The Healer's War (7 page)

"That's okay, honey," jake said, patting my hand. He obviously mistook the hint of distress in my tone for disappointment that I wouldn't be able to make an immediate date to acquaint myself with the ungainly object that was the current love of his life. "The cranes will be there when you can make it over. And there'll be other parties. Don't worry.

The talk turned to their families again, then, abruptly, Tommy Dean ducked out to see if the sergeant they'd ridden over with was done with his carousing at the NCO club. "Is he okay?" I asked.

"Oh sure, honey. just a little homesick. You know, I don't think you realize how much it means to him-to both of us-to have you come over and talk to us for a while." He stopped looking at me for the first time that evening and studied his fingernails, and the ceiling fan, and took great interest in the comings and goings of the waitresses. "Now, I'm not sayin'we wouldn't either one of us take somethin' if we could get it, if you know what I mean, but mostly we are happily married men. I miss my wife like hell. It feels so good to be able to talk to a woman without, you know, havin' to use sign language all of the goddamn time."

It was my turn to study my fingernails. I couldn't find the right expression to let him know how good it was to talk to men who didn't treat me like a servant (the doctors), a police woman (most of the enlisted men), or a piece of ass.

"If you guys have a jeep, would you mind dropping me off at the PX gate so I can hitch back to the hospital?" I asked.

They insisted on taking me all the way back to the 83rd, of course, and kept me laughing all the way. I was hoping one or the other of them would mention something else about Tony, but they didn't, though Jake reminded me of the party.

I felt pretty good until the jeep drove out of sight and I turned to walk past the sign that said "Welcome to Hell's Half Acre."

Beyond the gate, floodlights from the guard towers illuminated the compound, sandbags, concertina wire, plywood barracks, and administrative shacks. The hospital's white humps shone from within, the three long windows at the top of each ward glowing faintly with the light over the nurses' station. The hospital building was actually two sets of Quonset huts connected by a long, enclosed corridor. It resembled eight enormous oil drums that someone had split open and spread apart so that half of each drum lay directly across from the other. Each entire oil drum was a whole ward, with space enough for maybe another Quonset hut on each side of the ones already in place. You could almost see the cloud of pot smoke swirling above the visitors'

tent, defining the atmosphere between wards five and six.

Smelling it, I forgot about Tony and jake and Tommy Dean and could sec the inside of ward six again as clearly as if I'd never left Tran's bedside. Shame and grief not only for the harm I might have caused Tran but for the nurse I was not and was never going to be welled up in me again, returning in a massive sodden lump. The closer I got to the hospital, the bigger the lump swelled, until it filled my chest and throat and brought the taste of sirloin and stomach acid to my tongue. I should stop and check on Tran, just so everyone would know that I really did give a damn about her. But what if something had gone wrong? I took a shortcut through the hospital, my boots loud on the concrete hallway. No one else was out there, just the mingled smells of antiseptic, pot, and Nam, and the collective sound of deep breathing, restless sleep, shifting feet, and the occasional clank of metal trays or bedpans. The light glowed softly over the desk on ward six. Ginger was pouring meds. George was behind his comic. Tran's bed was still occupied. I crept just a little closer, not wanting to greet anyone.

The body in the bed was Tran's, and she was breathing.

I passed through the hospital, out onto the boardwalk, and up the stairs to my quarters, gratefully closing the door behind me. My side of the building had been out of the sun for several hours, so the temperature in the tiny room was more or less bearable. I turned on the fan and let it blow through my hair, evaporate the last moisture from my skin as I pulled off my fatigues.

My laundry was lying freshly pressed on my shelves-well, most of it was my laundry. Looked as if mamasan had left me somebody else's rice-starched and ironed lace panties.

I grabbed a clean set of underwear, slipped on a shift, and headed for the shower. It was cold, as always, but washed off the sand and the stink. No one seemed to be home in the barracks that night, but the light at the 83rd officers' club across the road still twinkled and

"Proud Mary" warred with the sounds of Aretha Franklin coming from the barracks in back of ours.

