WARD 6

For wounded Americans, the way station between the battlefield and home is one of the superbly staffed US military hospitals that are strategically placed throughout South Viet Nam. TIME Correspondent Don Sider injured by a mortar shell, spent several days recovering in one of the wards of the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku and filed this report:

NARROW is the horizon in Ward 6, Surgical. It is a drab room, twice as long as it is wide, divided down the center by a low partition. Two rows of steel beds run like exposed ribs down each side. At one end is the businesslike nurses' station, a bookcase with a collection of old magazines and paperbacks, a too-loud TV set. There are no flowers, no pictures, no decorations. There are windows all around, but no one bothers to look out.

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Day begins at 5 a.m. when a pretty, auburn-haired night nurse wakes the men with the inevitable hypodermic of penicillin, and leaves. It ends at 11 p.m. when she comes back on duty, switching off the TV and lights. Day is half-read magazines and half-watched television, dressings to be changed, and surprisingly good food to be taken on a tray in bed or, if one is able and ambitious, in the mess hall with the scores of other shuffling men in their faded blue pajamas. It is the colonel making his rounds, passing out Purple Hearts and, oddly, saying "Congratulations" with each presentation. Day is earnest conversation with the guy in the next bed, and jokes, not good but well shared. Day in Ward 6, Surgical, is a bore.

Night is the sound of people breathing all about, grunting now and then and groaning in drugged pain. The men are all too aware of their bodies at night, and displeased with what they perceive. Their bodies seem suddenly, unaccustomedly weak and unworthy. They ache and protest with each shift on the damp sheets. The stitches pull; one is certain that all the vital sap must be flowing from the wounds the doctors have left open to drain. Each man knows that he has not slept a moment, and he quietly hates the men next to him who seem to be sleeping so soundly.

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By day, there is some release, a pushing back, for a time, of the horizons. There is talk with one's neighbor, the compulsion to relive the moment when you were hit, to hear how it was when he was hit. The helicopter pilot tells over and over how the shattered AK-47 slug he is fondling came up through the armored floor of his chopper, ripped through his calf and embedded itself in the dashboard. As do the others, he reconstructs his adventure with the clarity of total recall--the surprise, the pain, the pleasure of having faced death and stared it down.

The men tell their stories to each other time and again. They talk of home, too, and how worried their wives and their parents must be. They talk of how things will be when they get back. A few hours ago they were strangers, but now they admire each other's wounds and trade confidences and insults with ease and affection. Without anyone saying it, they realize that they are members of a rather elite fraternity, and this pleases them.

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Strangely, they hardly ever use harsh language. Back in the jungle or on the fire base where they were hit, each noun carried an adjective, each verb an adverb, and usually they stemmed from the same utilitarian four-letter root. But here, in this place, no one even says "damn." Invariably, one is struck by the kindliness, the gentleness of these hard men for each other. The kid with both eyes bandaged is fed by the old trooper with the messed-up leg.

There are few grim faces in Ward 6. There is boredom and there is pain, but there are also smiles. Within a few days these men will be evacuated, some to Japan for a long recuperation, some--the lucky ones--all the way home. After they go there will be new men, dozens and dozens of them, filling the faded blue pajamas and the rows of beds--men whose horizons will suddenly shrink to the size of Ward 6, Surgical.

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