Chosen By Their Peers! Celebrating Our Six - Mission Hospital: Fill & Download for Free

Oh, this is sooooo easy man: The Prince of Tides! Pat Conroy is certainly one of my all-time favorite authors for simple pleasure reading and The Prince of Tides is arguably his saddest book; it’s incredibly sad! The Prince of Tides is Luke Wingo, brother to the twins, Tom and Savannah Wingo. Like most of Conroy’s books, it takes place in the south, South Carolina in this instance, and the Wingo family is just so dysfunctional and in such a Southern, or at least country, way. And boy do they get pounded! Here’s a passage from the Prologue which sets the stage:In a mental hospital in New York I visited Savannah after her second suicide attempt. I leaned down to kiss her on both cheeks, European style. Then, staring into her exhausted eyes, I asked her the series of questions I always asked whenever we met after a long separation.“What was your family life like, Savannah?” I asked, pretending I was conducting an interview.“Hiroshima,” she whispered.“And what has life been like since you left the warm, abiding bosom of your nurturing, close-knit family?”“Nagasaki,” she said, a bitter smile on her face.“You’re a poet, Savannah,” I said, watching her. “Compare your family to a ship.”“The Titanic.”“Name the poem, Savannah, you wrote in honor of your family.”“‘The History of Auschwitz.’” And we both laughed.But there’s so much beauty in the whole thing you simply cannot resist! It’s a Southern thing, the shrimp, the oysters, the bayous, the Mr. Fruits.Why is Luke Wingo’s death so upsetting? Well, he was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and in his mind he had earned the right to live in peace on the Wingo Island, this South Carolina island that had been in his family for generations, but the government wanted it for a nuclear facility. So Luke goes to war with the U. S. Government! He loses of course, but in such a goddamn pointless way. Here’s a bit of the background:It was night on the South China Sea and the planes were returning to the carrier after their raids over North Vietnam when the radio control center received an urgent message from a pilot that he was crash landing in a rice paddy less than a mile from the sea. The pilot had given the exact coordinates of his position when he was lost from radio contact. A brief council formed on the bridge of the carrier and a command decision was made that a team be sent ashore to attempt a rescue of the downed pilot.Lieutenant jg Christopher Blackstock was chosen to lead the mission and when asked by his commanding officer to choose the other members of his team said only a single word: “Wingo.”They were lowered into the sea after dark on a black life raft and paddled beneath a full moon through the three miles of rough water to the beach. The moon was bad luck but they reached the shore without incident, hid the boat beneath a grove of coconut palms, checked their position, then made their way inland.It took them an hour to find the plane, which had gone down in the center of a rice field that mirrored the moon in a thousand pools of fresh water. Luke told me later that a rice field was the most beautiful marriage of water and crops he had ever seen.This rice field inspired both awe and danger as Luke and Lieutenant Blackstock crawled on their bellies along one of the ridges that divided the field into shimmering symmetrical pools. The jet had lost a wing and lay glistening on its side, the high rice reaching up to the fuselage. The rice moved with the wind and reminded Luke of the salt marshes of Carolina, but the smell was more delicate and sensual.“This was real rice, Tom. Not that Uncle Ben shit. There were some damn good farmers sleeping in that part of the world.”“Did you think the pilot might still be alive?” I asked.“No, not after we saw the plane,” he said.“Why didn’t you turn back and get your butts back to the boat?”A year later when he was back in Colleton, Luke laughed and said, “We were SEALs, Tom.”“Jerks,” I said.