Finding David

By F. Mark Granato

When aimless, nineteen-year-old boyhood friends catch war fever at the height of the Vietnam conflict, they dream of adventure, glory and the romance of victory. Within weeks of beginning their combat tour as U.S. Marines, one is dead, a hero who has selflessly sacrificed his life to save his friend. Grievously wounded, the comatose survivor fights to stay alive for the girl they both loved. “Finding David” is the touching story of young, unfinished lives, unquenchable love, broken hearts and haunted minds, and an enduring devotion to “Semper Fi” — always faithful.

Although “Finding David” is a work of fiction, it is based on a war that fifty years later is still a source of pain that changed America forever. For many of those who fought the battles of Vietnam and returned to a deeply divided country, the scars of their service are often unhealed and untreated. It was in the wake of Vietnam that we began to recognize and confront one of war’s most horrific legacies: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Finding David” is a story dedicated a high school friend and classmate who survived just fifty-five days in the jungles of Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, in the hope that it will help to continue to raise awareness of the desperate need for greater efforts to help those suffering from PTSD.

• Language: English
• Publisher: F. Mark Granato
• Release date: Mar 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301927340

F. Mark Granato

F. Mark Granato’s long career as a writer, journalist, novelist and communications executive in a US based, multi-national Fortune 50 company has provided him with extensive international experience on nearly every continent. Today he is finally fulfilling a lifetime desire to write and especially to explore the “What if?” questions of history. In addition to THE BARN FIND, he has published the acclaimed Vietnam era novel, FINDING DAVID, a love story chronicling the anguish of Vietnam PTSD victims and their families, OF WINDS AND RAGE, a suspense novel based on the 1938 Great New England Hurricane, BENEATH HIS WINGS: THE PLOT TO MURDER LINDBERGH, and TITANIC: THE FINAL VOYAGE. He writes from Wethersfield, Connecticut under the watchful eye of his faithful German Shepherd named “Groban.”

Book preview

Finding David

Finding David

A Novel By

F. Mark Granato

All rights reserved

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

F. Mark Granato

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Copyright © 2013 by F. Mark Granato

Published in the United States of America 2013

Also by F. Mark Granato

Titanic: The Final Voyage

Beneath His Wings:

The Plot to Murder Lindbergh

Of Winds and Rage

The Barn Find

Out of Reach:

The Day Hartford Hospital Burned

UNLEASHED

This Boy

Stars In Our Window

The Long Shadow

The Spirits of Normandy

This story is dedicated to my wife,

forever my love and always my friend,

for her passion and wisdom

in guiding our sons

to become good and strong men,

and who still kisses them goodnight

in her dreams.

And to my beloved Grandson,

Richard Charlie Granato

May all your days

be filled with love and happiness

and free of the pain and stupidity of war.

In loving memory

David Michael Kirk

Friend and classmate

Private First Class

H CO, 2ND BN, 5TH MARINES

1ST MARDIV, III MAF

United States Marine Corps

Quang Nam Province

South Vietnam

May 15, 1969

One

~~~  ~~~

I scream again into the absolute stillness of the black void, then hold my ragged breaths and listen for a response.

"David?

Are you there?"

I cry out again and again, frantically, but the reply is always the same.

The silence is deafening.

I fight back against the panic rising in my throat. Surely, I reason, I am caught in a nightmare. I need only awaken to free myself.

But I cannot.

I am suffocating, blind and imprisoned in an impenetrable quiet. I am losing control, on the brink of insanity.

Demon thoughts race through my mind.

Have I been buried alive?

Am I trapped in a perpetual limbo from which there is no escape?

Where am I?

Where is David?

I cannot feel my body. Where is my body?

Am I dead? I cannot be dead.

I pray. Please let me die.

How long have I been here, I wonder. How long will I be here?

The answer comes to me immediately.

Eternity.

I scream again into the void.

"David?

Are you there?"

Two

~~~  ~~~

U.S. Army 95th Evacuation Hospital

Da Nang, South Vietnam

May 1969

Not far away from the alien jungle where men fought brutally and died violently every day in a war seemingly without end, a village of Quonset huts nestled absurdly at the base of Sơn Trà Mountain in Da Nang on the idyllic coast of South Vietnam.

