The Million-Dollar Wound (3 page)

He was waiting for me outside the nurse’s station; he wasn’t in military apparel. White coat, white pants. He seemed young for a medic, probably early thirties. Trim black hair, trim mustache, pale, kind of stocky.

He extended his hand for me to shake.

“Pleased to meet you, Private Heller,” he said.

“If that’s my name,” I said.

“That’s what I’d like to help you determine. I’m Doctor Wilcox.”

Civilian, apparently. “Glad to make your acquaintance, Doc. You really think you could help me find my way back? Back to my name. Back to where I come from.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I like your confidence,” I said, walking next to him down the hall. “But I always thought when a guy went bughouse, it was pretty permanent.”

“That’s not at all true,” he said, gesturing with a hand for me to enter a small room where two chairs and a small table waited; not a straitjacket in sight. I went in. He went on: “Many mental disorders respond well to therapy. And those due to some intensely stressful situation, such as combat, are often easier to deal with.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the trauma can be more or less temporary. Be grateful your problem isn’t a physical one. That it isn’t chronic.”

I sat down in one of the chairs. “You going to give me truth serum?”

He remained standing. “Sodium amatal is one possibility. Shock treatments, another. But first I’d like to try to knock your barrier down with simple hypnosis.”

“Haven’t you heard, Doc? Vaudeville is dead.”

He took that with a smile. “This is no sideshow attraction, Private. Hypnosis has often proved effective in certain types of battle neurosis—amnesia among them.”

“Well…”

“I think you’ll find this a less troublesome route than electric shock.”

“It cured Zangara.”

“Who’s Zangara?”

I shrugged. “Damned if I know. What do I have to do, Doc?”

“Just stand and face me. And cooperate. Do exactly as I say.”

I stood and faced him. “I’m in your hands.”

And then I was: his hands, his warm soothing hands, were on my either temple. “Relax completely and put your mind on going to sleep,” he said. His voice was monotonous and musical at the same time; his eyes were gray and placid and yet held me.

“All right, now,” he said, hands still on my temples, “keep your eyes on mine, keep your eyes on mine, and keep them fixed on mine, keep your mind entirely on falling asleep. Now you’re going into a deep sleep as we go on, you’re going to go into a deep sleep as we go on.”

His hands dropped from my temples, but his eyes held on. “Now clasp your hands in front of you”—I did; so did he—“clasp them tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, they’re getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, your eyes are getting heavy, heavy…”

My eyelids weighed a ton; stayed barely open, his eyes locking mine, his voice droning on: “Now your hands are locked tight, they’re locked tight, they’re locked tight. Can’t let go, they’re locked tight, you can’t let go; when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, and then you’ll get sleepier, your eyes getting heavier—”

Snap!

“Now your eyes are getting heavier, heavier, heavier, you’re going into a deep, deep sleep, going into a deep, deep sleep, deep asleep, far asleep, now closed tight, closed tight, deep, deep sleep, deeply relaxed, far asleep…you’re far asleep…far asleep…now you’re in a deep sleep, no fear, no anxiety, no fear, no anxiety, now you’re in a deep, deep sleep.”

I was in darkness now, but his hands guided me, as did his voice: “Now just sit down in the chair behind you. Sit down in the chair behind you.” I did. “Lean back.” I did. “And now fall forward into a deep, deep sleep. And now falling forward, going further and further and further asleep. Now when I stroke your left arm it becomes rigid, like a bar of steel, as you go further asleep, further asleep.”

My arm, as if of its own will, extended, rod straight.

“Going further, further, further asleep. Rigid.”

I could feel him tugging at my arm, testing it.

“Cannot be bent or relaxed. Now when I touch the top of your head, when I touch the top of your head, that arm will relax and the other will become rigid. You’ll go further asleep. In a very deep sleep.”

His hand, lightly, touched the top of my head; my left arm relaxed, right one went sieg heil.

“And your sleep is deeper and deeper. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot, you will not be able to bear it.”

Searing pain! Like red-hot shrapnel!