“Blackstock was the best soldier I ever saw, Tom,” Luke explained. “I’d have crawled all the way to Hanoi if he’d asked me to.”When they reached the downed jet, Blackstock made a motion for Luke to cover him. Blackstock climbed up the intact wing and peered into the empty cockpit. There was movement in a line of trees a quarter of a mile away and Blackstock dove for the soft watery earth as the first salvo from the AK-47s smashed into the fuselage of the plane. Luke saw five North Vietnamese regulars come running toward them, moving low and fast between the tall sheaves of rice. He waited for the wind to bend the rice again and when it did, he aimed his submachine gun, fired, and watched all five splash heavily into the paddies. Then it seemed as if all of North Vietnam rose up to challenge their return to the sea.They plunged down an embankment as mortar fire took the damaged plane apart behind them and they sprinted south along a perimeter of solid land as they heard orders shouted in Vietnamese being issued in the darkness. The jet was still receiving most of the incoming fire, and they put as much distance between themselves and the plane as they could before they turned and crawled along one of those straight and vulnerable ridges that divided the rice field into congruent designs. They heard the soldiers moving toward the perimeter and the jet, concentrating their firepower. A hand grenade exploded a hundred yards away.“There’s only about a hundred of them, Luke,” Blackstock whispered in Luke’s ear.“For a minute, I thought we were outnumbered,” Luke whispered back.“Poor bastards don’t know we’re SEALs,” he whispered.“Doesn’t seem to bother them much, sir.”“Let’s make it to the trees. Then they got to find us in the dark,” Blackstock whispered finally.But while they were low crawling toward the looming shadows of the forest the North Vietnamese had overrun the area around the plane and discovered that the Americans had escaped the ambush. Luke heard the sound of men running and of feet splashing through the rice paddies searching for them. But the rice field was vast and its divisions of water and long intersecting footbridges of land made a disciplined search impossible. It was only when a squad of North Vietnamese soldiers came rushing out of the darkness on that same isthmus of land, running headlong and reckless, that Luke and Blackstock instinctively rolled off into opposite sides of the paddy and, lying in water, waited until the men in black were almost on top of them. They killed seven of them in a space of three seconds, then took off, running through the water and high rice with bullets threshing the rice around them. When they reached the tree line, Blackstock rushed for the covering of jungle. Luke heard the single retort of an AK-47 come from the trees, heard Blackstock fire his submachine gun at the point where the shot had been fired, then heard Blackstock fall. Luke came out of that paddy spraying machine-gun fire in all directions. He crouched and fired until his ammunition was spent. He grabbed Blackstock’s weapon and continued firing. When he had emptied the second submachine gun, he began lobbing grenades to his left and right. It was ineffective, he agreed later, but he wanted to give the enemy something to occupy their attention.Weaponless, he lifted Blackstock off the North Vietnamese who had killed him, put Blackstock on his shoulders, and headed for the Pacific Ocean with a large contingent of the enemy forces in serious pursuit. Once he was in the forest, he began walking and listening. Whenever he heard his pursuers, he simply stopped until he no longer heard them. He treated his withdrawal as a long deer hunt and he used the knowledge he had learned from his lifelong association with the white-tailed deer. Movement could kill a deer or save it; it all depended on the wisdom of the choice the deer made when the smell of hunters entered the woods. For an hour Luke hid beneath the roots of a fallen tree that bore a strange fruit he had never seen. He listened to voices, footsteps, heard rifle fire near him and miles away. Again, he lifted Blackstock up on his shoulders and began carrying the leader of his mission toward the sound of waves crashing on the beach. It took him three hours to go half a mile. Luke did not panic. He listened and made sure that when he moved there was no one nearby to hear his advance. He was in the country of his enemy, he reasoned, and they held an enormous advantage because of their familiarity with the terrain. But the land was not that much different from coastal South Carolina and Luke figured that he had learned a thing or two as a kid. And it was dark and no one could follow a trail in the dark.At four in the morning Luke made it to the edge of the Pacific. He watched a patrol pass him heading north, their rifles locked and loaded. He let them get three-quarters of a mile down the beach before he walked in a straight line to the ocean without looking to his right or left. If someone saw his bold move to the water, he figured he was a dead man. But if he waited for daylight he had no chance at all. He reached the water and hurled Blackstock over a