It took less than twenty minutes for Dr. Henry Morgan to become sick to his stomach.
He pushed open the heavy, scarred metal door to the stairwell. Without even taking the time to find the key, unlock the door to the toilets, and get to a sink, he vomited into a trash can that happened to be resting in the corner. Trash cans in corners were a rare amenity.
He heaved copiously, returning to the elements the good breakfast Abigail had made for him as well as the lunch she had packed. Finally he vomited up traces of yellowing bile and, at last, his ribs aching, he heaved dryly for another minute or longer.
The Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx, New York, was hell. And he should know. His long and cursed life had ushered him into the underworld on more than one occasion: Charing Cross Asylum and its dreadful "hydrotherapy." The madness of Nora, fifty years on. The tenement slums of New York City and the stinking inferno of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper plied his horrendous trade.
But this – this was a hospital. A place of healing. At the thought, his stomach heaved again, even though there was nothing left to emit.
He straightened up painfully, took several deep breaths, wincing. As the sweat cooled on his face, he straightened his necktie with trembling hands and reluctantly pushed the door open.
"Excuse me. I'm sorry," he said automatically. Opening the door had brushed it against someone. He looked again. A priest, a man of about fifty, his own height, dressed in clericals.
The man smiled warmly, then looked closer.
"Come with me," he said. The gentle tone and light touch of the man's hand on Henry's elbow made it sound more like a tempting invitation than an order.
They found a lounge and sank into hard plastic molded chairs.
"I'm Charlie Watters," he said, extending a hand.*
"Henry Morgan."
"A doctor," Watters said.
"Yes."
Watters smiled. He let the silence knit between them, allowing quiet to begin to mend around the edges of Henry's soul – though that element would be forever scarred by what he had seen. And this was only his first day. He had another three hundred sixty-four of these to get through. God. He shuddered.
"First day?" Watters asked.
"Yes. My –" He almost put his foot in it and said, My son is over there. "My, uh … father was in the World War, but the care afterward was nothing like this." He shook his head. "During World War Two, there were close to fifty thousand army nurses. Now it's a tenth of that."
Watters shook his head. "Where was your dad?"
"Sixty-third Infantry. Europe. With the 7th along the Rhine." He held his breath.
"I was in the 43rd. 'Winged Victory.' Guadalcanal." Both men were silent for a moment, for different reasons.
"That gave me a bellyful," Watters offered. "It was after that that I took advantage of the G.I. Bill. Went to seminary. Decided that I should "never learn war any more."
They smiled. Henry sighed.
"So… what made you dive into hell?"
Henry's lips twitched. "I read the papers. I see Walter Cronkite. And I know it must be a fraction of an angle of the truth. It's dreadful. I had to do something."
Watters nodded.
"What about you?" Henry ventured. "Why are you here, instead of…"
"Instead of a lovely white clapboard church in Syosset or Pound Ridge?" Watters smiled, his eyes crinkling. "Same reason. It would make me sick to stand comfortably in the pulpit each week and preach prophecy and gospel truth to spoon-fed suburbanites who are mostly removed from the reality of the situation. I asked the bishop to send me to a poor neighborhood, one where parents actually have sons over there, thought about joining up as a chaplain to be the one who delivers death notices, but they actually send chaplains over there. Classmate of mine got killed at Dak To. Besides, I'm too old. I'm forty-nine."
"Well, this – this is unimaginable," Henry said. "Men lying in their own filth – I round in the morning and again in the afternoon, and they have been lying in their own filth the whole time.
"Rats running free, nibbling on the waste and the wounds. And the few nurses who are here – they take their anti-war feelings out on the patients. And the paperwork is appalling."
Watters nodded. "We've send the flower of our youth, as good old LBJ says, into hell thirteen thousand miles away. The best and the brightest – have you read Halberstam? – have sent our best and brightest into a death pit.
"You see, it's like this," Watters continued. "The boys who go off – they're young, their dads have grown up believing that war is noble and brave and true and that serving their country is the obligation of every red-blooded American … and the boys, they're going because they got a draft notice, and they don't have the money or the connections to go to Canada, or college, or become a teacher, or have a doctor fake them out, or … well, a few of them might actually believe it's the right thing to do.
"Now boys my age – I was over there for several years, but I added it up; less than half a year of that was in actual combat. And when we weren't in combat, we were safe. We knew where the front lines were, and we weren't there.
"Vietnam? Not only are there no front lines, there are no identifiable enemies. A six-year-old kid could be concealing a pineapple. The next step could land you on a mine or a trap.
"And I'll tell you what else: we got out? It took us six months or longer of peace and quiet before we could get a berth home, and the trip over took a few weeks. I see men here, now. They tell me: 'One day I'm in Pleiku – forty-eight hours later I'm in bed beside my wife, and she wonders why I'm twitchy!' Too fast, too abrupt, no debriefing. Would it kill them to ship guys home by way of Germany and give them a week or two at Landstuhl?"
He shook his head. "They get yanked off the streets, they get a bare minimum of training, they spend their days walking point, burning villages, napalm. Then six or seven months later they're a 'one-digit midget,' they're on a commercial flight home, guys are spitting on them in the airport as the remains of their bodies are pushed to us in a wheelchair, and they've got a huge heroin habit – which the lovely and talented VA helps them with by letting them detox while they're chained down so they don't claw their arms to the bone." He sighed.
"Sorry," he said ruefully. "I've become cynical. It's not healthy."
"How can anything be healthy?" Henry said. A pause. "What do you…"
"What do I do for them?" Watters sighed again. "What I can. Listen, mostly. Let them be angry at me. Some of them actually come to the services I hold each week."
To be continued.
*Charlie Watters was an actual U.S. Army Chaplain. He was killed in the Battle of Dak To while assisting wounded men.
