ten meters before they got him: a clean straight round that caught him under his swinging left arm and came out the other side of his chest.
In the Ashau, an RPG landed next to the CP and buried itself in the ground before it exploded. Ignoring the explosion, the medic was reaching up over the trooper to open the albumin can he had just hung when an RPD swept the area. The first burst shredded through his flack vest, lifting him up and spinning him around before it dropped him back to earth five feet away.
Watson had been a troublemaker since he was six. He was a bitter, imaginative, hate-filled kid who had been drafted and somehow had survived basic training without ending up in prison. He was assigned to the medics at an evac hospital and then to the field. When he went on line, the hospital personnel gave him a week to be busted and sent back to the States in irons.
When I met him he had been up front with his unit for almost five months. He was soft-spoken, but marvelously animated and alert. The old abusiveness was gone; even the adolescent arrogance I’d been told had for so long been the central pillar of his personality had disappeared. He was perfectly at ease and open. Those who had known him before were pleasantly surprised, if still a bit leery.
Watson didn’t mind talking. “Why not go all out, man? They need me, and I know what I’m doing out there. Hundreds of cases—fucken hundreds. The big-shot dermatologists, they come down once a week. They look at all that rotting skin and shake their heads and leave. Know what we done? We got a mix-master, threw in a couple of quarts of calamine lotion, a few kilograms of mycolgue for the fungus, and figured some tetracycline and penicillin couldn’t hurt, just in case there was any bacteria around. Called it jungle mix and bottled it and handed it out. Fucken dermatologists couldn’t believe it. Wanted to know where we’d read about it, what medical journal. Sure, I take chances. That’s my job—to save lives. The VC—well, I ain’t got nothing against ’em. Guess they’re doing their job, too.”
On a routine sweep through Tam Key, a squad of the Americal Division was ambushed. Watson was hit twice, both rounds shattering his leg. He kept helping the wounded, dragging himself from soldier to soldier until he was hit in the neck by a third round and paralyzed.
All the medics talk the same and they all act the same, whether they come from the ghetto or from the suburbs. No one planned it this way. It was the kids themselves, caught between their skeptical seventeen or eighteen years, and the war, the politicians, and the regular Army officers. Growing up in a hypocritical adult world and placed in the middle of a war that even the dullest of them find difficult to believe in, much less die for, very young and vulnerable, they are suddenly tapped not for their selfishness or greed but for their grace and wisdom, not for their brutality but for their love and concern.
The Army psychiatrists describe it as a matter of roles. The adolescent who becomes a medic begins after a very short time to think of himself as a doctor, not any doctor in particular, but the generalized family doctor, the idealized physician he’s always heard about.
The excellent training the medics receive makes the whole thing possible, and the fact that the units return the corpsman’s concern and competence with their own wholehearted respect and affection makes the whole thing happen.
Medics in the 101st carried M & M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the
In the Ashau, an RPG landed next to the CP and buried itself in the ground before it exploded. Ignoring the explosion, the medic was reaching up over the trooper to open the albumin can he had just hung when an RPD swept the area. The first burst shredded through his flack vest, lifting him up and spinning him around before it dropped him back to earth five feet away.
Watson had been a troublemaker since he was six. He was a bitter, imaginative, hate-filled kid who had been drafted and somehow had survived basic training without ending up in prison. He was assigned to the medics at an evac hospital and then to the field. When he went on line, the hospital personnel gave him a week to be busted and sent back to the States in irons.
When I met him he had been up front with his unit for almost five months. He was soft-spoken, but marvelously animated and alert. The old abusiveness was gone; even the adolescent arrogance I’d been told had for so long been the central pillar of his personality had disappeared. He was perfectly at ease and open. Those who had known him before were pleasantly surprised, if still a bit leery.
Watson didn’t mind talking. “Why not go all out, man? They need me, and I know what I’m doing out there. Hundreds of cases—fucken hundreds. The big-shot dermatologists, they come down once a week. They look at all that rotting skin and shake their heads and leave. Know what we done? We got a mix-master, threw in a couple of quarts of calamine lotion, a few kilograms of mycolgue for the fungus, and figured some tetracycline and penicillin couldn’t hurt, just in case there was any bacteria around. Called it jungle mix and bottled it and handed it out. Fucken dermatologists couldn’t believe it. Wanted to know where we’d read about it, what medical journal. Sure, I take chances. That’s my job—to save lives. The VC—well, I ain’t got nothing against ’em. Guess they’re doing their job, too.”
On a routine sweep through Tam Key, a squad of the Americal Division was ambushed. Watson was hit twice, both rounds shattering his leg. He kept helping the wounded, dragging himself from soldier to soldier until he was hit in the neck by a third round and paralyzed.
All the medics talk the same and they all act the same, whether they come from the ghetto or from the suburbs. No one planned it this way. It was the kids themselves, caught between their skeptical seventeen or eighteen years, and the war, the politicians, and the regular Army officers. Growing up in a hypocritical adult world and placed in the middle of a war that even the dullest of them find difficult to believe in, much less die for, very young and vulnerable, they are suddenly tapped not for their selfishness or greed but for their grace and wisdom, not for their brutality but for their love and concern.
The Army psychiatrists describe it as a matter of roles. The adolescent who becomes a medic begins after a very short time to think of himself as a doctor, not any doctor in particular, but the generalized family doctor, the idealized physician he’s always heard about.
The excellent training the medics receive makes the whole thing possible, and the fact that the units return the corpsman’s concern and competence with their own wholehearted respect and affection makes the whole thing happen.
Medics in the 101st carried M & M candies in their medical kits long before the psychiatrists found it necessary to explain away their actions. They offered them as placebos for their wounded who were too broken for morphine, slipping the sweets between their lips as they whispered to them over the noise of the fighting that it was for the pain. In a world of suffering and death, Vietnam is like a Walt Disney true-life adventure, where the young are suddenly left alone to take care of the
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