365 Days (20 page)

She turned back to Kelly. “This won’t hurt,” she repeated, lifting the edge of the chest pack.

“What part of the States you from, ma’am?” Justice asked, looking over her shoulder to watch what she was doing.

“Kansas,” she said, carefully peeling the packs off Kelly’s wound.

“Jesus!” Justice exclaimed, staring open-mouthed at the wound. It ran in a great jagged line from Kelly’s wired jaw, down across the front of his neck, through his shoulder and out again across the upper part of his chest, reaching down his front to the bottom of his ribs. Great wads of muscle had simply been ripped away; his collar bone was gone, and at places down the front of his chest the wound was so deep you could see the lung, shiny and pink, moving in and out against the inside of the ribs.

The nurse took some sterile scissors and began cleaning the dead skin from around the edges. Kelly sat rigid, staring straight ahead of him.

“I figured you were from the Midwest,” Justice said. “I’ve been through Kansas once with my family; pretty flat. Live there all your life?”

“Most of it.”

“We’ll leave off the gauze,” she said to Kelly as she put on clean packs, “until the doctors come by. Do you want anything?”

Kelly shook his head.

“Your wounds are coming along fine.” Turning to Justice she took back the soiled bandage.

“Been here long?” he asked.

“About a year.”

“Phew, that’s a long time.”

“It gets long,” she said.

Justice couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She was a big girl with a good figure, and she had a pleasant midwestern face, open and plain, but pretty, and it would be pretty for a long time. “If you won’t mind my saying so, Miss...Lieutenant,” he said stiffly, “I’ve never seen anybody looked so good in fatigues before.”

“I look better in a dress.”

“You look fine right now.”

“Thanks,” she said good-naturedly. “Now your turn.”

“Me?” he looked surprised. “I’m OK.”

“You got in this afternoon, didn’t you?” she asked, looking at her chart as she motioned him to take off his pajama top.

“Honest,” he said, “it ain’t much.”

“Well, let’s see it anyway.”

He had trouble getting his shoulder free.

“Here,” she said, helping him. “Turn a bit more.”

Twisting around on the edge of the bed, he let her see his back. A thick, puckered surgical scar, held together by heavy black sutures ran across his upper back.

“Can you move your arm?”

“Pretty much,” he said, lifting it up and down.

“Now across.”

“Wooo...” He grimaced. “Can’t do that too well.”

“It’s OK,” she said, helping him back with his top. “The doctors will be around to see you later tonight. They’re still up in the OR.”

“How long before you think,” he said, trying to be nonchalant. “I mean, before you think I’ll be going back?”

“To your unit? You’ve got a good three weeks. How much longer do you have in country?”

“Nine months.”

Her smile faded. “What do you do?” she asked.

“Eleven Bravo.”

“It’s a tough job,” she said softly. “But you know, after about six months they’ll probably pull you back from the front. What unit are you with?”

“Fourth Division.” Justice pointed to the unit patch pasted over his bed.

“Are you married?”

“No, but I hope...I mean, I expect to be.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rebecca.” Embarrassed, he glanced over at Kelly.

“Any pictures?”

“Lost ’em when I got hit. They sort of got blown all over.”

A chopper coming into the hospital flew directly over the ward, shaking the building, and they had to stop talking until it had passed.

“How did it happen?”

“Well...I was just sort of sitting around, doing nothing. Our platoon had made a sweep and we were waiting for the choppers. There were four of us, two 11 Bravos, and two engineers, and we decided to go get some water. I walked out on the track. Christ, I was even dragging my rifle in my left hand. I hadn’t gone five meters when—crack! It was like getting clobbered on the shoulder by a baseball bat. I started to fall when I realized it wasn’t too good a place to crash, so I just dropped my rifle and started running. They fired a burst, but it went behind me into the trees. I guess. They figured they’d had me, and when I started running, it sort of took them by surprise. They must have been setting us up for a good fifteen minutes. The only thing that saved us was my walking out by myself. If it had been all of us, they would have lit us up with everything they had.”

“You made it, though,” she said supportingly. “It will be over soon.”

“Yeah, one way or the other.”

