I was 12 when Allston James' "Waterbed" ran in the December 1982 issue of Surfer. There are no actual battle scenes, but this short piece of fiction brought home the horrors of war to me in a way that M*A*S*H* and The Guns of Navarone didn't. Fifteen years later, when I was at Surfer myself, I had the good fortune to work with Allston, who wrote our monthly environmental column. Allston now lives in New York and is an award-winning playwright. We've stayed in touch—we exchanged a couple of chatty emails just last week.

I never asked Allston about his personal experience in Vietnam, but I know he served in the Army and was as deep in the shit as you can get. "If any one episode shaped my environmental awareness," James wrote in 1993, in his final column for Surfer, "it was my stint as an artillery forward observer with infantry units, where on a regular basis I was responsible for lighting up triple-canopy jungle and rice paddies with napalm, heavy artillery and air strikes. Some of us carried cigarette lighters inscribed with 'Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity.' It was a crash course in planetary rape."

After I wrote Encyclopedia of Surfing, I edited a book of surf writing called Zero Break, and "Waterbed" was the first piece I locked down. That was 2003. Now here we are in 2017, and Allston's wartime prose, like Allston himself, has aged well.

Summer. More precisely, first summer swell. As I paddled out past the shorebreak, the grime that my arms had picked up from the car roof gradually faded away with each new immersion in the sea. Each individual stroke of my arms was important, not because of the resulting forward progress but simply because I was doing it. The time-lapsed pregnancy of a small wave lifted my board. Paddling over the next wave of the set, thoughts of the war came to mind. Not whole thoughts, just fragments. That’s the way memory shovels war to you after you’ve left the scene; just an occasional piece or fragment. Memory of anything is always going to be less than the whole, but with war, memory often seems less than nothing. A vacant lot in the head.

The Asian horror show had folded for me months ago. Not for everyone, but if had for me. It ended, then continued in a different way on hospital beds in Vietnam, Japan, and America. That’s the main thing I think about when I think about the war and hospitals—beds. Beds upon which every man can become the island that no man is supposedly capable of becoming. Or at least that’s what they used to say in Sunday school. No man is an island. That’s what they said. Before I ended up in a hospital, I had always thought that when people got hurt in wars, they got hurt in the arms, legs, shoulders, or stomachs. You know, sort of categorized. Like, War Injury Type A, War Injury Type B, and so on. But it wasn’t like that. After all, how would you classify the guys who were urinating and defecating through plastic tubes and bags? Or what about the 19-year-old kid who woke up at two o’clock one afternoon and asked for the lights to be turned on? Not yelling, just asking very softly if someone would please turn the lights on. From my bed, I could see blackened flesh all around the edges of his facial bandages. Where his eyes had been, there were now two big yellow gauze pads. He looked like a big fly or something. About the third or fourth time that he asked for the lights, I rolled over in my bed and cried until I urinated through my pale blue pajamas.

There were lots of people like that in the hospitals; people with burned-out eyes and people who cried and pissed all over themselves when they saw such things. I was lucky, although at the time I didn't quite see it that way. A few days after I got hurt, a doctor came to my bed and told me I might not be able to walk again for a long time. It scared me. When he left the ward, I stared at my crushed foot for a long time. It just sat there pulsating at the end of my leg. The pain told me that my foot was not right, that it wasn't really even much of a foot anymore. If a foot can’t act like a foot, then it can’t honestly be called a foot, can it? That's when I started thinking about the island.

Week after week I lay beneath the sheets, my body forming ridges and valleys under the whiteness. The space beyond the sides and ends of my bed constituted a great ocean, full of dragons, Vikings, and submarines. The other patients around me had no idea, but I dragged all of them into my nautical world as well. They were their own islands, complete with coasts and interiors. Knowledge of their '56 Chevys, hometown football teams, and girlfriends was translated into knowledge of their islands' mountains and valleys. Idle conversation provided me with all the charts and maps that showed me weird trails and secret caves on the islands surrounding my own. All of this was important, but not significant.

The significant thing was the surf. I began discovering surf spots all around my island. Several well-placed reefs just off of my forearms provided some damn hot peaks on occasion, and there was a constant beachbreak all along the stretches of both of my legs. But the best surf on the island was found along the shores of what I had at one time considered to be my right foot. Down there, long glistening lines wrapped around a point that used to be a big toe. Perfect sets every time. On some days every spot on the island would be working, and on those days I never talked to anyone. The bed and I were an island, and we had waves breaking around us.



"Son, we're sending you home in a few days."

"No, you're going home. Back to the States."

"Will I be able to walk around when my foot gets well?"

"Sure, but right now don't worry about that. Just think about home."

"OK, please wake me up when the plane gets there."

My mother forwarded a surf magazine to me a few days before they flew me home. I looked at the pictures and wondered about them for a long time. They seemed unrealistic, these photographic images of two-dimensional humans stuck on the sides of billboard-like waves. The photos lacked the life of the waves that washed across the shores of my bed.

Outside. I turned and paddled for shore as a sun‑speckled swell began to peak behind me. My foot ached in anticipation of what was to come. It wasn't ready for this. Learning to support a body that wanted to walk was one thing, but this was different. Back in the hospital beds, the crushed foot had only been called upon to serve as a point of land around which perfect waves could break. It wasn't ready to be a part of a man on a wave. It had been ready at one time, back before Asia, but it wasn't now. It just wasn't ready. But then it had never been ready for jungle boots and leeches either, so perhaps this was fair play after all.

I looked over my shoulder to check my position, then paddled a few yards to the right. My pale forearms and legs, suffering pangs of apprehension and doubt, protested by way of small muscle spasms, but just like small waves, they were gone in a moment. Even so, I could sense my body’s disapproval, much like it had done months before when it had begun to weaken in the first of many beds—beds that had turned my entire form into the mountainous terrain of a strange island . . . my foot into a point of land . . . my arms and legs into ridges . . . my body into an island . . . the emptiness beyond into a sea.

I stroked toward shore and began to slide. I stiffened my arms to raise my chest from the deck, and then, leaning instinctively, put the board on an angle across the face of the small wave. My speed doubled. The time was now. I went to stand but fell face down on the deck. The foot wouldn't work; it just went limp. Clutching the rails for stability, I felt like crying.

And the wave wasn't over yet. It wasn't over, but I didn't want to be with it anymore. The board continued to slide across the little wave out towards the shoulder. Everything felt awkward. I just lay there waiting for the inevitable wipeout, but it wasn't coming, at least not as quickly as I expected. Why should this wave continue to carry me? After all, I wasn't really surfing it. I just happened to be there, I should have been dumped yards ago. I may as well have been on the face of a billboard. Were people supposed to be on the faces of waves if they really didn't feel like they were there?

Just as I began to wish I was back in the military hospital ward where my foot could resume its role as a point of land, the lip of the wave, only a foot or so above my head, began to bounce a bit as the wave sucked itself up over the sandbar. I knew that I was about to swim. The board began to move faster in response to the increasing hollowness. The lip of the wave, done teasing, jumped out and circled down washing the side of my face. The lip was now a roof. I lay there beneath it, head twisted around to see the watery shelter. It was then that I realized that this was no more a billboard than a bed is an island. Waves don't wrap around big toes; they wrap around people who happen to be traveling through them. The absurdity and wisdom of it all crept into my mind just in time for me to giggle as the roof caved in, washing me up on the beach in a sprawling confusion of happiness.

ALLSTON JAMES' "WATERBED" - THE VIETNAM WAR COMES HOME

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