The Complete Collection. William Wharton

and gives me a shot. I feel myself slipping away.

      The next thing I’m being jiggled and moved from the litter onto a black operating table. A doctor smiles down at me with clean hands, a clean white coat and splatters of blood on his glasses. He looks at my tag, then starts to scissor off my clothes down to where I’m hit at the top of my leg, in the groin. He cuts off the bandage and I can feel him pressing with his hands. Somebody else is cutting and pulling off my boots and the rest of my clothes. I feel like a little boy. Nobody’s undressed me since I was four years old. The doctor turns to me and smiles. He’s tired. It’s been a red-letter day for surgeons.

      ‘We’re going to put you to sleep now and clean this up a bit. Don’t be scared, it’ll be all right.’

      Hell, I’m not scared; I want to be put to sleep. I want the whole medical corps to come and try themselves out on me. I want them to keep me in hospitals to practice on for five years, or however long it takes to get the crazy war over. I’ll do anything to keep people from knowing what I know. I’ll do anything to keep out of combat; if it means getting cut up by doctors in hospitals, that’s great with me.

      When I come to, I’m on another litter, a padded one, and I’m covered with a blanket. My face is practically smothered in bandages, my whole hand and wrist are bandaged. I reach down with my good hand and feel that I’m bandaged from my belly button down, but my cock and balls are still there, squeezed out between the bandages. There’s a tube coming out of the end of my cock. I lie back and relax. They’re not going to be able to give me a rifle for a while anyway.

      I feel like I’m on a moving stairway, an escalator. Even the smell of ether is good to me, a smell of security, of calm and of peace. I look around and realize I’m not in the field hospital anymore. There are rows of us and we’re in a big room. I lift my head to look around and I can’t believe what I see. There’s a woman in a uniform and she’s coming over to me. I haven’t seen a real woman in months. I’d forgotten how good they look. Think of it, I’m going to be able to go home where there are women and I’m not going to have a dishonorable discharge. I’ll probably even get a pension and people who don’t know will think I’m a hero. I’ll be able to fuck all the women I want. The lady stops and squats beside my litter.

      ‘Are you all right there, soldier?’

      I see the lieutenant’s bar on her cap. I can’t open my jaw and I talk through my teeth.

      ‘Yes, sir. Where am I?’

      ‘You’re at division headquarters and we’re waiting for an ambulance to take you back.’

      ‘Where will I go back to?’

      ‘Probably to the hospital in Metz.’

      I lie back. They haven’t found me out yet. If I can get as far as Metz, they’ll never get me in combat again.

      ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

      As she says this, she’s looking at the tag pinned to me. It’s longer and more official-looking; I’m special delivery now. I wonder if it’s still the same day. It seems like weeks since we left the forest and went down that slanted field toward Reuth. For just a minute I think of the war still going on. Who’s head of the squad now? I could’ve made staff if I’d stayed on. Did they finally take Reuth? I stop thinking about it. I’m rear echelon now; let the boys at the front do the fighting. The lady lieutenant is finished reading my delivery ticket.

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It says here you have a stomach wound. You can’t have any liquids. I saw your face and I thought that was all of it. I’m sorry.’

      This must be the first time I’ve ever had a lieutenant sorry for me. I pull my bandaged hand out from under the blankets to drum up a little more sympathy, but she’s already on to somebody else. If she can’t serve me coffee, she doesn’t want anything to do with me.

      I lay my head back and try to remember the reality. I want to remember how lousy a soldier I really am. I don’t mind fooling everybody else but I don’t want to fool myself. It’s been a hard lesson to learn. I can already see how easy it’s going to be for me to make myself out the big hero. I’ve got to take what I know about myself now and plan my life around that. I pass out while I’m thinking about it.

      The hospital at Metz is a real hospital. I mean it isn’t a school converted into a hospital or a barracks made into a hospital; it was a hospital in the first place.

      I have my first operation two days after I get there. It’s the operation on my stomach. Actually it isn’t my stomach. It’s an instant rupture I’ve got down there. They give me the piece of shrapnel afterwards. It looks about like one of the pennies we used to mash on the tracks of the trains at the terminal on Sixty-ninth Street. The doctor says I’m lucky I wagged when I could’ve wigged because it just missed cutting the sperm cord. He says the shrapnel looks like American one-five-five. Maybe he thinks I’m a kraut who snuck in here to get some free treatment.

      I couldn’t care whose side I’m on. I don’t even care who wins anymore. I’m out of it. I lie there in bed all day just enjoying the quiet, the normalness of things. My insides are gradually settling down. I’m happier than I can ever remember. When I wake up in the morning, before the nurse comes around to wake everybody up and wash them, before the orange juice, I lie there with my eyes closed, listening, thinking about how I’m out of it. I’m out of everything, not just the war. I’m captured; the world’s prisoner. I’m not fighting anymore. It’s a great feeling, everything seems so unimportant.

      Every morning they throw a pack of cigarettes on my bed. Free cigarettes. ‘Another carton of cigarettes for the boys overseas.’ I start smoking. Hell, I’m not trying to be the world’s strongest man anymore. I’m just trying to get through without making too much of a disgrace of myself. I lie there on the white bed, moving nothing but my good hand; a clean, clean hand, washed every day by clean hands. I put the white cigarette in my mouth and blow smoke through my bandages. I’m not really smoking, I’m blowing smoke and watching it. I practice blowing smoke rings. Uncle Caesar used to do it for me so I know all the moves. The air in the room is still and after a few days I get so I can blow perfect rings. I’m saving inhaling for another time. It still hurts to take a deep breath, and coughing is a misery.

      I blow away twenty cigarettes worth of smoke rings every day. I allow myself one cigarette each half hour. There’s a clock on the wall and I hold onto every minute I can. Time never seemed so sweet. I don’t think I every actually lived in the present before. Now, I’m forgetting everything that happened and not thinking more than half an hour ahead. Each of those half hours has more in it than most days in my life.

      There are other guys in the ward, but they’re mostly other gut wounds and are more serious than I am. All of them are on intravenous. I only have the peeing tube hooked to me, so I’m practically a free man.

      They change the bandage on my hand every three or four days and the big operation is looked at every other day. They put clean bandages on my face but it’s two weeks before they do anything except clean it. One day a doctor wheels me into a room and unwraps the face bandages. He takes little scissors and scissors away some pieces. He tapes it up and says I’m going to need plastic surgery. They don’t have any facilities to do it in this hospital. He tells me the jaw is dislocated and shattered in the joint. They’ll have to work on that first.

      I don’t care. I’m beginning to like operations. The nurses keep telling me how brave I am. Bullshit! Nobody’s ever going to fool me there. They can keep me in the hospital and cut me up a little at a time; only no pain, please. Take my lovely, muscular body and hack away. But no shocks, no sudden pain, no dirt, no attacks, no patrols; I can’t take it.

      I’m just able to sit up again when they tell me I’m being shipped back to the States. I’m being shipped to Fort Dix because it’s the military hospital nearest my home. Christ, I’m beginning to feel like a civilian already. A few pieces of metal cut into me and everything changed. I don’t even think about the squad, the platoon, none of it anymore. I read the Stars and Stripes every day to see how the old war’s going.