Returning to my cot, I slouched back against the wall with my stationery box on my knees and tried to write a long, philosophical letter to Duncan. Duncan was-well, it's hard to explain about Duncan now. He was-is-a former professor of mine, a great storyteller, and in my own heart then my own true love. Only he didn't seem to know it, or value it, and tended to treat me like a kid brother. Of all the men I could have had, he was the one I wanted, though I wasn't damn fool enough not to have my spirits lifted by the proximity of men like Tony Devlin.

Still, it was always to Duncan, rather than my mother, that I wrote the letters that really explained, more or less, how I felt about Nam. I'd been composing in my head, in my sleep, in between snatches of conversation, what I would tell him about the situation with Tran, but halfway through I tore it up. If he found out what a fuck-up I was, he'd never love me. Instead, I wrote a short, funny letter about the beach and meeting Tommy Dean and jake. I'd save writing about Tony for when and if there was something to write about that would make Duncan realize what an incredibly desirable woman I was.

I stuck the letter in an envelope, and took two more Benadryl. I thought I might finally be able to sleep.

Phody shuddered in horror when I reported for duty on orthoA pedics.

Nobody said, "Oh no, not her." Nobody gave me knowing glances that said,

"Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock told us about your kind." Major Marge Canon looked up from counting narcotics only long enough to give me a quick, slightly distracted smile. Sarah Marcus, who occupied the hooch next door to mine, wiped the sweaty hair off her forchead with her arm, pouched out her bottom lip to blow upward to cool her face, and looked straight through me in a spacey way not unusual for night nurses just coming off a twelve-hour shift. Then her eyes focused, and she sighed and nodded her head in my direction before resuming the count.

Sarah's morning report was rushed and perfunctory. "All five of the casualties from yesterday are going out today. I haven't had time to get their tags done yet. I was supervisor last night and there was a push of Vietnamese from some village that got shelled. I think we may get two or three of them. Joe was triage officer last night and didn't get scrubbed for our first case till about five-thirty, so you probably have an hour or two before recovery room calls. Right now you've got three I.V.s on the GI side, one on the Vietnamese. I'll do those tags now."

"Don't worry about it, Sarah," Major Canon told her. "We're finally getting some extra help around here. Blaylock sent us Kitty instead of making us wait around for joanie's replacement from the States, so there's no need for you to stick around."

"Yeah, well, g'night," Sarah said. "I have to go give supervisor's report to the colonel. By the way, Kitty," she added casually,

"everybody on your old ward had a pretty good night."

"Thanks, Sarah. Slecp well."

She waved good-bye, tucked the supervisor's clipboard under her arm, and disappeared down the hall.

Before the day crew disbanded from report, Marge made introductions.

"Troops, this is Lieutenant McCulley. She's been transferred to us to replace Lieutenant Mitchell. Kitty, this is our ward master, Sergeant Baker, our interpreter and nursing assistant, Miss Mal, and Specialists Voorhees and Meyers."

I nodded and said "Pleased to meet you" all around. Sergeant Baker was a broad black NCO with a habitual expression of longsuffering tolerance.

Miss Mal looked like an oriental elf who'd been out in the rain too long. All the time I was there, it was Mai's unvarving custom either to come to work early to wash her hair or to wash it during her break, so maybe she was more of a water sprite than an elf. Voorhees was a compactly built, sandy-haired corpsman of about nineteen. Meyers, the other corpsman, was a tall, chubby-checked black guy who looked as if he belonged in high school.

"Come on, Kitty, we'll try to give you a little orientation before it gets busy," Marge said. First she showed me how to fill out medevac tags for the wounded GIs, all of whom were bound for Japan for further care, and then to the States. So few of my seriously injured GIs on neuro had lived long enough to stabilize sufficiently for medevac that I didn't have much practice in filling out the forms.

I was so glad nobody seemed to be mad at me about my screwup on neuro that I wanted to prove myself, show the major how gung ho I could be. As we started rounds, I saw that one of the patients wore a badly saturated dressing over what was left of his right leg, so I pointed it out to Marge. According to the nursing care plan on the guy's chart, he had been backed into by a tank driven by a friend who had taken too much herbal remedy for the Vietnam blahs.

