Uncle Ed's arm

Uncle Ed's Arm

    I didnt really know my Uncle Ed.  We moved away from the old homestead when I was a baby.  A man with a family to feed has to go where the jobs are.  But when I was thirteen, I spent the summer with my grandparents, and one saturday Uncle Ed and I went fishing.
   
    I realized even then that this was probably one of the best days I would ever have.  The fish weren't making us work too hard and we were catching enough for a fine dinner.  Uncle Ed had a case of beer and I had a six-pack of coke.  He let me have one beer provided I swear on my mother's grave never to tell anyone.  Since we both knew my mother was alive and well, I was willing to do that.

    As we were sitting there letting the fish do all the work, I happened to glance over and see Uncle Ed's right arm.  It was deeply tanned, as you would expect on a man who worked outside every day, except for a long scar down the inside of the forearm.

    "How'd you get that?", I asked, pointing to the scar.  He didn't answer.  He just sat looking at it for what seemed like a full minute.  Then without looking at me, he reeled in his line and sat looking out across the lake.

    "That's my war wound.", he finally said, still not looking at me.  He paused a moment more, then continued his story.  "When I graduated from high school, I decided to volunteer rather than wait to be drafted, so that I'd have some control over where I went."

    "I ended up in the Navy as a medical corpsman."  He glanced over at me and smiled.  "The advisor thought he was putting one over on me, but I knew what I was doing.  You see, the Marines don't have their own medics.  They use Navy medical corpsmen.  But I wanted to be where the action was, rather than sitting on a ship treating sailors for sunburn."  He smiled grimly.  " And at that time, the action was in Viet Nam."

    He paused for a moment, straightening up the empty beer cans and opening up another beer, obviously more intent on gathering his thoughts than anything else.  Finally he continued.  "I ended up with a company of Marines in the highlands, up north, Quang Tri province.  Well, one time I was treating a guy who'd picked up a mortar fragment when a ChiCom stick grenade came flying out of nowhere and landed about a meter the other side of him."

    He stopped and looked at me and explained.  "That's a chinese grenade with a  wooden handle, kind of like a hammer handle.  I guess they think that makes it easier to throw."  He shook his head as if to shake off a buzzing fly, then looked back off at the lake.

    "Anyway, I dove across the guy I was treating and grabbed the grenade.  I was laying on my stomach, so I rolled over and sort of flung it backhand."  He absentmindedly waved his arm as if to illustrate, and then seemed to catch sight of his hand.  He brought it down and sat staring at it for a few moments.  When he spoke again, he spoke reflectively, as if to his hand.

    "The grenade went off about half a second after I let go of it.  That should have been all for me.  I should have died right there, but I guess that handle created a sort of dead zone.  About all I got was one chunk of metal that just barely sliced my arm and embedded itself in my flak vest."  He held up his arm and traced the line of the scar down to the side of his chest.  He looked back at his hand as he continued.

    "I blacked out for a few seconds, and when I came to I was looking up at my hand.  It looked like I'd dipped it in a can of red paint, and I thought, 'That's it,  it's gone.'  There was one big splinter of wood right here."  He tapped a spot on his arm.  "It was probably a mistake, but it freaked me out, so I jerked it out of there."

    He gave a sigh and dropped his arm to his lap.  "They sent me back to the hospital in Da Nang.  I was there about three days.  They spent most of the time picking splinters of wood and metal out of my face and hand.  Then they gave me a week's R and R in Saigon and sent me back to my company."

    I never talked to anyone about that fishing trip until about twenty years later at Uncle Ed's funeral.  I mentioned it to my mother as we were standing looking at Uncle Ed in his casket.  My mother looked at me as if I had grown horns.  "Uncle Ed was never in the Navy.", she told me.  "He got that scar in a bicycle accident as a kid, putting his hand through a window!"