“Your arm is rigid. Now when I touch your hand you will no longer feel any pain there. Will be normal.”

Pain was gone, no trace of it.

“Now your arm is relaxed and you’re further and further and further asleep. Now you’re deep asleep. Going back. Going back now. Going back to Guadalcanal. Going back to Guadalcanal. You can remember. Everything. You can remember everything. Back on Guadalcanal. You see everything now, clearly. You remember it all, now, every bit of it coming back. Tell me your story. Tell me your story, Nate.”

Through the haze I could see it, the island, “the Island” we’d soon call it. A red-tinged filter of dawn, like a soft-focus lens on an aging movie queen, worked its magic on the cone of land ahead, seducing us into thinking a Pacific paradise reclined before us, a siren lounging in a cobalt sea, waiting, beckoning, coconut palms doing a gentle hula.

Even then we knew we were being lied to. But after a month of duty on Pago Pago—that grubby barren no-man’s-land we’d come to call “the Rock,” in honor of Alcatraz—the vista before us made us want to believe the come-on.

“It looks like Tahiti or something,” Barney said.

Like me, he was leaning against the rail, sea breeze spitting pleasantly in both our faces. We, and the rest of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, were so many sardines in a Higgins boat, a landing craft without a ramp, meaning soon we’d be going ass over tea kettle over the sides into the foam and onto the beach.

“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “You’ve heard the scuttlebutt.”

“Only it ain’t scuttlebutt,” a kid squeezed in just behind us said.

The tropical paradise beckoning us was, we all knew, the site of the bloodiest fighting to date in the Pacific Theater. We of the 2nd Marine Division were on our way to spell the battle-weary 1st Division, who since early last August had been struggling to hold on to and preserve Henderson Field, our only airfield on the Island, named after a Corps pilot who fell at Midway. Outnumbered and outsupplied by the Japs, the 1st had held on in the face of air attack, Naval shelling, and jungle combat, the latter enlivened by mass “banzai” charges of crazed, drunken, suicidal Japs. We also heard about the malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot afflicting our fellow leathernecks; the sick were said to outnumber the wounded. Scuttlebutt further had it you couldn’t leave the battle lines unless your temperature rose above 102.

That was no travel poster come to life, stretched out before us like Dorothy Lamour. It was green fucking hell.

I looked at Barney, an aging bulldog loaded down in battle gear. “Another fine mess,” I said.

“Semper fi, mac,” he said, grinning, not seeming nervous at all. But he had to be.

Like me, he wore a steel, camouflage-covered helmet, heavy green dungaree jacket with USMC stenciled on the left breast pocket, a web pistol belt (with a pair of canteens, Kabar knife, hand grenades, ammo pouch, and first-aid kit hooked on), green dungaree trousers tucked into light tan canvas leggings over ankle-high boondockers, and a bronze Marine Corps globe-and-anchor emblem on one collar, for luck. The heavy pack on his back no doubt contained, like mine, a poncho, an extra pair of socks, mess kit, boxes of K rations, salt tablets, twenty rounds or so of carbine ammo, a couple hand grenades, toothbrush, paste, shaving gear, and a dungaree cap. Barney also carried photos of his family and his girl, and writing paper and pen and ink, in waterproof wrappers. I didn’t. I didn’t have family or a girl. Maybe that’s why, at age thirty-six, I found myself in a Higgins boat gliding toward an increasingly less beckoning beach.

Still, in a way, Barney really had gotten me into this fine mess. Mess kit, maybe I should say.

Oh, for the record: Barney is Barney Ross, the boxer, ex-boxer now, former world lightweight and welterweight title holder. We grew up on the West Side of Chicago together. The friendship stayed, as did we in Chicago, and in fact I was sitting with him in a booth in his Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge, across from the Morrison Hotel, on December 7, ’41, when the shit first hit the fan.

