The Time Keepers

Chapter 47

CHAPTER 47

T HERE ARE FRACTURES IN J ACK ’ S MEMORY, TINY FAULT LINES that absorb moments he can’t remember clearly. His mind’s a constellation of jumbled images and words that he isn’t sure actually happened or he imagined under a cloud of morphine. He has spent years trying to decipher whether the recurring dream he experiences nearly every night actually happened—or whether he has dreamt the scenario so often that he now believes it to be fact. But whether it is a memory he has conjured or something he had lived through, it continues to haunt him. In the dream, he’s on the evac chopper, minutes after Doc has put out the fire on his head. Chief is loading Gomez’s stretcher on board. Jack hears a voice saying, He’s not going to make it , but there is a third nameless marine who is crouched next to him. He reaches for Jack’s hand and squeezes it feeling the faintest bit of life still in his fingers. “He’s alive,” he tells the others, and the helicopter lifts off.

The rest would be a haze to him as he is transported to a field hospital where he is intubated and the Vaseline bandages that Doc had wrapped his face in are removed. The nurses have coated him in a thick paste of Silvadene and wrapped his face with gauze.

“If he makes it through the night, we have to get him on the next plane to Japan,” someone says. “We can’t do anything for him here.”

Within twenty-four hours, Jack is on a hospital plane to Okinawa, where he remains heavily sedated until they can get him to the best military burn unit in the States, Brooke Army Medical Hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

He does not hear the doctors and nurses questioning whether they are reading his file correctly, his Record of Emergency Data form only has a single name listed: his mother, Eleanor Grady. Within the hour, they will learn she is deceased.

“Are you saying this marine has no living relative? Not a single other person listed on his form?” The doctor’s voice is incredulous.

“Yes,” the nurse answers. Her voice is steeped in sadness as she looks over to Jack, still under sedation in the hospital bed, his face is wrapped in layers of white gauze bandages that make him look like a mummy.

“He whimpers at night,” she adds. “It’s terrible to hear.”

“There’s nothing more painful than a burn … and this—Jesus Christ … the white phosphorous burned half his face down to nearly the bone.” The surgeon sucks in his breath. “It’s really a miracle that this man is still alive.”

Over the next few days, Jack’s face and scalp is debrided of any remaining dead tissue and he receives his first skin graft. The surgical team takes skin from his buttocks and thighs, and then reattach it piece by piece to where he’s been wounded. They cannot restore his vision in his left eye, but they do their best to create a flap to create the allusion of an eyelid.

When he awakens from the long and intensive surgery, Jack can be heard swearing and screaming. In his delirium, he believes his face is still on fire. He repeatedly begs the nurses and doctors to let him die.

He floats in and out of consciousness and is only vaguely aware that a handful of nurses, after learning he has no remaining family now, come sit by his bedside and hold his hand. One of them plays music from a small transistor radio that she puts on the bedside table, next to the pitcher of water, a box of tissues, and a stack of plastic cups.

“What’s your name?” he manages to ask her as the words struggle to emerge from his dry lips. Although he is still wrapped like a mummy, he can just about make out her face from one his one good eye.

“Barbara,” she replies softly. “Barbara Starr.”

She leans over toward the radio and adjusts the antenna until the sound shifts from static to song.

Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” filled the room and the music, so quietly sung, roused something inside him. Emotions that had been numbed by the enormity of his trauma and by the pain medicine bubbled forth.

Jack’s eyes moistened with tears.

Barbara pulled some tissues from the bedside and dabbed both his eyes. Beneath the white coverlet, Jack’s chest lifted and deflated with each deep breath.

“It’s weird. I can’t see out of my left eye, but can still cry from it?” He was struck by the strange poignancy of his eye’s inability to fulfill its primary function, yet it could still emit emotion.

“I guess the lacrimal gland wasn’t damaged too badly,” she added gently. “Well, that’s some good news, right?”

Jack remained silent. He could count the times in his life he had cried on one hand. Even as a little boy, he hardly showed emotion when he was upset. He knew his mother had enough on her shoulders, and he tried not to burden her with whatever troubled him.

It was a small mercy that she had not lived to see him burned like this. That was really the only good news he could admit to. Not the fact that a gland inside his eye could still shed tears.

The music on the radio now shifted to a breaking news report about a special air force raid on a prison north of Hanoi.

Barbara’s hand lifted off the blanket and turned the radio off.

“You should be getting some rest now.”

He knew she didn’t want him becoming agitated by hearing any news about the war. But in reality, it was the music that had stirred something inside him, not the news.

The song’s lyrics had penetrated even his thickest burns. The words of the song felt like they were written for him.

