Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I began having migraine attacks twice a week after my book became a best-seller. Maybe watching it move up and down the list for fourteen weeks made me tense. The clinic had brought in an injectable version of Cafergot for me. It only worked some of the time, and I was getting depressed. When I wasn’t having migraines, I was having strange pains in my head. I went to the clinic and complained. Shouldn’t they check out my head to see how many tumors there were?

They agreed to send me to a civilian doctor in Niceville.

A week later, I got into a blue Air Force van driven by an inmate named Jennings, a veteran of World War II, who’d gotten caught trying to smuggle some pot in his airplane. I had not left the camp except for one visit to the base hospital for my initial physical and my overnight furlough with Patience. It was weird to me that Jennings just waved to the base guards as he drove through the gate. In minutes we were cruising among civilian traffic on our way to town. Think of it, two federal prisoners driving alone among real people. The fact was astounding to me.

“I do it every day, Bob. Everybody knows who we are,” Jennings said. “We’re everywhere. A lot of inmates are drivers; we got guys who go the officer’s club every day to take care of the club; we got guys who work at the golf course, the yacht club, you name it. Everywhere.”

“I just can’t shake the feeling that a cop’s going to pull us over and take us back to prison,” I said.

Jennings laughed.

Twenty minutes later, Jennings pulled into a parking lot in front of a medical center. “Here you are. I’ll come back in an hour,” Jennings said.

I got out and watched Jennings drive down the street. I saw an elderly couple get out of a car and walk into the building. The woman smiled at me and I smiled back, feeling very out of place. I read the name on the note they’d given me at the camp and looked up the office. I walked inside. I figured as soon as people saw my blue mechanics’ uniform they’d start shrieking and stand up on the chairs or something, but nothing happened. I went to the window and told them my name and who I was supposed to see.

“Robert Mason,” said the nurse. “From the prison?”

“That’s right,” I said quietly, trying not to alarm anybody.

The nurse smiled and told me to have a seat. The doctor would see me in a minute.

Dr. Johnson, a neurologist, asked me a bunch of questions and then told me he knew all about migraines and how much they really hurt because he was a doctor and also because he had migraine attacks, too. “I became a specialist in migraines because I get them, and I hate them. I’ve been looking for a cure for years.”

That meant he hadn’t found it yet. Dr. Johnson got out a picture of a human head sliced in half and for the next half hour described to me the nature of the ailment. His descriptions of the symptoms matched mine perfectly. He told me that the warning symptoms almost always happen the same way, and the trick was to take the Cafergot as soon as I felt the first twinge. That didn’t always work, he said. When it didn’t, lying still in the dark with a cold compress on your head was the only practical answer. They could, he said, give me narcotics, but my being at a prison camp probably excluded that possibility. When he wrapped up the examination, he said, “You the same guy who wrote Chickenhawk?”

“Yessir. That’s me.”

“That’s one helluva book. My son-in-law was a door gunner over there. Didn’t really understand what he went through until I read your book—he won’t talk about it, you know? Thanks for writing it. They treating you okay at the camp?”

“Yessir. If you have to be in prison, Eglin’s the place to be.”

Johnson laughed. “Good. Listen, Mr. Mason, I predict that when you get out of there, these migraine attacks will stop. They usually come when you’re under a lot of stress.”

I checked out at the nurses’ window and they just said good-bye. Didn’t have to pay anything, taxpayer’s treat. When I turned around, I saw Jennings sitting in the waiting room reading a magazine. He looked up. “Man. What was wrong with you? You’ve been in there over an hour.”

“Doc said I have to have a brain transplant,” I said.

On the way back to camp, we spotted a blue Air Force pickup truck parked at a convenience store. Two inmates were sitting in the cab drinking Cokes. “You want to stop and get something?”

“We can do that?”

“Well, not really,” said Jennings. “But they don’t hassle you if you don’t abuse it.”

“You can stop if you want,” I said. “But I don’t want anything. I have everything I need at camp.”

In a half hour I was home, feeling relieved to be there.

A month after his heart attack, Tony Abruzzo came back. He was a little thinner, but he had a tan, and he was filled with stories about life at Lexington. “The place is co-ed,” Tony said. “Can you imagine that? I didn’t know they had such a thing in the prison system. It was disgusting.”

“What d’you mean?” John said. “I’d like having some girls around to talk to.”