LANDMINES | Evelyn Potochny
You awake to Corporal’s voice through the tent flap: “Doc, wake up, there are casualties.” But this time, Corporal feeds you no names. No mention of dead or alive, which battalion they are with, or of injuries. You assume Corporal is withholding information to protect you from learning too soon that a casualty is also your friend, and this really sets you off. Typically, you receive all the particulars up front and the Chaplain would stir and put her boots on. Typically, but not tonight.
Instead, you peer down from your bunk to see Chaps in hers, barely moving. Boots still by her bedside. She’s fast asleep. You sit up in bed, twirl your hair into a bun, change from sweats into fatigues within the confines of your sleeping bag. You whisper loudly for her to wake up, we need to get to the hospital: Now! while you scan the other bunks for your friends, J and B, wishing neither were out on convoys. You fasten and refasten the ties on your boots–as if frantic movement by you will somehow propel Chaps into motion but it’s not working, so you crawl out of your rack and kneel down beside her, pat her shoulder, say, “Chaps, c’mon, wake up, casualties,” see her eyes blink open, this is taking too long, you are boiling now watching this waltz, so you grab your weapon and charge outside the tent, surely she realizes you are in a hurry, this is serious, what if J and B are gone, what if you have to go to the dark tent and stare at their bodies with your headlamp to render cause of death and then, fast forward months from now, what if you have to respond to their heartbroken husbands back home and tell them how peaceful they looked.
You wait outside the tent for what seems like minutes, more than minutes, it feels like hours almost days before you jump in the truck so Chaps will at least hear the door slam shut: let’s go! you turn the ignition and let the truck idle and wish you could–(why don’t you?) just floor it to the hospital alone, but Chaps is still getting herself together and you two are a package deal in these situations and how will it look if you arrive without Chaps and a casualty arrives alive and well enough to ask to speak with the Chaplain? What the hell, Chaps, how long does it take someone with a pixie to put some clothes on and get herself together and by the way it’s not like you have many outfits to choose from–it’s this pair of fatigues or that pair of fatigues, why is she being so slow?
C'mon! It could be J or B over there. Those triathlons together, 10Ks, shopping at Nordstrom’s, searing moonfish for dinner with Chardonnays, then Christmastime in Afghanistan opening packages and letters by the pre-lit tree, B pulling out a My Little Pony, the back issues of Time magazine and Rolling Stone and then one day you’re all walking to the chow hall quoting Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” because one of you needs a laugh and B gives you the play-by-play of “Gone With the Wind,” shocked you managed to make it to adulthood without ever having seen it. “Oh, Ashley! Ashley!” You could use a laugh right now.
Chaps flings open the door and hoists herself into shotgun, exchanges a silent glance like all the times before except she has no idea that you’re feeling this one on a different level like a nightmare you’re afraid you don’t want to have and boy do you want to tear hell for leather to the hospital but instead you ease into first gear then second gear never more than third gear on this two-lane, washed out dirt road and dang if every bump doesn’t further slow you down and you want to smack the steering wheel, why? why can’t this be just a little bit faster than 15 mph–15–that’s right, that’s way too slow to get there. Is it J? Is it B? Who is it? You know if you speed it’s only going to make it worse because you’ll just get pulled over by the military police (MP), which would take forever and could you imagine you getting pulled over now, under the starlit sky, maybe 2 or 3am and you have to try and talk the MP out of ticketing you because you’re in a real hurry, Sergeant, and by the way what do they even do in this kind of a scenario, ticket? Or would they just take away your driving privileges right then and there, you just don’t know and so you go slow not because you expect the road on base to be riddled with landmines, like the IED you imagine must have gone off somewhere tonight, had to be right? – maybe that’s why they didn’t tell you a name—because a blast rocked one of your battalion’s trucks? Maybe the lead truck in a queue of trucks in a convoy millipeding across the desert, who knows what kind of blunt force trauma to legs and arms, torsos and heads? So, you go slow tonight to get there quicker and not because you’re worried as much about those kinds of landmines on this commute.
Half-way there and you realize you aren’t speaking much, you and Chaps, have you said anything at all, or has it only been the noise in your head as you stare into the night trying to focus on your surroundings rather than your thoughts. You feel the truck turn as you make the sharp left to the adjacent base—the one with actual roofs and structures and not the canvas tents you live and work in, past the detention center, then right toward the hospital while you ready yourself for that first blast of information—the intel they never gave you back in your tent and now you’re yanking that emergency break and sprinting toward the hospital looking over your shoulder, yes, Chaps is there several strides behind you and look, now you’re fumbling with the front door to the hospital, fumbling, fumbling, now you’re in and marching toward the trauma bay when you hear, “Ma’am, your weapon,” and shit if you didn’t do it again—forgot to check your weapon with the armorer first so you double-back and hand it over and now you’re off again trotting down the hall to the emergency room where it’s either bad news, or it’s worse. It’s either someone else’s friend, or it’s yours.
Evelyn M. Potochny, DO, is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA. Earlier in her career, she was a medical officer in the United States Navy.