Read Online A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher - Free Book Online
Authors: Nicholas Christopher
Ads: Link
confided to no one, though most of my medical shipmates hated the war soon enough more than anyone stateside could imagine. This was not the case, however, with my one dour cabinmate, Evelyn, a starchy, taut-faced Alabaman from a fundamentalist military family who had intuited enough about my feelings on this subject to tell me, unsolicited, that it didn’t matter what had brought me to Vietnam so long as I kept doing my job so well. She was most put off that I read Latin, which she considered a heathen tongue, without a dictionary. As for Sharline, she had been keeping even more to herself, and smoking even more Thai stick, since her paramour’s departure.
“His tan was a shade lighter at the base of his ring finger,” she told me one day. “By now he’s back in Portland and he’s put his wedding band on again.”
The nurses called such sailors “territorial bachelors.” Most nurses avoided them, but they were the only kind of sailor Sharline liked.
“Definitely no emotional strings attached that way,” she observed, flicking her lighter.
The weather could change in seconds in those waters, and suddenly it began to rain, a dark squall that swept the deck with a staccato burst for several minutes. Sharline and I, once again sprawled out on beach chairs, were immediately soaked through, though she never stirred. Just that morning I had read in Pliny of a time during one of Rome’s bloodiest civil wars, before a massive battle, when it was reliably recorded that milk and blood rained down from the sky, then flesh—snatched in midair by the birds—and finally iron. This was a rain which would not have been foreign to Vietnam, I thought,watching the squall, like a black top, whirl across the sea toward the jungle.
When the stars reappeared, I scanned them. In the constellation Perseus the Medusa’s head has a winking eye, which my star books listed as Algol, a self-eclipsing double star, one star large and dim revolving around the other, which is small and bright. Every three days the larger star briefly eclipses the smaller one, and Medusa winks. As she was doing at the stroke of midnight when the P.A. system blared to life with a scratchy Christmas greeting from the captain and an announcement that a sleigh and eight reindeer would soon be touching down on the landing deck. Sharline woke up and without a word to me went down to our cabin.
Moments later, as I got up to leave, I heard a distant roar in the sky, farther out at sea. Straining my eyes, I finally saw a triangle of stars to the north streaking toward shore: a squadron of high-flying bombers. They were too big and too high to have come off any of the aircraft carriers, so I knew they were B-52s out of Guam. Vulnerable to sabotage, they could not operate out of Saigon, so they flew for eight hours to reach their targets and, after dropping their payloads, returned to the huge air base on Guam. Usually they made their runs much farther north of us. To someone in a faraway command center, I thought, it must have been a very important mission that required men to be sent up on Christmas Eve. Unless that someone had forgotten, or just didn’t care, what night it was.
By dawn a number of the men in those jets were being wheeled into my X-ray room. Dressed in an elf cap, with a cotton beard, I had joined several nurses in serving Christmas breakfast to our patients when the call came in that the choppers were bringing out some casualties: nine airmen—pilots, bombardiers, and a single navigator—who had been shot down while taking out a series of bridges in the wake of a battalion of marines retreating under hostile fire. Their planes were hit with surface-to-air missiles and then strafed with antiaircraft guns as they crash-landed. The survivors suffered multiple shrapnel wounds, broken bones, and burns. Two dozen airmen had died in action, and their bodies, in black bags, were lined up on the deck awaiting transfer to Quang Tri.
So we had nine new
“His tan was a shade lighter at the base of his ring finger,” she told me one day. “By now he’s back in Portland and he’s put his wedding band on again.”
The nurses called such sailors “territorial bachelors.” Most nurses avoided them, but they were the only kind of sailor Sharline liked.
“Definitely no emotional strings attached that way,” she observed, flicking her lighter.
The weather could change in seconds in those waters, and suddenly it began to rain, a dark squall that swept the deck with a staccato burst for several minutes. Sharline and I, once again sprawled out on beach chairs, were immediately soaked through, though she never stirred. Just that morning I had read in Pliny of a time during one of Rome’s bloodiest civil wars, before a massive battle, when it was reliably recorded that milk and blood rained down from the sky, then flesh—snatched in midair by the birds—and finally iron. This was a rain which would not have been foreign to Vietnam, I thought,watching the squall, like a black top, whirl across the sea toward the jungle.
When the stars reappeared, I scanned them. In the constellation Perseus the Medusa’s head has a winking eye, which my star books listed as Algol, a self-eclipsing double star, one star large and dim revolving around the other, which is small and bright. Every three days the larger star briefly eclipses the smaller one, and Medusa winks. As she was doing at the stroke of midnight when the P.A. system blared to life with a scratchy Christmas greeting from the captain and an announcement that a sleigh and eight reindeer would soon be touching down on the landing deck. Sharline woke up and without a word to me went down to our cabin.
Moments later, as I got up to leave, I heard a distant roar in the sky, farther out at sea. Straining my eyes, I finally saw a triangle of stars to the north streaking toward shore: a squadron of high-flying bombers. They were too big and too high to have come off any of the aircraft carriers, so I knew they were B-52s out of Guam. Vulnerable to sabotage, they could not operate out of Saigon, so they flew for eight hours to reach their targets and, after dropping their payloads, returned to the huge air base on Guam. Usually they made their runs much farther north of us. To someone in a faraway command center, I thought, it must have been a very important mission that required men to be sent up on Christmas Eve. Unless that someone had forgotten, or just didn’t care, what night it was.
By dawn a number of the men in those jets were being wheeled into my X-ray room. Dressed in an elf cap, with a cotton beard, I had joined several nurses in serving Christmas breakfast to our patients when the call came in that the choppers were bringing out some casualties: nine airmen—pilots, bombardiers, and a single navigator—who had been shot down while taking out a series of bridges in the wake of a battalion of marines retreating under hostile fire. Their planes were hit with surface-to-air missiles and then strafed with antiaircraft guns as they crash-landed. The survivors suffered multiple shrapnel wounds, broken bones, and burns. Two dozen airmen had died in action, and their bodies, in black bags, were lined up on the deck awaiting transfer to Quang Tri.
So we had nine new
Similar Books
