The Healer's War (16 page)

Carol told me she thought her boyfriend might be a little bit more married than he'd told her to begin with. Judy was mad that she and her corpsman had to sneak around because the brass had ruled against nurses seeing enlisted men. Sarah's long face was wistful when she talked about her doctor boyfriend going home to his wife.

We confided in one another, and on the ward, during quiet times, I confided in Marge. She was older, had an upbeat but sensible attitude, and played the field. Or so I thought until she came back from mail call with her boots floating a couple of inches above the linoleum, a letter on Army stationery clasped to her bosom, and a silly grin on her face.

"Good news?" I asked.

She sighed. "It's from Hal. I knew him in Japan. What a guy!

He's going to be reassigned here."

"Here? To the 83rd?"

"No, but in Vietnam. We can see each other sometimes. He's really a kick, Kitty. You'd like him."

"Is he a doctor or what?"

"An MSC officer. He'll probably be a hospital administrator somewhere.

But between my contacts and his contacts, we're bound to be able to get choppers back and forth once in a while."

"When's he coming?"

"In a couple of months. God, I hope he gets assigned somewhere close.

Too bad Colonel Martin just got here."

"Marge! You'd be the scandal of the post, making it with the boss -tsk tsk."

She grinned. "Yeah. I would, wouldn't I?"

Being rather young, I believed that if I was not the model-perfect specimen portrayed in the fashion magazines, no man would have me, so Marge's romance came as a revelation to me. She was probably in her late thirties to early forties and a long way from being a beauty, though her pleasant personality and warmth made you forget that. She was even tolerant of the Army, a difficult thing for a reasonable woman to be, I thought. She had the same attitude toward it that many nice women married to men who are jerks but good providers seem to have toward their husbands. It's a living, and he means well. She had lots of buddies and was friendly with both enlisted men and officers, married and single. But it was obvious that this was far from your casual kind of affair. You could almost see little hearts popping out of her head, the way they did in the cartoons.

And for a while there was ample time to daydream. We admitted casualties in twos and threes instead of bunches, and saw men with bad backs and twisted ankles. Most of them wanted rest or drugs or both.

Mal was teaching Xinhdy English in her spare time and Ahn hung out with them when he wasn't following me around. I decided to join them and see if I couldn't learn more Vietnamese in the process. I didn't, as it turned out, but provided everyone with a lot of amusement as I tried to pronounce Vietnamese words. Ahn and Xinhdy were both much better pupils. Sometimes we watched the Vietnamese TV station, which featured singers of wavery-tuned songs doing what seemed like a cross between the oriental version of grand opera and soap opera against backdrops that were strictly from Sunday school skits. It wasn't very interesting to me and sounded like fingernails on a blackboard after a while, but it was better than the bullshit you saw on Armed Forces TV. Mal, Marge, Sarah, and I sometimes had mock battles over who got the honor of changing Dang Thi That's dressing. That would watch us with her eyes dancing, and laugh through the painful procedure, encouraged by the healing she could see for herself if she twisted far enough. Soon she could be grafted, and once that took, we could start physical therapy in earnest and maybe get her back on her feet.

If Ahn had adopted me as his mother, he took to Xe as a grandfather.

He'd sit by the old man's bedside and chatter at him, bring things to show him, try to involve him in conversations. Xe wasn't interested for a long time, but finally Ahn and Mal convinced him to 'Join them at Xinhdy's bedside to chat.

This sort of thing went on intermittently for several weeks at a time, you understand. New patients were admitted and discharged, but our long-term patients were the core group and watched one another and us for entertainment the same way we watched them. But a lot of the time they slept or vegged out in front of the TV, and those times were pretty trying. Hectic as the pushes were, they were easier to deal with in some ways than the weeks and weeks of twelve-hour shifts that dragged by while you tried to find something to do.

When the patients were napping, the last roll of tape was neatly lined up with the next on the dressing cart, the bedpans were cleaned, and the empty beds gathered dust, the day shift sat around the nurses' station and talked to each other.