We were arguing with a couple of sportswriters about how long Joe Louis would hold the heavyweight crown. The radio was on—a Bears game—and the announcer must’ve cut in with the news flash, but we were a little sauced and a little loud and none of us heard it. The bartender, Buddy Gold, finally came over and said, “Didn’t you guys hear what happened?”

“Don’t tell me Joe Louis busted his arm in training,” Barney said, half meaning it.

“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!” Buddy’s eyes rolled back like slot-machine windows. “Jeez, boss, the radio’s on, aren’t you listening to it?”

“What’s Pearl Harbor?” Barney asked.

“It’s in Hawaii,” I said. “It’s a Naval base or something.”

Barney made a face. “The Japs bombed their own harbor?”

“It’s
our
harbor, schmuck!” I said.

“Not anymore,” Buddy Gold said, and walked away, morosely, polishing a glass.

From then on, or anyway right after President Roosevelt made his “day of infamy” speech, joining up was all Barney talked about.

“It’s stupid,” I told him, in one of God only knows how many arguments on the subject in his Lounge. Over beers, in a booth.

“So it’s stupid to want to defend the country that’s been so good to me?”

“Oh, please. Not the ‘I came up from the ghetto to become a champion’ speech again. You’re not cutting the ribbon on some goddamn supermarket today, Barney. Give a guy a break.”

“Nate,” he said, “you disappoint me.”

Nate. That’s me. Nathan Heller. Onetime dick on the Chicago PD pickpocket detail, currently a fairly successful small businessman with a three-man (one-secretary) detective agency in a building owned by the very ex-pug I was arguing with. Actually, it was about to be a two-man agency—my youngest operative was going into the Army next week.

“I suppose,” I said, “you think
I
should join up, too.”

“That’s your decision.”

“They wouldn’t even take me, Barney. I’m an old man. So are you, for that matter. You’re thirty-three. The Marines aren’t asking for guys your age.”

“I’m draft age,” he said, pointing to his chest with a thumb. Proud. Defiant. “And so are you. They’re taking every able body up to thirty-five.”

“Wrong on two counts,” I said. “First, I turned thirty-six, when you weren’t looking. Squeaked by the draft, thank you very much. Second, you’re a married man. I know, I know, you’re getting a divorce; but then you’re going to marry Cathy, first chance you get, right?” Cathy was this beautiful showgirl Barney had taken up with after his marriage went sour. “Well,” I went on, “they only take
married
men up to age twenty-six. And you haven’t been twenty-six since you fought McLarnin.”

He looked gloomily in his beer. “I don’t intend to shirk my duty by using some loophole. As far as I’m concerned, I ain’t married anymore, and even so, I’m joining up.”

“Oh, Barney, please. You got dependents, for Christ’s sake. You got family.”

“That’s just why I’m doing it. I got a special obligation to represent my family in the armed service.”

“Why?”

He shrugged expansively. “Because nobody else was able to go. Ben’s too old, Morrie’s got back trouble, Sammy’s got the epileptic fits, and Georgie’s got flat feet and the draft board turned him down.”

“That poor unlucky bastard, Georgie. Imagine goin’ through life with flat feet when you could’ve got ’em shot the hell off.”

“I take this serious, Nate. You know that. Think about what’s happening overseas, would you, for once? Think about that cocksucker Hitler.”

A word that harsh was rare for Barney; but the feeling ran deep. He’d gotten very religious, in recent years; and his religion was what this was most of all about.

“Hitler isn’t your problem,” I said, somewhat lamely.

“He is! He’s mine, and he’s yours.”

We’d been over this ground many times, over the last three or four years. Longer than that, really. From the first news of persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, Barney had gone out of his way to remind me that I too was a Jew.

Which I didn’t accept. My father had been an apostate Jew, so what did that make me? An apostate Jew at birth? My late mother was a Catholic, but I didn’t eat fish on Friday.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You hate Hitler; you’re going to whip those lousy Nazis. Fortunately for you, Armstrong isn’t on their side.” Armstrong was who Barney lost his title to. A little desperately I added, “But why the goddamn
Marines?
That’s the roughest damn way to go!”

