THE DOORS OPEN

It’s Memorial Day and everything is backwards - a burst of icy weather at the beginning of summer, ghost stories told in the morning, The Doors open a radio show, singing, ‘This is the end’. I am driving to a mountain retreat, listening to a Memorial Day special on NPR, a compilation of stories from men who were medics during the Viet Nam war. “I don’t want to hear this,” I say to myself, and change the channel. But there is nothing else, really, and so I listen.

The first man says, “I was in Viet Nam from May, 1968 to May, 1969. It was only a year but what I experienced there shaped my whole life.” By the end of the interview he is weeping and asking the host, “Isn’t there something else we can talk about?”

Then two men are telling a story together. When one trails off the other steps in. When the second one falters, the first one continues. The story pours into the car like a rising tide: They have just arrived in Viet Nam. There is a midnight attack. Bloodied bodies are strewn all over the deck outside their hut. They rush into a surgery bunker to work on a marine whose chest is blown open. They see the heart. They see the stomach. He dies. They bring him back to life. He dies again. They bring him back a second time. An artery is severed. They open one of his legs and splice a section of vein into his chest. They lose count of the units of blood they replace. They lose him for the last time.

The name of the surgeon is Dr. Mouna. (I think of luna. I think of moon.) He is so distraught that he tears off his gloves and storms out of the operating room. The others follow, except one man, the one telling the story now. He is left behind, alone with the body, to clean up. The room is cold. He stands in silence looking at the boy with the open chest when suddenly the heart beats, and beats again, and he’s screaming for the others to come back. ‘He’s alive! He’s alive!” They come running back in. Dr. Mouna plunges his ungloved hands into the boy, massaging the heart, commanding him to live. Shouting and massaging, shouting and massaging, but it’s no good. He is gone, and they realize that the beating heart was only the body doing what it does to adjust to death. In the words of poet Naomi Shahib Nye, “Death comes when you can no longer make a fist.”1

1 Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”