A Sailor's Story

By Kim E Brandell

Although he left Vietnam, it traveled home with him. Ernie Quist, a Navy Corpsman, adjusts to life after war with the help of friends, some alive, others dead, and learns that no one escaped Vietnam unscathed. A book about the challenges war creates and the rewards that can be mined with hard work, a commitment to growth, and the help of new and old relationships.  A Sailor's Story is a satisfying journey from sweltering hospital tents in Southeast Asia to the frigid cold of North Dakota. Join Ernie, Judy, and Casey as they leave the battlefield and try to find happiness at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Brandell
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393034452

Kim E Brandell

A Minnesotan and a married father of two, Kim Brandell is a retired lawyer who spent 40 years in the courtroom dreaming of being out of the courtroom, sitting at a desk and writing novels. His wish finally came true. His book are about transformation, from child to adult, from bad to good, from dark to light. Although sometimes salty, the books are light hearted and encourage growth goodness, kindness and generosity.

Book preview

A SAILOR’S STORY

PROLOGUE

Those who lived and died before us remain. They touch us, speak to us, and influence us every day. I’m bald because my dad was. I speak with an accent even though I was raised in the Midwest because my mom speaks with a Minnesota accent, the Cohen brother recognized but I did not. My great-great-great-grandfather volunteered to fight for the Union because he was progressive and believed slavery was wrong, and he sits on the couch with me when I watch Donald Trump and say, Asshole. They lived and died, but their influence, their presence, remains. Sometimes I hear them, and when I do, I say, Thanks.

One

This book’s title is A Sailor’s Story, but you’ll not read of ships, bumps on the horizon, waves, foreign ports, high tides, or rough seas. Some days, I don’t even remember having been a sailor. When I served, I was a neophyte, a large child, a nearly blank slate. It was long ago, and my hitch didn’t last long. I outgrew my uniforms, stopped saluting gold bars, and forgot the UCMJ. I now eat lunch, not chow, wear ball caps, not Navy covers that resemble Dixie cups, and sleep late in my bed rather than rise from my bunk early when the bugle calls. Was I a sailor? Yes, I was. It was a long time ago, but my service in the Navy helped shape my life and forged the shoes I used to travel through the years. It was important, perhaps defining.

Years ago, when I read an 87-year-old man’s obituary, a summary of his life that described him as a staff sergeant, I rolled my eyes and wondered, Why didn’t his survivors, the authors of his obituary, lead with his family, his children or the accomplishments of 87 years? A staff sergeant? Over 87 years, and they lead with the rank he acquired during a two-year stint in the Army? Come on, do better!  After choosing A Sailor’s Story for this book’s title, I will never again question the wisdom of the staff sergeant’s survivors. For reasons I don’t understand, they made choices, and they are reflected in the dead man’s obituary. Criticism of the choices the sergeant’s survivors made would be hypocritical. His military service was essential to him; it is nearly definitional to me. According to his newspaper eulogy, he was a Staff Sergeant, and according to this book’s cover, I am a Sailor.

*****

I was born in Anoka, Minnesota on April 1, 1951. An April Fools’ baby. A joke? My parents didn’t think so.

My dad was born on April 1, 1925, and my mom on April 1, 1929. How they found one another, I don’t know. I asked, but the answers were bizarre, full of crazy variables and twists that made it hard to follow, and always ended with April Fools! So I don’t know. I have my suspicions, read between the lines of the stories they told, but I don’t know. After they found one another, they decided to expand their base. They knew it was nine months from planting to harvest and how to count nine months back from April 1.

My older sister, Karen, was born on April 1, 1948, and my younger brother, Phil, on April 1, 1955. According to my mom, a difficult doctor who believed things come when ready and not a day early, a doctor who refused to interfere with God’s plan by inducing Mom, delivered my younger sister, Eva, at 1:22 a.m. on April 2, 1956. Damn. An hour and 22 minutes late. Damn. A day late.

Five out of six wasn’t good enough for my parents.

