The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (2 page)

I got stationed at Cam Ranh Bay, at the 23rd Medevac, for two months, then the 118th Field General in Saigon, then back to the 23rd. They weren’t supposed to move you around like that, but I got moved. That kind of thing happened all the time. Things just weren’t done by the book. At the 23rd we were put in a bunch of huts. It was right by the hospital compound, and we had the Navy on one side of us and the Air Force on the other side. We could hear the mortars all night and the next day we’d get to see what they’d done. 

It began to get to me after about a week. That’s all it took. The big medevac choppers would land and the gurneys would come in. We were the ones who tried to keep them alive, and if they didn’t die on us, we’d send them on. 

We’d be covered with blood and urine and everything else. We’d have a boy with no arms or no legs, or maybe his legs would be lying beside him on the gurney. We’d have guys with no faces. We’d have stomachs you could hold in your hands. We’d be slapping ringers and plasma into them. We’d have sump pumps going to get the secretions and blood out of them. We’d do this all day, day in and day out. 

You’d put them in bags if they didn’t make it. You’d change dressings on stumps, and you had this deal with the corpsmen that every fourth day you’d clean the latrines for them if they’d change the dressings. They knew what it was like. 

They’d bring in a boy with beautiful brown eyes and you’d just have a chance to look at him, to get a chest cut-down started for a subclavian catheter. He’d say, “Ma’am, am I all right?” and in forty seconds he’d be gone. He’d say, “Oh, no,” and he’d be gone. His blood would pool on the gurney right through the packs. Some wounds are so bad you can’t even plug them. The person just drains away. 

You wanted to help but you couldn’t. All you could do was watch. 

When the dreams started, I thought I was going crazy. It was about the fourth week and I couldn’t sleep. I’d close my eyes and think of trip wires. I’d think my bras and everything else had trip wires. I’d be on the john and hear a sound and think that someone was trip-wiring the latch so I’d lose my hands and face when I tried to leave. 

I’d dream about wounds, different kinds, and then the next day there would be the wounds I’d dreamed about. I thought it was just coincidence. I’d seen a lot of wounds by then. Everyone was having nightmares. I’d dream about a sucking chest wound and a guy trying to scream, though he couldn’t, and the next day I’d have to suck out a chest and listen to a guy try to scream. I didn’t think much about it. I couldn’t sleep. That was the important thing. I knew I was going to go crazy if I couldn’t sleep. 

Sometimes the dreams would have all the details. They’d bring in a guy that looked like someone had taken an ice pick to his arms. His arms looked like frankfurters with holes punched in them. That’s what shrapnel looks like. You puff up and the bleeding stops. We all knew he was going to die. You can’t live through something like that. The system won’t take it. He knew he was going to die, but he wasn’t making a sound. His face had little holes in it, around his cheeks, and it looked like a catcher’s mitt. He had the most beautiful blue eyes, like glass. You know, like that dog, the weimar-something. I’d start shaking because he was in one of my dreams—those holes and his face and eyes. I’d shake for hours, but you couldn’t tell anybody about dreams like that. 

The guy would die. There wasn’t anything I could do. 

I didn’t understand it. I didn’t see a reason for the dreams. They just made it worse. 

It got so I didn’t want to go to sleep because I didn’t want to have them. I didn’t want to wake up and have to worry about the dreams all day, wondering if they were going to happen. I didn’t want to have to shake all day, wondering. 

I’d have this dream about a kid with a bad head wound and a phone call, and the next day they’d wheel in some kid who’d lost a lot of skull and brain and scalp, and the underlying brain would be infected. Then the word would get around that his father, who was a full-bird colonel stationed in Okie, had called and the kid’s mother and father would be coming to see him. We all hoped he died before they got there, and he did. 

I’d had a dream about him. I’d even dreamed that we wanted him to die before his mom and dad got there, and he did, in the dream he did. 

When he died I started screaming and this corpsman who’d been around for a week or two took me by the arm and got me to the john. I’d gotten sick but he held me like my mom would have and all I could do was think what a mess I was, how could he hold me when I was such a mess? I started crying and couldn’t stop. I knew everyone thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t stop. 

