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,