Читать книгу The Light Where Shadows End - rg cantalupo - Страница 6

I never heard the mortar call my name.

No one did.

Oh, maybe you heard the round shooting out the tube a thousand meters away, the muffled poomf! and then a buddy yelling “Incoming!”, but once it was in the air, you never heard a sound.

If they were going to miss you, arc high over your head or to the left or right beyond you, then you might hear them spinning, a soft whistle like wind through bamboo as they spiraled past you through the sky.

If they were close though--close enough to wound or kill you, so close they were going to hit the ground only a few feet or a few inches from where you stood--you didn’t hear a thing, you only saw the orange and red burst of the explosion, and felt the burning shrapnel tearing through your flesh.

But on this night, I heard nothing--neither the firing, nor the explosion.

We’d just returned from three weeks of ‘search and destroy’ in the Ho Bo Woods, and Firebase Pershing, the battalion headquarters, was a welcome sight, the place where hot showers, clean socks, warm meals, and letters from The World were waiting, where no L-shaped ambushes or hot LZ’s lay around a bend in the trail or on the shadowy side of a tree line.

No, with two rings of concertina wire around the perimeter, four batteries of artillery, and the battalion command post dug in under three layers of sandbags, the firebase was relatively safe.

Only the occasional sniper from nearby rubber trees gave us the rush of terror now and then.

Or the sound of incoming mortars.

I awoke in the silent dark, not even the geckos cackling their favorite “fuck-you, fuck you, fuck you”; not even the crickets strumming their broken-stringed guitars.

I awoke and I did not know whether someone put a palm on my shoulder and nudged me, or whether some larger mystery roused me in the dark.

I awoke and the night was silent and I was inside a bunker, inside the belly of a beast whose rippled, olive-drab sandbag skin and steel ribs conjured up the belly of a gecko in my daze.

I doused my face with musty canteen water, tied my boot laces and stepped halfway into the doorway trying to find my bearings in the dark—

To the west nothing, not even a line where the horizon ended—

To the east, a few distant flares from a firefight too far to hear.

I turned toward the north, faced the perimeter our bunker guarded, and looked out into the night.

A red ember caught my eye.

One of the new guys on guard, smoking?

Dumb. Dumb. Really dumb. Sniper-bait.

You don’t smoke out in the open at night. Not if you want to survive. Not if you want to keep your head. You have to hide it, shield it, cup the red ember wholly in your hands.

I step out of the doorway to tell him.

One step. Two. Three.

Time compressed into a rapid heartbeat and the rush of adrenaline--toward the burning ember, deeper into the mouth of night.

From the moment I stepped through the dark doorway and into the open sky, I knew something was wrong.

Call it a premonition, a sixth sense, combat hyper-awareness, but as I stepped through the dark doorway into the naked sky, the hairs on the back of my neck spiked.

I felt like I was walking into the firing zone of an ambush just before the trip-wire snaps and the bombs explode.

I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly, but I felt it.

It was too quiet maybe.

Or it was the careless red glow of the FNG’s cigarette pinpointing our position.

Or it was the ominous black of the new-mooned night.

Call it what you want, but for the few seconds while the mortar was spinning toward me through the dark, I could feel death’s breath on my neck.

One step. Two. Three.

Midway into the fourth, the ember burst into a thousand sparks.

I am blown into the night sky, thrown like a rag doll, a hundred burning fires shooting into my body as I hurl.

When I hit the ground, I hear someone screaming, “Medic!!! Medic!!!”—realize the voice is mine.

After that, all I remember is the heat, the red-hot metal, the jagged fragments piercing my arms, legs, chest, and head.

I remember the warm liquid oozing over my body, the jungle fatigues soaking and sticking to my skin, the dull throbbing, the fear flailing like a caged bird in the locked chambers of my heart.

Still, I do not remember how I got there.

Not then, and not now.

I don’t remember whether I walked out of the bunker because someone roused me for guard duty, or if I’d simply wandered outside because I’d heard someone call my name.

Blood pours out my head, neck, chest, left arm and legs, drenching my jungle fatigues with a sticky wetness like warm pee.

I lay on my back, numb, the pain of my wounds not yet breaking through the shock of the explosion.

“Move!” I say to my body, “Crawl for cover!” but my body will not answer, my arms and legs beyond my words.

Blood seeps into the dry clay beneath me, forms a puddle like monsoon rain.

I am dissolving into the earth, sinking down in a warm pool.

Then a hand, hands start to pull me out, up. I see faces, flashlights with red lenses, red flames igniting my eyes.

