Born on the Fourth of July Page 10

Every morning I wheel into the bathroom of my new apartment and throw up. It frightens me to live alone with my paralyzed body and my thoughts of Vietnam. I am dreaming too often of the dead corporal. The tension and fear are twisted up inside me like a loaded spring. I get into my car and drive around for hours. Sometimes I drive very fast.

  I have registered at the university and it is much better when classes begin. Maybe all I needed was to be with people again. I begin to look back and think about the summer, about Mexico. Even with all the loneliness, there were times that had been good. My first summer without the war. I tell myself the war and the hospital are behind me now. The best years of my life are still ahead of me.

  I am more determined than ever to learn to walk on braces and I exercise for hours every day. In the hospital they have shown me a way to stretch my legs a little and I am doing it one evening in my second week of school when I hear something snap. It sounds like the branch of a tree breaking off—and there is my right leg all twisted under me. I panic for the first few minutes, then call my father. He drives over right away and takes me to the hospital, the V.A. hospital in the Bronx. I spend the next six months there.

  I am alone again. I have been lying in Room 17 for almost a month. I am isolated here because I am a troublemaker. I had a fight with the head nurse on the ward. I asked for a bath. I asked for the vomit to be wiped up from the floor. I asked to be treated like a human being.

  My leg has swollen to twice its original size. The thigh bone has been completely shattered in the break, leaving the bone sticking out just beneath the surface of my skin. It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before.

  The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me.

  It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy.

  It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something.

  Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to break people than to mend them and put them back together again. I don’t want them to cut my leg off. It is numb and dead but it still means something to me. It is still mine. It is a part of me and I am not going to give it away that easily. Why isn’t anyone helping me? I think over and over again. Why am I being forgotten in this place?

  Something is happening to me in Room 17. I lie and stare at the walls of the small green box they have put me in. The walls are almost as dirty as the floor and I cannot even see out of the window. I feel myself changing, the anger is building up in me. It has become a force I cannot control. I push the call button again and again. No one comes. I am lying in my own excrement and no one comes. I begin shouting and screaming. I grab an ice pack and my water pitcher. I throw them out of the open door into the hallway, splashing water and ice all over the floor. I have been screaming for almost an hour when one of the aides walks by. He sticks his head in the door, taunting me and laughing. “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” I tell him. “I fought in Vietnam and I’ve got a right to be treated decently.”

  “Vietnam,” the aide says loudly. “Vietnam don’t mean nothin’ to me or any of these other people. You can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass.”

  I am in the intensive-care ward. It is so quiet I can hear the big round clock ticking on the green wall. There are mostly old men here. They are all attached to complicated machines. The clock keeps ticking. I look down. There are big stitches on my leg and two plastic tubes—one runs a clear fluid in and the other carries a bright red fluid back out of the wound. There is some kind of machine on the side of the bed that keeps clanking and pumping, keeping everything flowing nicely. I realize I have made it, I have lived through the operation. I am not going to die and they haven’t cut my leg off. They have put a steel plate in. They have screwed in all the screws and sewn the whole thing up. I will be out of this place soon. The leg will heal and I will get out of this hospital. I will get out of it for good and never come back.

  The pump stops suddenly. An aide comes over and kicks it. He curses at it and kicks it very hard. It still doesn’t work, and I am frightened now that I will lose the leg. “Goddamn thing,” he says. “This hospital doesn’t ever have nothing but old equipment.” He runs to look for a doctor.

  The doctor who comes in isn’t the one who did the operation. He is a younger man from a big university in the city. He tells me the pump is old and probably will not work anymore. “Well, doesn’t this hospital have another one?” I say. “I can’t believe that a modern veterans’ hospital like this doesn’t have an extra pump.” The young doctor explains in a very matter-of-fact way that this is the only pump they have. It all has to do with the war, he explains. It is all because of the war. “The government is not giving us money for things that we need. It’s really too bad. It’s not fair at all.”

  “I’ve tried so hard to keep this leg,” I tell him. “I’ve done everything.…” I’m trying to be calm, as calm as he is.

  “Yes,” he says, nodding his head. “I completely understand.”

  An hour or so later the pump starts going again. No one even kicks it. It just starts up by itself. They tell me I am very lucky.

  The leg heals slowly. I am weak and sick for a long time, but I continue to survive in the Bronx V.A. hospital. There are times I scream and shout and throw things out my door. I get a bath and an enema every four days. I have to watch the pump all the time to make sure it doesn’t stop. I am so tired, so weary. One day the doctor comes and pulls the two plastic tubes out of my leg and puts small bandages over the holes. He and an aide put me on a gurney and strap me down. They are very careful with my leg. I have two hospital canes and am able to push myself and the gurney up and down the hospital ward. It is the first freedom I have had in months and I am very careful not to go too fast.