wave and dove in after him. It took him fifteen minutes to get past the breakers and into open water. But once he was in the water, he knew he had entered his element at last and that no one presently living in North Vietnam could ever take Luke Wingo in salt water.When he hit the open sea, he checked the stars and tried to get his bearings. Then he swam three miles, towing Lieutenant jg Christopher Blackstock behind him. He was picked up by an American patrol boat at eleven o’clock the next morning after being in the water for six and a half hours.Luke was called before the admiral of the Pacific Fleet to give his account. Luke reported that the pilot was not in the wreckage of his plane and that Lieutenant Blackstock had confirmed that visually. They did not know if the pilot was dead, captured, or had bailed out prior to crashing. Then, they had encountered heavy enemy resistance and were involved in a fire fight on the way back to the beach. Lieutenant Blackstock had been killed by rifle fire. Luke had obeyed his orders and returned to the general staging area of his mission.“Sailor,” the admiral asked Luke, “why did you bring Lieutenant Blackstock’s body back to the ship with you if you knew he was dead?”“We learned it during training, Admiral,” Luke said.“Learned what?”“SEALs don’t leave their dead,” Luke answered.When Luke returned to Colleton at the end of his tour of duty, we sat on that same wooden bridge where we had celebrated our graduation from high school. Luke had won a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars.“Did you learn to hate the North Vietnamese, Luke?” I asked him as I passed the bottle of Wild Turkey to him. “Did you hate the Viet Cong?”“No,” he said, “I admired them, Tom. Those folks are good farmers. Good fishermen, too.”“But they killed your friends. They killed Blackstock.”“When I was in the rice field, Tom,” Luke said, “I figured I was the first white man who had ever been to that field. I had come armed with a submachine gun. They were right to try to kill me. I had no business being there.”“Then what were you fighting for?” I asked.“I was fighting because I live in a country where they put you in jail if you tell them you won’t fight. I was earning my right to get back to Colleton,” he said. “And I’m never going to leave this island again. I’ve earned the right to stay here for the rest of my life.”“We’re lucky in America,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about a war on our own soil.”“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “The world is a terribly fucked up place.”“Nothing ever happens in Colleton,” I said.“That’s what I love about Colleton,” he answered. “It’s like the whole world is happening for the first time. It’s like being born in Eden.”So the Government comes in and tries to take Eden from Luke Wingo and Mr. Wingo isn’t having any of it. He’s been well-trained by that very same Government and, well, he’s fresh back from Vietnam. The FBI sends former Green Beret snipers after him all the while trying to cut a deal, communication running through the younger twins, Tom and Savannah. They, the twins, finally talk their brother into accepting the Government’s deal and The Prince, thinking the ordeal is a done thing, let’s down his guard. But the Government doesn’t get word out to it’s snipers in the field in time and one of them kapows The Prince and he is dead, dead, dead - pointlessly dead. A hero from the Vietnam War killed senselessly by the Government he was serving because a bunch of chicken-shit already rich assholes who didn’t go anywhere near Vietnam wanted even more money, hence, the nuclear facility. It’s an age-old theme, not distinctly American.Savannah writes a book of poetry and dedicates it to her brother, The Prince of Tides; the dedication reads:“Man wonders but God decidesWhen to kill the Prince of Tides.”I blaze with a deep sullen magicSmell lust like a heron on fireAll words I form into castlesAnd storm them with soldiers of air.What I seek is not there for askingMy armies are fit and well trainedThis poet knows her battaloinsTo fashion her words into blades.At dawn I shall ask them for beautyFor proof that their training went wellAnd night I shall beg them forgivenessAs I slit their throats by the hill.My navies advance through the languagesDestroyers ablaze the high seasI soften the islands for landingWith words I enlist a dark armyMy poems are my war with the world.I blaze with a deep southen magicThe bombardiers taxi at noonThere is screaming and grief in the mansionAnd the moon is a heron on fire.It’s a really great book, but sad, so sad!