The lush South China Sea backdrop for the U.S. Army’s 95th Evacuation Hospital was an obscene contradiction to the business going on within it. In rare moments of quiet, the sound of breakers crashing on the white sand beaches below gave the hospital the aura of a tropical resort. But the sky above was usually filled with the whup whup resonance of helicopter blades beating the air as arriving Huey’s — Bell UH-1 Army helicopters — brought a continual supply of new casualties to the hospital. Severely wounded American soldiers, mostly boys in their late teens or early twenties, filled the gunships that doubled as air ambulances.

The metallic smell of fresh blood was thick as triage doctors and nurses rushed to meet each incoming flight on the tarmac, evaluating the wounded even as they were hurriedly whisked away to waiting surgical units or holding rooms. The work was gruesome but analytical. Those injured beyond help were quickly separated from casualties who might live if treated immediately.

Speed was always of the essence. Most victims were already in a critical state from blood loss and the onset of circulatory shock. The lucky ones were unconscious. They were oblivious to both the vetting and the agony.

It was here that my nearly lifeless corpse had been pulled from a blood-soaked Huey some days before. An optimistic triage doctor had looked beyond my severely torn face and shone a flashlight intensely into my eyes. He saw a faint glimmer of life and rolled the dice. Get this Marine on a table, Stat, priority one, he screamed to the stretcher-bearers. My only other memory was hearing the words, My son, are you ready to receive the Last Rites? and the wet touch of holy oil upon my forehead. I was operated on immediately and miraculously survived. More surgeries followed, sometimes just hours apart, each a desperate bid to keep me alive. Finally, Death rested from calling my name.

Now, oblivious to time or place, I lay in a deep, drug-induced coma, my grievously wounded body expending only enough energy to keep it alive. The barbiturate diet that kept me comatose maintained the steady beat of my heart and the slight rise and fall of my chest. This forced, deep unconsciousness was intended to isolate my traumatized brain from the agony of the multiple wounds I had suffered. If the injuries didn’t kill me, the pain might. It was sound theory.

Unfortunately, a subterranean war was waging in my unconsciousness — an endless battle that was completely invisible to those who tended to the healing of my wounds. They were unaware that even as they fought to keep my body alive, my mind prayed for death. They could not have known that given a choice, I would gladly have succumbed to the pain rather than suffer the endless, hideous terror of being alone in the black void.

But then, without warning, the conflict between body and soul ended. A noise exploded across my hibernating brain, a white-hot blast of light and clamor that caught me in mid silent scream. Later I recognized the catalyst as the most innocuous of sounds — the screeching of a metal chair being dragged across a linoleum floor — that finally jumpstarted my reawakening. It was the sudden break in the protecting silence that ultimately triggered the first coherent sensations of mind and body I’d had since being wounded a week before.

I drifted slowly back to consciousness, floating through empty space towards a flicker of light that grew brighter but always remained just out of reach. Then finally, like a drowning man clawing towards the surface of the water with his last remaining strength, I slipped the grasp of the parallel reality that had imprisoned me and drank in awareness. For long moments I lay awake but motionless, having no sense of my circumstances. I felt the urge to cry but did not know why.

With the sudden reawakening came no immediate recall of what had happened, where I was or what was left of me. But as cognizance flooded back and my mind and physical presence reunited, I quickly regained sensations, some of which were exaggerated and nearly overpowering. Before I could even recall my own name, I reached one conclusion: I knew I wasn’t dead because I could feel a burning, crawling sensation on the left side of my face, as if worms were slithering beneath my skin.

My crusted eyes strained to open but I could not see. Except for the raw irritation of my face, I had little sensation of feeling anywhere in my body except for an overall heaviness, as if I was tied down. My mouth was numb and I could not feel my jaw. I rubbed my tongue across the back of where my front teeth should have been but felt something like rough cloth. Then I tried to speak and made the mistake of attempting to turn my head. A stabbing pain pierced my neck. No sound came from my lips even when I screamed.

My vision began to clear. The progress revealed little more than slits of light -- foggy, pale yellow openings that seemed to jump around in intensity. Then the first bit of reality hit me. I was in a hospital room. The slightest whiff of a hot breeze moving behind my head told me that a window was open somewhere close by. I thought I could hear the rattle of a metal curtain blind. That might explain the dancing light. A bit of sunlight was sneaking through the window. The pale yellow haze helped to take away some of the sterility of the antiseptic whiteness surrounding me.