I bounce up and down.

I am a huge insect with eight legs running toward a bunker.

I look up at the faces lit by red light.

I see fear, fear of death, fear of bad karma and bad luck, fear that whoever called to me may soon call to them.

And now I too am afraid, afraid of what they see, afraid of the bloody face reflected in their eyes.

“Hang in there, Radio!” Mike, our platoon leader, screams. “You’re alright!”

His order will not rouse me. I can no longer hear his commands.

“How’s the FNG?” someone asks.

“Gone. Mortar must’ve hit right where he was standing.”

“You find a body for his tags?”

“Uhhh…no. Not much there, you know.”

“Keep looking. Find something to tag. Alpha one, this is Bravo-two-twelve. Request medevac. Affirmative. One. Yes, just one. Serious. How you doin’, Ace?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Medic!!! Where the fuck is that medic? Just relax, Radio, we’ll have you out of here in ten minutes. You see the flash?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“No…nothing.”

I can’t answer him. I can’t talk. I want to sleep, close my eyes and sleep, let my body fall into that pit I’ve seen so many before me fall.

Besides, I didn’t see the flash. The round must’ve already been in the air.

“I will not die here.”

Others might, but not I.

I said it under my breath during lulls in firefights.

“I will not die here.”

I said it as I walked out of the company’s perimeter on eight-man night patrols deep into the terrifying jungle.

“I will not die here.”

I said it as I lay on my back three hundred meters from the company’s barb-wired perimeter on two-man listening posts as enemy soldiers moved in green shadows around us.

“I will not die here.”

I said it as a promise, as a vow to myself against the war, as a pledge to my own allegiance.

I said it over and over to keep humping down the trail each day.

“I will not die…”

Not here.

Not in this god-forsaken country a world away from my wife and home.

Not here in this sick excuse for a war.

Not here where a life wasted is ever a bullet or trip wire away.

Not here.

Not now.

I said it after the mortar exploded and left me a crumpled heap on the ground.

I mouthed it in half-breaths.

“I will not die here.”

I repeated it over and over like a mantra as I waited for the medevac to come.

“I will not die here.”

I said it as I watched my buddies pull a poncho over the FNG’s body parts.

I said it as blood pushed the air out of my punctured lung.

I said it as I looked at my reflection in Mike’s eyes—a bloody, ripped face I’ve never seen.

I said it as I couldn’t breathe.

“I will not die here.”

I said it silently as I started to slip into irreversible shock from loss of blood.

“I will not die……

.here…”

Scissors cut through my bloody jungle fatigues, and quick fingers peel the pants and shirt apart to get at the wounds. Gauze bandages and tape are wrapped tightly around both my legs. Butterfly bandages pull the ragged gashes in my neck and head together. Compresses are taped to deep wounds in my left forearm and chest.

“I…I can’t breathe, Doc.”

“Okay. Let me get an I.V. in you.”

“I’m fucked up ain’t I, Doc?”

“You’re alright. Just hold on, Radio. You’re going back to The World. What’s the ETA on the medevac?”

“Ten to fifteen.” barked Mike.

“As soon as I get an I.V. in him and a chest tube, we need to run him down to the LZ.”

I was down to half-breaths now, sips of air as if I were floating on my back in a turbulent sea. Waves jostled and broke over my head.

But the short gasps weren’t enough. I needed more, more breath, more air, more than my collapsed lung could hold. I was hyperventilating, drowning in my own blood.

I close my eyes. The voices around me fade, and I drift into a peaceful half-sleep.

“I will not die here.”

“Hey, Radio, wake the fuck up!”

I open my eyes as a needle pushes into my vein. An icy, burning liquid shoots through my right arm. My shirt is cut off and pulled away, and then a blade edge presses between two ribs. The blade pierces my skin sharply and stabs in. I can feel the metal inside me, but the pain is muted, far off, as if my punctured body were no longer mine. Through the numbness, I feel a tube slide through my ribs and into my chest. After a few minutes, the pressure on my lung begins to ease and I am able to breathe again.

“Alright, let’s get him down to the LZ.”

Mike, Lee, and a new guy pick up the stretcher while Doc holds the I.V. bag. Pain shoots through my wounds as they double-time me to the landing zone.

“I will not die here!”—but my voice is drowned out by the whirr of the rotor blades.

We rise slowly above Firebase Pershing, the olive drab entrails of the chopper like a cocoon around me, and out the doorway, the sparks of distant flares.

