That’s all he said to me. I didn’t sleep much in those times, anyway. Large numbers of casualties were flooding in, and I was on edge even when I was lying flat on my bed. My muscles wouldn’t relax no matter how many deep breaths I gulped down. Despite the screams, the blood, the missing limbs, or the vast cases of gangrene, I was always, and still am, haunted not by the horrors of the war, but rather by the serene faces of men whose bodies were mangled, mutilated, and sometimes burned so badly that the offensive stench of their burnt flesh was enough to bring up the little amount of food I had managed to hold down temporarily. But even though those brutal injuries had nearly devoured the life of their victims, there still remained some young men who were frozen in an expression of tranquility. Perhaps it was the shock of severe pain or pure insanity provoked by the war, but whatever it was, it affected me in a way that is beyond repair.
As a practicing nurse, it was imperative that the woman maintained a clear mind while she worked, otherwise the sensitive emotions a woman possesses would render her hazardous to the soldiers’ last chance for survival. Breaking down into fits of hysteria or even mere tears cost time which was something the men had little of. A nurse has to become a kind of machine really; a robot, so to speak, free of feelings. I managed to keep my eyes alert with extreme focus and my ears closed off from the violent screams of agony, but by the time I had lied down to sleep, the noise of chaos, suffering, and heartache would seep into my mind and gradually grow louder and louder the more I tried to push it out of my head. Those pallid, peaceful faces would reappear in my sleep and I would shake so terribly that I couldn’t put my glasses on when I awoke. I couldn’t help wondering what they were thinking of as they slowly sunk into unconsciousness, then death. I’d imagine that they had kids at home with a patient wife pacing back and forth, fighting the inevitable tears. What would she do if she ever saw him the way I saw him—so unaware of the world as his last seconds escaped him? What if he was trapped in a dysfunctional body while being tortured mercilessly by his gory wounds? That poor man brought up to die such a bitter death…
“Virgie! Get going!”
I was relieved to hear the doctor’s voice come crashing into my thoughts. It snapped me out of the abyss that some nurses fall into when they let their shield down. They change from the machine back into a mother, wife, sister, or daughter and get caught up in panic. Happy to have switched back into machine mode, I flung on my clothes and found the doctor and a few nurses ready to leave in the topless back of a transport truck. I hopped in unsteadily; too nervous to break the five am silence of the crew. Keeping my eyes open so as not to see anything that may have stumbled into my mind and shown up in front of the black backdrop of closed eyelids, I calmed myself by staring directly across from me at the crown of a nurse’s head that was drooping over her chest. The more I narrowed my sight on the center point of her head, the more I ignored the dizzying whirl of trees whizzing by in a blur as the truck sped past them. It was gloomy, cold, and gray, but I have never seen anything as gray as the young faces lined in a row opposite me. I peeled my eyes from the head I had been staring at and scanned the faces of the crew. They were ash-colored with lines etched in deeply around their brows, eyes, and mouth. I wanted to pity them, but I could only sympathize.
I was just beginning to feel an irrational surge of aggression mixed with desperation when the truck came to a slamming halt, throwing a couple of us into our neighbors. The death trance was broken, and all of us jumped alive. We climbed down the back of the truck with stiff limbs, still terrified into silence; all of us trembling with cold and dread, emerging from each cloud of breath that managed to escape our tight chests. We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew we had to restrain that mother, wife, sister, or daughter that threatened to penetrate our machinery. The ground was covered in a brown slop of mud which froze our weary feet. Not one nurse paid any notice to the ill conditions we were to work in, but every one of us put up a good fight to resist the urge to ask what we were up against. Instead, we followed the doctor into a small grouping of trees then out into an open field exposing a mountain a good distance away. What should have been thirty minutes felt like thirty seconds and there, despite all our will to constrain that domestic woman so full of human emotions, was the cause for half our group to surrender to their bleeding hearts.
Just a few feet away from me was a cloud of billowing smoke rising from a destroyed plane that had only moments ago carried a precious cargo of returning soldiers who were, no doubt, in disbelief of their unexpected fortune. They were going home. They were going home and right into the arms of the woman who had been pacing the floor and looking desperately at their child as if it had already lost its father. The wife has deceived and defended herself with a false hope and must face the consequence of the brutal truth. The nurses are forced to deal with the hard, relentless truth day in and day out, hour after hour, death after death, and even now, at the foot of what should be a breathtaking mountain, a nurse had to struggle to gain her wits and control her retching stomach so that she could collect the scattered limbs of freed soldiers and match them by skin color or size. A body puzzle. The malodor of smoke, burnt hair, cremated bodies—the sight of endless puddles of blood, charred bones, scorched grass—hissing flames, popping from the fire, tumbling rocks from the mountain made it difficult to focus—and again, always, forever, is that one face with half closed eyes and a inkling of a smile; untroubled, placid and at peace. Like he’s forgotten the world and his wife who will rain tears over his grave.
It was the only thing we could do to compensate the women at home who loved those men. We did our best though the men may have shared more than death with each other. We gave their families a patched up body to be indentified and honored with a ceremonious funeral. I try to convince myself that it was worth giving those women something tangible to put in a box. Those women didn’t have to see the doctor and nurses taking turns to purge their stomachs of vomit caused by a sight, smell, and touch unavoidable in such a job unsuitable for humans let alone a woman who were imagining every one of those severed men to be their own loved ones. We gritted our teeth, and did what we had to do. We simply had to do it. No thinking, just action. Thinking was for later, and then the shock of what had happened would take its toll.
I’m sure those women felt that the return of their men was bitter-sweet. The insufferable game of waiting had now ended, but it wasn’t the ending they had hoped for. It wasn’t the ending any of us had hoped for, of course. While the thought of their men now feeling no pain, now embracing the peace that death brings, may have consoled the families of the deceased, it is the very thought of the dead, relaxed faces that haunt my dreams. I will never be able to erase those pale at ease faces from my deepest thoughts. They are embedded in a cache of memories far beyond my conscious ability to reach them. I will always be tormented by them whenever I sleep, if ever I sleep, for the rest of my life.
© Mikal Minarich
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