The Healer's War (11 page)

"Huh?" I said stupidly. Maybe Xinh wasn't feeling so good either -she was that funny color around the edges. Maybe we were both sick. I looked at both of Xinh's hands-all of the nails were intact. I shrugged. She shrugged and happily accepted the mending of her manicure as a miracle of American medicine. I felt distinctly dizzy as I started back for the nurses' station.

Mal returned to the ward, her hair newly washed, and glowing irl

'descent pink. I rubbed my eyes and looked away from her.

The lunch cart arrived, and Meyers and Voorhees started passing lunch trays. I joined them at the cart and pulled a tray out, then started giggling helplessly. Not only did a baby-pink glow wrap both corps men, but the food was also color-coded: a pale green wisp over the cottage cheese, a faint orange to the fish.

"You okay, Lieutenant?" Voorhees asked.

"Uh-yeah. But I think I'd better sit down. Everything looks funny to me." I turned back toward my chair and tripped over my own feet.

Meyers caught my arm. "Whoa there, ma'am, what you been on?"

Istared hard at the dark brown center of his face and ignored the fluff of pink tipping his modified afro. "I dunno. One of you guys put a drop of acid on my fizzle or something? You're all weird-" I started to say "colored" and was afraid Meyers would take it wrong, so instead I asked for a drink of Kool-Aid and sat down again with my head between my knees. Maybe I was having some kind of drug reaction, but I found that hard to believe. More likely it was the heat. I had fainted during my first scrub, when I stood in a closed operating theater in muggy ninety-degree heat and watched a particularly bloody mastectomy while unwiped sweat ran down my face and pooled under my surgical mask. I'd also fainted during my first O.B. case, also in the summer, when the heat made the blood smell like hot metal. But I hadn't ever seen colors like this before-a roar in my ears and a sudden blurring of vision, but never distinct shades surrounding perfectly welldefined individuals. And I'd been sick those other times. Today I didn't actually physically feel any worse than I'd felt every day since I'd been in country.

Maybe I should have my eyes checked? But that wouldn't explain why Xinh had a blue-green halo while everybody else's was pink. Did only staff get pink halos? I'd have to ask Chaplain O'Rourke about that one. Maybe there was more to that angel-of-mercy stuff than met the eye. Trying to figure it out did make me start to feel a little nauseous, so I avoided the whole issue by refusing to look at anyone and finishing my charting instead.

When the major returned from her Tuesday morning staff meeting, she pushed Xe's gurney in front of her. A rosy glow surrounded her. He looked gray around the gills.

"Joe says it will take a couple more procedures to get Xe's stumps in shape for prostheses," she said. "But he came through this like a champ. Get his vitals, will you, Kitty?"

As I bent over to listen to his blood pressure, the amulet fell out of my shirt. I pulled the necklace off over my head. "Here you go, papasan. Safe and sound," I told him, and looped the theng back over his shaved head. His color and my vision immediately improved. That is, the gray around him vanished and a little warmth touched his cheeks, not above them but right there in the skin, where it belonged. The glow disappeared from around my hands too. I knew something strange was happening, and remembered what Heron and Mai said about the old man, but I misunderstood even then and got it backward. "You must be a holy man, papasan," I said. "You seem to have cured whatever was wrong with me."

suppose so far it sounds as if we never treated anyone but ivietnamese patients. Sometimes, the slower times that was almost true. Joe kept the native patients as long as he could, until they were as completely well as we could make them, because life outside the hospital was more conducive to dying than to healing.

But we did treat GI casualties, of course, and when they came, it was in swarms that all but swamped us. The first big push came the day after Xe's surgery. It was what I had imagined it would be like while I was in training, while I was at Fitzsimons, while I was working neuro, where we seldom got mass casualty patients except as overflow. The pushes weren't as constant as I'd believed they would be, which was just as well, because despite all my imaginary scenarios of how I would handle that kind of situation, when the first one came I definitely was not ready.

Partly, that was because of the way I had spent the night before.

Tony had ambled onto the ward during evening report and hung out at the coffeepot until I finished. "Carry your books home for you, Lieutenant?" he asked, grinning.

