365 Days Read Free Page B

running, was vibrating around him.
    Covered with blood, Peterson yelled to the corpsman to get some O-negative and to call the operating room. Then, with the crew chief, he carried the soldier off the chopper and gave him the first four O-negative units right there on the helipad under the landing lights. By the time they got the patient up to the OR he had some color back.
    Peterson operated for two hours. He had to expand the wound, ending up with an incision that ran twelve inches from the front of the patient’s thigh, right under his groin, and back around the sides of the leg. When he had cut out the infection and cleaned what he couldn’t cut, he had a decent view of the area and carefully went after the artery. Dissecting down through the leg’s great vessels and nerves, he found a medium-sized branch of the femoral artery, right above the bone, with a small hole in its anterior surface, and tied it off.
    The pathologist from the 406th came in; they had used up all the O-negative blood they had, but it wasn’t enough. Half an hour later, a chopper carrying all the O-negative blood at Kishine came in, and two hours later one came in from Drake. It took ten units of blood, but the leg stayed on.
    Ten units of blood, though, can do strange things to you. It dilutes normal clotting factors, so that even while you’re getting blood, you bleed. Before Peterson had tied off the vessel, the trooper began to ooze from the edges of the wound, then from his nose and mouth. While Peterson worked, Cooper, the head of medicine, opened the blood bank and gave the patient units of fibrinogen and fresh frozen plasma. The bleeding was held in check enough for Peterson to finish up and close the wound. He left the patient to Cooper, and since it was too late in the morning to go to sleep, he went to the snack bar and had some coffee. An hour later he began his morning cases.
    Five days later they moved Robert Kurt from the ICU down to the medical ward, where he became Cooper’s patient. Peterson had checked him every day while he was in Intensive Care and continued to check on his wound even after he had left the unit. Kurt was quite a bit older than the average soldier, much more alert, and certainly more interesting than the usual adolescent corporal who came through the evacuation chain. He told Peterson he’d been drafted when he had dropped out of his first year of graduate school. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to go on, he said, it was just that he was getting tired of going to school and wanted to be free for a while. He had taken a chance, and the Army got him.
    Two weeks after the operation, Peterson came by and found that someone had put an 101st Airborne patch on Kurt’s bed frame.
    “You’re kidding,” he said, staring at the patch.
    “No,” Kurt said, shrugging. “I figured since I was in it, I might as well really be in it. Besides, I wanted to be with guys who knew what they were doing. I didn’t know,” he said, smiling good-naturedly, “they would be goddamn crazy.”
    Peterson nodded, a bit too soberly.
    “No,” Kurt said, “don’t get the wrong idea. They saved my life. Any other unit, and I’d be dead now. I mean it. I’m glad I was in the 101st.”
    Peterson didn’t look convinced.
    “It’s the truth. We get hard-core lifers, E-8’s and E-9’s, captains with direct battlefield commissions, who know fighting. It’s their life. When things get hot, they just step in and take over, tell you to get down and wait, this is what’s happened and that, and this is what to do. They’re calm, and so nobody panics. It’s not some storybook thing.” He looked down at his leg. “I know I’d be dead now, we’d all be.”
    Peterson just stood there and let him talk. Apparently Kurt needed to talk, and he let him.
    “We got caught—three companies. It must have been an 800-man ambush. They just waited on both sides of us and closed the door on each company—just cut us off from one