Patching Up The Past

When Novak ran past shouting, “Incoming!” I tumbled out of my GI hammock and scrambled to a sandbagged culvert hooch, waiting out the attack with squad leader Lloyd Edge. At the all clear signal we emerged to shouts that a nearby bunker had been hit. I clutched my aid bag and hurried toward it. Gene Locklear, crouched inside, held both hands to his face. He’d been struck in the forehead and arm by mortar shrapnel; he groaned in pain.

“Gene,” I said, ducking inside. “There’s a case of frags on fire on top of the bunker. You’ve got to get out before it blows.”

I coaxed and prodded the wounded man while “Shake ’N Bake” Johnston doused the flames, likely started by the mortar blast. If the frags exploded we’d be engulfed in a cloud of flame and steel, and shredded to pieces. I walked Gene to the aid station, where I handed him off to the doctor, who was drunk.

“How… How do you use a morphine syrette?” he asked. 

And I showed him.

That was the last time I saw Gene. He’d been in-country three months.

Over the past 55 years I have found half my platoon. We have talked by phone, traded emails, met in person. In the company morning reports, obtained from the National Archives, Gene is listed as Bernice Locklear. I have googled his name many times without success. One day in October 2025 I redoubled my efforts, spotted a match in a church congregation in North Carolina, and emailed the pastor. 

A day later he replied. “Yes, that’s him. He was wounded just like you put it. Gene is a member here. He just left to see the eye doctor. Here’s his number.”

That evening I made the call. Gene’s wife answered. 

“Gene, it’s that feller from Massachusetts when you was in the war.” 

We spoke for ninety minutes. In my imagination, Gene and I were humping through the jungle, pulling perimeter guard on remote bases, chowing down on C-rations, cleaning our weapons with diesel fuel. But the voice I heard was that of an old man, who talked slow and paused often, and Gene may have been smoking a cigarette, or sipping coffee, or drinking a Coke like the girls on motorcycles sometimes sold us. We drank the warm, dark sugary fluid; the girls collected the empty bottles, hopped on their motorcycles, and zoomed off.

“Doc,” said Gene, “In all this time I talked to one other fella from our platoon.”

He recalled very little of being hit. Just the white flash and loud bang. Blacking out. Coming to in a daze. Waking at a “medical center” as he put it; which may have been 93rd Evac in Long Binh. Everything else, a blank. We talked about Larry Roy, who Gene buddied up with. I said Larry Roy, from Michigan, was an excellent pointman. Larry told me he loved golf. Gene brightened at that. He said Roy, (he knew him as Roy), had shown him his golf swing. 

“How you spread your feet. How you point your toes… like this… and like that.” 

I laughed, and recalled how I met short, feisty, 17-year-old Larry Roy in dry season on LZ Compton, in An Loc, helping him load his pack with C-rations, one-quart canteens, trip flares, and Claymores. Found him ammo and frags. I recalled how Larry smiled that day, and neither of us, standing in that bomb crater, knew that soon enough he’d walk point. 

Point: On patrols, as we trudged or crawled or snaked our way through jungle, Larry Roy walked first into the forbidding undergrowth, entered the emerald bamboo forests so deathly quiet. 

Slightly hunched, neck craning, M16 held at the hip, his eyes rove, searching for any hint of an ambush. His heart pounds. His sweat saturates his uniform, which clings to him like a second skin. Step by step he plods forward, looks, listens, scents the air for signs of enemy passage. He is the pointman. He lives in a world of absolute clarity where every step might be his last, and one day I nearly killed him. 

It happened like this: After a long patrol we set up a night perimeter. Exhausted, I cleared a small spot in the jungle, sat on my pack and rested. Larry Roy, having set out the trip flares and Claymores, approached me. 

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “I don’t feel so good.”

Not now, I thought. For Christ sake, not now. I need to rest. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

His throat hurt. His stomach ached. He coughed and wheezed. His temperature was a hundred and three. I opened my canvas aid bag, unscrewed the caps of plastic bottles and handed him one or two of every antibiotic, antispasmotic, muscle relaxant, analgesic, and antihistamine I had.

“That ought to help,” I said, zipping the canvas bag shut.

