I try to keep in pretty regular touch now with some of the guys I served with in Vietnam and last night’s phone chat with one of them was great fun, as is always the case. I had called to check on the health of my former squad leader, Jim Gratton, who has recently been diagnosed with sugar diabetes and the heart problems that can go along with it. He’s an honest, straight-talking man with a great sense of humor and more well-earned valor medals than you can shake a stick at, and part of our lengthy conversation went a little something like this:
“How’s the weather up there in Willits?” I asked Jim after we had said our hellos.
“Well,” he explained, “it’s always pretty cool this time of year up here in redwood country. Plus, I’m about 3,000 feet up so I’ll be getting a little bit of snow before too long.”
“Are you still adding on to that great little retirement home you’ve built for yourself?”
“Well, I actually have to be pretty careful about that,” he said.
“How come?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, the goal is to make this place big enough for lots of good-looking women to come visit me, but not big enough for any of them to want to stay, if you know what I mean.”
“So,” I said after I had stopped laughing, “I hear the VA doctors have you back in their clutches again.”
“What can I say? I’m not getting any younger you know – and neither are you by the way!”
“So,” I asked, “did they give you pills for the diabetes, or are you going to have to make yourself take shots?”
“Just pills for now, but you know how that goes. Plus, I’m really going to have to be careful about what I eat for the first time in my life, which isn’t going to be easy. And they also want me to take a class on how to give myself shots just in case.”
“But you’re already taking more pills than any man can count,” I reminded him.
“Tell me about it!” he said. “How about you? Are you taking the pills you’re supposed to be for all the crap that’s wrong with you?”
“No, not really,” I admitted.
“Well, then, I don’t want you complaining to me if I outlive you.”
“So, has this new diabetes diagnosis got something to do with all the other circulation problems you’ve had over the years?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it does, but to tell you the truth, some of those problems have been getting a little bit better, and the doctors can’t figure out why. I guess I’m a medical marvel.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, for instance, they did a bunch of tests to see if I’m getting enough blood up into my head and discovered that the two main arteries responsible for doing that are barely working.”
“But that’s a pretty serious problem, isn’t it?”
“Damn right,” he said, “but they said I’d probably never make it off the table if they tried to surgically fix it, so we all kinda agreed that I’d just keep taking all these stupid pills and hope for the best. The doctor said that my circulatory system is still somehow getting the blood where it’s supposed to go – especially to my legs now — and recommended that we probably shouldn’t mess around with a good thing, and since I’ve already had open heart surgery and all that fun stuff, I agreed with him.”
“What about symptoms?” I asked. “Do you get dizzy or anything like that from not enough blood getting to your brain?”
“Only if I turn my head too far to either side,” he said, laughing.
“Well, you don’t sound too worried.”
“Why worry?” he said. “The last I heard, none of us are going to get out of this thing alive, and I figure I should have already been dead a couple of times over in Vietnam.”
“More times than that,” I reminded him, recalling some of the scary scrapes our little Aero Rifle Platoon always seemed to get itself into so many years ago.
“Anyway, it’s all free time now – right?”
“Right,” I answered.
“Most of the World War II vets are gone now, and the Korean vets and us Vietnam vets are next in line, and that’s just a fact of life. I really had some of those VA nurses laughing, though.”
“How so?”
“Well, during my last checkup, the subject somehow turned to my love life – I guess I brought it up because of all these darn circulatory problems I have. So, one of the nurses said that the best thing I could do for my love life was to stop smoking.”
“Hey,” I said, “I bet that’s true, because I read somewhere that nicotine in cigarettes shrinks blood vessels, and shrinking blood vessels can’t be good for anyone’s love life. The doctor said I really need to stop smoking, too, but when I asked him if he could guarantee me that it’d give me another ten or twenty years, he said he couldn’t guarantee me anything close to that, so I told him I probably wouldn’t be quitting any time soon.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Well, one of the nurses asked me if I wasn’t going to quit smoking, then just what did I plan to do to help my love life.”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“I told her I was going to try real hard to stop dating so many ugly women.”