After that things got worse. I’d see more than just a face or the wounds. I’d see where the guy lived, where his hometown was, and who was going to cry for him if he died. I didn’t understand it at first—I didn’t even know it was happening. I’d just get pictures, like before, in the dream and they’d bring this guy in the next day or the day after that, and if he could talk, I’d find out that what I’d seen was true. This guy would be dying and not saying a thing and I’d remember him from the dream and I’d say, “You look like a Georgia boy to me.” If the morphine was working and he could talk, he’d say, “Who told you that, Lieutenant? All us brothers ain’t from Georgia.” 

I’d make up something, like his voice or a good guess, and if I’d seen other things in the dream—like his girl or wife or mother—I’d tell him about those, too. He wouldn’t ask how I knew because it didn’t matter. How could it matter? He knew he was dying. They always know. I’d talk to him like I’d known him my whole life and he’d be gone in an hour, or by morning. 

I had this dream about a commando type, dressed in tiger cammies, nobody saying a thing about him in the compound—spook stuff, Ibex, MAC SOG, something like that—and I could see his girlfriend in Australia. She had hair just like mine and her eyes were a little like mine and she loved him. She was going out with another guy that night, but she loved him, I could tell. In the dream they brought him into ER with the bottom half of him blown away. 

The next morning, first thing, they wheeled this guy in and it was the dream all over again. He was blown apart from the waist down. He was delirious and trying to talk but his jaw wouldn’t work. He had tiger cammies on and we cut them off. I was the one who got him and everyone knew he wasn’t going to make it. As soon as I saw him I started shaking. I didn’t want to see him, I didn’t want to look at him. You really don’t know what it’s like, seeing someone like that and knowing. I didn’t want him to die. I never wanted any of them to die. 

I said, “Your girl in Australia loves you—she really does.” He looked at me and his eyes had that look you get when morphine isn’t enough. I could tell he thought I looked like her. He couldn’t even see my hair under the cap and he knew I looked like her. 

He grabbed my arm and his jaw started slipping and I knew what he wanted me to do. I always knew. I told him about her long black hair and the beaches in Australia and what the people were like there and what there was to do. 

He thought I was going to stop talking, so he kept squeezing my arm. I told him what he and his girlfriend had done on a beach outside Melbourne, their favorite beach, and what they’d had to drink that night. 

And then—this was the first time I’d done it with anyone—I told him what I’d do for him if I was his girlfriend and we were back in Australia. I said, “I’d wash you real good in the shower. I’d turn the lights down low and I’d put on some nice music. Then, if you were a little slow, I’d help you.” 

It was what his girlfriend always did, I knew that. It wasn’t hard to say. 

I kept talking, he kept holding my arm, and then he coded on me. They always did. I had a couple of minutes or hours and then they always coded on me, just like in the dreams. 

I got good at it. The pictures got better and I could tell them what they wanted to hear and that made it easier. It wasn’t just faces and burns and stumps, it was things about them. I’d tell them what their girlfriends and wives would do if they were here. Sometimes it was sexual, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I’d just ruffle their hair with my hand and tell them what Colorado looked like in summer, or what the last Doors concert they’d been to was like, or what you could do after dark in Newark. 

I start crying in the big room one day and this corpsman takes me by the arm and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the john and he’s got a needle in his hand, a two percent solution. He doesn’t want to see me hurting so much. I tell him no. Why, I don’t know. Every week or so I’d walk into the john and find somebody with a needle in their arm, but it wasn’t for me, I thought. People weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. Junkies on the Pike back home did it —we all knew that but not doctors and medics and nurses. It wasn’t right, I told myself. 

I didn’t start until a couple of weeks later. 

There’s this guy I want to tell you about. Steve—his name was Steve. 

I come in one morning to the big ER room shaking so hard I can’t even put my cap on and thinking I should’ve gotten a needle already, and there’s this guy sitting over by a curtain. He’s in cammies, his head’s wrapped, and he’s sitting up real straight. I can barely stand up, but here’s this guy looking like he’s hurting, so I say, “You want to lie down?” 

