The Healer's War (17 page)

"If you hear of anyone going, let me know. I've got to get out of here.

The last time I did anything interesting was the flying crane ride."

"Poor baby," Carole said, then chewed on her pencil awhile. "Hey, what's tomorrow? Thursday? Why not go on the medcap mission? I know it sounds like a drag to work on your day off, but if you don't mind losing the sleep-"

"So who can sleep? You're a genius, Swenson. I'll tell you all about it."

"well, look who's here," Charlie Heron said affably. "Bac Jvst Joe, how's it going? Nice you could come, Lieutenant. Climb in, climb in.

Lieutenant, you want to sit up front?"

He motioned to the ovenlike cab of a deuce-and-a-half.

"No thanks," I said. "I'll ride back here with the rest of the troops."

"Suit yourself," he said, and climbed in beside Joe.

The doctor and I hadn't exactly planned to come as a team, but the slow ward work had gotten to both of us. I met him as we were walking toward the gate that morning. Joe walked briskly and happily, a large camera and lens case around his neck. Photography was his other pet hobby, besides carpentry and orthopedic surgery.

"Hi, Geppetto," I said. "You don't mean to say that Marge is letting you go for the day, too?"

"Ma ings rge knows more about those folks than I do, by now. Th' have been too slow. Got to go drum up business or I'll get rusty. Bob Blum can handle any emergencies that come in. I want to see a village," he said. "Do you think a wide angle and a telescopic will be enough lenses?"

"That'll feed two families after the kids steal them from you, and the camera will probably feed half the village, so-"

"You're as funny as a broken leg, Lieutenant McCulley, you know that?

Speaking of broken legs, what's that limp about?" He cast an expert eye on my size nines.

"I don't know. Feels like I might have a rock in my boot."

By then we were at the truck and being hailed by Heron. I wasn't that thrilled to see him. But even though his tone had been carefully indifferent, I could tell he was glad to see me there. Cathie Peterson, from ICU, came along too. She was already in the cab of the truck when Joe and I arrived.

A young Marine corporal helped me into the truck. "Glad you could make it, ma'am," he said. "The villagers are always glad to see you nupses.

You don't know how much they appreciate it."

I looked around at all the Marine camouflage fatigues in the truck. "I didn't know the Medical Civic Action Team was a Marinesponsored thing,"

I said. The truck bucked into action and rumbled through Dogpatch and out onto the highway.

A swarthy sergeant whose name tag said "Hernandez" and who had swung up into the truck behind me after making sure all personnel and gear were aboard, said, "Yes, ma'am. This one is. Though it started with Special Forces as a PSYOPS mission. Most of these men been out in the bush the best part of their tour. They're short-three or four months to go. They finish up the tour working in the villages."

"You mean they come off of combat duty and go right out on medical missions?" I asked, feeling a little uneasy about it. These men could as easily have been the numbed, miserable-looking wounded who cycled through the wards, enthusing about nothing but the joys of bayoneting gooks and how the difference between a VC and a friendly was how fast the individual in question could run. If the human target escaped, it was friendly. If it died, it had to be VC.

"Yes, ma'am. Sergeant Heron handpicked them."

I had to digest that. Although most of the men surrounding us were marines, and there were certainly a lot of decent guys among them, there'd been a couple of nasty incidents early in my tour at the 83rd that made me question the kind of training they had. Lindy Hopkins had come steaming off the ward one night, slammed into Carole's hooch, and sat there crying. "Those bastards. Those goddamn bastards."

"Take it easy, Lindy. What the hell's the matter?" Carole asked. She and I had been sitting around talking. Lindy worked on ICU with Carole.

"They brought her in-she was just a kid-eleven years old and they raped her-"

"Who?"

"The seven big strong marines who brought her in. They raped her till-till they broke her spine. She's going to be paralyzed, Carole. An eleven-year-old kid. And then the sons of bitches had the gall to ask when visiting hours were!"

Another time another marine tried to break into Judy's hooch at night to rape her. Fortunately, Judy's got great lungs.

So I was not crazy about marines. Maybe the only reason I associated marines with the vicious and cruel things that happened was because the Marine Corps dominated the area. Of course, I knew the enemy did horrible things to our people and to their own. But they were the enemy. They weren't supposed to be civilized. I'd grown up with men like these, and they were supposed to know better. I despised any kind of training that taught them to be less than human.

At least the men around me refrained from drooling or pawing the bed of the pickup truck. They looked perfectly normal-a little older and sadder than a lot of the GIs who passed through the hospital, but basically okay.

The man nearest me even offered me his truck tire to lean against and cushion my back. I accepted gratefully, reveling in the wind the truck made as it rolled down the highway to Freedom Hill. There it turned off onto a dirt road and bumped along through what could have been a rural area south of San Antonio, Texas. Golden fields were flanked by fences, and rows of fanning leafy trees shielded the houses from the hot, heavy sun. Water buffaloes with pa'amaed people in tropical topees and coolie hats prowled the lone prairie instead of cowboys and longhorns, of course, but it was still cattle and cattle tenders of a sort, so what the hell. It was almost like home, lolling in the back of the truck, just enjoying the ride. The only signs of war were the uniforms and the weapons. The men acted as if they were going on holiday, although their eyes shifted toward the trees now and then.

