Now I’m thinking I might call Hey Baby and ask how he’s doing. No shit, a couple of neuropsychs—we probably have a lot in common. I could apologize to him. But I learned from my fits that you don’t have to do that. Good and evil are only illusions. Still, I cannot help but wonder sometimes if my vision of the Supreme Reality was any more real than the demons visited upon schizophrenics and madmen. Has it all been just a stupid neurochemical event? Is there no God at all? The human heart rebels against this.

If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow—maybe stay at my sister’s place. If they send me to the nuthouse I lose the dogs for sure.

The Black Lights

COMMANDER ANDY HAWKINS​, chief psychiatrist of the neuropsych ward at Camp Pendleton, received the inevitable nickname Eaglebeak, or Eagle, early in his first tour in Vietnam when a crazy Marine attacked him out of the clear blue and bit off his nose. It became a serious medical event when Commander Hawkins developed a resistant staph infection in his sinuses, which quickly spread to his brain—a danger that is always present with face wounds. To complicate matters, Hawkins was allergic to the first antibiotics administered to him and went into anaphylactic shock. When that was finally controlled, his kidneys shut down, and he had to be placed on dialysis, as the infection continued to run rampant through his system. Hawkins developed a raging fever and had to be wrapped in ice blankets for two days, and weeks later, after his kidneys and immune system kicked in again, he came down with hepatitis B and nearly died from that. He resigned his commission, quit doctoring altogether for a time, and went to the Menninger Foundation in Kansas, where he did some work—work on himself. He wanted to regain some compassion for his fellowman before trying to go back into private practice, but his dreams of a successful civilian career were destroyed by the fact that he had no nose. He wore a tin nose, complete with a head strap, crafted by a Vietnamese peasant, and it made him an object of ridicule, led to a divorce from his wife, and prompted him to rejoin the Navy, where it didn’t really matter that much what you looked like if you had enough rank. It mattered socially—at the Officers’ Club and so on—but not on the job.