Honolulu, Hawaii. The spring of 1964. A Thursday morning in the military ward of Tripler Army Medical Center, the large pink hospital on the ridge above Pearl Harbor that had been treating soldiers and sailors and their families since 1948. and that had in the spring of 1964 a ward on the third floor devoted to men who had come back from Southeast Asia with injuries that required the specific kind of care that could not be provided in the field and could not be provided in Germany and required the facilities and the specialists that a major military hospital on American soil could provide. The ward had 32 beds arranged in two rows of 16. A nurses station at one end and a window at the other that looked
out over the ridge and down toward Pearl Harbor and the Pacific beyond it. The water flat and blue and indifferent to the ward and everything in it in the specific way that large bodies of water are indifferent to the things that happen on the land beside them. On this particular Thursday morning, 31 of them were occupied.
The men in them ranged in age from 19 to 34. They had come from different branches and different units and different parts of the country and had arrived at Tripler by different routes, but they had in common the fact that they had been in places that the American public was only beginning to understand were places American soldiers were being sent.
And they had come back from those places with the specific kinds of injuries that the weapons and the terrain of Southeast Asia produced. The ward smelled the way military wards smell. Antiseptic over something underneath that the antiseptic was designed to address. And the light was the fluorescent light of a working medical facility that had no interest in atmosphere and every interest in visibility.
The nurse who ran the ward was named Margaret Selby. She had grown up in Akran, Ohio, and had gone into nursing because her brother had been in the army. And she had wanted to do something that connected her to the world he had gone into without going into it herself. And she had discovered in the first year of nursing school that the connection she had been looking for was real and that the work was something she was built for in the specific way that some people are built for the work they find rather than the work they plan. She was 41 years old. She had been a military nurse for 16 years and had worked this ward for three of them and had developed in those three years the specific knowledge of each of her 31 patients that a good ward nurse develops which was not just the medical knowledge
in their charts but the human knowledge that the charts did not contain. the knowledge of which men needed the television on to sleep and which needed silence, which men had family coming on weekends, and which had nobody, which men were progressing in ways the charts confirmed, and which were progressing in ways the charts could not measure, because what was progressing was not in the body.
Margaret Selby had made a phone call 3 weeks earlier. She had made it because one of her patients, a 22-year-old corporal from Bakersfield named Danny Kowalsski, had mentioned during a night shift conversation that his favorite film was The Searchers, and that John Wayne was the only actor he had ever seen who moved like a man who had actually been somewhere difficult and come back from it.
She had made the call on a Tuesday evening from the phone in the breakroom after her shift had ended. Sitting in the specific exhausted quiet of a nurse at the end of a 12-hour day who has decided to do one more thing before going home. Because the one more thing is the kind of thing that requires a certain kind of tired to do correctly, which is the tired that removes the voice that says this will probably come to nothing and leaves only the voice that says it needs to be tried.
She had made the call, not knowing whether anything would come of it, because she had made similar calls before on behalf of patients, and the outcomes had ranged from nothing to a signed photograph to one occasion when an entertainer had actually appeared in the ward for 20 minutes and shaken hands with five or six men nearest the door and left.
She had made the call because Danny Kowalsski had not had a visitor in 6 weeks and because the chart said he was progressing and because she knew things the chart did not say. And one of the things she knew was that the progression the chart was measuring was not the only kind of progression that a 22year-old man from Bakersfield needed to make in order to go home.
John Wayne’s office had called back within two days. The man who called said that Mr. Wayne would be in Honolulu the following week for a project and would be able to visit the ward on Thursday morning. He said Mr. Wayne asked how long the visit should be. She said she had one patient in particular she wanted him to meet and that an hour of his time would be more than generous.
The man from the office said he would pass that along. He called back the next day and said Mr. Wayne would be there at 9. John Wayne arrived at 8:55. He had been in Honolulu since Monday for pre-production work on a film that would begin shooting the following week. He had a full schedule and a production team that had constructed that schedule with the specific care that production teams use when their lead actors time is the resource that everything else is organized around.
