The Healer's War (5 page)

Despite the Benadryl, I couldn't get comfortable. My elbows and knees were in the wrong places, and vast patches of my skin stuck to the cot.

Someone climbed the steps to the upper porch and walked toward my room, the footfalls sending tiny vibrations across the floor aild up the cot legs. A face and a pair of hands squashed against my screen door.

,, Kitty? You there?"

I grunted, and Carole Swenson opened the door and plopped herself on the edge of my cot. Her ditty bag and another of the Vietnamese bedspreads slid to the floor beside her boot. "Hi. How was your night?" she asked as if it wasn't already all over the compound how my night had been.

"Oh, you know. Long," I said.

Carole was maybe my best friend at the hospital, but I couldn't talk to her about this. She waited a moment for me to continue, then started pawing through her ditty bag, the little olive-drab cloth sack we all used as a purse. Triumphantly she extracted a stack of three-by-five cards. "I had a brainstorm. Lookit here."

"What are those for?" I asked.

"My schedule. I got tired of reciting it to guys who keep forgetting it and call me up while I'm on duty, so I decided to start copying it out on three-by-five cards. It'll save time."

"Uh huh," I said, mild amusement lapping at the edges of my bone-tiredness. Carole did tend to carry her talent for organization a little far sometimes. But that talent was part of what made her such a good nurse. She handled the ICU, which was a nightmare, as if it were routine ward work, and conducted eincrgency triage situations as coolly as if she were planning seating arrangements at a party. Her I.V.s always seemed to hit the veins on the first punch, she always found the bleeder, she always managed to hold someone where it didn't hurt, and she seemed to know before the patients did what would make them more comfortable, feel a little better. She was the kind of nurse who would be there with a glass of water half a second before a patient realized he was thirsty.

"If you have your schedule, you could do the same thing she suggested, which was supposed to give me an opening to tell her about my transfer.

The hospital compound was a small place. Rumors had probably spread far and wide about how I had nearly killed Tran and what Blaylock had done about it. Carole, who would never have made the same kind of an error, nevertheless had probably already put herself mentally in my place and was trying to help.

I grunted noncommittally, because I still didn't want to talk but I didn't want her to go away mad either. I needed all the friends I could get.

,,Be that way," she said, and tucked her cards back inside the bag, and abruptly changed the subject. "Judy's ward master is going to the PX

and said he'd drop us at the beach on the way. Wanna come?"

She'd done it again. Suddenly I knew that I needed to get off the compound and away from the hospital more than anything. I nodded, plucked my beach bag from the corner, and followed her out the door.

Carole, Judy Heifetz, and I crowded into the jeep driven by Sergeant Slattery, the ward master on Judy's ward. Getting a ride all the way to the beach was a rare treat. Usually we had to walk to the gate and hitch ' with a passing deuce-and-a-half or whatever other vehicle was willing to pick us up. Women weren't allowed to drive vehicles off post. Too dangerous.

The Jeep bumped its way through the gate and down the dirt road through Dogpatch, the Vietnamese village that separated the southern 'de of the compound from Amer'can-bu'it Highway I. The highway si I I ran down the coast of Vietnam, and led past Tien Sha, the naval base north of us, past Freedom Hill and the China Beach R&R Center, to the south.

Somewhere along the way was a turnoff for the bridge across the river to Da Nang and another road that led to Marble Mountain Air Force Base.

Vietnamese children stopped and watched our Jeep sputter past. A little boy, who was probably eight but looked five, ran toward us. "Hey, GI, you want buy boom-boom?"

"Get lost," Slattery yelled.

"Hey, man, numbah one boom-boom, no shit." The child continued with the hard sell. After all, family pride was no doubt involved, since he was probably pimping for his mother or sisters.

We laughed, and Judy leaned out and waved him away. "Hey, man," she said. "We mamasans. No need boom-boom."

The kid, undaunted, trotted along beside our dust cloud, calling, "Hey, mamasans, you want numbah one job?"

