The Healer's War (38 page)

He caught me looking at the gun.

"Do not force me to kill you, co."

"I wouldn't dream of it," I murmured in English. He looked surprised, then wary, at my response. I don't think he understood precisely what I said. I think his comprehension was general, in the same way that mine initially had been. I saw him wondering if perhaps I wasn't a magician after all, because, of course, he didn't understand the power of the amulet. He was puzzled by the sensation that he understood me, when he knew logically that he couldn't have.

The drizzle wet my cigarette through almost at once, and I chewed on the end of it, bringing saliva to my mouth to relieve the dryness. The jungle was thick here, the undergrowth tall and twining.

The colonel stubbed out his cigarette, field-stripped it, put it in his pocket, and poked the man nearest the tunnel entrance with a twig.

Before we left the tunnel site, one of the soldiers, a boy of about fourteen, rigged a mine to the entrance.

We spent the morning climbing. My guard and I were the very last in the column, with machetes hacking up ahead of us. The trail was so steep that my thighs started throbbing with exertion after only a few steps.

Gradually the ground yielded to more rocks than brush.

At the top of the ridge we rested, or rather, the colonel ordered a halt so that I could rest. As I caught my breath, I found I was inhaling stale smoke. It was coming from the valley below us. What I had mistaken for jungle steam was still drifting up from the charred ruins of the village hit the previous night. Among the few buildings still standing or partially intact, a few people wandered dazedly. The colonel gave me a smug look. This was the village from which my patients came. We had skirted it carefully, avoiding the survivors, lest anybody be grateful enough to help me, I supposed. I shrugged at him. He'd been overly cautious. Those people below us looked to me to be too out of it to care.

I was trying to be casual for the colonel's benefit, but the sight of those people, homeless, grieving for who knows what losses, and alone in the jungle, shook me. Their fields were bombed and blackened. How would they eat? They were hurt. How would they work? Right now they apparently were sympathetic to the VC and taking fire from us, but it could as easily turn the other way, I knew. Would Hue's village be bombed soon? I wondered. Or would it be invaded again-what if William found those GIs and told them about me and they returned to the village to find me gone? What would they do to the villagers? Jesus, out of the frying pan into the fire for those people. It must be like living in a Stephen King novel you can never finish-a new fate more horrible than the last on every page. Well, I'd gotten too close and now I was in it as well and I didn't even want to think about what would happen to me-unless William stayed sane long enough to bring help.

Ahn would try to tell a rescue party what had become of me, I was sure, but how could he do that without condemning the people who had taken him in? I wondered if he would be alive by the time help came. His wound could break open again or, worse, someone might decide he was dangerous to them and kill him. Sometimes, I heard, children who had lost limbs were poisoned. The reasoning supposedly was that they would not be able to lead useful lives and would be more abused as they grew older. I hoped Ahn's stubborn streak and the self-interest that had caused him to flee William would stand him in good stead. Some mamasan he'd picked.

I'd wanted to protect him so that I would not have to watch him die or hear of it, but how soon after I took him to Quang Ngai would he have been in a situation as bad as his present one, if not worse? They couldn't keep him in the hospital forever. If I really cared, if I'd fought hard enough, couldn't I have adopted him? I doubted it. Even GI fathers married to the mothers of their Amerasian children had trouble moving their Vietnamese families to the States. It was a good thing I hadn't promised to adopt Ahn. I would never be going back to the States myself now. I stopped thinking then. It was much less painful to agonize about what would happen to Ahn and the villagers than it was to think about what would happen to me.

We ate dry handfuls of uncooked rice, a little harder to chew than unmi

'Iked Grape-Nuts, and I had another swig of water. I still needed to rest. My wind wasn't up to this. The colonel took three men aside and started pointing things out, a few yards away from me. I was staring at my boots, feeling the mud run off me with the rain, wonder'dly if part of my shortness of breath wasn't encroaching pneumoing I I nia, when something sharp jabbed my left breast. I looked up and there was lava-aura, pointing his bayonet at my chest, grinning as if he'd done something clever.