Then dread began to well up in my throat. Was I alone? Was I still trapped? I began to choke on the anxiety that rose in my throat. I forced myself to feel the gentle movement of the air and to follow the flitting shadows. It was better than the darkness.

There was a sudden commotion of talk close by, but I could make no sense of it. The grotesque itching on my face suddenly became unbearable. I had to scratch it. A surge of claustrophobia hit me, and with a pull, I yanked my left arm free. A white-hot bolt of pain surged through my limb, but surprisingly, it was held down only by tightly wrapped sheets. The movement was enough to alert someone in the room to say, He’s awake with a tone of unmistakable surprise. I wanted to respond, but couldn’t and settled for being able to free a finger enough to reach up and scratch my face. It was a bad decision.

Before anyone could intercede, I jerked my hand up to scrape my nose as if I had a bad case of poison ivy. In my delirium, I hadn’t sensed the heavy plaster cast encasing my left arm from fingertips to shoulder. The temporary prosthesis smashed unhindered into what remained of the left side of my face. I didn’t know that metal shrapnel had flayed my nose open, shredded half my lower jaw and left a gaping hole in my skull. In the weeks and months ahead there would be many more surgeries and complicated reconstruction of my face -- if I lived that long. But now there was an instantaneous blast of pain and the unmistakable taste of blood flooding into my throat. A scream came from nearby. No, Tommy, don’t! a nurse yelled. Another hollered for a doctor. Someone pressed a compress to my face. I could sense commotion all around and felt hands holding me down.

Thus ended the gradual reintroduction to consciousness the hospital staff had planned as they weaned me off the Sodium Thiopental keeping me in a comatose state. The drug-induced coma had successfully helped my body to focus its precious energies on overcoming the shock and immediate trauma of the extensive wounds I had suffered. But now, choking on blood pouring down my throat from the wounds I had reopened on my face, I was in immediate danger of suffocating. I panicked and with my free hand grabbed the wrist of a nurse pressing a towel to my nose to staunch the bleeding. My fingers frantically tightened around her wrist as if it was my own Mother’s. I saw her lips mouth the words, Hang on, Tommy, hang on…

I abruptly felt the stab of a needle into my hip and the searing flow of a syringe of morphine being emptied into the muscle. Long seconds later, the drug hit, bringing an enormous wave of relief. Blackness followed quickly. My hold on the nurse’s arm gradually relaxed as I slipped back to sleep. Later she told me that she had held me for several minutes more to calm herself, her own emotions exhausted. It was hard work to watch boys die, she said, knowing that somewhere in the world, a mother was unaware that her son was desperately clinging to his last seconds of life. I was nineteen and just barely alive. She had prayed for me.

Maybe it was the nurse’s prayers that kept me alive. I actually think it was the touch of her hand that gave me just enough strength to fight off death again. But as I lapsed once more into unconsciousness, this time my mind was working, processing in a kind of confused overdrive. I drifted back to the instant when all had changed for me forever.

There was the terrifying instant when the bombs and bullets of the hidden enemy tore open my body when the shock and blood nearly overwhelmed me.

There were the explosions, the screams, the cries of agony and the gale of stirred air as a helicopter lifted me and other wounded to safety.

There was the painful jolt of surprise as the face of my best friend inexplicably appeared before my eyes, followed quickly by the harsh blow of understanding and the weight of immense sadness.

There was the vivid recall of my unintelligible pleas to go back and pick up his pieces – the fragments of David’s being that I intuitively knew had been blown across a field of elephant grass outside a meaningless Vietnamese village. There was the gruesome logic that ran over and over again in my head that my friend could be put back together again if only we found all his pieces.

There was the sudden recall that it was David’s name I had been screaming into the void in my eternal nightmare.

Then there was the most terrifying awareness of all.

Tommy DiMarco had been saved.

David Kirk was gone.

But one could not survive without the other.

