by: Marty Chrisman

Three long weeks passed, weeks that seemed more like an eternity in hell. By the third week in their cages, both men were so weak that they no longer had the energy to swat at the bugs, insects and other critters that crawled into their cages and over them. They didn’t even seem to feel it when they got bit or stung anymore. Luke was listening as Henry started telling him a story about his Uncle in Tennessee who ran moonshine too. Only half of his mind was paying attention, the other half had drifted off into the recesses of his own mind. Suddenly, Luke felt a sharp sting on his bare foot.

“LUKE!” Henry yelled in a frantic voice “IT’S A SNAKE!”

By the time his words registered in Luke’s foggy mind and he glanced down the snake had already crawled across his pant’s leg and found his foot dish. Through blurry eyes, Luke saw the two little puncture marks just above his left ankle. Being a country boy, he knew far too well the dangers of getting snake bit.

A few minutes later, Luke started shaking violently. Even though it was still early morning and the temperature was crawling up into the high nineties, Luke had never felt so cold in his life. Unable to lie down, all he could do was sit there hunched over in his usual position as the poison slowly seeped into his system. Luke grew steadily worse as the day wore on. He could hear Henry talking to him but he was too sick to reply. The next few days were a blur in his mind and always would be. The only thing Luke would ever remember clearly was feeling so cold all the time and wanting to give up, to just curl up and die so he could stop the pain and misery of this place. But his mind refused to let him give up and slowly he started coming out of it. When he was coherent enough to start responding to Henry again, Henry told him that all he had done for the past three days while he was delirious was rant about Hazzard and Rosco chasing him. Luke’s foot was swollen up to twice its normal size and was turning purple. He could barely move that leg and his foot throbbed with pain.

The morning after Luke started to come out of his delirium, the guards came and took Henry away. It was hours before they brought him back and when they did, it was obvious that he had been badly beaten.  Henry told Luke that the Viet Cong had questioned him for hours wanting to know the location of their camps and weapon sites. They refused to believe that Henry didn’t know. The next morning, the guards came for Henry again. Luke watched helplessly as they drug him away. Only this time they didn’t bring him back that day. Alone in his cage, Luke felt the terror seeping into every part of his being. He could feel his mind starting to slip away without Henry there to keep him from losing it.

Two mornings later, Luke felt like he was teetering on the very edge of sanity. He was afraid that he was going to start screaming and never stop. Suddenly the guards came through the trees dragging Henry’s body. They threw his dead body down in front of Luke’s cage, jabbering something he couldn’t understand in Vietnamese. One of the guards reached out and unlocked Luke’s cage, hands reaching in to grab at him. With a whimper, Luke scooted back as far into the corner as he could get his eyes wide with terror. Then he heard it. The sound of gunfire and explosions coming from the direction of the main camp. The two guards turned and ran back towards the camp, Luke momentarily forgotten. But that wasn’t all they forgot. They forgot to close the door to Luke’s cage.

Luke half fell, half stumbled out of the cage, falling on the ground beside Henry’s dead body. As he looked at his friend’s dead body and empty eyes, something deep inside of Luke snapped. So weak he could barely move, somehow Luke managed to scrape a shallow grave out of the loose dirt in front of his cage using his bare hands. Not very deep but deep enough so that he could bury his friend. It was the last thing he could do for him, the only respect he could show for his murdered friend. When he had finished, Luke collapsed on top of the makeshift grave and let his mind drift far away.

The rescue team consisted of men from Luke’s platoon together with some other platoons. They had been searching for the prison camp for months. When they found it, they killed every Viet Cong solider they came across and freed the prisoners in the shed. They would have missed finding Luke if one of prisoners in the shed hadn’t told them about the cages hidden in the jungle clearing. Two of the rescue team, one of them a man from Luke’s own squad, made their way into the jungle and saw the tiny cages. They also saw Luke lying face down on the ground in front of one of those cages.

At first they thought that Luke was dead. He couldn’t speak and his eyes stared sightlessly ahead when one of the soldiers rolled him over onto his back. Only the warmth of his skin and the faint rise and fall of his chest told them that he was still alive. The man from Luke’s squad barely recognized him.  His hair was dirty and tangled, grown out from the regulation Marine cut, his face was unshaven, and he had lost at least thirty pounds since his captivity. He was dirty and covered with bites from insects and a seriously injured left foot, the swelling from the snake bite had advanced up into his leg almost half way to his knee. The man gently picked Luke up into his arms and carried him back to the medi-vac helicopters that were waiting to remove the prisoners to a military hospital for care.

As Luke was loaded onto a stretcher inside the copter, a nurse quickly assessed his condition. She determined that he was severely dehydrated and malnourished with a serious weight loss. He had several bites and scratches that were severely infected and a nearly critical infection in his left foot and leg. She knew that it had been caused by a snake bite; she’d seen similar infections before caused by the untreated bite of that one particular little snake. He could end up losing the leg. And she was worried about his mental status. He seemed to have withdrawn deep inside of himself where nobody could reach him. She carefully strapped him to the stretcher preparing him for the flight to the nearest field hospital. He would be unloaded with the rest of the other critically injured or ill prisoners. Other prisoners who were not as seriously ill or injured would be taken to another hospital. Once she had Luke secured to the stretcher, she quickly started an IV to get some fluids into him as quickly as possible.

The nurse examined the young man’s face. He couldn’t be much over twenty or twenty one. So many of the soldiers she dealt with were young men in the prime of their lives. She said a special prayer for each of them. She had became a good judge of which ones would survive and which ones wouldn’t and she had a feeling that this young man would survive. She just hoped that they would be able to save his leg and bring his mind back from wherever he had retreated to. As she finished tending to him, she signaled the pilot that he could take off. A breeze filled the inside of the chopper as they lifted into the air. As they started to fly towards the field hospital, the young man with the snake bite on his leg started to get extremely agitated as if he were aware somehow that he was in a helicopter. To keep him still, the nurse quickly injected a sedative into his IV line to calm him down.

Forty-five minutes later, the chopper landed at a field hospital and medical personnel came running out to help unload the injured soldiers. Briefly the nurse on board gave a quick assessment on each man as he was unloaded from the chopper. The young man with the snake bite was unloaded last. As she watched them carrying him towards the hospital, she smiled and whispered under her breath “God bless, soldier”