When I looked up he jabbed me again, on the other side. Trying to deflate me, the adolescent asshole. He jabbed again and, swinging my bound hands, I shoved the damned thing aside. It laid open the side of my arm, which bled freely since I couldn't even put pressure on it to stop it. He smiled unpleasantly. "Let me alone, you 'erk," I said, halfsobbing. He smiled even more unpleasantly and twitched the bayonet back and forth at eye level, my blood mixing with rain and dripping off the tip.

We had creeps like that on our side too, congenital sadists, probably, little boys whose favorite sport was tearing wings off butterflies or torturing kittens, boys who finally had a little authority and used it to abuse anyone who came under their control. And he had me good. If I screamed, he might not kill me but he could very well put out my eye, just for the fun of it. He wanted to scare me and was doing a damned good job of it, but I was getting so angry at his bullying I was beginning not to care. The balance between being afraid of mutilation and being determined to shove that damned thing up his ass was rapidly tilting toward the more suicidal choice. I didn't have much to gain either say, except satisfaction.

I was steeling myself to lunge at the damned thing when someone picked up my tether and jerked it sideways, slamming me down into the mud. In almost the same instant an explosion lifted my tormentor off his feet and knocked him halfway down the hill.

I brushed the mud from my eyes as my ally helped me back onto my rock and started fussing over my cut. I lifted my hands to my neck and took the amulet in my fingers, brushing it against my guard while he examined my cut. The blue of his aura had been darkening a little, but now it brightened and grew a fragile shoot of mauve. I could not see what was happening, but I felt the bleeding stop. I dropped the amulet casually back into my shirt as the guard looked back at me, awe and guarded hope in his face. He had been with the liberation movement since the Diem government executed his family. He had thought the movement would be a way to avenge his family, help his country. He was not so sure now.

Sometimes the scene he had watched from hiding-his parents, grandparents, sisters, and brothers being deliberately murdered-came back to him in the things he and his comrades did. He had wanted to be a Buddhist monk and then for a while he yearned to be admitted to the Party. He had wanted to drive out foreign aggressors and their puppet governments. Instead, as a child, he had carried bombs to blow up boys not much older than he who were sometimes trying to be kind, and

"punished" villagers the way his parents had been punished. He had begun to doubt the good in anything until the night in the village. He was Hien. He would do for me what he could, but what was his unworthy protection compared to that of Colonel Dinh himself?

The colonel frowned down the hill, his .45 already replaced in its holster. With Hien's help, I rose to my feet. The body of lava-aura sprawled halfway down the hillside. His death aura did not change or clarify. It remained black and red, almost indistinguishable from his physical appearance-half ' of his chest covered in blood, a black cloud of insects already gathering around him. Was I right about his being vicious since boyhood? Was he simply a naturally talented sadistic Psychotic killer? I wondered. Perhaps his aura had started out like William's, just occasional flashes of killer craziness, and had eventually taken over his whole personality. From my standpoint, it didn't matter much.

"Thank you," I said, bowing to the colonel, but he turned on his heel and walked away from me, making a small gesture that mustered the group back into action.

Lava-aura's body was left where it fell. I examined the auras and faces of the men around me. I was afraid some friend of his would blame me and try to kill me out of revenge.

But the men around me didn't even look at the body. Hien hummed softly to himself. He wasn't the only one to seem relieved. Some of these men were hard-core dedicated troops, true, but several were virtual draftees from the villages, men who had 'sined the Vietcong because to do otherwise would cost their lives or those of their families. Most of the auras never changed, just remained the same muddy brown, indifferent, numbed, and hard as nails, but without the vitality their late comrade had derived from hurting people. No one seemed to blame me. I would have been flattering myself to think the colonel had killed one of his own men on my account. The man had been executed for disobeying orders. Even a guard dog that doesn't mind its master and bites unpredictably has to be put down.

just before dark we headed down the ridge, toward another village.