I know I need to stay conscious to survive, but my eyes slowly close, and the dark washes over me like black blood.

All I want to do is sleep, to let my body go.

Rotor blades chop through the heavy air. In the distance, I hear B-52’s carpet-bombing the Ho Bo Woods—boom! boom! boom! boom! as the thousand pound bombs thud and explode against the wet earth.

Through the rotors’ whirr, I hear the pilot’s muffled voice talking to someone at the Army hospital in Chu Chi.

“Affirmative. One W.I.A. Multiple shrapnel wounds. That’s affirm. Head, neck, chest, left arm, both legs. Grave. ETA about fifteen.”

“Hey! Wake up, soldier! What’s your name?”

The medic crouches over me and holds my face in his thick hands.

“Wha…?”

“I can’t hear you! What’s your name?”

“Radio.”

“Okay, Radio, what’s your mother’s name?”

“What?”

“Your mother? Your mother? Open your eyes!!”

“Lil…Lillian.”

“Where you from?”

“L.A.”

“Alright Radio from L.A., you’re not going to sleep on me are you?”

No answer. I’m back in that secret room behind my eyelids where the chopper’s whirr and the medic’s voice fade away.

No tunnel of white light to go through, no dead buddies and relatives waiting to greet me on the other side—nothing but a silent, dreamless sleep.

“I will not die...”

“I will not…”

“What company are you from?”

“How old are you?”

“How long have you been in country?”

His questions are staccato now, a rapid fire of question after question—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat like a fifty caliber machine gun—meant to pull me back, to open the door to my secret room and pull me out.

“Wake up, Radio!”

I want to stay where I am, but I know if I stay here too long I will not return—“I will not die here.”

I open my eyes to see the medic’s face leaning over me, his green flight helmet starring down at me like a gigantic fly.

“Nineteen.” I mutter. “Bravo.”

There were no brain surgeons in Chu Chi.

The doctors and nurses who hovered over me with their tubes, clips, gauze, tape, and sutures stopped the bleeding from my neck, and the artery in my left arm.

They stabilized my heart rate and blood pressure and got me off the border between life and irreversible shock, but the more severe wounds, the shrapnel lodged in the membrane around my heart, repairing the vein severed at the juggler vein takeoff, and the two pieces of shrapnel somewhere inside my frontal lobe would have to wait.

The light where the horizon ended glowed like a red-hot machete’s blade as I was wheeled out of the hospital doors and into another medevac.

I wanted to sleep now, to fall depthless into darkness, to slip out of my body, but the new medic wouldn’t let me. He kept asking me the same tired questions as the chopper ascended into the lightening sky.

“What’s your name?”

“Where are you from?”

“What company are you with?”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

The Earth’s far edge was on fire, a slow burn eating the sphere’s dark shadow as we rose above the hospital and then beyond the surrounding rice paddies and farms fringing the city.

We flew east into the blade of light, the chopper’s whomp, whomp, whomp a comforting mantra as the flickering bursts of fire beneath us told another story, a story I would never be part of again.

And then I rose.

Above my body.

Above my life.

Is this my soul parting from my flesh, my spirit rising toward eternity, flying through the tunnel of white light toward people I loved?

I rose in darkness, in shadow, the body below me—my body—graying to a shade, the medic slowly dimming to a hazy silhouette.

I rose, but my wounds did not fly away on angel’s wings, nor did I see my mortal life bleeding into light as if I were eternal.

I merely slipped in and out of a world filled with fire and burning pain—

--and then I fell.

Through the stretcher where I lay.

Through the olive-drab floor of the med-evac.

Through the black, night sky glittering with muzzle flashes and fiery explosions. Through the elephant grass and rice sprouts into the darker, moist earth below.

A silent falling, bodiless, weightless, like falling through the depths of a calm sea, like falling in a falling dream.

No sounds. No colors. No smells.

No faces of loved ones who’d passed on.

Nothing.

Just falling,

falling,

falling…

I fell as if I would fall forever, as if this life--our lives--from birth until death--was surrounded by this endless dark matter in which we all must fall.

Perhaps there is no heaven for soldiers, no realm beyond this world of blood and bone, no kingdom where the dying warrior rises into light.

Perhaps God departs from the battlefield as a spirit might depart, the air vibrating with His absence, the red rice paddies marked with His trail of blood.

Perhaps the tunnel of white light we all imagine is so blackened by the vestiges of war, that our souls remain on the Earth, staining our world like Hiroshima shadows silhouetting the walls of the city through Time.