There were no mirrors in the burn unit at Brooke Army Hospital. “We just want you to concentrate on your healing,” Jack was told when he asked the nurses when he’d be given a chance to see his new reflection once the bandages were removed.

He knew he would never again look anything like his former self. After all, the doctor had told him several times before the first surgery that he shouldn’t expect his healing to be complete. But he still wondered, would he ever again even look normal?

The doctors and nurses did not know that Jack Grady had been voted “most handsome” in high school or that his buddies in his platoon called him “Hollywood.” And they certainly had no idea that across the country, there was a girl named Becky, who had not the slightest inkling as to why she hadn’t received an answer from Jack to her most recent letters.

The head plastic surgeon attempts to prepare Jack the best he can. In his softest voice, he speaks of the possibilities of additional surgeries to promote future skin growth. “Jack, it’s important to realize that what you see in the mirror will not be the end result. We will continue to be vigilant about scar tissue and constriction. We’ll make sure to do further grafting to ensure you have the best results we can give you, so you can go on to have a full life.”

Full life. Jack hears the words and instantly thinks such a thing will never be possible.

He will not tell them about Becky Dougherty, the girl with the chestnut-brown hair whose letter he had carried in his helmet throughout his entire tour, before they were lost in an explosion in the jungle of Vietnam. Instead, he remains silent, and pushes the thought of her far down inside of him. Safely sheltered in a small college town, he only hopes Becky is moving on from him, and that because of his silence, she has given up and believes him to be dead.

The doctor unwraps his bandages slowly. The air on his wounds is painful. The rawness of his skin still overwhelms him, and he thinks to himself what he chooses not to say aloud, that he wishes he hadn’t survived. “The good news is that the surgery was a success, and there is no sign of infection,” the doctor informs him.

“You’re still very swollen, Jack, so just remember what I said that this will all look a lot better in a few weeks.”

“Doc, why didn’t you do everyone a favor and shoot me up with too much morphine when I was under and just call it accident?”

“Jack …” The doctor’s voice has lowered even further. “I’m a doctor.… I’ve taken an oath to save life, not extinguish it.”

The quiet that follows is a pain in itself.

“I would like to see my reflection,” Jack pushes.

“Not yet,” the surgeon insists. “You need to heal more, then we can make a decision about when to bring in a mirror.”

He remains in the burn unit for several more weeks. He will surrender to having his nurses gently cleanse his new skin and to change his dressings to prevent infection. He will wear a collar to ensure his skin doesn’t constrict as it heals, and he will eventually be weaned from his pain medication.

And during this time, he will write not a single letter, nor make one phone call.

Jack is with his platoon in the jungle. Chief and Flannery. Stanley and Doc. Sometimes he will have conversations in his head with them. He will see Gomez’s eyes flash with mischief as he pulls out a deck of cards from his pocket, or Stanley hunched over his Bible reciting a passage or uttering the comforting words of a psalm.

On the nights when the ward is enveloped in a silent darkness, except for the rolling wheels of the medicine cart, Jack will try to banish his memories of Chief walking up the mountain in the rain, holding Stanley’s body wrapped in a blood-soaked poncho, his muscles straining to hold him, to ensure Stanley’s head does not touch the ground.

When Jack’s surgeon finally tells him he’s ready to be discharged, he asks again for a mirror.

“I’d like to see myself before I leave, Doc,” he tells him. “It only seems fair I get to do that before anyone else outside the hospital walls does. Doesn’t it?”

The doctor takes a deep breath. “We usually wait for that to happen when the patient’s back with his family, Jack.” He pauses for a moment and considers his words. “But I’ll have one of the nurses see if she can arrange something.”

Jack nods and feels as if he has won a small victory. He needs to know how others will see him so he can figure out how to reconcile the loss of his former physical appearance with his current reality.

Later that afternoon, Barbara appears and hands Jack a small plastic handled mirror that she pulls out from the pocket of her scrubs. Out of respect, she lowers her eyes as Jack brings the mirror up to his face.

He lifts his finger and traces all the new valleys and bumps of skin on what was once his cheek and forehead. The left side of his face is enlarged and red, the topography of his pain and trauma read like braille. The hairline is irregular with the front portion of his black curls now completely gone. There is still a considerable amount of swelling where his left eyelid once was, and he looks like one of the villains he used to read about in comic books as a little kid, like Two-Face from Batman , or worse, an ogre from a Grimms’ fairy tale.

“Fucking hell,” he utters. “I don’t even look human.”

On the afternoon he is to be discharged, Barbara Starr tells him something special is planned for his departure.

“I don’t want anything,” he tells her. The very thought of some sort of farewell gesture makes him feel uncomfortable.

