The Night In Question Read Online Free PDF

story did not come easily to B.D. He hardly ever talked about the war except in generalities, and then in a grudging, edgy way. He didn’t want to sound like other men when they got on the subject, pulling a long face or laughing it off—striking a pose. He did not want to implythat he’d done more than he had done, or to say, as he believed, that he hadn’t done enough; that all he had done was stay alive. When he thought about those days, the life he’d led since—working his way through school, starting a business, being a good friend to his friends, nursing his mother for three months while she died of cancer—all this dropped away as if it were nothing, and he felt as he had felt then, weak, corrupt, and afraid.
    So B.D. avoided the subject.
    Still, he knew that his silence had become its own kind of pose, and that was why he told his girlfriend about Ryan. He wanted to be truthful with her. What a surprise, then, to have it all come out sounding like a lie. He couldn’t get it right, couldn’t put across what he had felt. He used the wrong words, words that somehow rang false, in sentimental cadences. The details sounded artful. His voice was halting and grave, self-aware, phony. It embarrassed him and he could see that it was embarrassing her, so he stopped. B.D. concluded that grief was impossible to describe.
    But that was not why he failed. He failed because he had not felt grief that day, finding Ryan gone. He had felt delivered—set free. He couldn’t recognize it, let alone admit it, but that’s what it was, a strong, almost disabling sense of release. It took him by surprise but he fought it down, mastered it before he knew what it was, thinking it must be something else. He took charge of himself as necessity decreed. When the next chopper came in, B.D. helped the medic put the corpse and the wounded men on board, and then he went back to his position. It was starting to rain.
    A doctor in Qui Nhon did what he could for Ryan and then tagged him for shipment to Japan. That night they loaded him onto a C-141 med evac bound for Yokota, from there tobe taken to the hospital at Zama. The ride was rough at first because of driving winds and the steep, almost corkscrew turns the pilot had to make to avoid groundfire from around the airfield. The nurses crouched in the aisle, gripping the frames of the berths as the plane pitched and yawed. The lights flickered. IV bags swung from their hooks. Men cried out. In this way they spiraled upward until they gained the thin, cold, untroubled heights, and then the pilot set his course, and the men mostly quieted down, and the nurses went about their business.
    One heard Ryan say something as she passed his cot. She knelt beside him and he said it again, a word she couldn’t make out. She took his pulse, monitored his breathing: shallow but regular. The dressing across his forehead and face was soaked through. She changed it, but had to leave the seeping compress on the wound; the orders on the chart specified that no one should touch it until he reached a certain team of doctors in Zama. When she’d finished with the dressing the nurse began to wipe his face. “Come on in,” Ryan said, and seized her hand.
    It gave her a start. “What?” she said.
    He didn’t speak again. She let him hold her hand until his grasp loosened, but when she tried to pull away he clamped down again. His lips moved soundlessly.
    In the berth next to Ryan’s was a boy who’d had both feet blown off. He was asleep, or unconscious; she could see the rise and fall of his chest. His near hand was resting on the deck. She picked it up by the wrist, and when Ryan relaxed his grip again she gave him his neighbor’s hand and withdrew her own. He didn’t seem to know the difference. She wiped his face once more and went to help another nurse with a patient who kept trying to get up.
    She wasn’t sure exactly when Ryan died. He was alive at one moment, and when she stopped by again, not