Later, out on the highway, Slattery had to stop the jeep for an overturned Honda while the three occupants reloaded two baskets of chickens, their laundry, two water jugs, and a pig onto the little vehicle. While stopped, we all assumed the sort of hunchbacked position required to cover your watch with your right hand while keeping your elbows tight over your pockets and, in our cases, our ditty bags tucked firmly into our armpits. Vietnamese street kids watched for just such incidents to dart out and strip the valuables off the passengers of stopped vehicles before the suckers knew what happened. It occurred to me more than once that it was a damned good thing jeeps didn't have hubcaps.

Carole and Judy had worn bathing suits under their fatigues, but I had to stop at the ladies' room of the officers' club to change. My mom had picked my suit, a gold velour modified bikini, out of the Sears catalog.

Needless to say, it was not particularly revealing, but it wouldn't have made any difference if it had been cut like a pair of long Johns.

Stepping from the ladies' locker room onto the glaringly sunlit beach, surrounded by a couple three hundred males, I squinted down the long stretch of beach between me and the blankets Carole and Judy had stretched by the edge of the water. I felt I was running the gauntlet, like the guy in that old movie Flight of the Arrow, although the scenario was more like Annette Funicello in Beach Blanket Bingo. Or maybe it was Sally Field in Gidget Goes to War.

Heat pulsed from the sand, and I smelled the rubber of my flipflop soles, hot as a teenager's tires. I was glad I had my new tortoiseshell-rimmed aviator-style dark glasses to hide my eyes as the usual chorus of wolf whistles and catcalls followed me down the beach.

"Hey-hey, Joe?" someone on the enlisted side of the beach called.

"Yeah?"

"Get a load of that funny-shaped guy in the two-piece suit."

I turned around and saw two tanned-to-the-waist, white-legged specimens of American manhood staring after me with a cross between bewilderment and awe. One of them looked mildly mortified that I was staring back.

The other one gave me a cocky grin. I waved hello and kept walking. A month ago I would probably have struck up an acquaintance, gone swimming with them, or played beach ball for a little while. But during the last month, our fellow officers had decided that female nurses were not safe consorting with all those horny enlisted men, most of them marines on in-country R&R from combat duty. Our fellow officers thought we were much safer consorting exclusively with horny officers. Carole, Judy, and I, as well as a lot of the other girls, were pissed off about it.

The guys on the enlisted side of the beach were the ones who were taking all the risks. They were the ones who needed the morale maintenance that officers on the make were so quick to remind us round-eyes women was part of our patriotic duty. Probably some of those guys were dangerous-I mean, they were supposed to be dangerous to the Vietcong and the NVA, weren't they? But the treatment I'd received from them hadn't frightened me. Though there'd been some tentative passes, so respectfully tendered as to almost be comical, most of the guys had just seemed happy to be reminded that there were other kinds of people around besides Vietnamese and men.

Carole was busily filling out her three-by-five cards when I arrived, while Judy tried to get to sleep. I waded into the sea. It was warm as urine and about as refreshing, but I wet myself down anyway, then waded back out again to lie face down to bake on my blanket.

I dug little holes in the sand with my toes and tried to snuggle the sand into conformation with my body. The skin of my back twitched when I lay still, my muscles relaxing only slowly as they grew accustomed to the warmth of the sun.

An aircraft carrier rode the waves on the horizon, a guardian beast for the beach. I felt, as much as heard, the distant rumble of artillery, the sand vibrating beneath my breasts and stomach.

The tepid gray-green sea lapped the beach, its rhythm soothing. I lay still until the droplets of water evaporated from my hide and were replaced by droplets of sweat. Then, feeling like a dolphin needing to keep her skin wet at all times, I waded back into the sea.

Before I could settle back down on my blanket, a shadow interposed itself between the sun and my body.

"Hi there, young lady. You look like you could use a drink. What'll it be?"

I peered up at this aspiring cocktail waiter. He had thinning grayish hair, an eager expression, and a white band around his left ring finger where his tan stopped.

"Nothing, thanks," I said. "I'm trying to get some sleep right now.

I'll get something to drink later."

He plopped down beside me. "Don't be crazy, hon. You'll get all dried out in this sun. Hey, you're starting to blister already. Better let me rub some suntan lotion on you."

"It'll just wash off again," I said, but he was already squeezing my lotion onto his big pink ringless hands. I thought about making a lunge for it and asking Carole or Judy to do the honors instead, but they had found new friends and wandered off down the beach.