He had looked at the schedule the previous Friday and found Thursday morning and made a call to his office and had the Thursday morning cleared. His office had called the production coordinator to explain the change. The production coordinator had called the director. The director had said that Thursday morning was going to be tight.
John Wayne’s office had said that Thursday morning was not available. That had been the end of the conversation. He was 56 years old. He was 6’4 in tall and 240 lb. and he arrived without an entourage, without a publicist, without a photographer, without any of the infrastructure that public figures bring to public appearances to ensure that the appearance is documented and distributed.
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He arrived with one man, his driver, who waited in the car in the parking structure, while Wayne went through the hospital entrance and took the elevator to the third floor and presented himself at the nurse’s station, where Margaret Selby was standing with a clipboard, and the expression of a woman who had arranged this visit, and was now slightly uncertain about what she had arranged.
He shook her hand. He said he was sorry if he was early. She said he was not early. She said that the patient she had called about was in bed seven and that she would take him there. He said that was fine. Then he stopped. He looked down the length of the ward. He could see the beds from the nurses station, the long double row of them, the men in them in various states of wakefulness and attention.
Some were watching the television mounted near the ceiling at the far end of the ward. Some were reading, some were looking at the ceiling, some were looking at him. He stood at the nurse’s station for a moment. Then he said something that Margaret Selby had not expected him to say. He said that before they went to bed seven, he wanted to know who was in bed one.
He said it in the tone of a man who has looked at a situation and made a decision about how to proceed and is now communicating the decision rather than proposing it. Not a question, a statement of what was going to happen next. She looked at him. She said that bed one was a 26-year-old from Georgia named William Foster who had been there for 4 months and whose family had not been able to visit because of the distance and the cost. He nodded.
He said that they would start there then and work their way down. She looked at him for a moment with the expression of a woman recalibrating what the next hour was going to look like. Then she said that she would need to let the ward know. He said that was fine and waited while she walked to the center of the ward and said in a clear voice that they had a visitor who was going to spend some time with them this morning and that anyone who wanted privacy should let her know and she would make sure that was respected. Nobody asked for privacy. She walked back to the nurse’s station. She looked at John Wayne. He said that they could start whenever she was ready. They started at 9:02. What happened in the next 4 hours and 17 minutes was not what Margaret Selby had
arranged and was not what she had described to her supervisor and was not what the man from John Wayne’s office had communicated when he called back to confirm the visit. What she had arranged was a 1-hour visit to one patient in bed 7. What she had told her supervisor was that a celebrity visitor would be in the ward on Thursday morning for approximately 1 hour.
What the man from John Wayne’s office had communicated was that Mr. Wayne would spend an hour with the ward. None of these descriptions were wrong at the time they were made. They were simply descriptions of a thing that had not yet happened, made by people who did not know what the thing was going to turn out to be.
What happened in the next 4 hours and 17 minutes was not what Margaret Selby had arranged and was not what John Wayne’s office had communicated to her and was not what she had described to her supervisor when she filed the request 3 weeks earlier. What she had arranged was a one-hour visit to one patient. What happened was that John Wayne sat with every man in that ward.
Not stood at the foot of the bed and said a few words and moved on. Sat. He pulled the chair from beside each bed and sat in it and talked with the man in the bed. The way you talk with someone when you are not going anywhere and they are not going anywhere. and the conversation can go where it needs to go.
