Do you think you could write more about Twig and a frontline nurse in Vietnam? It could be headcanons or a fic, it's all up to you. I loved your previous post 🥰
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On a patrol boat riverine across the Rung Sat Special Zone, he got shot.
A positioned sniper hitting him from somewhere in the bushes.
Not a serious wound by any capacity; the bullet merely grazed him.
More luck than brains, their Commanding Officer Turner quickly remarked once they were back on shore, and the infirmary it was for Terry, aided as always by John who was due for a Tetanus shot while Ponytail was off schmoozing the nurses at the bay area, ever the popular guy. Like a cat with nine lives, the only one not injured out of the squad, Terry makes note of it partially admiring, partially envious, partially relieved once safely in a familiar, erected tent all by himself, and the provisional doctor he was often deployed to was there, pulling up his white latex gloves, clean and antiseptic. He could’ve been in his late thirties or early forties, looking like the spitting image of pa’s old movie actors back home.
A bit like Charleston Heston, perhaps.
Okay, maybe he was suffering from heatstroke.
He thought John looked a bit like that too. Then again, every man looked a bit like John.
But, Terry once watched this man amputate an arm up to the elbow without pain killers while he was laying in on a nearby bed, recovering from a broken rib once bunks for the wounded became scarce and the experience was transcendental in that crammed, makeshift hospital, the sensation frightening and disturbed at first, like something that threatened to lurch out of his stomach in the form of sick and bile, but Terry found himself staring at the live operation, transfixed until the muted sounds of screaming drifted away and all he saw was the bone, the open flesh and the blood with the doctor's assistant angrily drawing on the curtains, put off by him looking so ardently. Blood. So what? Somewhere during that lay in, he remembered John's kindly voice advising him to look away. -"If they find you staring like that at the other guys being worked on, they can send you for a psych evaluation, and well, if you fail that..."- John trailed off in warning. There was always talks of those unfit for service sent back home due to being shell-shocked and frenzied after combat, endangering both themselves and their group, but Terry never wanted to be one of them. His father would never let him live it down and it would mean leaving behind the only friends he’s made in his life. It would mean leaving Johnny behind. Ponytail. -"You can get discharged, Twig. Maybe that's safer for you, though, I mean..."-
There's a sense of empathy (and pity) in John's tone and Terry instantly shoots it down.
No!
He wouldn’t be the one sent home.
-"I'll stop looking, just for you, Johnny."-
Terry promises solemnly, tiredly smiling from his bunk bed, wrapped in bandages across his torso as the soldier with the arm lopped cleaned off was led off to the emergency room. That doctor --- his doctor --- was right there, at the helm of it all that day. Terry even remembered the date, like something jubilant. 1968, November 6th, five in the afternoon, the infirmary bay in Saigon. But, now he was back in with the same man in his first aid tent and he wasn't sure what the feelings he had were called. Intrigue? Yes, maybe Terry was intrigued by the good doctor's line of work. All those...tools. Scalpels. Turning forks. Cutters. Saws. Ways in which pain could be accentuated, controlled, cured, prolonged, made acute. Was it warmth? Whenever Terry was helped and the puss and filth was cleaned from his scars with the doctor's steady, focused hands in semblance of something like care? Was it merely the coziness he felt in the presence of someone older and in charge who didn't make a note out of demeaning him, the way Captain Turner did? The very act of someone being vaguely kind making him flush as he sat there, waiting for his wound to be cauterized. Possible. The doctor speaks to him, applying the flashlight to his eyes, spreading his lids ever so slightly to check for signs of trauma. -"Not counting the bullet,"- He inquires, patiently. -"feeling any weird side-effects? Grogginess? Nausea? Migraines?"- He lists off a couple of plausible side-reactions and Terry nods away at each, saying nothing. -"Are you out of it, Private?"- He asks plainly then, removing the blinding light, looking him square in the face as Terry blinked, examining him, as per habit. -"No, I just like it here."- Terry blurts out, cursing himself for saying just about anything he deemed fit, looking around the tent, legs dangling back and forth from the tall bench where he was seated.
Man, he really needed to get in control of what kind of shit he uttered.
-"Oh, yeah? That's a first! Don't hear that often. What do you like about it?"-
The doctor chuckles, seeming somewhat amused. The older man has soft features. Soft eyes. The type of soft eyes John’s Betsy had on that photograph he carried around as a lucky charm. Terry knows by sheer experience that the boys coming back from the bush tend to say and do the darnedest things after months lacking proper socialization with anyone but each other and the wild and the medical staff, as he observed in the aftermath often lets them have it, in one ear and out the other (makes it easier to weed out the bad apples too) but still, Terry halts himself from saying what he really, truly liked about the medical bay tent specifically, John’s warnings about developing a filter coming to mind:
How did it feel like? Cutting through the bone? Terry yearns to ask.
How does it feel, sawing through it?
Being in control of the pain?
The pain, the pain, the pain.
-"It's calm, sir."- Terry lies.