Sarah and I alternated on nights, so I rarely got to work with her, since the head nurse, Marge, had to be on days all the time. We were supposed to have another nurse, but she had yet to arrive. If she'd been there, she'd have been as bored as the rest of us.

So Marge and I sat around discussing such burning political issues as what we planned to order from the Pacex catalog before we went home. She also waxed lyrical recalling her tours in Japan and Okinawa, talking about the shopping in those places. If you wanted cameras or stereo equipment you went to Japan, everybody knew that. But Hong Kong was the best place for all-round shopping, tailor-made anything, fast and cheap, sequined evening clothes and sweaters, jewelry, pirate editions of the latest bestsellers.

I could almost see it in all its quarter-to-half-priced glory, and it cheered me in my hour of need, when the patients were surly, when Tony was gone or we'd had a fight. Nonmaterialism and spiritual values are all very laudable, but when you're in a situation where everything including your J'oh involves questionable ethics, things are the safest possible topic for conversation and food for thought, except maybe for bargains, which are even better. Talking politics, work, or morality was confusing and depressing. Talking about home was even more depressing. Armed Forces TV showed news reports of what was allegedly happening in Vietnam, but to me they always looked wrong. Exaggerated numbers of Vietnamese dead and understated numbers of American dead and wounded may have been good propaganda, but seemed disrespectful of the sacrifice made by those dead and wounded who had not been counted. And anyway, only the naive new recruits, the terminally gung ho, and lifers believed all that crap about assisting the South Vietnamese in repulsing the Red Peril.

The Vietnamese I saw seemed more worried about getting enough to eat, keeping their families together, and not getting killed than they were about political ideals. Coming back late from China Beach, when the moonlight glistened on the flattened Miller High Life and Schlitz cans covering the Vietnamese huts with tin-into-silver alchemy, and the candlelight shone through the strands of plastic beads (a phoenix, a peacock, a dragon) curtaining the doorways, I imagined what the family gathered around the candle talked about.

"How many watches did you nab today, Nguyen?"

"Thirty-four and four very fat wallet, honorable mamasan. See here, thirty-four dollars and a J. C. Penney credit card. Do you think you can get a catalog from one of the Americans whose houses you clean?"

"I'll work on it. Daughter, how many tricks did you turn today?"

"Fifteen, Mama. One soldier was mean and wouldn't pay me, but then another gave me this ring. How much do you think we can get for it?"

"we'll ask your papa when he gets home from carrying rockets for the VC.

He's had a hard day of guard duty at China Beach."

"I wish poor Papa didn't have to moonlight like that."

"War's hell, my son."

If I were in their shoes I'd probably have done the same thing. Tony had hit the nail on the head. The peace marchers were eventually going to pressure the President into getting American troops out of this mess, and when they did, the people who'd been loyal to us were going to be up shit creek. It probably didn't make much difference to them if they were growing rice for South Vietnam or for North Vietnam, as long as they were able to eat it themselves. Some of the senior officers I'd talked with said America should have supported Ho Chi Minh to begin with. And some of the guys with a couple of years of college claimed that the war was not about communism and freedom but about boosting the economy and making Southeast Asia safe for the oil companies and the international military-industrial complex, whatever that was. While that sounded pretty paranoid, it was less hokey than saying that the whole war was strictly for the sake of political ideals. The only people who said anything about political ideals recited their lines in the same way church ladies said "blood of the Lamb" and "fallen from grace," or the Communists reputedly talked of "imperialist running dogs."

Shallow, materialistic bitch that I was, I preferred talk about something real like stereo equipment and clothes.

We were sitting there gabbing one afternoon when Sergeant Baker wandered in with the mail, eavesdropped a moment, and while Marge opened hers gave us the lowdown on Hawaii and on Thailand, where he'd spent a tour and knew all the best bars and brothels. Meyers, returning from being pulled to ward eight, chimed in that he wanted to go to Australia because he'd heard the women were real friendly. Married men like Voorhees tried to go to Hawaii to meet their wives. I wanted to go to Australia as much as anything because nobody I knew had ever been there.

