Those Medical Folks
by Rob Morris
"Now, its like as not I've told you before about how I went to Viet-nam. That's where I met Bubba, who will always be my very best friend of all. And that is where I lost Bubba, too. It makes me cry, to think that you can know somebody so well, then have them be gone forever. But Viet-nam was like that."
"When the Lieutenant got all angry with me for keepin' him from dyin', he tried to strangle me, and he almost made it, even though he'd lost his legs for good. The lady who was the head nurse near to lifted him right off me, though she said later it was somethin' ta do with leverage, like on a teeter-totter. I like teeter-totters. Me and Jenny used to ride on one. We tried sitting on the same side, once--but it didn't hardly work at all, that time."
"Since I got shot in the butt-ocks, and that's not so harmful a thing as it is hurtful, I didn't need quite so much attention as the other fellas. But the head doctor still came to see me. He ran the place, and he seemed to do a bang-up job. He called it a Mo-bile Army Surgical Hospital, even though the army called it something different, nowadays. When I told him how good a job I thought he did, he laughed a little, and then he said that somewhere in heaven, a man named Henry Blake was laughin', fit to bust, to hear anyone call this doctor a good commander. Colonel Hawkeye was a funny man, and he liked to tell jokes, too. They wasn't always quite as funny. He needed to work on his delivery."
"The roads out was a battle zone, to hear the Lieutenant talk when he wasn't yellin' at me. So I was there for a while, and eatin' ice cream can get real old, if that's all you do. The head nurse--and she was married to Colonel Hawkeye--it had been for her he reenlisted-- squeezed my cheek when I asked for strawberry ice cream, stead of vanilla. Said I reminded her of a police sergeant she knew in the city of Saint Louis. That's in Missouri, which is near as great a state as Alabama, though you don't want to go sayin' that in Alabama. Just because."
"When you ask people for somethin' to do, odds are, they'll find somethin' for you to do, so I did it. The Colonels--and she was miffed bad that he was a whole Colonel ahead of her--put me on cleaning the instruments they use. It was just like cleaning and assembling a rifle. Only thing is, this stuff pulled bullets and grenades and such outta young fellas. Colonel Hawkeye said that it'd be really nice if someday, the bullets didn't go in at all. That's a nice idea, but I'm just not sure it would ever work. The Colonel had a lot to learn."
"When you do jobs for someone, you get to know them pretty well, and that's even when they try to fool you. Colonel Hawkeye and his missus tried to fool everyone, but I allus saw the things folks keep around the corner. I may be all stupid like some ask me if I am, but maybe that leaves room for the stuff they miss. Anyhow, I took to noticing that they were coloring their hair--but only they was adding in gray, stead of taking it out, the way Mama sometimes did. The smell was all wrong for the kind the barber back home used on his customers. I could not for the life of me figure why they wanted to look older. People act a certain way, and that wasn't the way."
"They carried on in their tent, the way marrieds do. And they worked hard, like medical folks do. Only I caught wind of the fact that they almost never slept any at all. They didn't look nor act tired, at least not like everyone else. It didn't make any more sense than what happened next. A chopper came down, and by that I mean it came down hard. It hadn't gone and exploded, but that wasn't far off. The Colonels told everyone to run and fetch buckets, cept' I didn't, cause fires and explosions make me think of Bubba, and how running didn't do him any good at all. So they didn't see me see what it was they did. I was never so amazed in all my life. Not ever."
"Now, Colonel Margaret--though I shouldn't call her by name, bein' another man's wife and all, began to run faster than I could ever hope to--and I can run like the wind. While she circled the chopper wreck, Colonel Hawkeye, who does not look like a strong nor a powerful fella, tore the engine loose, and it was both heavy and hot, and he tossed it like it was a frisbee. They got the pilot and the patient out, but they was already gone, just like poor Bubba. Then the Colonels finally saw me as the people with the buckets came, and they looked pale. I had seen something I was not supposed to see."
"Colonel Hawkeye stopped lying to me, and he even explained why he had. Seems he was in another place like Viet-nam, only it was called Ko-rea. The day came when near everyone but him and Mrs. Colonel had the flu--they didn't get along too well back then. They both took these new-type flu shots--he had his in his butt-ocks--only they wasn't really flu shots at all. Some dirty-dealing folks that the US of A has around but never talks about gave out these phony flu shots, just to see what would happen to folks. These must not be nice people any at all, cause they didn't care that of all the folks they gave this junk to, only the Colonels survived. And they did more--they changed."
"Later, Mrs. Colonel went on and told me how they didn't get old any more, and how they could do everything at once, if their minds were to it. But they couldn't let themselves be happy about it. Too many good folks had passed early so this could happen. I asked if they were gonna live longer than their very best friends. She said a couple of them couldn't die either, less you cut off their heads. Then she started to cry a bit, so I let her stop talking. The roads out cleared, and I was gone after promising to keep their secrets for as long as I lived--and I will, cept' for talkin' to you, Little Forrest."
"That's all I got to say about the Colonels' Pierce in Viet-nam."