My dad commenced a lawsuit asking a judge to amend Eva’s birth certificate to show she was born on April 1, but after asking my dad if his lawsuit was an April Fool’s joke, the judge refused to grant his request and dismissed his petition.

Although we all loved Eva, I think my parents thought she was a bit of an outsider, a person born on April 2 in a household full of people born on April 1, and wary of their continuing ability to subtract nine to arrive at April 1, my dad and my mom began to practice birth control, and our family remained at six until Eva died by suicide on April 1, 1971.

I was an April Fools’ baby in an April Fools’ house. April fools? No, sorry, it’s true.

*****

I was relatively small when I was a public school student. Quite short and lean. Not too short, not too thin, but never tall enough for basketball or big enough for football. I was under five feet tall when I entered junior high school, weighing 85 pounds, and when I graduated high school, I was five foot four inches tall and weighed two pounds over 100. Small. Diminutive.

Some small, diminutive people develop an aggressive attitude to overcome their relative insignificance, which they believe exists because of their tiny physical stature. They fight when others would walk away and shout when others would whisper. They rarely put their hands in their pants pockets but keep them above the waist, balled in tight fists. No offense goes unanswered, and no opportunity to darken the mood is ignored. Small, short, tough, brutal, always willing to fight.

Not me.

On my last day of sixth grade, a fellow sixth grader, a bigger boy, a burly brute who weighed 130 pounds, a bully, a classmate who disapproved of my apparent intellect, my ability to answer the teachers’ questions and pass exams, a boy who was to repeat sixth grade as I was promoted to seventh, cornered me in the gymnasium and asked me to fight. I didn’t want to, but when he pushed and tackled me, I didn’t have an option, so I accepted the challenge. He landed seven blows, six to my face, and I landed none. He walked from our battle without a bruise, a cut, or damage to his ego, the creases in his pants intact; I walked away, my face bruised and swollen, my nose bleeding, and my ego non-existent. He came; he conquered; I whimpered; I mopped blood from the gymnasium floor.

The boy required to repeat sixth grade, the boy who bruised my face and made my nose bleed,  taught me a valuable lesson. I learned and didn’t forget. Smarts have little to offer a pugilist. Small and relatively weak rarely beats big and relatively strong. Be smart; stay away.

As my wounds healed and my fears grew, my potential for aggression vanished, and I became a conciliator. My potential for violence melted into a bucket of fears, and I became a peacemaker. It wasn’t that I had concluded there was a better way, a peaceful option; I decided peace was the path to follow because I didn’t want to get beat up again. I was afraid, and getting beat up was so damn demeaning. And it hurt. Lots.

In seventh grade, a boy hit me in the face, called me a coward, and asked me to fight. I told him he was entitled to his opinion, that although I didn’t think I was a coward, I understood why he believed what he believed, and asked him if he was interested in a cherry coke rather than a fight. I told him I’d buy it, and he walked away laughing.

In 1966, an effeminate boy a year older than me called me a fag in front of a bevy of attractive girls and offered his chin to my fist. Rather than strike him, with wobbly knees, trembling fingers, and sweaty armpits, I told him he was wrong, that although I honored his beliefs and disagreed with his conclusion, I didn’t care what he thought about my sexual preferences. I cowered, the girls giggled, and he strutted away wearing a confident, masculine smile, a smile he’d not worn since fourth grade, likely not since he discovered his sexual preference and heard what the uneducated and ignorant said about his type.

The blows to my sixth-grade face thrown by an illiterate boy required to repeat sixth grade; challenges I was afraid to answer, transformed me. They woke me and introduced me to a dangerous, hurtful, unforgiving world. When a door opened, I expected that a predator would emerge, and when a doctor examined my test results, I expected he’d tell me I’d soon be dead. I was afraid. I was frightened by the aggressive and odd and the routine, predictable, and familiar. They could change; predictability could become unpredictable and dangerous. Or so I suspected.