Everyone grew marginally more tense, the colonel's aura sparking with anxiety. A few yards from the perimeter, we saw a man with a lfl . He yelled, "Dung lai," but as we got closer, he saw that this was r c no time to play High Noon and scuttled off into the village, his aura leaving a light trail of gray-violet fear.

The colonel exchanged a few words with his men and nodded into the jungle, the paddy, up the hill. One of the men with flat, muddy auras took the point position walking into the village. I tried not to allow myself to feel excited. If the colonel was being so wary here, that must mean this was not a VC village. Or at least not entirely.

Maybe they were even hiding American troops, right now. Maybe . . .

I was looking the other way, squinting into the hills, trying to see what the colonel had been nodding at, when the point man stepped on the mine. I heard the explosiormo big thing, really, for Nam-and the howl of pain almost at once. Some of the others started to run forward, but the colonel stopped them with a gesture and strode over to the naan with a confidence only I could see was tinged with fear.

He hollered to Hien, who suddenly looked as if he might faint. His aura was whirling with teal, pale grayed olive, and violet, underlain with mustard. He believed I was special, a saint perhaps, and should be protected and helped, but he was a simple man, not a brilliant one like the colonel, and he was afraid. His very thoughts were traitorous. If there was help here for me-but the colonel was beckoning us across the minefield and Hien removed the rope from my wrists and took my hand to lead me forward, showing me by example that we must step only in the colonel's footsteps.

The colonel nodded to the injured man, telling me to do my thing, whatever it was. Then he signalled everyone except Hien to follow him into the village. Now the yellow in his aura swirled with a sad brown the color of an old bloodstain, and red kindled in the blue. The auras of the men blended in similar combinations with his-the influence, I suppose, of a leader more charismatic than he wanted to be or realized.

I cut away what was left of the point man's trousers. His left leg was severed above the knee, the femoral artery spurting. I started applying pressure, as I normally would, and imagined the artery sealed, the wound mending, a smooth clean stump, but the wound continued to spurt until I took Hien's hand in one of mine and held it, trembling, against his comrade's wound. Blood covered both of us now, but gradually it receded, like a film of a flowing river shown in reverse. Hien looked from the patient to me with eyes as large as bomb craters. The injured man had groin wounds, too. He would father no more children, but with Hien holding him with one hand and holding my hand with the other, the wounds magically began forming granular tissue from the inside, one of the initial stages of the healing process. This time the process looked like a film run on fast forward. But it wouldn't be fast enough to save him from sepsis. For that we would need more hands. My strength was gone and Hien's had been drained with the healing we'd done together.

I looked up from the patient to see if the colonel was anywhere close, to ask him to send us someone else to help.

He was not close, but he was close enough for me to see what happened.

They had gathered the village together, with the frightened perimeter guard, now unarmed and scared halfway to death already, in the center.

His aura shot sickly pus-purple. He looked like a teenagera good-looking boy with his black hair parted on one side. He was probably not old enough to have been drafted by the ARVN. His eyes looked like a frightened horse's, the twilight bouncing off them, and he kept babbling at the colonel in a tone at once apologetic and argumentative.

The colonel gave an order and one of the VC, a man whose skin was mottled as if he had been burned at some time, stepped forward. Another man pushed the boy to his knees and forced his arms up so that his head bent low. I thought they would shoot the boy, but the man with mottled skin drew a machete from his belt and started hacking the boy's neck.

I buried my head in my hands and screamed, my screams lost in those of the others, the moans and wailing and "ol oking" of the frightened villagers. I didn't want to look back up, but I couldn't help it. One by one an old man and an equally ancient woman, a middleaged woman, a girl and the baby on her hip, and three older children, the boy's family perhaps, or village elders, or both, were kicked into the center, bent over double, and butchered as the boy had been. I was on my feet now, screaming and screaming for them to stop.

The colonel had been as coolly intent on the executions as if he were supervising a ditch digging or a concrete pouring. Almost casually, he glanced our way and his eyes met mine, cutting through the 'I'ght. His face looked just the same, but his aura was a bare w'sp of twil drabness around him.