1969 to 1970, Keesler AFB, Biloxi, Mississippi

By Ed Trainor

When the boys came home for the holidays, they went shopping on Grant Street. It was the last Christmas of the ’60s. But, it had yet to dawn on Tony or Ed that this season was any different from the rest.

Oh, they’d traded their high school uniform of cuffed khaki slacks, penny loafers, and London Fog jackets for camouflage fatigues and dress blues. And they sported burr heads instead of the bowl-cut mops that were the rage of their generation. But, other than cosmetic changes, Tony and Ed were the still same boys who’d marched, six months before, with their fellow graduates in the Class of ‘69. They were still Royal Barnhill and Speed Patterpeck, the characters they’d portrayed in the All-School Play last spring. They were not yet tainted or twisted or tried.

Those features and the New Year awaited them even as they toasted life with beers. It wasn’t legal, but no one asked soldiers for I.D. As seniors they’d been carded. As soldiers they were served.

By himself, Ed might still have been sent along his way. His Air Force Blues didn’t scream out “Viet Nam” like the Marine outfit that Tony wore. Ed’s uniform seemed cut from a coarser cloth that failed to hold its definition. Sure he was G.I. issue, but he was not of “the few” or “the proud.”

Tony was. His Marine blues were the color of a deep bruise. His jacket had the academy look. His horse blanket coat looked tailored with its hem cutting the crease in his slacks precisely at the knee. And Tony was gung ho. He could not understand why his buddy would even contemplate the unthinkable.

“Canada. You’re crazy, man. That’s desertion,” Tony whispered when Ed told him he wasn’t going back to his base.

“Nah, it’s just a little French leave, except I don’t speak French so Quebec is out of the question. Vancouver looks good though. I hear there’s thousands of guys up their waiting for this thing to end.”

“Yeh, but they’re all punks and flakes. They’re not All-Americans, they’re not like us. They don’t understand honor. Hell, you spoke at graduation. You challenged our whole class to accept responsibility for this world. Now you’re talking about slipping over the hill. Besides you Air Force guys get light duty in the war and anyway I’ll be over there … if you need me. Geez, you go AWOL, you beaucoup dinky dau, man.”

After Christmas both boys did go back to camp. Tony became a tiger, a fighting marine, a fire-breathing jarhead. In April, he got the call. He was ready. The Corps had polished him in their elite “recon” school. Six months later, the polish was wearing off of a jungle regular who’d inherited the point position on a patrol aptly dubbed “Grim Reaper.”

Ed was still stateside. He was in training. Assigned to the emergency room of an Air Force medical center, he was learning not to puke at the first sight of trauma. The day shift saw mostly officer’s children with puncture wounds and fractured limbs. The doctors treated them. But the graveyard shifts were different by design. That’s when the MDs slept and the medics learned their medicine.

On weekends, a slew of injuries paraded through the swinging doors. Most were homesick airmen who’d gotten deep into the bottle and clashed at the clubs downtown. On those already anesthetized patients, Ed learned how to whipstitch flesh together and got used to hearing grown men groan.

Emergency Room medics enjoyed a special status among their peers. Only because they walked with weirdness or had access to the pharmaceutical stash that was passed around the barracks, were those assigned to the psychiatric ward or the pharmacy as highly thought of as E.R. corpsmen. Still, no one called those guys “quack.” That affectionate term was reserved for the medics who worked at the ambulance unloading dock.

Over the 200 nights, Ed reported in, he escorted four litters to the hospital morgue. The first carried a beautiful, but legless, woman who’d met her maker at an unmarked railroad crossing. The second bore a barracks buddy who had answered a “Dear John” letter by diving head first off a fire tower. The third and fourth were teenage twins who’d perished in an apartment fire. Ed pushed one gurney and pulled the other. A twin himself, Ed praised the boys for refusing, even in death, to abandon their alter ego.

While damage from knives and bottles, fists and pool cues was frequently seen, not once was a gunshot wound presented for treatment in his emergency room. Still there was evidence of such trauma everywhere. Half of the hospital’s 1,000 beds belonged to boys who’d escaped our honorable Asia war with just their lives. Some had left their legs or looks behind. Others rested for a while and then made steady progress from their wheel chairs to crutches to canes. In the vacant stares of a few others, was ample proof that war can disfigure a man without leaving a mark.

Recovery and rehabilitation were only rushed when the holidays drew near. Then every ambulatory patient with a lower ‘48 address and a duffle bag was shipped home to their family.

As burr-heads, fresh from basic buffed evacuated hospital hallways, rotation Orders came down.

Ed drew Cam Rah Bay. He shipped out from California on a commercial looking flight outfitted med-evac style. The seats faced the rear of aircraft and its airborne hospital ward. Ed slept through refueling on the islands.

But, when the rubber met the asphalt in country, the sleep of innocence was over. The plane taxied up to a camouflaged hangar where another group of passengers waited. These men had nothing in common with Ed. He was coming and they were going. He was walking and they might not walk again. He was fresh and they were used. His veins held blood and theirs leaked it. Ed didn’t recognize this strange world or anything about it.

Except Tony.

There to greet him, at the end of the airplane ramp, tossed on a bloody green cot, was his best buddy. His injuries were massive. There was no small talk between them. Tony lacked the strength to recognize, much less welcome, his friend. Besides, he was engaged in the more important formality of dressing his face with a smile he could wear for eternity.

So the leatherneck was not embarrassed by the way Eddie held his hand and offered no sign of protest when his partner slipped the class ring off his finger and replaced it with his own. Tony didn’t comment on or even acknowledge this last gift exchange or the tears that accompanied it.

Back home the Christmas shoppers on Grant Street paid little attention to the caravan of cars that followed Tony to the cemetery. Apparently they had no idea that one of the boys and a little silver slice of another had made it home for the holidays.

Ed Trainor is the oldest son of poet Elizabeth Pruitt.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, December 18th, 2006 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 12:07 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.