When dark cumulus clouds turned green, announcing severe weather was minutes away, I sat in our basement, a concrete cellar, and drew my knees to my chest and cried, waiting anxiously for the danger to destroy our home, kill me, or pass. When a classmate was hospitalized after a car accident on Seventh Avenue, afraid I’d be next, I refused to drive a car or ride in one unless my dad was behind the wheel. At night, when the lights were off and my room dark, I shuddered remembering Walter Cronkite’s Evening News and reports from Vietnam and, shaking beneath the sheets, begged God to spare me from the swamps, bugs, Communists, guns, and death.

When the door closed loudly, I jumped. When a green bug crawled near me, I cringed. When a sore, bump, or rash appeared on my skin, I obsessed about my imagined poor health and wondered who would deliver my eulogy.

I was a teenage coward, afraid of almost everything.

My cowardice didn’t always show. To the extent that I could, I hid my anxiety, my trepidations, and my fears. I knew I’d have more to be afraid of if others knew I was scared. If my weaknesses surfaced, if I revealed my insecurities and others knew, sick opportunists in search of prey would feast on me, and those who were inclined to protect the vulnerable would require me to see a professional, someone who could help, someone who would peel back the layers and learn how fucked up I was. I didn’t want anyone to know, so I wore a phony face and my cowardice seldom showed.

I kept my fears to myself, smiling when I was shaking, laughing when I was crying, flying when I was immobilized by anxiety, fear, and the fists of a sixth grader required to repeat sixth grade.

I suffered from more than fear. As a teen, I was afraid, looking for and inventing threats, but I was also bored and uninspired by teachers or the material they hawked. I was scared and a poor student.

School didn’t interest me. Chaucer wrote in high-brow, ancient English about Beowulf, and I asked, Who fucking cares? Mr. Horton explained what happens when mercury is introduced to nitrogen, and I’d say, "What difference does that make to me? In eleventh-grade composition, Mrs. Jorissen said English speakers commonly and inappropriately end sentences with prepositions, and to myself, I said, If we all do it and everyone better understands when we do, so what? Why change? Where’s the objection coming from?" I didn’t care about the Forefathers; they were dead, and their lessons irrelevant. I didn’t care about wars fought before I was born because they were over, and I’d not be required to fight them. Math was fun, a challenging puzzle, but if it became difficult, I surrendered, concluding I’d never employ a cosine to solve a problem that included a quadratic equation.

I rarely studied. I ignored textbooks and dreamed of Gail Larson or puppies with docked tails during classroom lectures. I passed most tests with common sense and information I’d ingested watching PBS, Perry Mason, or the nightly news, supplemented by what I heard smart people say or what I saw in the backyard, at the creek, on store shelves, or a baseball diamond. Mostly, I got by watching, investigating, contemplating, and understanding what was around me.

I didn’t often study, but I could if needed, and the results of my efforts astonished me.

During my senior year, a high school counselor told me I was in danger of not graduating with my class. He told me I needed to raise my grade in chemistry or return to school during the summer to earn enough credits for graduation. Wanting to graduate with my classmates, remembering the pain inflicted by a boy unable to advance with his class six years earlier, knowing I didn’t want to be him or attend rudimentary classes with him, and dreading sunny, warm July mornings in a classroom, I studied. I opened a book and learned.

The year’s final chemistry exam was on chemical element carbon. I hadn’t opened the chemistry book all year, but to avoid attending classes during a summer in high school, I brought the book home before the last exam and studied the chapter on carbon. I learned about its half-life, physical properties, and ability to form polymers. Nearly fascinated, I read the text for three hours and studied notes I had taken while reading for 45 minutes. I took the test, scored the highest of any chemistry student in the school, and graduated with my class. When Mr. Horton, the chemistry teacher, asked, What gives? I just smiled.

I could do it; I chose not to—most of the time. But when required, when threatened with being retained, I could.

In the classroom, I avoided effort, but when the bell rang at the end of the school day, I worked hard. I had a job. I needed money. I used it to entertain girls.

