The Healer's War

BY ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

Synopsis:

Very realistic and chilling novel of an army nurse in Vietnam. Kitty finds herself alone in enemy territory with a crippled Vietnamese child, her only protection a mysterious amulet given to her by an ancient Vietnamese wise man. The touch of fantasy keeps this book from being a true nightmare. The author was a nurse in Vietnam herself and the descriptions in this novel are not for the squeamish.

Dedication This book is specifically for Lou Aronica, who asked the right questions.

It is also for my fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead, male and female, military, civilian, and pacifist, American, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Australian, Dutch, Laotian, Cambodian, Montagnard, Korean, and Chinese. And for our children, in hopes of arming them with hard questions to ask leaders selling cheap glory.

The perspective, extrapolations, fantasy elements, and selection of story material in this novel are entirely my own. This story is a work of speculative fiction, not an autobiography, although some of the more mundane aspects and background are based upon my own experience as a nurse in Vietnam. This work does not, however, claim to be representative of the viewpoint of any group or of any other person but me. However, I have obtained nonjudgmental help, support, information, and reference materials from the invaluable sources listed below.

I would most especially like to thank John Swan for generously sharing his experience as a field medic, combat soldier, Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center counselor, and human being, for helping me cope with the initial stages of this book, and for introducing me to the Fairbanks Combat Veterans Rap Group. Another debt is owed to a Vietnamese lady whose perspective was of real help but who prefers to remain anonymous.

Thanks also to Mack Partain; Megan Lindholm; Dr. Sharan Newman; Dr.

Peter Cornwall; janna Silverstein; Karen and Charlie Parr, my parents; Don and Betty Scarborough, my agent; Merrilee Heifetz, her assistant; Kathilyn Solomon and others at Writers' House; and Walt Williams of the Seattle Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center. In addition, I owe a great debt to all of the veterans who have been courageous enough to tell their stories, whether they thought what they had to say would be acceptable or not. Without their example I would not have been able to write my story. Particular thanks to Lynda Van Devanter, author (with Christopher Morgan) of Home Before Morning; to Cheryl Nicol, a portion of whose story is in 4 Piece of My Heart; to Patricia L. Walsh, author of the novel So Sad the Hearts, based on her experiences as an American civilian nurse who treated Vietnamese patients in Da Nang; and to Huynh Quang Nhuong, author of The Land I Lost, a portrait of the author's boyhood in rural Vietnam before the war. Also thanks to those who collected the stories of other veterans: Keith Walker for the excellent 4 Piece of My Heart; Kathryn Marshall for In the Combat Zone; Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders for Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam; Wallace Terry for Bloods; and Mark Baker for Nam, among many others. I owe special gratitude to Robert Stone for suggesting Dispatches by Michael Herr, to Shelby L. Stanton for advice on technical aspects of the story (all mistakes are purely mine, however), to Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake, and to Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann, editors of In the Field of Fire, for suggesting that writers of fantasy could have anything to say about Vietnam.

Glossary Author's Note Spellings are phonetic and meanings are approximate, not literal, translations. Many terms are not actually Vietnamese but pidgin. My apologies to any Vietnamese speakers for inaccuracies. I wish I had had your assistance when compiling this.

Ba: Vietnamese term for a married woman.

Bac si: Vietnamese term for a doctor.

Beaucoup: French for "much" or "many," used in pidgin VietnameseEnglish.

Bic. Vietnamese term for "understand." (Bicced is author's Americanizing of past tense.)

Cam ong: Vietnamese term for "thank you."

Cat ca dao: Vietnamese term meaning "cut off head."

Chung wi: Vietnamese term for a lieutenant.

Co: Vietnamese term for an unmarried woman or girl.

Com bic?: Vietnamese term for "Come again?" or "I don't understand."

Dao: Vietnamese term for "head."

Dau: Vietnamese term for "pain."

Dau quadi: Vietnamese term for "much pain." (Dau quadied is author's Americanizing of past tense.)

DEROS date (military jargon): The day a person can leave an assignment; in Vietnam, when one leaves country.

Didi or didi mau: Vietnamese or pidgin used often by GIs and Vietnamese; approximate meaning "Go" or "Go quickly."

Dinky dao: Vietnamese or pidgin for "crazy."

Dung lai: Vietnamese term for "Stop."

Em di: Vietnamese term for "Shut up."

La dai: Vietnamese term for "Come here." (La daied is author's Americanizing of past tense.)

Mao: Vietnamese term for a cat.

Mao hey: Vietnamese term for a tiger.

MOS: Military Occupational Specialty.

Sin loi: Vietnamese term for apology.

Tete or titi: Pidgin for French word petit.

TPR: Temperature, pulse, and respiration.

Triage: As used in medical emergency situations, this term refers to the process of sorting victims of a mass casualty situation or disaster into categories,. e., those who can be treated and released, those who can be saved by quick intervention, and those who will need more extensive help if they are to recover. The last category are those so seriously injured they will probably die without immediate, extensive care and may die anyway. In triage situations, patients are treated in the order listed, the worst injuries requiring the most care left until last so the greatest number of people can be treated.

Prologue The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can haul myself out of one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked sheet under me is not wet jungle floor, that the pressure against my back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle or a terribly wounded Vietnamese but my sleeping cat. When someone in a suit or a uniform frowns at me, it doesn't always make me feel as if the skin over my spinal column were being chewed away by pointed teeth. Sometimes I can

*just shrug, and recognize the authority in question as an uptight asshole with no legitimate power over me-none that counts, that is, nothing life-threatening.

