PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : For Veterans With AIDS, a War to the End

The cafeteria of the Veterans’ Hospital in West Los Angeles is a slow and heavy place. Men wait here with neither patience nor impatience, as if waiting were itself a state of being. Once, long ago, they had firm muscles and quick salutes; they were soldiers of clear outline and precise energy. They were military men, the golden gods of time past.

Into this room of bulbous jowls and defeated paunches intrudes a moment of electrifying alarm. A wheelchair appears at the door and in it is a skeletal man, pushed by another hardly more substantial. Their fiery hollowed faces stand out. About them is the incandescent look of those who struggle with death, the ultimate unarmed combat. They are vets; they are men with AIDS.

On the walls of the Immunodeficiency Unit, someone has taken care to hang pictures full of sunlight and life: a Monet of lovers dancing or stealing away. The paint has been refreshed, the bedside night tables are new--and no one uses this unit as a shortcut. It is a place of fear.

Brian Meheny, head nurse, brisk and clean, looks like Richard Dreyfuss a little, or a jovial Lenin. Here is what he hates: people who are afraid of AIDS patients, people who complain about aches and pains, banker friends who moan about the horrors of their job, doctors who ask for masks and gloves for cursory examinations, outsiders who hear the word AIDS and see the specter of the grave.

“We laugh a lot in this ward. We make fun of things here, we get our patients to laugh. Maybe they’re going to die in 24 hours, but maybe they’ll last for 10 years. They come in here damn near dead but we bring them around. There are miracles here and I love this job, it’s the best job I’ve ever had. It’s done a lot of neat things for me.”

The 10 nurses and three aides are volunteers. “We’re not a fashionable crowd here.” John, with his clear untroubled face and blue eyes, looks too young to be married, to have one child and another on the way. “My wife backed me all the way on this. We just try to make life 100%.”

Beverly, kind and cheerful, has a face that quickens with energy. “One gentleman suddenly said, ‘Beverly, sit me up in bed, please.’ He wanted to clean his teeth, then he called his friends to say ‘thank you.’ And he died.”

Generosity has many springs. Brian Meheny’s mother had TB once and spent two years in a sanitarium. Hers was a cold and tired life: She had six children over 37 years of marriage. Her husband was a hard and bitter man who fought against his children’s dreams of college. “He didn’t believe in it.” Meheny has known more laughter here than in that childhood home in Utica, N.Y.

The patients gather at times in the common room: Llewellyn, Harley, Mark, one half-paralyzed by a disease picked up from his cats, which must now be put to sleep, another wracked with infection and with missing friends who have left him. They die, they go back into the world. The world, of course, is afraid of them, and the irony is that it is they who must fear the world. Every germ, every careless moment of sickness brushed up against brings closer the final battle.

It seems incongruous to find here a ring commemorating Da Nang, Marine Corps’ service in Vietnam, to hear military reminiscences. “Oh, it was a romantic endeavor going into the Army, playing soldier. The uniform, the beautiful uniform, the time the general sat at the lunch table with me and my little friends. . . . “ They loved the Army. They were boys from small towns in America, from homes of tiny dreams, who went out into strange places, running, sweating, puffing, being healthy enough to fight and to die.

Some fight here to the end; others give up. Brian Meheny has comforted men in the long, dark nights, held them close in their passing: “I’m not afraid to die. I want to live longer. But through the years I have watched doctors pounding on chests, trying to save people who should have been left alone with their family holding their hands. I want to be in a room with friends, candles, music--love me, and let me go.”

A soldier’s courage takes many forms.