I pumped gasoline and changed oil in cars forty hours weekly during my junior and senior years of high school. As a sophomore, I was a varsity reserve on the high school baseball team, a player the coach predicted would lead the Tornadoes for the next two years, but I forfeited baseball for lube guns, dipsticks, ethyl, and a weekly paycheck. I went from high school to Super America and from Super America to bed five days a week. I smoked cigarettes between customers, drank RC Cola sitting on the counter waiting for customers, and only wore a jacket and gloves if temperatures dipped below zero. I tolerated the work and would have preferred the baseball diamond or pinball machines, but I enjoyed the income and what it allowed me to do.

I dated girls a year younger than me and not so pretty or popular. They were friendly, kind, a bit too large, a smidgen unkempt, an hour from desirable. They were all right. Acceptable.

Afraid of bigger, aggressive, fighting boys, green skies and bugs, Vietnam, and rejection from pretty, popular girls, I hid from the tough guys, cowered in the basement and under the sheets when the skies darkened, and ignored the beauties and the superbly curved and asked only those girls I thought would say, Yes.

Surprisingly, but perhaps because in part I was able to hide my fears and had lowered my expectations to focus on the substandard, many did say, "Yes."

A fourth-chair clarinetist kissed me during movies at the drive-in. An overweight girl who sang in the Junior Choir let me remove her bra and massage large breasts with nipples the size of and temperature of illuminated flashlight bulbs in the front seat of my car, parked at the dark end of a road that led to the baseball diamond I should have found when the sun was high and the stands packed.

I accepted my lot, asked the unattractive, and when I forgot I was not a member of the select few, I was quickly reminded of my appropriate place. When a rare fit of confidence moved me, I introduced a stately blonde girl who wore blue horn-rimmed glasses and had moved to Anoka during our senior year to my mom. A week after I introduced her to Mom and kissed her cheek on her front doorstep, when the platinum blonde beauty discovered her proper place at Anoka Senior High, she began dating someone bigger and stronger, a boy who drove a ‘65 Chevrolet and smoked Camels. When I saw her in the school hallways, I smiled and said, Hello; she laughed and said nothing. I stopped pursuing the blonde with big tits and took my proper place at the end of the line, behind the stupid, fat, and unattractive,

I was a frightened, hard-working adolescent, uninterested in classrooms, books, and lectures but very interested in girls. My birthday was celebrated on April 1 with my parents and siblings.

****

On New Year’s Day 1971, I was 19 years old, three months from 20. My sister Eva had killed herself on April 1, 1970, eight months earlier. She left a cryptic note. It read, Sorry, I’m just tired and don’t want to do it anymore. It’s no one’s fault. I’m just tired. See you on the other side. I hope. Eva, d.o.b. 4-2-56.

Those in our family who remained, the five born on April Fools’ Day, still grieving, somewhat lonesome, and racked with guilt, celebrated the first day of 1971 somberly. We ate at Greenhaven, a golf course with a restaurant in Anoka, and watched college football. No one sang, no one joked, no one ordered dessert. Although we weren’t a religious family, after the waitress delivered our meals, my dad asked us to wait and said, I’d like to say a prayer. Please fold your hands and bow your heads. We quizzically looked at one another and ultimately decided compliance was easier than resistance, so we folded our hands and bowed our heads, and he continued. God, 1970 was hard. Protect Eva. Make her happy and safe. Help us who remain find peace in her passing and the strength to carry on, dedicated to one another and committed to those things that are important in life: family, community, service, and You. In God’s name, Amen.

A coward, afraid of nearly everything, grief-stricken, mourning the loss of my kid sister who died at her own hand, largely uneducated, bored by what was found in textbooks, my future was not bright. I needed direction and help. When he said Amen, I audibly repeated the amen like a Baptist and crossed myself like a Roman Catholic, but I wasn’t so sure. If He was there with our family, if He was willing to help, where was Eva, and why the Hell was I so fucking frightened? Help.