Larry Roy popped the artificial rainbow into his mouth, tilted his head back, glugged water from his canteen.

“You’re all right, Doc.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Thank you much.”

An hour later he returned to me, eyes glazed, speech slow and easy.

“Doc.” He smiled. “Whatever you gave me… Man, I feel great!”

Two weeks later, back in the rear, a doctor chastened me.

“You could have killed him,” he said. “Don’t ever do that again.”

Gene thought Larry Roy was hit in the mortar attack and lay near him, bloodied from shrapnel in the face and chest.

“Doc, all these years, I seen him there, bleeding and such, me not helping. I feel bad about that. You know what I’m saying?”

“You must be thinking of someone else,” I said. “I’d have known if he was hit. And besides, you were too shocked to help.”

Bad with names, Gene wondered how I could recall Bieck, Wilson, Dorio, Rudy, Lieutenant Sharpe, the others in our squad. By chance, at a military hospital in Washington state he met up with a grunt from our platoon.

“A red-haired feller. With a big long scar down the side of his neck. Said he was hit in Cambodia.” 

I’d spoken with machine gunner Steve York a year ago. Days before it was overrun, Steve was hit on LZ Ranch. Pellets from a GI Claymore the enemy aimed toward the base ripped through his carotid artery. Someone yelled “Medic!” and I ran toward Steve, but turned back for my weapon, ammo, and aid bag. I stopped the bleeding; bandaged the wound. Steve got a Purple Heart for his neck, but not for his arm, when he and Johnny B were hit three months earlier by friendly fire, Johnny getting it worst, a nervous door gunner riddling his arm and leg with a burst of machine gun fire.

Gene’s PTSD caused him to retire at 51. He began therapy, but didn’t get along with the VA shrinks. After a time, frustrated by how they treated him, he never went back. 

“All they did was ask questions, Doc. They never talked to me. Never listened like you do. Which only made things worse.”

From personal experience, I knew what he meant. VA therapists start each session with a rigid script of clinical queries that deflate the hope for meaningful dialogue. For ten minutes the therapist interrogates, typing the answers into a computer:

“How would you describe your sleep?”

“How would you describe your mood?”

“How would you describe your appetite?”

“Do you have thoughts of harming yourself?”

“Do you have thoughts of harming others?”

The endless litany would sour anyone wishing to talk, vent, open up, feel cared for, be listened to. And some VA therapists understand combat vets better than others. A therapist I’d seen for years once asked how I knew a machine gunner, who had visited me a week prior.

In disbelief I asked, “Do you know who makes up an infantry platoon?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

As she sat before me in her black comfy chair, eyeing her cup of fresh hot coffee, I belted out the twenty or so haggard grunts on a typical patrol.

“First in line, the pointman. Behind him, the slack man, who will try to protect the point if he is shot. Next, a half-dozen riflemen. Behind them, the machine gun team. More riflemen. The RTO. An officer. The medic. More riflemen. The last man, also called ‘slack.’”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

A New Jersey VA doctor prescribed me psych meds for PTSD, which made me stagger. I poured the remaining blue capsules into an envelope which I mailed to him.

My polite note read, “Fuck you.”

At the same facility, before my 101st Airborne friend Tom hobbled away, his war wound bleeding from migrating fragments of shrapnel, the foreign doctor asked, “‘Zhrapnel?’ Vut iss ‘zhrapnel’?”

Years later, a Manhattan VA doctor questioned my murderous rage at the battalion surgeon who’d asked how to use a morphine syrette.

“Why were you so angry? Why did you want to kill him?”

“Because I cared for the men in my platoon. Gene was bleeding, in shock, and the fucking doctor was drunk. How can you not understand that?”

“Do you have any Agent Orange?” a VA clerk in Brooklyn, NY once asked me. 

To which I replied, “Yes, I have some right here, in my pocket.”

After I described to her the decapitated NVA, the half-dead girl next to him, the booby-trapped bodies, an experienced Vet Center therapist exclaimed, “You should be proud of your service to your country.” 

For imposing her views on me, I scolded her and terminated our meetings. “I’d prefer to see Dave,” I said. At the Battle of Dak To he’d been shot in the chest and leg. Near death, a chaplain performed last rites. Dave knew how to listen. Knew what to say and when to say it. He was the best therapist I ever had.