He asked where they were from. He asked about their families. He asked about what they did before they enlisted and what they plan to do when they got out. He did not talk about himself unless they asked. And when they asked, he answered directly and without the performance that celebrities use when they are talking about themselves in public.
the practiced modesty and the self-deprecating humor that signals awareness of one’s own fame. He talked about himself the way a man talks about himself to someone he has just met and wants to know honestly, which is by saying the true thing without the frame around it. He spent 23 minutes with William Foster from Georgia, who had not had a visitor in 4 months, and who had a wife at home with two children, and a third coming in July, and who had been lying in this bed for 4 months, with the specific particular loneliness of a man who is being cared for medically in a place that is very far from the place where the people who love him are, and who needed someone to sit next to him and ask about the baby coming in July in a way that assumed the baby was coming and that he would be there for it.
John Wayne asked about the baby in exactly that way. He spent 23 minutes with William Foster from Georgia, who would later tell his wife when he finally got home, that he had not been sure until that morning that anyone outside this ward knew he was here, who had not had a visitor in 4 months. and who would later tell his wife when he finally got home that he had not been sure until that morning that anyone outside this ward knew he was here.
He spent 31 minutes with a 19-year-old from rural Minnesota named Paul Henrikson, who had enlisted at 18 because there was not much in rural Minnesota for a boy who was good with his hands and not interested in farming and who had gone to Southeast Asia with the specific practical confidence of a young man who has been told he is good at things and has not yet discovered the category of things that confidence alone cannot address.
Paul Henrikson had discovered that category four months ago and was still in the process of incorporating what he had discovered into the understanding of the world that he had brought with him from rural Minnesota. He spent 31 minutes with a 19-year-old from rural Minnesota who had been in the ward for 6 weeks and who cried for the last 8 minutes of the conversation and did not apologize for it and did not need to because John Wayne did not move his chair or change his expression or do any of the things that people do when someone is crying who they wish would stop. He simply stayed where he was and said what needed to be said and waited. He reached Danny Kowalsski in bed 7 at 11:40, 2 hours and 38 minutes after he
had sat down in the chair beside bed 1. having moved through every bed in the ward with the same unhurried attention he had brought to the first one, and having given each man in each bed the specific experience of being the only person in the room that mattered for however long the conversation lasted.
He stayed for 44 minutes. He stayed because Danny Kowalsski wanted to talk about The Searchers and because John Wayne was willing to talk about The Searchers with the specific patience of a man who understands that talking about a film with someone who loves the film is not an obligation, but a gift that goes in both directions.
He left the ward at 1:19 in the afternoon, 4 hours and 17 minutes after he had arrived, having sat in the chair beside every bed in the ward, and talked with every man in it who was awake, and having sat quietly beside the two who were not awake for 5 minutes each. in the specific way that a man sits beside someone who cannot know he is there but for whom the sitting matters anyway.
Margaret Selby walked him to the elevator. She had been a military nurse for 16 years and had seen the range of what people brought to hospital wards when they came to visit and the range of what they left behind when they went. She had seen people leave behind signed photographs and baskets of fruit, and the specific hollow cheerfulness of people who had come to do a good thing, and had spent their time performing the doing rather than doing it.
She had never seen what she had watched happen in her ward that morning, which was a man sit in every chair beside every bed, and be present in each one without any portion of his attention given to the next one or the previous one, or to the time or to anything that was not the man in the bed in front of him.
She said that she did not know how to thank him. She said it in the voice of a woman who has been a military nurse for 16 years and does not use that phrase lightly because she has seen enough to know the difference between what deserves it and what does not and who is using it now because what had happened in her ward that morning was in the category that deserves it.
He said that she had nothing to thank him for. He said it in the flat direct way he said things he meant which was without elaboration and without the false modesty that people use when they want credit for declining credit. He meant it. He said it because he meant it and for no other reason. He said it in the flat direct way he said things he meant.
And then he stepped into the elevator and the doors closed and he was gone. She walked back to the ward. 31 men were in their beds. The ward had the specific quality that wards have after something has happened in them that changed the air. A quality that was not noise and was not silence, but was something between the two.
The quality of a room full of people who have each been given something privately and are now sitting with it in the company of others who have been given the same thing. Each of them aware of it and none of them needing to say so.