  I lie in the hall a lot. I do not talk to anyone. I am very quiet. My mother and father come down to see me every week. I do not even want to talk to them. I do not tell them what I have been thinking about the war and the wound and the hospital—that the whole thing is beginning to go round and round in my head. I am just beginning to see what it all adds up to. It would only hurt them if they knew.

  I WAS IN VIETNAM when I first heard about the thousands of people protesting the war in the streets of America. I didn’t want to believe it at first—people protesting against us when we were putting our lives on the line for our country. The men in my outfit used to talk about it a lot. How could they do this to us? Many of us would not be coming back and many others would be wounded or maimed. We swore they would pay, the hippies and draftcard burners. They would pay if we ever ran into them.

  But the hospital had changed all that. It was the end of whatever belief I’d still had in what I’d done in Vietnam
. Now I wanted to know what I had lost my legs for, why I and the others had gone at all. But it was still very hard for me to think of speaking out against the war, to think of joining those I’d once called traitors.

  I settled into my apartment again and went back to classes at the university. It was the spring of 1970. I still wore a tie and sweater every day to school and had a short haircut. I was very sensitive to people looking at me in the wheelchair. I buried myself in my books, cutting myself off from the other students. It was as if they threatened me—particularly the activists, the radicals.

  I was sitting alone in my apartment listening to the radio when I first heard the news about Kent State. Four students had just been shot in a demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia. For a moment there was a shock through my body. I felt like crying. The last time I had felt that way was the day Kennedy was killed. I remember saying to myself, The whole thing is coming down now. I wheeled out to my car. I didn’t know where I was going but I had to find other people who felt the way I did. I drove down the street to the university. Students were congregating in small groups all over the place. The campus looked as if it were going to explode. Banners were going up and monitors with red armbands were walking up and down handing out leaflets. There was going to be a march and demonstration. I thought carefully for a moment or two, then decided to participate, driving my car past the hundreds of students marching down to the big parking lot where the rally was to be held. I honked my horn in support but I was still feeling a little hesitant. I stayed in my car all during the rally, listening intently to each speaker and cheering and shouting with the crowd. I was still acting like an observer. The last speaker was a woman who said there would be a huge rally in Washington that Saturday and that it was hoped that everyone would make it down. I decided I would go.

  That night I called my cousin Ginny’s husband Skip. He used to come and visit me at the hospital when I first came back and after I got out we became good friends. Sometimes we’d stay up all night at his house playing cards and talking about Vietnam and what had happened to me. Skip’s views were very different from mine back then. He was against the war. And each time I left his house to go home, he’d give me books to read—books about the black people and poor people of the country. I laughed at him at first and didn’t take the books too seriously, but it was lonely in my room and soon I began to read. And before long, every time I went to his house I asked for more books. Skip seemed surprised when I asked him to go to the rally with me but he said yes, and early Saturday morning we left for Washington.

  The New Jersey Turnpike was packed with cars painted with flags and signs, and everywhere there were people hitching, holding up big cardboard peace symbols. You didn’t have to ask where anyone was going. We were all going to the same place. Washington was a madhouse with buses and trucks and cars coming in from all directions.

  We got a parking space and I gave up my tie and sweater for no shirt and a big red bandana around my head. Skip pushed the wheelchair for what seemed a mile or so. We could feel the tremendous tension. People were handing out leaflets reminding everyone that this was a nonviolent demonstration, and that no purpose would be served in violent confrontation. I remember feeling a little scared, the way I did before a firefight. After reading the leaflet I felt content that no one was going to get hurt.

  Skip and I moved as close to the speakers’ platform as we could and Skip lifted me out of my chair and laid me on my cushion. People were streaming into the Ellipse from all around us—an army of everyday people. There was a guy with a stereo tape deck blasting out music, and dogs running after Frisbees on the lawn. The Hari Krishna people started to dance and the whole thing seemed like a weird carnival. But there was a warmth to it, a feeling that we were all together in a very important place. A young girl sat down next to me and handed me a canteen of cool water. “Here,” she said, “have a drink.” I drank it down and passed it to Skip who passed it to someone else. That was the feeling that day. We all seemed to be sharing everything.

  We listened as the speakers one after another denounced the invasion of Cambodia and the slaying of the students at Kent State. The sun was getting very hot and Skip and I decided to move around. We wanted to get to the White House where Nixon was holed up, probably watching television. We were in a great sea of people, thousands and thousands all around us. We finally made it to Lafayette Park. On the other side of the avenue the government had lined up thirty or forty buses, making a huge wall between the people and the White House. I remember wondering back then why they had to put all those buses in front of the president. Was the government so afraid of its own people that it needed such a gigantic barricade? I’ll always remember those buses lined up that day and not being able to see the White House from my wheelchair.

