. Second times...” He fumbled nervously in his pocket for a cigarette. “And getting hit...well, you know.”

Peterson pointed to the bottle of pills sitting on the edge of his desk.

“Thanks,” Kurt said, picking up the bottle.

“Why are you going back?”

Kurt shook out a couple of pills.

“You haven’t answered.”

Kurt shrugged. “I have to.”

“No,” Peterson said softly, “you don’t have to and you know it; you’ve been around enough to know what can be done and what can’t.”

Kurt looked at the pills in his hands. “I’ve got three months left,” he said, looking up.

“You’ve got two weeks. Look,” Peterson said, folding his hands on top of his desk, “everyone’s got to decide the important things for themselves. I can’t tell you what to do; all I can do is point out a few things.”

“I know,” Kurt said.

“Do you?” Peterson said. “This war, if anything, is a war of limits and distribution. No one asks that anyone stay in Nam more than a year, no one demands that we bomb beyond a certain line, that we go more than a certain distance—that anyone stay to the end. It’s a war of shares, Kurt, and you’ve done yours. That’s all that’s asked of anyone or by anyone. I’m not saying whether it is right or wrong, but just how it is. I don’t want you killed. You’ve done enough, you’ve survived once. I’ll extend your profile two more weeks. That will put you over the time limit for a completed tour in Nam, and you can go back to the States. War’s over, job’s done, tour completed.”

Kurt shook his head. “You’re making it tough.”

“No, Kurt, you are. You’ve done enough.”

“There are a lot of guys still there.”

“Yeah, there are. And now it’s their turn. You’ll be leaving anyway in three months. You going to extend forever until it’s over?”

Kurt walked out without answering. Two days later he called the surgical unit and asked for Peterson.

“Telephone, Major,” the corpsman said. Peterson left the new evacs, and going over to the desk, picked up the phone.

“Yeah?” he said. For a moment, he had trouble recognizing who it was. “OK, I’ll see you in my office in about an hour.” He hung up and went back to the evacs. “Well, son,” he said, “what happened after the round spun you off the dike?”

Kurt was already in the office when Peterson walked in.

“No, no,” Peterson said, motioning for him to keep his seat.

Kurt crushed his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray beside him and reached into his shirt pocket for another. He looked exhausted, and his hand shook as he lit up. He leaned forward wearily, elbows on knees, holding his head in his hands. “I can’t even sleep with the pills,” he said, staring down at the floor. “And I got the shits now, too—and nightmares. The whole damn thing.”

Peterson sat down behind his desk.

“It’s really gotten to me.”

Peterson studied him for a long moment. “Go home, Kurt,” he said quietly.

Without looking up, Kurt shook his head.

“I’ll call Cooper.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Kurt!” Peterson waited until he lifted his head. “You can always go back if you want. Let it set for a while. See the States, relax, and then if you want, go back. That’s all I’m saying.”

Kurt took a deep, weary breath.

“OK?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, getting up from the chair. “If you say so.”

“I’ll tell you what Cooper says.”

Peterson picked up the phone and nodded good-bye as Kurt left the room. Cooper was in his office, and the sergeant put the call right through.

“Hi, Dave,” Peterson said. “Hear your wards are filling up.”

“Hear!” Peterson had to move the phone a bit away from his ear. “They sure are. Someone in Nam decided they’re not to have more than 3000 in-patients in country at any one time; might look bad or something like that, so for the next two or three weeks we’ll be getting thirty to forty medical evacuations a day. The problem is, where the hell we’re going to put them.”

“Want some surgery beds?”

“I’d be happy with a few mattresses,” Cooper said. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

Peterson leaned back in his chair. “Robert Kurt is going back to Nam in a day or two,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We were talking, and I found out that he only has five days until his ten months, five days are up. It seems a bit unreasonable to send him back so short.”

“He’s already been discharged,” Cooper said flatly, “and profiled fit for duty.”

“I know,” Peterson said, “but five days isn’t very long. You could extend him just that long for observation.”

“That would be a lot of trouble.”

“So is three and a half months of getting shot at.”

“If you’ve talked to him,” Cooper said curtly, “then you know he’s a demolition expert and carries a critical MOS.”

“So what?” Peterson hesitated a moment. “What the hell have they been doing over there without him? Stopping the war till he got back?”

“Look,” Cooper said into the phone. “That’s not the point.”

“That is the point,” Peterson interrupted.

“Major,” Cooper said coldly, “just in case you don’t remember, and you obviously don’t, the mission of the Army Medical Corps is to support the fighting strength, not to deplete it. Right now, there are units running around Nam at three-quarters strength. That makes every man over there that much less protected and that much more vulnerable. We’re in war, whether you or me or anyone likes it or not.”