Noble Norfleet by Reynolds Price

Author:Reynolds Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hard as it is to believe, a lot of adult men and women have no idea of what our years in Vietnam meant to several million Afro, Anglo, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish and Native Americans who went to a country as beautiful as any on Earth, though not as big as California. The famous Wall in Washington is at least a public record that some sixty thousand men died in those thirteen years (the most frequent names, in order, are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones—there are two Norfleets); and if you read a good history of the war or see the good movies, like Apocalypse Now, you’ll maybe have some feeling for the unique grind of guerilla war in a tropical climate. Your enemies there, for instance, could range from ten-year-old boys weighing sixty pounds in black pajamas who could plant a land mine in under three minutes (that would blow both legs plus your testicles off) to eighty-year-old grandmothers wearing ditto with grenades in their pockets (that could strip the face off your skull in an instant and leave you upright holding your rifle that was useless now as a broke toothpick). Not to mention the beautiful young housewives who ran devastating anti-aircraft batteries or their five-year-old sons who could toss hand grenades or the dead-earnest grown men whose every intent was to kill all the Yanks they could see, hear or sense at whatever cost to their own life and limb.

But my war was not like most people’s war. I had pretty much the standard array of nightmare times in my thirteen months. I tended to men with everything from a bad case of dandruff or a syphilitic chancre, to tropical-foot-rot with symptoms straight out of a crazed science-fiction tale, to abdominal direct strikes from a mortar shell that left yards of gut outside their bodies in stinking gray senior-prom-type festoons. I tended to boys in fields where the gunfire came so thick it sounded like sleet blowing past your ears. More than once I single-handedly ran for yards toward a waiting helicopter with a badly damaged man in my arms under gunfire, I even hunched down and trotted more than a hundred yards with a bloody boy back into the cover of a bamboo thicket and laid him down before I noticed he didn’t have a head—not a trace of a head, torn off at the neck by a shell before I touched him. Haste was a medic’s first enemy of course. It was also your main hope of keeping your own self alive in a pinch, but you weren’t supposed to think of that till you’d saved all your wounded.

I turned out to love it. In spite of the nightmares, I loved almost every waking minute for more than a year; and I’d be lying like a lot of other people—men and women both—if I didn’t say so. I don’t mean I loved watching agony and blood, but what Tom Landingham had said came true in a strong way out there.

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