He'd pushed his aviator specs back into his curls and looked like a movie star playing a helicopter pilot. "Hi, soldier, new in town?" I kidded back, slipping into the space under his arm as we walked out of the hospital.

"I had to see you. You glad?" he asked. Well, I was glad he wanted to see me, yeah, but I wished he'd waited till I'd taken a shower.

"Sure am. But who's going to fly all those helicopters while you're away?"

We just fit walking hip to hip, up the barracks stairs. "I told Lightfoot, my crew chief, where to find me if he needs me," he said, slamming my screen door behind us, flipping on the fan, and attacking my top button in a single fluid motion. The room was smothering, as always, but Tony was a lot hotter. He finished my buttons and helped me with his during what was probably a fifteen-minute French kiss, if I'd been counting. And that was just the one on my mouth. "Come on, baby,"

he said, sliding with me onto my bed. "Tell me how you want it.

Well, what the hell. The dialogue wasn't exactly from Gone With the Wind, but the action was certainly impressive. He was innovative and skillful, all over me and that bed. The man had to have pored over the Kama Sutra as thoroughly as he'd studied his helicopter manuals, and he handled me with the same sort of competence. The trouble was, I wasn't a helicopter. Don't get me wrong. The sex was great, and I enjoyed it even more because I felt maybe I was finally going to have a real boyfriend, someone I could get away from work with and confide things in. So I snuggled next to him, waiting until he was comfortable to tell him about the crazy thing that had happened that morning, with the colors and so on, and about Ahn and the old man. We wedged ourselves spoonlike in the bed with the fan finally evaporating some of our mutual sweat. He tapped a pack of Marlboros against his chest until one popped up, lit it, and took a couple of long, satisfied puffs. "You'll get a kick out of this, Tony," I said. "Something really weird happened to me on the ward this morning......... I leaned up on one elbow to watch his face. He was already asleep. I sighed, wondering why I felt it was so much ruder for me to wake him up to talk to him than it was for him to screw my brains out, then fall asleep. If he was going to sleep, I wanted out of the bed and into a cool shower. I ran my fingers through his hair to remind him that I was still stuck between his butt and the wall. He rolled over, smiled lazily, and evcrything started all over again.

I climbed over him while he was in the process of lighting up the next time. He was sleeping when I returned, and I pulled off my clean clothes and slid in beside him, getting slick again from his sweat. I flipped the sheet up over us and wondered fleetingly if this was what a real honest-to-God wartime romance was like before I, too, dropped off.

I don't know how much later it was that someone pounded on the door. I woke up a little disoriented, felt Tony next to me, and thought, Oh shit, it's the colonel. "Who is it?" I asked.

The door cracked and a round brown face with a hawkish nose poked.in, looked mildly interested at what it saw, and backed out again. "Spec-5

Lightfoot, ma'am. I came for Mr. Devlin. We're on red alert now. Need to-"

"Tonto? That you?" Tony asked sharply, sitting up and pulling on his shorts and trousers as quickly as any fireman. "That's a roger, kemo sabe. Time to saddle up. We gotta didi."

He did lace his boots, but he was still buttoning his shirt as he ran out the door. He ran back and dropped a kiss on my nose. " 'Bye, babe.

Call you later."

I nodded and listened until his boots hit the bottom stair.

Still, it was a good thing I'd spent a little time in bed that evening, because the rocket attack started a short time later and I spent the rest of the night under the bed, in a T-shirt, panties, flak jacket, and helmet, keeping the cockroaches company, hugging the plywood.

What I was actually supposed to do, what we were all supposed to do, was grab flak jackets and helmets and head for the sandbag-reinforced bunker hunching up between my barracks and the one facing it. Usually, nobody even bothered to vacate the officers' club. We hadn't received heavy fire in so long that the bunkers were not taken seriously. During my first rocket attack, I had dutifully reported to the cavelike little shelter to find the chief of internal medicine suavely sipping a martini and reading an Ian Fleming paperback by flashlight. By the next time, he had DEROSed (left the country) and the bunker was unoccupied. I took one look at the dismal, hot little hole and thought of coiled cobras and scorpions and snuck back up the stairs to hide under the bed.