****

In 1970, I received a draft notice. The Greetings Letter told me to report to the Minneapolis Post Office for induction into the United States Army. I suspected the Army meant basic training with pugil sticks, hand-to-hand combat, and, after that, a ticket to Vietnam. Afraid, a peacemaker, not a warrior, petrified, unwilling to do battle with a retained sixth grader, the Viet Cong, or pugil sticks, and allergic to Southeast Asia, I resisted the draft and enlisted in the Navy.

When I arrived at boot camp in Orlando, Florida, I was nearly six feet tall and weighed 160 pounds. I had grown. I was no longer five-four-four and 102 pounds. I was relatively tall and somewhat strong, but the lesson I learned in sixth grade hadn’t died. My face still hurt. I avoided confrontation, quaked when challenged, and ran rather than fought. I was still afraid, made mute by a boy required to attend sixth grade twice.

At the end of the seventh week of boot camp, when we had become accustomed to a barking man with three stripes on his sleeve and a broad-brimmed hat on his head, after we had undergone aptitude and intelligence testing, a chief petty officer entered our barracks and demanded we stand at attention. Accustomed to doing what those in khaki demanded, we did as he ordered and stood erect and motionless, watching him walk the length of our barracks between two lines of recruits who stood stiffly at the end of our bunks. When he completed his journey of intimidation, he stood near the rear door to the outside and shouted two names, Schaeffer and Quist!

Schaeffer and Quist met with the non-commissioned officer on the back steps of our barracks and were told, You two tested high and have what I’m looking for. You’ll be transferred and trained as corpsmen when you complete boot camp. Congratulations.

I’m Quist. Ernie Quist, soon to be Corpsman Ernie Quist.

*****

Frightened beyond scared, anxious, trembling, I returned to my bunk, sat, and watched as Schaffer told others, fellow boots, what we had been told. When he had told everyone, my bunkmate, a 22-year-old from New Jersey, the only recruit in our company old enough to kill North Vietnamese and drink alcohol legally, walked to our bunk, sat on my mattress, looked at me, and said, A corpsman? That’s too bad. Marines don’t have their corpsmen. They use the Navy’s. The army left Vietnam. It’s now just Marines and their corpsmen, Navy corpsmen. You. That’s too bad. A fucking shame.

At the end of the tenth week, days before graduation from boot camp, after I had developed a disdain for orders issued by dopes, a lifetime coward near panic, I decided to refuse the offer given, the invitation to Corpsman School. I decided I’d admit my anxiety and explain that I would panic in battle and be a liability in the field. The 22-year-old who slept above me told me that if I did, I’d be charged with violating a direct order and ultimately jailed in the Navy brig, so I attended graduation ceremonies with my fellow Boots and said nothing.

Without acceptable alternatives, I attended Corpsman training at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois. Over 16 weeks, I learned how to diagnose and treat common injuries, how to set and stabilize a broken bone, and how to clean and close a wound, whether caused by infection, a bullet, knife, or booby trap. Most importantly, I learned to recognize when I lacked the skills to treat and where to refer the patient.

When I completed Corpsman training at Great Lakes, I was ordered to report to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for nine weeks of combat field service training. Schaffer, my fellow boot who was told he’d be a corpsman with me, a sailor who’d sat either in front of or behind me in every Great Lakes Corpsman class, a gung-ho seaman who relished his future as a corpsman who saved Marines injured in battle, received orders to Naval Air Station Glenview, Illinois, where he was to work in the infirmary until his discharge from active duty. When we compared orders, he wistfully and softly said, Sorry.

In North Carolina, I was instructed in combat medicine. I learned how to stop the bleeding when shrapnel tore skin, mangled muscle, and broke bones.  I learned that different saws were used for different body parts: one for fingers and toes, one for arms, and one for legs above the knee. I used them all, disagreed with my instructor, arguing that the finest saw, the one with the smallest teeth, the one recommended for fingers and toes, was best for arms and legs, just slower, and was told, You’ll learn. Time is an obstacle on the battlefield, and you’ll want to use the one that gets the job done quickly. I tied tourniquets, set broken bones, dressed wounds, and draped dummies with blankets from head to toe when their vitals disappeared and I was unsuccessful in reviving them.

