Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
That next fall, during my last semester at T.W.C., the mentally ill teenage son of my
biology advisor back in Georgetown shot his sleeping parents and sister. Dr. Wolcott's
murder evoked surprisingly little emotion in me, perhaps because I was already be-
numbed to tragedy and otherwise distracted: I was dating Donna, a woman I'd met at
Southwestern. We married in early 1968, within weeks of graduation. The Vietnam War
was in full swing, and when my draft notice arrived I enlisted for an extra year in return
for the army's guarantee that I'd be a medic.
Basic training at Fort Bliss lasted two months in the El Paso summer, during which I lost
twenty-five pounds from the Spartan diet and intense daily regime. We did calisthen-
ics, ran miles under the weight of a steel pot helmet and light pack, and took classes.
After breakfast a captain would lecture on the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the
Geneva Convention rules for treatment of prisoners. Then a drill instructor showed us
how to dispatch the enemy with rifles, bayonets, and bare hands, all the while shouting,
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” Day after day, week after week we gulped down meager rations, choked
through tear gas, hurled grenades at piles of tires, and low-crawled under concertina
wire, around exploding bunkers, and beneath machine gun tracer fire.
A recruit's life made Boy Scout hikes seem trivially easy, but there was a dichotomy
in our ranks: draftees just out of high school were in good physical shape but rebelled
at mental hazing, whereas us flabbier “college boys” may have found exercise grueling,
but I just laughed inside when a “D.I.” leaned his hat brim against my forehead and
shouted obscenities. Training was couched in terms of “when you get to 'Nam” and “if
the Viet Cong overtake your foxhole,” and of course widespread antiwar sentiment was
on our minds, however rarely mentioned. One June morning we stood at attention as
a sergeant laid out the day's schedule, then added, “Some of you might like to know
Robert Kennedy was assassinated last night. Personally, I'm glad the son of a bitch is
about it myself, the more so for already having handled lots of gunshot victims, but by
the end of basic I thought I could kill if it came to down to either that or someone killing
me.
Many of the men in my company at Fort Bliss went on to advanced infantry training
and a tour of duty in Southeast Asia, whereas I was sent to San Antonio for medic
school. Our first class consisted of a film about army medicine in Vietnam, which fol-
lowed several soldiers from injury to treatment and rehabilitation. In one scene a mortar
blast reduced a sergeant's leg to a smoldering stump; under withering small-arms fire,
a medic low-crawled to the injured man, applied a tourniquet, and pulled him to cover.
Another case depicted a surgeon pulling an intact slug out of a soldier's eye, at which
point one of my fellow trainees fled the room gagging. Over the next few months we
made hospital beds, emptied bedpans, took blood pressure, and gave injections; then I
learned to chart and clean teeth, take X-rays, and make gelatin impressions for fitting
dentures.
After I'd completed the medic and dental assistant courses, my first assignment was
back at Beaumont General Hospital in El Paso, where our patients had disfigured faces,
missing limbs, and other dramatic war injuries. Given the likelihood that I was headed
for Vietnam, distractions were welcome. Checkered whip-tailed lizards foraged on the