“Twenty thousand go home a month.”

“I know,” he said absently. He was looking at the name tag sewn on her fatigues, too shy to let his eyes rest on the curve of her breast.

“It’s officially Lieutenant Allen,” she said, “but here it’s just Joan.”

“I like Joan,” he said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

She went on to the other patients. Everyone who wanted a sleeping pill got one. Sometimes she gave two and three; 400 or 500 mg of Seconal was not uncommon, and no one ever checked the sleeping-pill inventory. It’s hard to rest, much less sleep after you’ve spent a few months crawling through the jungle, and these boys came in right out of it. No transition; one moment a healthy eighteen- or nineteen-year-old out there, and the next he’s torn apart, lying in a hospital. Every noise gets to them; just the corpsman walking by to take a temp or blood pressure sets them off. Half a year or half a week of looking for the flash off a rifle barrel or freezing at the crack of a twig—nobody can really sleep after that, nobody, so they have to be drugged. It might not be good medicine, but it keeps the wards quiet and lets the corpsmen do their work without having half the patients jump up every time they hear his steps. It helps, too, if the hospital should get hit during the night.

In the eleven months that Joan had been working at the 312th, her hospital had been mortared five times. It was in a valley, which made it easier to hit. Two of the attacks had been just a round or two; the other three had brought out the gunships. One time they almost got through the wire, and the alert had gone red.

She had wakened the patients then, putting them sleepily on the floor below the sandbag line. The corpsmen helped her, while the ward master opened the ward supply and got out the M-16’s.

The patients in traction were left where they were and covered with mattresses from empty beds. And all the while the cobras and gunships came roaring in, crisscrossing above them, their turbines whistling in a kind of high-pitched frenzy. The noise shook the building, and they had to scream at each other to be heard. She had put herself on the floor between two of the critical patients. A rocket had gone off outside the building, the noise crashing over the ward like a concussion. With a blinding flash, another rocket went off, this time closer.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” one of the patients said, looking down over the edge of his bed. “I’ve been through this lots of times. It ain’t bad.”

Not bad, Joan thought afterwards. But the medical ward was hit, and the ward master, one of the doctors, and six patients were killed.

It had only happened like that once, but the attack did break up the routine of lots of work followed by lots of boredom. During the malaria season, the 312th averaged forty to fifty medical admissions a day—sick kids collapsing on their way through the door. Malaria for some units is a 72-hour disease. You have to have a fever of 102 or above for three days before the battalion surgeons are allowed to make the diagnosis of malaria. And all that time you are still out there in that 110-degree heat.

“Why don’t they take their anti-malaria pills?” she’d asked.

The ward master smiled. “If they knew they’d be evacuated as soon as they got sick, nobody would take ’em. The 72-hour thing is a way to keep them straight.”

The number of surgical admissions, though, depended on the level of the fighting. During a big push they ran seventy to eighty major cases a day. At first the vocabulary as well as the wounds had shocked her. “Ten hummers today and six rotacery cases—Christ!” the ward master said, looking at the admissions list. “Rotacery cases—do their abdomens and then you have to turn them over and do their backs.”

She assisted in cases where the surgeon, opening the shattered abdomens of boys still in their teens and faced with a belly full of blood, had to decide within seconds whether first to take out the battered and bleeding spleen, go after the lacerated liver, and clamp the torn vena cava, or start with the hole in the renal artery.

During the offensive through the Ashau, she had not slept for almost a week. When things slowed, though, and stayed slow, it was worse.

There was nothing to do except to endure the heat and discomfort. There was no privacy and never any place to go. The fellows, even the doctors, were transient, and outside the perimeter nothing was secure. In the eleven months that Joan was in the country she had left the 312th only three times, each time against orders.

The first time was four months after she’d arrived. It had been a brutal three weeks before that; she just had to get away. She had gathered her courage and, ignoring the order that no woman was to leave the base, asked one of the docs to drive her out the gate to the dispensary at the 2nd Field Force. The 2nd Field ran their Med Caps from the dispensary. Smiling innocently, fiddling with the top button on her blouse, she lied again, telling the Med Cap officer about having permission, and got on a Med Cap chopper going north to the ARVN compound at Dalat. The morning Joan hitched a ride, the compound was hit. There was some thought at the dispensary about cancelling the mission, but there were too many wounded, so they went anyway. It was a lovely trip. Joan sat in the doorway of the chopper with her feet dangling over the edge and watched the rich browns and greens of Nam pass under her. The sky was a deep crystal blue.