  We went back to the rally for a while, then went on down to the Reflecting Pool. Hundreds of people had taken off their clothes. They were jumping up and down to the beat of bongo drums and metal cans. A man in his fifties had stripped completely naked. Wearing only a crazy-looking hat and a pair of enormous black glasses, he was dancing on a platform in the middle of hundreds of naked people. The crowd was clapping wildly. Skip hesitated for a moment, then stripped all his clothes off, jumping into the pool and joining the rest of the people. I didn’t know what all of this had to do with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State, but it was total freedom. As I sat there in my wheelchair at the edge of the Reflecting Pool with everyone running naked all around me and the clapping and the drums resounding in my ears, I wanted to join them. I wanted to take off my clothes like Skip and the rest of them and wade into the pool and rub my body with all those others. Everything seemed to be hitting me all at once. One part of me was upset that people were swimming naked in the national monument and the other part of me completely understood that now it was their pool, and what good is a pool if you can’t swim in it.

  I remember how the police came later that day, very suddenly, when we were watching the sun go down—a blue legion of police in cars and on motorcycles and others with angry faces on big horses. A tall cop walked into the crowd near the Reflecting Pool and read something into a bullhorn no one could make out. The drums stopped and a few of the naked people began to put their clothes back on. It was almost evening and with most of the invading army’s forces heading back along the Jersey Turnpike, the blue legion had decided to attack. And they did—wading their horses into the pool, flailing their clubs, smashing skulls. People were running everywhere as gas canisters began to pop. I couldn’t understand why this was happening, why the police would attack the people, running them into the grass with their horses and beating them with their clubs. Two or three horses charged into the crowd at full gallop, driving the invading army into retreat toward the Lincoln Memorial. A girl was crying and screaming, trying to help her bleeding friend. She was yelling something about the pigs and kept stepping backward away from the horses and the flying clubs. For the first time that day I felt anger surge up inside me. I was no longer an observer, sitting in my car at the edge of a demonstration. I was right in the middle of it and it was ugly. Skip started pushing the chair as fast as he could up the path toward the Lincoln Memorial. I kept turning, looking back. I wanted to shout back at the charging police, tell them I was a veteran.

  When we got to the memorial, I remember looking at Lincoln’s face and reading the words carved on the walls in back of him. I felt certain that if he were alive he would be there with us.

  I told Skip that I was never going to be the same. The demonstration had stirred something in my mind that would be there from now on. It was so very different from boot camp and fighting in the war. There was a togetherness, just as there had been in Vietnam, but it was a togetherness of a different kind of people and for a much different reason. In the war we were killing and maiming people. In Washington on that Saturday afternoon in May we were trying to heal them and set them free.

  IT WILL be my t
urn to speak soon. They have put me up on the platform of this auditorium in this high school that is so much like the one I went to, in this town that is like the one I grew up in. I am looking at all the young faces. Kids. They were laughing, horsing around when they came in, just the way we used to. Now they are silent, looking at me and Bobby Muller, my friend from the V.A. hospital who is speaking to them from his wheelchair.

  It is like the day the marine recruiters came. I remember it like it was yesterday—their shiny shoes and their uniforms, their firm handshakes, all the dreams, the medals, the hills taken with Castiglia by my side his army-navy store canteen rattling, the movies the books the plastic guns, everything in 3-D and the explosive spiraling colors of a rainbow. Except this time, this time it is Bobby and me. What if I had seen someone like me that day, a guy in a wheelchair, just sitting there in front of the senior class not saying a word? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe that’s all it would have taken.

  Bobby is telling his story and I will tell mine. I am glad he has brought me here and that all of them are looking at us, seeing the war firsthand—the dead while still living, the living reminders, the two young men who had the shit shot out of them.

  I have never spoken before but it is time now. I am thinking about what I can tell them. I wheel myself to the center of the platform. I begin by telling them about the hospital.

  5

  AFTER THE SPEECH in the high school I spent less and less time going to classes at the university. Suddenly school no longer seemed important. What I really wanted to do was to go on speaking out. Bobby and I made a couple of other speeches at high schools together and once I did one by myself at a university. It was November and turning cold. Ever since I’d been wounded, I’d hated the cold weather. Snow was like a jailer for me. It made it so hard for me to get out of the house, to move around. I felt I’d stayed in one place for a very long time—I’d never lived more than a few miles from my parents’ house except for the years when I was in Vietnam. For a while I thought of taking another trip to Mexico, but then just before Christmas my friend Kenny came home from California and asked me if I wanted to drive back across with him and live out there. I jumped at the idea of going. California seemed like such a warm and beautiful place, another planet. I cleaned my whole apartment out in one Sunday afternoon and gave all the furniture I owned to Mom and Dad. My car was packed that night and the next morning Kenny and I were on the road.