“Gene,” I nearly said. “I hear you loud and clear, buddy. Loud and clear.”

As we talked, I helped Gene flush out a few memories, but mostly I listened. Listened to a deeply traumatized man recall how the war affected him—a man whose wounds I’d bound a half-century ago. Apparently VA therapists hadn’t listened to him.

Gene’s first wife died years ago. “She got the cancer,” he said. He remarried; they have kids from former spouses. He has a grandson too, but after an episode of rage, when he caught the boy where he did not belong, he no longer babysits him.

For years Gene had nightmares, bouts of hairpin rage, depression, anxiety, crying spells. In his nightmare sleep he would sometimes hit his wife. Sometimes choke her. He’s better now. VA doctors prescribed him sleep meds. Before that, fearing his war dreams, he went days without sleep, slept standing up at work. 

Every combat veteran has nightmares. For thirty years, on and off, I wrote mine down. I’m being chased by the enemy. Or my M16 is broken. Or is toy-like. Or the bullets spill from the barrel like syrup. Or the enemy, with bayonets drawn, surrounds me. Or gleefully I kill them with bursts from my M16. Waking, sometimes I’m filled with dread, sometimes sobbing until the sorrow passes. 

From time to time Gene punctuated his sentences with “Thank the Lord,” or simply “bless” or “blessed,” religion playing a large part in his life. After all, I’d found him at a Baptist church in North Carolina, where he is Deacon Bernice Locklear. Bernice, the name on his birth certificate, was meant to be Bernest, similar to his brother’s name, Ernest. The family accepted the error.

“So lots of times people see Bernice and think it’s a female,” said Gene, “but it’s pronounced BURness, like a man.”

Perhaps another time I’ll tell Gene that like himself, Larry Roy found God.

“Doc, do you have Jesus in your life?” he asked when we spoke in 1998.

Home from Vietnam, before the Lord saved him, at breakfast Larry Roy would scream at his folks at the kitchen table, or yell and bang his head against the living room wall.

“Doc, when I first came home—man, I was crazy.”

First in line—any step might be your last.

“Do you have Jesus in your life, Doc?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t.

Perhaps one day I’ll tell Gene how I was settling down to a C-ration can of diced fruit as Larry Roy, Bieck, Rudy, and Mike placed a half-dozen rotted logs lengthwise. Suddenly Joe Dorio came running into the perimeter. “Gooks! Gooks!” he shouted. 

As he dove behind the logs I saw a running blur. “Is that one of ours?” I asked. 

“No, you idiot,” said Joe, and I fired, likely missed, and the NVA fought back.

From behind the mud thick roots of an upturned tree I watched the four grunts, laying prone, repeatedly raise up, fire their M16s, duck down, fire again, Rudy unleashing machine gun bursts into the jungle. When Shake ’N Bake Johnson, to their right, was shot in the leg, I patched him up, then ran to cover. 

“Doc, look to the left, they’ll try to outflank us,” yelled Mike. 

A brief lull. We heard the dread click of a Chicom fuse activated. 

Mike shouted, “Grenade!” and moments later a wood-handled Chicom sailed through the air, exploded by the machine gun, twisting the barrel in half. As dust and dirt filtered down on us, the NVA opened up with bursts from their AKs. The grunts cursed them as they fired back.

“Sons of bitches! You motherfuckers! Fuck you! Fuck you! Sons of bitches!”

“Doc!” shouted Larry Roy. “Toss me a grenade.”

I chucked him one. He pulled the pin, counted three, threw it, and BOOM, they must be dead. 

But then came the mechanical snap of a second Chicom, this one landing between the men, who scuttled to where I crouched, and threw themselves upon me. The blast seemed to lift us up, throw us down. Mike, last on the pile, got it worst. After the wounded were medevaced, the company commander and Larry Roy reconned a blood trail.

“Found a GI helmet,” said Larry. “And chunks of human meat.”

Mike Derrig, machine gunner and M79 man, once asked me why Gene and several new men who were out on ambush—FNGs, we called them—let the enemy walk past. 