“Right.” He sipped his beer, very cool, very measured. “They’re the toughest of all the combat outfits. If I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to do it right. Just like in the ring.”

I tried a kidney punch. “What about your ma? It was rough enough on her when you were fighting in a ring—now you want to go fight a
war?
How could you do that to her?”

He swallowed; not his beer—just swallowed. His puppy-dog eyes in that bulldog puss were solemn and a little sad. His hair was salt-and-pepper and he really did look too old to be considering this; he looked older than me, actually. But then I hadn’t taken as many blows to the head as him. Very deliberately, he said, “I don’t want to bring no more heartache to Ma, Nate. But wars have to go on no matter how mothers feel.”

It was like trying to argue with a recruiting poster.

“You’re serious about this, this time,” I said. “You’re really going to go through with it.”

He nodded. Smiled just a little. Shyly.

I finished my beer in a gulp and waved toward the bar for another. “Barney, look at this place. Your business is going great guns. Ever since you switched locations, seems like it’s doubled.”

“Ben’s going to take over for me.”

“Aw, but you yourself are such an important part of it—the celebrity greeting his customers and all. No offense to your brother, but it’ll flop without you.”

Again he shrugged. “Maybe so. But if Hitler comes riding down State Street, I’ll be out of business permanent.”

Such a child. Such a simple soul. God bless him.

“How far have you gone with this thing?”

“Well,” he said, smiling, embarrassed now, “they turned me down at first. Told me I was overage and should go run my cocktail lounge. Just like you did. But I kept swinging, and finally they sent a letter to Washington to see about getting me a waiver on the age rule. Took sixty days for it to come through. And today I got the word. All I got to do is sign on the dotted line, and pass the physical.”

I sat there shaking my head.

“The recruiting office is in the post office,” he said. That was just a few blocks away. “They’re open twenty-four hours, these days. I’m going down tonight. Why don’t you keep me company?”

“What, and join up
with
you? Not on your life.”

“Nate,” he said, reaching across to touch my hand. It wasn’t something I remembered him ever doing before. “I’m not trying to talk you into any such thing. You have every right to stay here, doing what you’re doing. You’re past draft age, now, you got my blessing. Really. All I want is yours.”

He didn’t know I’d already given it to him. I just sat there shaking my head again, but smiling now. He took his hand off mine. Then suddenly we were shaking hands.

That’s when we started to seriously drink.

It gets hazy after that. I know that my own mixed feelings—my own barely buried desire to get into this thing myself, my expectation of being drafted having turned to guilt-edged relief when the call-up missed me—came drifting to the surface, came tumbling out in confession to Barney, and, well, I remember walking him to the post office, singing, “Over There,” along the way and getting strange and occasionally amused looks from passersby.

I remember studying a poster boasting the great opportunities the Marine Corps offered a man. There were three Marines on the poster—one rode a rickshaw, one was cleaning the wings of an airplane, one was presenting arms on a battleship. I remember, albeit vaguely, studying this poster for the longest time and experiencing what must have been something akin to a religious conversion.

I’m sure it would have passed, given time.

Unfortunately, time for sober reflection wasn’t in the cards. The blur that follows includes a recruiting sergeant in pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie, and forest ranger hat (a “campaign” hat, I later learned). I remember looking down at his shoes and seeing my face looking up at me. I also remember saying, “What a shine!” Or words to that effect.

The conversation that followed is largely lost to me. I remember being asked my age and giving it as twenty-nine. That stuck with me because I had to concentrate hard, in my condition, to be able to lie that effectively.

I remember also one other question asked of me: “Any scars, birthmarks, or other unusual features?”

And I remember asking, “Why such a question?”

And I remember the matter-of-fact response: “So they can identify your body after you get your dog tags blown off.”

One would think that would have sobered me up (and perhaps that question was the recruiting officer’s attempt to do so, to not take undue advantage of my condition); but one would be wrong. It took the next morning to do that.

The next morning, by which time Barney Ross was in the Marines.

And so, when I woke up, was I.