He turns slowly to look at me and I don’t believe it. I know this guy from a dream, but I don’t see the dream clearly. Here’s this guy sitting in a chair in front of me unattended, like he could walk away any second, but I’ve had a dream about him, so I know he’s going to die. 

He says he’s okay, he’s just here to see a buddy. But I’m not listening. I know everything about him. I know about his girlfriend and where he’s from and how his mom and dad didn’t raise him, but all I can think about is, he’s going to die. I’m thinking about the supply room and needles and how it wouldn’t take much to get it all over with. 

I say, “Cathy misses you, Steve. She wishes you could go to the Branding Iron in Merced tonight, because that band you like is playing. She’s done something to her apartment and she wants to show it to you.” 

He looks at me for a long time and his eyes aren’t like the others. I don’t want to look back at him. I can see him anyway—in the dream. He’s real young. He’s got a nice body, good shoulders, and he’s got curly blond hair under those clean bandages. He’s got eyelashes like a girl, and I see him laughing. He laughs every chance he gets, I know. Very quietly he says, “What’s your name?” 

I guess I tell him, because he says, “Can you tell me what she looks like, Mary?” 

Everything’s wrong. The guy doesn’t sound like he’s going to die. He’s looking at me like he understands. 

I say something like, “She’s tall.” I say, “She’s got blond hair,” but I can barely think. 

Very gently he says, “What are her eyes like?” 

I don’t know. I’m shaking so hard I can barely talk, I can barely remember the dream. 

Suddenly I’m talking. “They’re green. She wears a lot of mascara, but she’s got dark eyebrows, so she isn’t really a blond, is she.” 

He laughs and I jump. “No, she isn’t,” he says and he’s smiling. He takes my hand in his. I’m shaking badly but I let him, like I do the others. I don’t say a word. 

I’m holding it in. I’m scared to death. I’m cold-turkeying and I’m letting him hold my hand because he’s going to die. But it’s not true. I dreamed about him, but in the dream he didn’t die. I know that now. 

He squeezes my hand like we’ve known each other a long time and he says, “Do you do this for all of them?” I don’t say a thing. 

Real quietly he says, “A lot of guys die on you, don’t they, Mary.” 

I can’t help it—I start crying. I want to tell him. I want to tell someone, so I do. 

When I’m finished he doesn’t say something stupid, he doesn’t walk away. He doesn’t code on me. He starts to tell me a story and I don’t understand at first. 

There’s this G-2 reconnaissance over the border, he says. The insertion’s smooth and I’m point, I’m always point. We’re humping across paddy dikes like grunts and we hit this treeline. This is a black op, nobody’s supposed to know we’re here, but somebody does. All of a sudden the goddamn trees are full of Charlie ching-ching snipers. The whole world turns blue just for me, I mean, it turns blue—and everything starts moving real slow. I can see the first AK rounds coming at me and I step aside nicely just like that, like always. 

The world always turns blue like that when he needs it to, he says. That’s why they make him point every goddamn time, why they keep using him on special ops to take out infrastructure or long-range recon for intel. Because the world turns blue. And how he’s been called in twice to talk about what he’s going to do after this war and how they want him to be a killer, he says. The records will say he died in this war and they’ll give him a new identity. He doesn’t have family, they say. He’ll be one of their killers wherever they need him. Because everything turns blue. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s like a movie, like that
Manchurian Candidate
thing, and I can’t believe it. They don’t care about how he does it, he says. They never do. It can be the world turning blue or voices in your head or some grabass feeling in your gut, or, if you want, it can be God or the Devil with horns or Little Green Martians—it doesn’t matter to them what you believe. As long as it works, as long as you keep coming back from missions, that’s all they care about. He told them no, but they keep on asking. Sometimes he thinks they’ll kill his girlfriend just so he won’t have anything to come back to in the States. They do that kind of thing, he says. I can’t believe it.