“Why didn’t they blow them away?”

Gene didn’t mind talking about the war, but Mike’s question bothered me. I never heard from Johnny B, medevaced from a bomb crater, after we spoke in 2024. Machine gunner/RTO Jim Lamb visited me in 2006. Both said they’d stay in touch. I never heard from them again. 

Toward the end of his visit, as we shared war photos, Jim began to pace anxiously.

“Jim, you alright?”

“Yeah, Doc. I’m okay.”

But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe all these years Jim had buried Vietnam, kept it safely stashed in a corner of his mind. Until at last, machine gunner and medic reunite, and “It”: the war—patrol, jungle, ambush, monsoon, chaos and killing, losses and grief—finally surfaced. Outside, on the porch, saying goodbye, we embraced.

“I love you, Doc,” said Jim.

“I love you, Jim,” I replied.

And that was the last I heard of him. Not wanting to risk upsetting Gene, I didn’t mention the FNGs, who were probably scared shitless.

Gene and I have spoken a couple of times since our first conversation. On one call, he clarified that VA doctors did listen to him, but talking about Vietnam made him cry. And he cried at work. And he cried at home. And he cried as he spoke to me, recalling how, at his lowest point, his life in ruins from PTSD, he thought of killing himself.

“But that’s when I opened my life to Jesus,” he said, his voice quavering with emotion. “I’m not perfect, Doc, but the Lord saved me.”

On another call, Gene abruptly asked about a pointman shot seven times. It wasn’t Larry Roy. Who was it? Then I remembered. I was sitting with the lieutenant when half the platoon, out on a clover leaf patrol, walked into a VC ambush and radioed for help. I grabbed my rifle, aid bag, and ammo, and ran with the lieutenant through the jungle until we came upon Wilson, Bieck, Larry Roy, the others, standing over Red. He lay on his back. He was conscious. Alert. He’d been shot seven times. I replaced the faulty bandages the grunts had placed on his arms, legs, and belly. With two fatigue shirts stretched over bamboo poles, we carried Red to shade. Wilson called in a medevac. RASH arrived and fired rockets, but the VC were long gone. Curiously, all this time, no one, not even Red, spoke. We loaded him onto the medevac. Never heard from him again.

About thirty years later I located Mike Wilson; every few months we talked by phone. One night, it might have been winter, for some reason I asked Mike how Red got shot. Mike went quiet. He was breathing hard. I could almost see him trembling.

“What is it? What’s bothering you?”

“Can’t talk about it Doc. I might get in trouble.”

“You can trust me,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

I knew that Red was a transfer from another division; they didn’t do things the way we did. I didn’t know he’d been warned several times to move up if we made contact. Mike said that during the ambush, Red stayed back. This time, at close range, someone shot him.

“Was it you?”

Mike didn’t answer. He was sobbing. 

I told him I understood. I told him I’d have done the same. 

“A fella’d have to be real angry to do that,” said Gene, when I told him the story.

“Let me tell you something,” I said. “I was so angry at the doctor being drunk that I could have killed him.”

Gene’s forgiving nature surprised me. “Doc,” he said, “in the eyes of the Lord, everyone’s just human.”

Fifty years passed before I was humbled by learning what might have led the doctor to drink. His younger brother, an infantry officer, had been killed by a sniper in 1968. He’d been in-country just two weeks.

Gene was raised on a farm by loving parents. Several times he described himself as a gentle soul. Then came the shock of basic training. The hectoring drill sergeants. The daily jostling of one hundred men marching, running, firing rifles. The bayonet drills of “Kill! Kill! Kill!” On Gene’s third month in combat, the fiery white bang of the mortar blast. Then years of war rattling inside his head.

“Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. Like punishment,” I said.

What had he done to deserve it?

“So you cry sometimes. It’s normal. It really is.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gene. “For a little while I do feel better.”

He could have been speaking for all combat vets.

Losses, horror, heartbreak, occasional laughter—when Gene and I talk, the sweet and mournful and terrible songs continue to vibrate between us. By coincidence, Blake, Gene’s son, served in the Marines as a medic. I hope Blake has fared better than his father, and his father’s medic, who, after all these years, still cares for him.