"Yeah, man, I really want to get out of here, go to that Australia, man," Meyers said. "But more'n that, I want to go home. Get outa this place forever and ever."

"Well, man, you ain't got it so bad," Baker said. "Think of them poor damn Vietnamese. They don't get to go nowhere ever. They're home already and this is as good as it gets."

Tony hadn't called in a couple of weeks and I was about to start night duty, but I wasn't sure if I cared if I heard from him or not. Most of our dates had been spent in bed, with very little socializing or any other kind of activity.

"Look"' I said, the last time he came over. "Could we do something else besides screw for a change?"

"What? You don't want to?"

"It's hot in here and it's been a long, boring week, okay? I'd like to get out and see something maybe, or at least go to the club and dance."

"Surel- we can go dance if you want to, but there's plenty of time before that-"

"Tony-', "Baby, I'm risking my life up there," he said, slipping his hands up under my shirt and bra and nuzzling my neck. "Who knows? I might not come back next time."

Eventually we did go dancing, but it was one of those nights when the band played line dances and the fast kind that I love. Tony danced one or two but then sat in the corner talking helicopters with one of the other men from his company. When I sat down, sweating and happy, he said, "Do you have to show off all the time? Why can't you just sit here with me and talk and have a drink?"

"Because I don't know anything about helicopters and, frankly, they're not that interesting to me," I said. "You're not the only one who needs to recharge when you're off duty, you know. I put in long days too."

"Don't I make you happy, baby?"

The argument was conducted in fierce whispers and nonetheless we were drawing a little attention. "Tony, you're a fantastic lover, but sometimes I think it's not me you love at all-I keep getting the feeling you wish I were somebody else entirely, someone who is quiet and demure and keeps her place. Probably somebody who doesn't work a twelve-hour day. Well, I'm not. I'm me. And"-I threw in a line from an old blues song, because it fit-"And if you don't like my peaches, don't shake my tree, okay?"

He slammed down his drink. "Okay. Excuse me, I think I'd better get back to the unit. I may be needed there.

I didn't know whether I was madder at him for treating me like a whore who wasn't due any consideration or for spoiling my off-duty time. He was just jealous of the attention I got, I thought. He was used to being in the middle of things himself and couldn't take it that in this situation any woman would be more interesting to the vast majority of the population than any man. And that emotional blackmail crap about how he might not come back. The creep! After a week, I calmed down and realized that maybe some of it could have been my fault. I had to admit I recognized that he wanted me to be somebody else because I couldn't help wishing he were somebody else too.

Wednesday evening he called. "Hi, babe. How's it going?"

"Fine," I said. "How've you been?"

I've missed you. You're off tomorrow, aren't you? How about if I come over?"

"It's my sleep day," I said. "If I don't sleep, I won't be any good at work tomorrow night."

"You can sleep some of the time," he said.

"I don't think so, Tony."

"We had a couple of close calls this week, baby.........

"I'm sorry. Please be a little more careful. Maybe you could use the rest, too. Tony, we need to have a talk sometime soon, but I have to have tomorrow to think, okay?"

"Yeah. Sure. See ya," he said, and hung up.

Then, of course, I couldn't sleep that night, so I padded over to ICU to see how busy Carole was. She was bored stiff, sitting at the desk reading while her corpsmen played cards.

"Jesus, McCulley, what's wrong with you?"

I told her. "I don't want to break up with him, Carole, but dammit, if we're going to spend every free moment together I occasionally want to talk about something besides which position we should assume next and whether I came or not."

"I see where that would get old. Tom and I talk about everything. I dunno, Kitty, there are other fish in the sea, of course, but not many as sexy as Tony."

"I know. That's the whole problem."

"If he calls tomorrow are you going to let him come over?"

"No. It'll just be the same old thing. I don't think I'll be able to sleep, but I sure don't want to spend another goddamn day on post.

Besides, if I'm here and he calls I'll give in. Want to go to the beach?"

"Can't. I'm having my own summit conference."