Which was what everybody else who paid any attention to the shelling did. I had the procedure perfected by now. I took my pillow, flak jacket, helmet, usually a paper fan and a Coke, a book and a flashlight.

It was a little like playing house under the dining room table when I was a kid. Usually I didn't mind it too much. The floor was hard, but you needed your mattress on top of the bed to shield you. That particular night I read the same sentence several times before giving up. I was plenty cool now, and I cursed Tony for being out there flying around making Vietnam safe for democracy when he should have been under the bed with me.

Then I thought about him flying around up there with all those rockets whistling through the air, and I wished I could be working, just to take my mind off it. Over on the wards, the staff would be moving the patients who could be moved under the beds. Those who couldn't would have mattresses piled on top of them. Several times already, I'd had to give meds on my hands and knees. The GIs with the facial injuries kept asking for their weapons, which were locked up, and I kept wishing I could slide under one of the beds, too, and huddle next to someone till morning. Even though I was supposed to be protecting those guys, I felt better knowing that they were there, under the beds.

You could joke your way through a shelling over on the wards, and act tough. It was less funny to lie alone listening to the shrieking rockets, the mortars crumping like God stomping around out there thoroughly pissed off.

Mentally, I composed a letter describing the rocket attack. Not to Mom and Dad, of course. I glossed over this kind of stuff when I wrote to them, knowing it would scare them a lot worse than it really scared me.

But it sounded nice and dramatic when I wrote to Duncan and might make him worry about me a little, the shit. In my imaginary letter I told him about Tony, too-well, not everything, but enough to make him

'Jealous. I'd have to get around to writing that sometime, I thought.

Then, if I was ever found with shrapnel through my throat like that nurse who was killed while sitting on a patient's bed, Duncan and Tony would both be sorry.

I had some good moments there imagining Tony berating himself for leaving me alone, and Duncan in tears when they sent my pathetic medals home to him (of course, they wouldn't. They didn't send anything to people you wished were your boyfriend. They sent all your stuff to your parents). But I got tired of that eventually. I was pooped, and the noise was giving me a headache, and my own dumb game didn't make the one going on outside seem any less stupid.

It was fine for those guys to run around at night and shoot things at each other, but how was I supposed to work if I had to toss and turn all night on the damned plywood? Probably I'd catch my death of cold, too.

If something was going to hit me, I wished it would just hit me.

Otherwise, the whole war should just shut the hell up so a person could get some sleep. All that noisy crap was just a nuisance anyhow. Nothing evej hit inside the compound. The VC couldn't afford to hit the 83rd.

Who else would they be able to trick into taking care of their wounded?

Once when George spent the night on guard duty and got pulled to work the E.R. the next day, he returned to the ward shaking his head and muttering, "They had a gunshot wound of the buttocks down there? Man, I swear that looked like the same ass on the same sapper I hit last night.

Friendly as hell this morning, though. Loves baseball, apple pie, and Elvis like you wouldn't beeleeve."

Finally, about 0300, choppers began thudding onto the pad, and their steady drone lulled me to sleep.

When I went to work that morning, the ward was transformed. The day before, we'd had only two beds on the GI side filled; now we had only two empty. Twelve bottles dangled from poles and Sarah sprinted from one to the other upending bottles long enough to squirt meds into the rubber caps or inject them straight into the new, special little chambers that came with some kinds of tubing.

The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker ferried wash water, razors, and cigarettes from the nurses' station to the patients.

"Hey, Sarge, can this dude have a drink of water?" Meyers called.

"Private Garcia here wants a cigarette, but he's got a chest tube and bottles. What d'ya think?" Voorhees called.

Sarah rehung a bottle, then consulted her clipboard. "No, he's going to surgery he called to Meyers. "Absolutely not. Not till he's Off 021"

she said to Voorhees. "But you can give him a drink of water if he wants. They operated on him last night."

Marge grabbed an armload of charts and threw a clipboard at me. We followed Sarah through the ward and she gave us a running account of each patient's wounds and what had been done for him.