all four would be coming back to the exact same place. That is, to us, in Luxor.
Usually, it was us in the Luxor hospital who heard news soonest. That was because we were the largest individual group. At one point there were twelve of us there. It made us the main nerve center of the network. We accepted this responsibility without complaint, and dutifully wrote the letters and post cards that would keep the others informed.
News of the company still out there in those jungles was the most important thing to us. It was more important, more real than anything we saw, or anything that happened to us ourselves.
Winch had been our 1st/sgt out there. John Strange had been the mess/sgt. Landers had been company clerk. Bobby Prell, though busted twice from sgt and only a cpl, had been the company’s toughest and foolhardiest sparkplug.
It was strange how closely we returnees clung together. We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us. We were somehow unclean. We were tainted. And we ourselves accepted this. We felt it too ourselves. We understood why the civilian people preferred not to look at our injuries.
We hospitalized knew we did not belong there in the clean, healthy areas. We belonged back out in the raging, infected disaster areas; where we could succumb, die, disappear, vanish forever along with what seemed to us now the only family we had ever had. That was what being wounded was. We were like a group of useless unmanned eunuchs, after our swinging pendants had been removed, eating sweetmeats from the contemptuous fingers of the females in the garden, and waiting for news from the seneschals in the field.
There was arrogance in us, though. We came from the disaster areas, where these others had never been. We did not let anyone forget it. We came from the infected zones, had been exposed to the disease, and carried the disease in us to prove it. Carrying it was our pride.
For our own kind, an insane loyalty flamed in us. We were ready to fight all comers and sometimes, drunk and out in the town, did fight them. We would fight anybody who had not been out there with us. We wore our Combat Infantryman badges to distinguish us, and nothing else. Campaign ribbons and decorations were considered contemptible display. All that was propaganda for the nice, soft people.
And the company had been our family, our only home. Real parents, wives, fiancées did not really exist for us. Not before the fanatical devotion of that loyalty. Crippled, raging, enfeebled, unmanned in a very real sense and hating, hating both sides of our own coin and of every coin, we clung to each other no matter where or how far the hospital, and waited for the smallest morsel of news of the others to filter back to us, and faithfully wrote and mailed the messages that would carry it on to the other brothers.
Into this weird half-world of ours the first news we had of the four of them came on a grimy, mud-smeared post card from some lucky-unlucky man still out there.
The card said the four of them had been shipped out to the same evacuation hospital, almost at the same time. That was all it said. The next news we got was that all four had been shipped back home on the same hospital ship. This came from the base hospital, in a short letter from some unlucky, or lucky, man who had been wounded but had not made the boat. Later, we received a letter from the company’s tech/sgt, giving more details.
Winch was being shipped back for some kind of unspecified ailment that nobody seemed to know much about. Winch himself would not talk about it. He had bitten through one thermometer and broken another, chased a hospital corpsman out of the compound, and gone back to his orderly tent where he was found slumped over his Morning Report book in a dead faint on his makeshift desk.
John Strange had been struck in the hand by a piece of mortar fragment which had not exited. The hand had healed badly, the wound becoming progressively more crippling. He was being sent back for delicate bone and ligament surgery and removal of the fragment.