"Yeah, that needs reinforcing okay. Let's wrap it with another couple layers of gauze. We're just going to reinforce most of the dressings on these guys. We don't usually change them when they come straight from the field and are medevaced the next day. Too much danger of infection.

Open up a wound here and it sucks germs out of the air. Pseudomonas, staph, you name it, Vietnam's got it."

"I didn't see much of that on neuro, but then, a lot of times we didn't get open wounds," I told her. "And I suppose the Vietnamese have a certain tolerance built up."

"Probably, or anyway those that don't are dead before they get here. But we get a lot of infection on the Vietnamese side of the ward, '%u'll see that later."

too.

Another soldier, this one with frag wounds of his upper torso and compound fractures of the right clavicle and humerus, couldn't wait for us to reach him. He had been using his good arm to scratch frantically at his cast and dressings. "Ma'am, ma'am, you can change my dressings, can't you? I mean, since I'm asking. You've just got to. They itch like hell."

Marge said something soothing and regretful and examined his bandages, then pointed to a fly that had lighted on the dirty part of the dressing. "Probably maggots."

The soldier, who looked about fourteen, turned a green only a shade or two lighter than my fatigues. "Yuck. Get them the fuck off me," he said, trying harder than ever to scratch.

Marge gently restrained his left hand. "Leave them alone, soldier.

They're saving you from gangrene. Maggots only ea-maggots clean up dead tissue, sort of nature's way of debriding wounds. They won't hurt you.

They just itch a little. They keep wounds like yours from putrefying."

The boy, red-faced and almost in tears, lay back with a whimper. Not knowing what else to do, I handed him an emesis basin. He appeared neither convinced by the major's explanation nor willing to revise his no doubt long-standing prejudice against maggots. He was in for a long trip to Japan. I could only hope he'd get accustomed to the idea of bodily dinner guests.

There was also a marine with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his right foot, and two other patients with less serious multiple frag wounds, overflows from the general surgery ward.

Voorhees and Meyers were already at work with razors and basins of water. Sergeant Baker brought the dressing cart, and Marge and I put fresh layers of bandage around the filthy, seeping dressings. It felt like sweeping dirt under the rug The boy with the maggots groaned when we raised him to reinforce his dressings and cursed us as we manhandled him, but when we were done, lay back and said, "Thank you, ma'am," as sweetly as if he were talking to his Sunday school teacher.

We were headed for the Vietnamese side when recovery room called to tell us that the first of our new admissions was being transferred to us.

After that, three more arrived in fairly rapid succession. The corpsmen were still busy escorting the GIs to the helicopter, so Marge, Mai, and I did routine vitals. I wondered where the charts were, but every time I asked about pain or nausea medication or whether to touch a bandage, Marge referred me to a little recipe box containing standing orders.

These orders authorized nursing staff to administer medication for pain, nausea, or fever, to reinforce dressings, and to perform other routine care without doctors' orders written specifically for each patient. I was finishing the vital signs on the second patient when the third was wheeled onto the ward.

Joe Giangelo, red-eyed and barely able to lift the soles of his paper scrub shoes, pushed the last gurney in front of him and stopped at the desk to hand the major a stack of charts.

His scrub suit was dotted with a fine spray of red droplcts up one side, blood that had soaked through his scrub gown while he worked. His hair was matted from being tucked under a scrub cap all night. He opened the refrigerator door and gulped down a canned Coke as if he'd been dying of thirst. He looked a lot different from the twinkly-eyed benefactor who whistled while he built cabinet shelves. I thought he was about to drop. But when I reached for some of the charts, he said, "Why don't you grab a clipboard instead, Kitty, and make rounds with me. I'll tell you what I know about some of these folks and what we're going to try to do with them."

The Vietnamese side of the ward was more vigorously noisy than neuro had been. A bedlam of trol ois, dau quadis, and less articulate moans and whimpers greeted us, along with a cheerful wave from the end of the ward from a girl who squealed, "Bac si Joe! Bac si Joe!"

Bac si Joe drew himself up to his full five feet four inches and summoned Voorhees, who was counting vitals on one of the new patients.