*****

I was sent to Vietnam and assigned to a Marine Unit. We listened to bombers fly overhead, removed supplies from helicopters with rotors running when the copter was on the ground, slept in tents, pissed in the swamp, engaged the enemy when we pushed north, and rebuffed the enemy when it pushed south.

I saved lives. Lots of lives. I wasn’t a hero, wasn’t required to dodge bullets while performing open-heart surgery, and didn’t do anything that required what I didn’t have: courage. I wasn’t a miracle worker; I was more like a mom who saved her children from potentially fatal chicken pox.

When a marine asked me what he could do to cure an infection that oozed puss from blisters caused by wet socks and miles of reconnaissance, I irrigated his feet, bandaged them, gave him antibiotics, and told him to keep his feet as dry as he could. His infection diminished, and his infection didn’t spread from his feet to his heart and kill him. 

A captain tripped a wire, and a sergeant fell into a hole concealed by brush. Both were bleeding, and their wounds needed to be closed before they bled to death. After they were carried to our base, I cleaned their torn flesh and stitched them up, and they stopped bleeding and were flown home to their families alive.

A navy corpsman, the medical provider for a marine unit four miles north of my company, slogged through swamps and walked through grasslands to show me a lump under his chin. I didn’t like what I saw, knew I could do nothing about it, and issued orders for him to be transported to a navy hospital near Da Nang for diagnosis and treatment. The cancerous tumor was removed, and he was discharged from the Navy with disability and medical benefits. Alive. He was saved, in part, by me.

They called me Doc but could have just as accurately called me Mom. My skills were limited, and the tasks I performed were elementary. But like good mothers, I performed them and saved lives. I wasn’t proud. I was unimpressed by what I did but pleased with the results of my efforts. I was pleased because marines who would have died if I hadn’t done what I did lived because of what I did. I was unimpressed because it was clear what had to be done, and anyone else in my situation would have done it. Not complicated. Not dangerous. Not heroic. Simple, easy, but effective. Mom.

I was scheduled to leave Vietnam thirteen months after I arrived. Two days before I was to leave the jungle, I was rousted from sleep by a sergeant who told me to get my medical bag and follow him into the jungle. We walked for about half an hour, and at the edge of a swamp, at the base of a tree, I saw an unconscious Marine lying on the ground in puddles of blood. The sergeant who led me there told me he and two others, including Thompson, the man lying before us, had been injured by a mine that exploded when they were trying to set it on a trail used by the Viet Cong. He said he had applied tourniquets, and because he couldn’t carry the big man by himself, he had walked to camp with the other injured man and found me, hoping I could treat Thompson and help carry him to camp.

Thompson lay in a pool of blood. He was pale and not moving. Although the sergeant had applied tourniquets to both legs, the bottoms of which were missing, he had bled from those open stumps to the jungle floor. Although his skin was warm and blood moved by gravity still oozed from his severed legs, his heart had stopped beating, and he was no longer breathing. The sergeant leaned against a tree that covered Thompson from falling rain and asked for a diagnosis.

Doc?

I didn’t provide an audible answer. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I spoke when the rain stopped, and the jungle became silent as if to honor the dead. What was his first name?

The sergeant took 15 seconds before answering. Don’t know. Never asked.

The path back to our camp was narrow. We could not walk side-by-side carrying Thompson between us, so the sergeant tied the rope around Thompson’s stumps, pulled the rope over his shoulders, and led the way out while I held Thompson under his arms, his head resting on my shoulders.

As the sergeant and I walked the narrow path through the jungle, while a dead 19-year-old’s head bounced from one of my shoulders to the other and rain tapped my helmet, I smiled as I thought about the sixth-grader who had hit me in the face six times. I silently laughed, remembering the boy who called me a fag and the seventh-grader who wanted to punch me and had refused my peace offering of a cherry Coke. Trudging through the swamp carrying a dead man, I