For beyond the whomp, whomp, whomp of the medevac’s swirling blades rising above or falling below my soul, I never heard God’s voice summoning me back to life.

When my soul returned to the medevac, the only words I heard, came neither from a god nor an angel, but a man--green, insectlike in his helmet—his voice muted by whirling blades chopping through the heavy air, yelling—

“Wake up! Wake up, soldier! What’s your name!? What’s your name!? What’s your name!?”

Somewhere between Chu Chi and Bien Hoa I surrendered.

I no longer fought my wounds, nor battled the medic’s interrogations to keep me awake.

I surrendered to the short, even breaths in syncopation with the steady beat of my heart, to the rock and roll movement of the med-evac as it rode the currents through the early morning twilight; to the jerk and tug and pull of more hands grabbing my stretcher and lifting me onto a gurney, and to the lights shooting by above me as I was rushed through the hallways and into another emergency room.

New doctors and nurses checked my wounds and reset the tubes and wires that hooked me up to machines, fluids, blood.

The bandages on my left arm were cut off and the wound re-examined. The butterfly sutures holding my neck wound closed were replaced by wire sutures. A fresh bag replaced the empty pint of blood dangling above my head. Then I was wheeled into the x-ray room to take pictures of my heart and brain.

Somewhere between the emergency room and the x-ray room, I surrendered to the realization I would survive, that I was no longer on the border between life and death, that I’d stopped floating between this and some other unknown realm.

After x-rays, I was wheeled into the pre-operation room where a neurosurgeon spoke to me about the upcoming craniotomy he would perform.

“Hello. I’m Doctor Chang.”

I looked at him with dead eyes.

“We’re going to have to do some surgery to remove a few pieces of shrapnel from your brain.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You have two small fragments in your frontal lobe area. We have to remove them.”

I was lucid then, clear.

“What are my chances?”

Doctor Chang held my stare, then smiled.

Not a fake smile he put on to diminish my trepidation, but a genuine smile created out of the directness of my question.

Here I was, a nineteen year old kid with wounds all over his body, a young soldier who’d been medevaced out of the bush a little over three hours earlier, asking whether I would live or die at his hand.

And so my sheer audacity, my black and white innocence broke through his professional demeanor

He smiled and patted my good arm.

“You’re going to be just fine soldier.”

And, for that one small moment, I believed him.

I lay in the pre-operation room as drops of anesthesia dripped through the IV tube into my bloodstream, and I slowly slipped away.

Not falling or rising, but floating, drifting inside the deepest sleep I’ve ever known—a sleep not unlike death perhaps, if there is a likeness to death in life.

Limbo.

Somewhere between heaven and hell.

Around me the sound of tools whirred, the vague tones of voices, the metallic clink and clatter of instruments—a dull buzz, buzz, buzz as my hair was shaved off, soft rasps as a razor cut the stubble from my skull until there was nothing, the smooth surface of skin and the crushed right forehead where the shrapnel smashed through my skull--a scalpel, a serrated blade, a pinchers and a clamp to pull and hold the cranial flap open and peel the skin off the skull.

And then there were more voices, close, closer to my ear—the surgeon and his nurses—and other sounds—the electric whirr of the saw cutting through my skull, the I.V.’s drip, drip, drip pulling me out into an endless sea—the odor of blood, the tincture of anesthesia and antiseptic—drifting out, out, out, floating on the waves...

…and somewhere…drifting out to sea…

I awoke.

The sounds of the hospital returned.

Gurney wheels rolled past where I lay.

There was a cry, a muffled moan, a doctor’s voice calling for a compress, a clip, a nurse running by.

In the far, far distance, explosions, the heavy, slow, rat-tat-tat of fifty caliber machine guns, the call and response of mortars, rockets and artillery rounds…

I woke in a room, a bed, at some indeterminable time, night, yes, surely night, or early morning, no light coming through the bamboo blinds, and yet I was still drifting, floating on a raft, floating in blackness on a dark, uncharted sea.

I tried to lift my arms, but I could not.

I tried to shift my hips, move my legs, turn, sit up, rise, but I could not.

I cannot feel my body, my face, my skin. I cannot open my mouth to call.

I do not know if I breathe, if I am breathing, if I am still alive…

I drift.

Through darkness. Through space.

In the distance, I hear the whirr of a saw as it cuts through my skull.

I drift. And drift. And drift.

And when I awaken again there is light, not white light, but a surgeon’s lights; not the light of eternity, but the light of life, the light where shadows end.