I shook my head and it tried to fall off. Lee propped me up again.
"You've been out of your mind for three days now and running a hell
of a fever. I sponged you and gave you APC's. I even gave you a shot
of penicillin when we thought you were going to die." His young face
screwed up with worry.
"I've still got the fever, haven't I?" I muttered weakly. "It feels
like it."
Makstutis came into focus beside Lee. "It's down some, Doc, but your
face was red as a tomato and your eyes are still all bloodshot. Your
urine was bloody too. Now you've got little red marks, kinda like
bruises, on your skin."
"Eyes all bloodshot ... little red marks." Somewhere a circuit snapped
shut in my head. "God Almighty! I've got Songho Fever."
"Songho Fever? What's that, Doc?"
"It's called Epidemic Hemorrhagic Fever in the States, and it hit a lot
of G.I.'s around the Iron Triangle in the Korean War."
Jimmy wasn't too young to remember. He had been in on the tail end of
that fight.
"You must have picked it up around Kumwha," he said. "There's nothing
you can do for it is there?"
"No more than you are doing now, unless the Reds have something we
don't know about." I sipped the water someone brought and lay back.
Blackie had come in when he heard I was conscious. "Lee Sung is back,"
he said. "Maybe he could get something from Anders, or better still,
get Anders to see you."
"I couldn't walk two minutes, let alone twenty miles."
"By Golly, we'll carry you," said Blackie. "Don't you worry Colonel." I
fell asleep again with his comforting hand on my shoulder.
The trek across the ridges was rough. I can't remember much of it
except the feeling of falling when the improvised stretcher tipped
on the steep slopes or someone lost his footing. By now, one of our
sergeants, another Korean War veteran named Lim On, was ill with
what appeared to be the same disease and the morale of the unit was
slipping. We had jumped a week ago and as yet had accomplished nothing.
In a deserted, half-collapsed farmhouse about a mile from Song-dong-ni,
they laid Lim and me down on piles of straw while most of the men
bivouacked in small dugouts camouflaged in the woods beside the house.
We waited for Lee Sung to get Anders.
He arrived the following afternoon. A tall man, he looked like a
benevolent hawk, pale smooth hair, sharp nose, keen grey eyes. He
stooped under the low lintel of the hovel and stood for a while in
the semi-darkness of the tiny, paper-walled room until his eyes were
adjusted. Then he came and dropped on one knee by my side.
"You are a very sick man, Colonel," he said slowly, in precise English.
"I think I have hemorrhagic fever," I said.
"There is little doubt," he agreed as his hands searched my neck
and armpits for swollen glands. "See, the small blood spots on your
abdomen, and your eyes. And what else have you noticed?"
I gave him the story, including what Makstutis had told me about the
bloody urine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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