Savages

231

Ken “Doc” Lorenzen, former medic on Chon’s SEAL team, is one cool cat.

You don’t believe it, you should have seen him at that ambush scene—dry ice in triple-digit heat—moving from one wounded man to the next with deliberate haste—as if bullets weren’t coming in at him, as if he weren’t a target. If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical, Doc out there with his weird body shape—short legs, short trunk, long arms—distributing life-saving medical assistance. What Doc did that day should have earned him the MOH but Doc didn’t care.

Doc did his job.

He got Everyone Out.

Now he lives in this trailer off his pension and disability, pounds beer, eats Hormel chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, watches baseball on his little TV and looks at porn except when he can pull a four-wheeler chick off her dune buggy, one who doesn’t mind a trailer.

It’s a decent life.

He sweeps crushed beer cans, newspapers, porn mags, and a bag of Cheetos off the “kitchen” table. Chon hops up and then lies down.

“Is that sterile?” Ben asks.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job. Go boil some water or something.”

“You need water boiled?”

“No, but if it will keep your piehole shut …”

He finds his kit under a crumpled wet-suit, scissors Chon’s shirt off, and probes the shoulder. “You got a movie wound, brother. Fleshy part of the shoulder. Must have nicked the Kevlar and bounced up.”

“Is it still in there?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Can you get it out?”

“Oh yeah.”

You kidding me? Simple surgery in a (sort of) clean, air-conditioned trailer with no IEDs going off and nobody shooting at him?

Gimme putt.

Tap it in with your foot if you want.

He takes out a wound pad and creates a sterile field. Pours a glass of iso and dips his instruments into it.

Ben sees the scalpel.

“You going to give him some whiskey or something?” he asks.

“Seriously, who are you?” Doc answers. He takes out a vial of morphine. “By the way, what mischief have you children been up to that my boy here isn’t at Scripps?”

Chon answers, “You got any beer left?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Morphine and beer?” Ben asks.

“Is not just for breakfast anymore,” Doc replies.

He fills the syringe and finds a nice vein.