"My name's Mitch," the man said as he smeared goo onto my back. "What's yours?"

"Kitty," I said. I didn't care how good it felt. Name, rank, and serial number were all he was entitled to.

He chuckled as if he'd already made a dirty joke out of my name. I glared at him and he put a lid on it. I was surprised. It was the single indication he had given of sensitivity. Or perhaps he just felt vulnerable in swimming trunks.

"What do you do, Kitty?"

"I'm a nurse. I just got off a twenty-four-hour shift and I'm trying to get some sleep, " I repeated. A little reinforcement is never amiss when dealing with slow learners.

"A nurse? Army?" he asked, and I nodded into the blanket. "Say, we sure do appreciate you girls. Me, I'm over at I Corps HQ."

I grunted. If good ol' Mitch was from I Corps headquarters and had time to hang out at the officers' beach, he had to be some kind of brass, which accounted for the amount of it in his approach. He took my grunt for an invitation instead of what it was: the most eloquent un'cat'on I felt I could spare, and that only because I was comm I I brought up to be polite. I was so tired I would have gone to sleep with him there if I'd dared.

He lay down on my blanket beside me and got even chummier. "Yeah, we supply this whole area, you know. Do you like those fancy dishes in the Pacex catalog? We got a whole load of those the other day by mistake.

I'll bet I could get you some really cheap."

"uM, " I mumbled.

"What?" he asked, a little starch creeping into his voice when I did not instantly offer him my undying gratitude. You usually got that sort of unrealistic expectation only from lieutenant colonels and above.

"I said to let me know, after Mrs. Mitch makes her choice of pattern, and I'll talk to my fianed and see what he thinks."

He sat back up and dusted sand onto my freshly oiled back. "Well, sure am getting thirsty, Kitty. Sure you won't take me up on that drink?

Nope? Nice talking to you."

Judy had returned to'her blanket, alone, this time, and had been eavesdropping. "Hey, Kitty, what pattern is Colonel Martin going to get for you just out of the goodness of his little old heart?"

"He asked you too?"

"He's asked every nurse in Da Nang, I think. Somebody ought to let the poor schmuck know he's real confused about our particular mi I 'I'tary occupational speciality, and even if we were what he seems to think we are, who ever heard of a hooker who does it for china?"

"Hanoi Hannah might-do it for China, I mean, get it?"

"You are on the very seriously ill list, McCulley, and that's a fact.

Get some sleep, woman."

I slept, and in my sleep kept doing vital signs and neuro checks, vital signs and neuro checks. Tran's eyes stared up at me, just the whites, and I knew I was going to fall asleep on duty and she'd die because I wasn't awake. . . . I jerked myself awake and saw the sand and smelled the oil. My back felt slightly tight, a little too hot.

I wet down again and tried to bake the other side, but even through my sunglasses, the light pried my lids open. I now felt the 'llery rumble

'n my spine. Oddly enough, it drowned out other, less arti predictable noises and lulled me back to sleep. I don't remember dreaming that time.

It must have been at least two hours later that Carole shook me. "We have to get back now and shower for work. Coming?"

"I think I'll stay here and have something to eat. I'm not all that anxious to get back."

Carole gave me a stern look of the "once you fall off a pony, pardner, you just have to climb back on" variety, but I had better things to feel guilty about than staying at the beach all day.

The China Beach Officers' Club was a rambling French coloTnial building on a hill above the beach. It commanded a splendid view of the South China Sea and the adjacent mountains and jungle. It was a romantic-looking place if you overlooked the concertina wire and sandbags and disregarded the attire of the clientele. With its lazily rotating ceiling fans, latticework of white painted wood, wide veranda, and potted palms, the place always made me feel as if I should be wearing a white linen safari suit and a pith helmet and walk in on the arm of jungle Jim. I kept expecting somebody to come riding up on an elephant and call me "memsahib."

Right then, however, the Gunga Din illusions of the place were of less allure than its distance from the hospital.

I usually dressed up to go to the club and went in a group, or with an escort. This time I just pulled on my rumpled fatigues over my swimsuit, which was by then bone-dry, tried to brush the sand off, and stuck my hair up under my baseball cap. I looked like a grunt, which was fine with me. I didn't feel very glamorous..