A cobra—tough and lean—kept pace the whole way, while a loach darted nimbly along in front of them. A few miles from the LZ the cobra suddenly pulled up while the loach, dropping, moved on ahead. The crew chief, putting his head close to her ear, yelled above the noise of the engine that the village was still taking fire. At the LZ the loach circled protectively overhead, while the cobra stayed up and circled counter-clockwise above the village. The pilot brought them in, but didn’t land—instead, he hovered the craft three or four feet off the ground. An armed escort surrounding the LZ motioned frantically for them to hurry. Jumping off with the rest of them, she ran hunched over with the others toward the compound. The escort moved along with them, and in the background she could hear the sharp, high-pitched cracking of machine-gun fire. The cobra, churning down, roared in over them, the racket of its miniguns shattering the air. Startled, she had tripped and stumbled headlong into the dust. Scrambling to her feet, she kept running. At the dispensary, she pushed away their hands. “Welcome to my last Med Cap,” she said indignantly, pushing the dusty hair out of her eyes.

The wounded were laid out on the ground behind the dispensary. There were five of them; the dead had already been carried away.

Like all Vietnamese they were incredibly small, almost delicate. Their families, expressionless, squatted around them, waiting. They set up in the dispensary, nothing more than a hut that had been set aside for medical work, and began taking care of the patients. Everything was done under local anesthesia, the wounds cleaned and packed, the cuts and lacerations sutured.

After the wounded were taken care of, they opened the dispensary to general sick call—first the paratrooper advisers, then the ARVN troops, and finally the villagers. The advisers had a medic with them. He handled almost everything; there was not much left to be done. The ARVN’s, though, were a different story: boils, abscesses, rotten teeth, thirty new VD cases, diarrhea, vomiting—they all came walking through the hut, everyone smiling, and Joan, wiping the sweat out of her eyes, began to feel ill from the heat.

Finally, when the ARVN’s were through, they moved outside the hut to see the villagers. No matter what was asked, they nodded: “Yes. Head hurts.” “Yes, chest, yes, stomach hurt?” “Yes, legs,” “Yes.” The Docs shrugged it off and, ignoring the rampant tuberculosis and tumors, just passed out aspirin and iron pills. Joan gave the bicillin shots—two to four million units for any infection—and handed out the diarrhea mix for any kind of diarrhea. It went on for hours.

Just as they were ready to leave, a woman came into the compound carrying a limp child whose leg, abscessed from the knee to the thigh, was twice the size of the other. Two of the little girl’s toes were already turning black from the pressure. They put her on a table and while they held her down, the surgeon took a scalpel and made an incision down the length of the abscess. Without a sound the child closed her eyes and fainted. The corpsman collected the pus in an empty fruit tin. He filled it three times before the oozing stopped. They put in a drain and made arrangements for her to be evacuated to the 312th the next morning.

“Is it always like this?” Joan asked, sponging off the table.

“No,” Major Norris said, cleaning his equipment. “Sometimes we get a few VC. Why so surprised? These people have been fighting now for thirty or forty years. It’s a way of life; they’ve come to grips with it as best they can. The VC leave their guns at the gate, and we take care of them.”

“But...”

“No buts. Look,” he said quietly, “there is an informal structure around here. It’s quite different from what we say, Saigon says, or even the VC say. It may seem foolish, but not to these villagers. It’s like reaching an agreement with your infection. I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me. We’ll just exist together. It’s like this,” he said, putting away the scalpel into his medical kit; “we’re in the ARVN compound, the village is around us, and around the village are the VC. If they wanted, they could take it; it would cost ’em, but they could take it. So everyone lives together.” He looked at her and shrugged. “I know, but it’s not my war. In five months I’ll be home, and this will all be like it never happened.”