Three

~~~  ~~~

I clenched my eyes shut as I listened to the weeping Marine tell the story, but the last images I had of my lifelong best friend, David Kirk, would not fade. My chest was so tight I thought my heart would explode. I almost wished it had. The morphine they fed me regularly helped a little with the pain, but it made my thinking fuzzy. It was hard to maintain my focus in any conversation, but especially this one.

It plays over and over in my head, Tommy, but I don’t really know what the fuck happened, he said, both hands squeezing the metal hospital bed rail so tightly that his knuckles were white. It all came down on us so fast. One minute it looked like we were clear for the night, the next…

George Neander was a Marine Corps Jarhead like me. Jarhead was a term of endearment in the Marines going back to World War II because of the uniform way we were required to wear our hair. Our heads were shaved into a sort of Mason jar look – a little high on top, really tight on the sides. Neander had come by the Da Nang Evacuation hospital before they shipped me back stateside several weeks after I was wounded. He had been one of the lucky ones from H Company platoon – a unit of the famous 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marines Division that had been nearly wiped out in the ambush. He was lucky — at least in the sense that he had come through physically intact. I wasn’t so sure about his emotional state.

David and I had met George at Parris Island, the Marine Corps training center in Beaufort County, South Carolina that was as close to hell on earth as any man could ever come. The three of us had become close friends. Somehow, Neander was spared from the shrapnel of the first cluster of Russian supplied land mines that our guys had tripped, as well as the intense following fire that came from the Viet Cong regulars who were hiding in the hillside above us. The VC had hit the remainder of the platoon with fire from a barrage of AK-47 automatic rifles with the ease of targets at a practice range.

George was dog tired that morning after a long, steaming night of lugging the platoon’s Browning Automatic Rifle, a massive beast of a gun, and had been dragging his ass bringing up the rear of the platoon when it happened. With tears streaming down his face, he struggled to describe what had happened to us. Reliving the slaughter was probably more painful for him than me. I had only been wounded. Neander had seen thirty-eight of the seventy Marines who had gone out on that patrol butchered before his own eyes. Another dozen were critically injured. He was drenched in their blood when the last Huey lifted him out of the zone. The oldest of those killed was twenty-two.

We were diddy-bopping through that tall elephant grass field, you know? he said. The one right outside base camp? We couldn’t have been more than a few klicks from home, a cold beer, some hot grub, and a shower. How the fuck did the VC get in there? Didn’t anyone see those motherfuckers? Our own guys let us walk right into it. Christ, nobody gives a shit here, Tommy. He was tired, angry and sad. It was a bad state of mind for a guy who’d have to walk out into that same jungle again tonight. George was more than beaten. He was resigned to the nightmare in which he found himself trapped.

It took him a few minutes to compose himself again. I gave him time. George had been a lot like David when I first met him. Always ready for a good time or a good fight, bright-eyed, handsome, a perfect poster boy of a Marine. He had aged years in just the four months we’d been in South Vietnam, and I don’t think he was capable of smiling anymore. He appeared to be okay, but he was already physically and mentally exhausted and was not the same George Neander who had left Davenport, Iowa six months before. If he was fortunate, he’d get to go home after eight more months of this lurid absurdity, but he would carry a heavy burden of horror and bitterness for the rest of his life.

I forced myself to open my eyes and face him. I had to know.

What about David? I mumbled to him, my words barely intelligible through what was left of my shattered jaw that had been surgically wired back together. Pain seared through my face from the movement of my mouth.

George wiped tears away from his eyes and stared at the floor for a while before answering me. He didn’t want to tell me the rest.

I had to know and squeezed his hand to continue.

Tony Rizzo was at point with Stragger following. They both got it right away, he finally answered. I think the claymores were rigged together, you know, Alpha-Alpha style because a shit load of those mothers went bang all at once. Probably more than a dozen. He hesitated again. Then ’Charlie’ started picking at us from the trees. The grass was pretty good cover but they’d seen where the guys had gone down. It was like target practice for the bastards. You weren’t moving and I thought you were hit. David was to your left. I saw him empty a full clip into the trees trying to protect you and lay down some cover for the medics.

George stopped again. It took everything he had to finish the story.

C’mon man, I gotta know, I said to him, gripping his arm with my good hand. I was in agony from the involuntary clenching of what was left of my jaw muscles.

Shit, Tommy… I remember that all of a sudden you got up and started running toward Rizzo, like you could help him or something. You were firing blindly into the trees. There was so much noise I couldn’t hear what Kirk said but I saw him screaming at you to get the fuck down. You kept going toward Rizzo. David jumped up, still firing into the trees, and chased you down — threw himself over you. The crazy bastard knocked you flat on your ass.

Neander let go of the bed rail and sat down slowly in a chair. He sobbed at the vision that overwhelmed him. His body kept going and he went right over the top of you and when he hit the ground again… He looked away from me and out the window. He landed face down on the claymore you would have stepped on, Tommy. He stopped, shaking his head at the vision. That’s when you took it, too.

There it was. The vague recall I had of the chaos smashed back into my memory so vividly that my body shook. The truth was that I had caused the death of David Kirk, my lifelong best friend. He died trying to protect me.

Just like he always had.

Neander grimaced as he said the words, but went on. Then the fucking sappers started dropping mortar and RPG fire on us. We had so many guys down we couldn’t move until the Hueys came in and blew rockets into the trees and dropped some green smoke. The poor bastards with the bandaid boxes didn’t know where to start. I helped carry you to the bird. Man, you were so fucked up, bleeding so bad I didn’t think you’d make it. It looked like half your face was gone. They managed to fill the Huey with wounded, just guys stacked on top of each of other to get you out of there to Quang Nam. But David…

Tell me.

This time he didn’t hesitate.

There weren’t pieces of him big enough to bring home, Tommy. We couldn’t even bag him. Don’t even know if they found his dog tags. They just blew him all to shit. A couple of F4 flyboys hit the zone an hour later with napalm. It’s just black earth out there now, man.

We were quiet then. George finally said the only thing left to say.

He’s gone Tommy, he said, dropping his head into his hands, weeping.

"David’s gone.

They’re all gone."

Four