Still, most of the time, I retain the feeling that it's the nightmares that are real and my life here and now that is a dream, the same dream I dreamed in the hospital, in the jungle, in the Vietcong tunnels. I'm always afraid that someday I'll be dragged out of this dream, back to Nam, to a war that goes on and on for real in the same way it replays itself in my memory.

"That is what stops your power, Mao," Nguyen Bhu tells me. "You cannot provi 'de a clear path for the amulet's power until your own mind is clear. When you turn your face from your fear, that fear bloats with the power you give it. Look it in the eye, and it will diminish into something that is part of your life, part of your memory, something that belongs to you rather than controls you."

Nguyen Bhu sweeps the floor at his cousin's grocery store. Charlie says he's a former Cao Dai priest, a mystic like old Xe, and the wisest man to escape from Vietnam. He is sixty and looks ninety, has lost three fingers from his right hand, has more sense and is far less expensive than a psychiatrist whose lifelong concern has been to avoid obesity rather than starvation.

And most important, Nguyen Bhu knows what I have to say, and insists that it is not too much to ask people to believe and forgive. Charlie knows part of it, but he has his own nightmares to chase. Of the others who know, I keep hoping that at least one or two survived, and that someday I might see and recognize them among the refugees. One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and find me, and we can heal together.

I didn't know old Xe was a magician the night I began to be iaware of his powers. If anybody had told me there was anything magical going on that night, I'd have told them they were full of crap, and assumed they either had a sicko sense of humor or had been smoking too much Hanoi Gold.

I was in the worst trouble of my life, to date, and had brought someone with me. An eleven-year-old kid lay comatose, barely breathing, on the bed by my chair.

Every fifteen minutes I repeated the same routine.

Right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, I pulled up a spare lump of flesh from each of the little girl's limbs and pinched hard, silently daring her to kick me or slug me. Then I ground my knuckles into her chest, counted to ten, and prayed for a sign of pain.

A kick or a slap, a whimper or a wiggle, even a grimace would have gladdened my heart. But the kid just lay there, her disproportionately long limbs limp as wet rags, her breathing so shallow that it barely stirred her skinny ribs a quarter of an inch up or down.

I peeled back her eyelids one at a time and dazzled them with the beam of my flashlight, checking to see if the pupils contracted at the same rate, to the same size, or if they expanded at all. If they stayed fixed, or if one was the size of a dime while the other stayed the size of a pencil lead, both of us were in truly deep shit. I had to try them five or six times before I could be sure they were not contracting more slowly than they had fifteen minutes before. I'd been performing this same cruel routine continuously since she had been wheeled back from O.R., already deeply unconscious. Thank God, they had not yet anesthetized her for surgery.

"Come on, baby, come on," I prodded her encouragingly, as if she were my kid up to bat at a Little League game, and pumped up the blood-pressure cuff that circled her skinny upper arm. I had to pump it and release it three times before the faintest throb of pulse came through the membrane of my stethoscope. Partly that was because her pulse pressure was so weak. Partly it was because the papasan in bed five had started up again.

"Dau quadi," he whined ("much pain"), twisting in the padded cuffs binding him to the side rails. He sounded like a night in a haunted house, with the rails rattling like hail on windows, his sheets thrashing like those of a particularly agitated ghost, his bedsprings squeaking like unoiled ancient portals.

"Dau quadi!" he shrieked this time, his voice shrill with the hostility head injuries inevitably display when and if they start to heal.

All eleven of the patients then on ward six, the neurosurgery ward, were Vietnamese with some kind of trauma to the head. Most of them were civilians, war refugees. Before, we'd had two poor GIs on Stryker frames. One was a gork-a vegetable, who didn't know that he wouldn't ever move by himself again. The other guy wasn't so lucky. Both of them had been medevaced to Japan that morning, so tonight there were just Vietnamese on this side, them and George, the corpsman, and me. Ginger Phillips, who was officially in charge of the graveyard shift that night for ward six, was staying on the other half of the ward, across the hall. The EENT patients were over there, injuries and ailments of the eyes, ears, nose, and throat, a couple of GIs with sinus infections and a couple more with superficial facial wounds, as well as elderly Vietnamese suffering from cataracts and facial cancer. Men and women were mixed together on both open wards, which was true throughout the hospital. On most wards the division was between GIs and Vietnamese instead.

Papasan dau quadied again and the old man in the next bed stirred restlessly. I pulled my stethoscope out of my ears.

"Can you shut papasan up, George?" I asked. "I can't hear a damned thing for the racket."

George nodded, rose from his semislumped comic-book-reading position, and lumbered sleepily down the aisle between the beds. I waited while he threatened in a gentle, soothing voice to do hideous things to the old man, pulled the gnarled and squirmy body up in bed, and smoothed the sheets. Then I tried again. I could hear the systolic140-but the diastolic eluded me until the second reading-it was 60. Up 6 points from the previous reading. A widening pulse pressure-the difference between the first throb I heard and the last-was a sign of increased intracranial pressure. But last time the spread had been 144/ 52, so it had decreased slightly. I hoped I could take that as a good sign.

The girl's respirations were still so slow and shallow I had to Measure the movement of her ribs against the sheet to be sure she was breathing.

Her right radial pulse, before slowed to 50, was now 56, but that was not necessarily a good sign. As the pressure on her brain increased, her pulse might start racing as her squashed brain sent wild signals to her heart, panicking it into an essentially useless flurry of activity.

I took pulses in both wrists, at both ankles, and at her carotid pulse, at the base of her jaw. They were within two points of one another.

Her Foley catheter was still draining urine from her bladder, her I.V.s were still dripping on course. I wrote everything down on the chart at the end of the bed, sat on the metal folding chair, and used a towel to wipe the sweat off my face and neck.