“You deserve something ,” she says gently. “Please, Jack. It’s all been arranged.”

An hour later, after he’s been examined one last time by his doctor, five marines in their dress blue uniforms enter his room. Each one of them with their hat tucked beneath their arm.

“Lance Corporal Jack Grady,” the honor guard announces. “On behalf of a grateful nation, we are here to present you with this Purple Heart.…” He begins to read from a citation letter describing Jack’s injury and his service to his country.

While serving as a radio man, Lance Corporal Grady was engaging the enemy in Quang Tri Province and was severely wounded on November 27, 1969.… The entire nation is indebted for his service.…

The Gunnery Sergeant opens up a small brown box to reveal a purple ribbon with the gilding metal heart attached, the image of George Washington in its center.

With no family members to witness the Purple Heart presentation ceremony, three of his nurses and two of his doctors instead crowd the back of Jack’s small hospital room. But it is Nurse Starr who is crying as the honor guard salutes her patient and pins the medal on his chest.

When he moves into a small apartment not far from the hospital, Jack puts the medal in a cardboard box on the top of his closet shelf, along with the Vietnam Campaign ribbon, the Marine Corps Combat Action ribbon, and his Presidential Unit Citation. For him, they mean nothing. A ribbon can’t bring any of his friends back. A medal can’t resurrect a life or heal his wounds.

He hears Walter Cronkite on the television reporting about the strengthening tides of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. These men were nothing like the hippie who’d thrown a drink on him at the airport. Rather, they were guys like him who’d been in country and knew firsthand the insanity of it all—the lack of any clear directive or cogent reason to be there. With so much anger inside him, Jack wished he could join them. He’d lost everything. His friends. His future. And half his face. But how could he go out and raise a fist into the air, join their protesting? The cameramen would have a field day zooming in on his scars. Jack knew they’d make him the poster child of the goddamn war.

For the next ten months, he lives on his disability payments. He buries the thoughts of Becky along with the memories of the friends he left back on the battlefield.

He curses the doctors and nurses who neglected to ever inform him how painful scar tissue and the excision surgeries to remove it would be. He rages when he remembers one of the grunts asking an officer just before they shipped off, “What are we fighting for?” and the major revealing the hollowness of it all: “We’ve lost too many good men to turn back now.”

The anger boils.

There will be nights when he has consumed too much whiskey that he picks up the phone to call Becky. But he counts the months she’s been studying for her teacher’s degree and realizes she would have graduated the month before.

But one afternoon, after he has numbed himself with two glasses of Jack Daniels, he calls her number, only to find it has been disconnected.

He then calls information and receives three different possible numbers for a Rebecca Dougherty in western Pennsylvania. Finally, he hears her voice on the other side, and its very sweetness causes his heart to constrict painfully in his chest.

“Becky?” The tenor of his voice sounds as fragile as glass.

Silence engulfs the line.

“It’s me … Jack.”

Again, there is only silence, and Jack’s entire body grows rigid in the stinging quiet.

Becky’s stomach is in the back of her throat. “I thought you were …” Her voice cracks, but after a few seconds, she has regained a stoic sense of composure. “Jack, I thought you were dead. I tried everywhere to get more information, but no one would tell me anything.”

He has concocted an excuse, practiced in his mind over the course of several nights, one where he can test the waters before committing himself to the pain of her seeing him with his disfigurement.

“I’m at a hospital in Texas, I have a friend with me whose face is so badly damaged. Jeez, it’s just the worst thing to see.” He sucks in his breath and closes his eyes.

“He’s being discharged in a few days, and he’s got no family, Becky. That’s why I went missing. I had to stay with him.” He adjusts the receiver to his ear. “My buddy doesn’t have a place to go, and I was wondering … I know it’s been a long time since I saw you, and it was really shitty I stopped writing to you. But do you think we could come over, and the two of us could hang at your place a while?” He takes a hard swallow. “You gotta know how much I missed you.…”

A few seconds of silence swim between them. She is so overwhelmed. She has waited for him and wondered what had happened for nearly fourteen months and spent countless nights lying in her bed crying for someone she didn’t know was dead or alive. She more than missed him … she had grieved for him.

“Can I just see you alone first, Jack? Let me see you and then we can talk about your friend. I haven’t seen you or that beautiful face of yours in so long.…”

He doesn’t hear any of her words except “that beautiful face.”

She doesn’t know that he has made up the story about his friend to test her. To gauge her response in order to protect himself from being hurt any further than he’s already suffered.

The line falls mute.

“Jack?”

He hangs up the phone and tells himself he has the answers he needs. But this time it is not his one good eye and blind one leaking tears. It’s his heart. Opening like a raw wound, weeping inside his chest.