~~~  ~~~

249th General Hospital

Camp Drake, Asaka, Japan

The nurse took more time with this patient than usual, despite the routine she knew so well. She checked the respirator that kept him breathing, measured his pulse, adjusted the intravenous drips that kept him both sedated and hydrated, emptied the collection bag from his Foley catheter and took a moment to wipe the small portion of his face that wasn’t bandaged with a cool, damp cloth. It might have been her fourth or fifth visit of the shift. For some reason, she was really fretting over this one, and it troubled her. She worried about all of the young men she cared for but tried desperately not to. So many of them didn’t make it. Everyone took a piece of her heart with them.

Only twenty-three and out of nursing school little more than eighteen months, the young Army nurse looked much older than her years. That was the price of seeing boys barely out of high school come into her hospital all shot to hell. Some arrived drowning in their own blood, others screaming for a missing arm or leg. Many suffered head wounds that left them walking dead or spinal cord injuries that never let them walk again. A lot were more fortunate. They just died without ever waking up.

This one was really amazing, she thought. The boy, a nineteen-year-old Marine, had suffered more than thirty severe wounds and they’d pulled nearly two hundred shards of shrapnel from his head, torso and legs. His bladder was ruptured, and his rib cage was shattered by a bullet that had pierced his chest and just missed his heart. His face…my God, she prayed. She wondered if the surgeons would ever be able to restore his features. It probably didn’t matter. A piece of shrapnel had carved out a huge chunk of his skull, taking with it a small portion of his brain.

There wasn’t much she hadn’t seen in the eight long months of her tour in Da Nang. She’d built up an individual psychological immunity to it all and no longer suffered nausea from the gore. She slept peacefully when there was time. The nightmares had long since stopped, but she knew that in the years to come there would be many long nights of reliving the hell on earth that was an Army field hospital in Vietnam.

Tall and thin, she was actually quite beautiful. But the shapely blond, her hair pulled back from her face in a tight bun, spent little time on her appearance. She would have invested more time on her makeup in another world, but her beaus now were her patients. And they cared more for the tender touch of her hand, the sight of her warm smile or the sound of a few caring words much more than they did about her eye shadow or lipstick. For the boys under her care, she was the mother, sister or girlfriend whose hand they couldn’t squeeze or lips they couldn’t kiss.

But this one, she thought, leaning down over the bed occupied by a six-foot-two, sandy-haired boy whose eyes she’d never seen opened, didn’t know who she was. He probably didn’t even know she was there with him. Other than the beating of his heart, he showed no indications of life. The mechanical respirator controlled his breathing. The pupils of his eyes were dilated and unresponsive to light. He was alive, she knew, but what did that mean to him? Was he aware of anything? Was his mind processing? Was he dreaming? There was no way to tell, she knew and sadly reflected on the fact that she might never know. If he remained stable for a few more days, he would be transported stateside to a military hospital, a long trip he would be