Loon - Jack McLean [87]
At long last, a lone dark blue Chevrolet Malibu sedan made the approach to the terminal. Donny was driving with Ruthie also in the front and Gretchen sleeping in her car bed in the back. Ruthie later remembered me as “standing there tall, handsome, and healthy, and looking a bit tentative.”
There we were—loading my seabag into the car—gazing at one another from head to toe, wondering what to say, trying to find the words and emotions to fit a moment that had no precedent in our young lives—an epic family event being shared for the first time by three siblings with no parents in sight.
All that was Marine Corps or Vietnam flew from me like water off a shaking dog.
I climbed into a car for the first time in a year.
I rolled the window down and turned the radio up. As we headed for the freeway, I stuck my head out and let the sweet cool air fill my lungs over and over again. The regular morning commuters looked at me with curiosity. They had no idea.
Their daily routine was just beginning.
My new life was just beginning.
In San Francisco the climate was very antiwar. I was coming from nine months fighting in it, while most people there had spent the nine months fighting against it.
After calling my parents, I immediately called the Oakland naval hospital in hopes of locating Doc Mac Mecham. Oakland was the amputee center for boys who hailed from west of the Mississippi. The Philadelphia naval hospital covered the East.
Doc was there and thrilled to hear my voice. He was largely recovered from the physical wounds from the LZ Loon blast that had cost his right thumb, and, since he was a navy corpsman, he had been put on a regular shift at the hospital while awaiting his eventual discharge from the navy. I could have no understanding of his fermenting mental wounds, to say nothing of my own.
Later that day, he drove over to San Francisco in his red Austin Healey and picked me up at Ruthie’s house in the Sunset District. We then shot back across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and the hospital, with the top down and the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” playing at full volume on the little car radio. Dustin Hoffman re-created the scene in The Graduate—top down across the Bay Bridge to the music of Simon and Garfunkel.
I could not imagine there ever being a more wonderful moment in my life.
Minutes later, we pulled up to the cavernous old facility and parked.
As with so many other events over the past two years, there was nothing in my experience that could possibly have prepared me for what I was about to face on that gorgeous late July afternoon.
I had bought a box of fresh doughnuts. I hadn’t known what else to do.
Our footsteps echoed as we walked down the long whitewashed hallways past a seemingly endless number of partially open doors that revealed the human remnants of other eras—navy and Marine Corps veterans from distant wars, either dying from injuries sustained long ago or just dying.
We turned the final corner and pushed open the frosted double doors that contained the amputee ward. All of the boys in the room had recently sustained their injuries in Vietnam. After being medevaced from combat, most had spent days or weeks being stabilized on a hospital ship offshore before being moved back to the States. Once in Oakland, they remained a month or two to be fit with prostheses, undergo physical therapy, and just lie there contemplating their new lot in life. As we were a mere seven weeks removed from the horror of LZ Loon, there was an inordinate number of marines from Charlie and Delta companies lying prone between the crisp white sheets of the beds in the amputee ward of the Oakland naval hospital.
There was nothing in my life’s experience that could have provided balance or perspective to that which flooded my eyes as I gazed down the dimly lit ward. The human detritus of our three days on LZ Loon was spread before me. How could I possibly connect what my eyes observed with what my brain could rationally process?