A small boy wearing a blue shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap and carrying two metal jerricans over his right shoulder offered us a drink of water as the vehicles stopped beside the village pump. His shins were dusty, his face expectant. The men poured out of the truck, one of them knocking the kid's cap off and ruffling his hair, before replacing the cap, backward.

Joe started taking pictures the minute he hit the ground. The village was cool and shaded, made darker than the surrounding fields by a canopy of treetops lashed together overhead. Beyond the fields the mountains rose, and depending on where you were standing, you could see sparkles of a river glinting through the trees. This was not a newsreel-type-village, bombed and half-burned. This was a collection of neat little unpainted homes, most of which bore trellises loaded with flowers and melons. The streets between the houses and trees were busy with bicycles loaded with baskets of pigs, Hondas with nets full of coconuts lashed to them. Grubby children with big brown eyes and bowl-cut black hair danced around them. Adults squatting on their heels in the shade looked up from their work or talk and waved.

Heron pointed out the school and the marketplace, and the hut that I later described to Mom as the "labor and delivery facility." It was windowless and dark and had the smell of old blood, rot, and other, pungent, vaginal odors very strong within this tropical bacteria breeding ground. My clinical description was a euphemism; the place was so ripe I had to suppress an itch to scratch my own crotch in sympathy.

Little nests had been made inside, holes dug out of the dirt and lined with grass and old rags. One mother and her newborn, under the supervision of an unhurried-looking midwife, occupied the space on one side of the inevitable Vietnamese bedspread partioning the makeshift postpartum section from the L&D. "I'm afraid there's no delivery tables, Lieutenant," Heron said. "Vietnamese mothers deliver from a squatting position." Damned know -it-all. I'd assumed as much. So did my Indian ancestresses. So did a lot of women practicing the new natural childbirth methods.

He showed us to the clinic with another glance at me, as if he expected me to be horrified. I resolutely was not. The clinic area was a hut-a long, low one, also dirt-floored and dark. "You'll do fine," he told me. "I've done amputations in worse places than this, Lieutenant."

My "Goody for you" was drowned out in another introduction as Heron presented a boy of about eleven. "This is Li. He'll interpret for you.

And this is Miss Xuan from Province Hospital"-he indicated a plain-faced girl in a white go dai, the graceful tunic-dress of Vietnam, and conical hat-"and my ARVN counterpart, Sergeant Huong."

Li was as officious as any sergeant major as he lined up the patients for treatment. He strutted up and down the line while the examinations took place, as if supervising instead of interpreting. Li claimed that Miss Xuan, who was at least twice his age, was his niece. The niece didn't do much work but mostly flirted with Heron's ARVN counterpart, Sergeant Huong. Huong swaggered a bit, James Dean style, and flirted back.

I was nervous, not because of the conditions but because this was my first whack at public health nursing. Li's main usefulness was in telling the patients what I said. They were able to make themselves pretty clear with gestures and facial expressions. Besides the usual

"owies" the children had, there were a lot of snotty noses and deep coughs and running rashes. Joe diagnosed a carpenter with sore knees as having tenosynovitis, an inflammation of the tendons caused mostly by being a carpenter.

"Oh boy, McCulley, come look at this," Cathie called me, peering at the side of a woman's head. The woman was youngish, with rather protruding teeth and a pained expression.

"She say she no hear too good," Li said.

"No wonder," Cathie said, and stood aside. The woman's right ear was completely blocked by a protruding tumor.

"Tell her she needs to come to the hospital with us to have this fixed,"

I told Li.

Li fired off twenty or thirty syllables that rose and fell like Vietnamese music. The woman shook her head and replied with fifty or sixty syllables of her own.

"She say no can do, co. Papasan work in field and she have these babysans." He indicated the two shorts-clad toddlers clinging to her pajama bottoms and the little girl, about seven, carrying a nude baby of about two on her hip.

"Well, tell her to talk it over with papasan, and if she wants us to help her, come to the hospital with the team next week."

My next patient was a sickly little girl whose round brown face, black bangs, and huge dark eyes made her look more like a doll than a real child. She was hot, her mother said, and cried all the time. I took her temperature, which was 103, and listened to her chest. For an FUO, fever of unknown origin, you also always checked lymph nodes routinely, so I raised the little girl's arms. Lumps the size and color of plums swelled in the child's armpits.

I took one look at them and said, "Whoopee shit," and called out to Joe.

"What is it, Kitty?"

"I'm not sure. I never studied tropical medicine or anything, but a couple of weeks ago I was reading this novel? And in it the heroine ends up treating a whole bunch of people in the Appalachians for bubonic plague. Joe, the book said the victims had big purple lymph nodes in their axilla and groin areas, just like this kid has. Come and see what you think." I tugged down the little girl's shorts and checked her groin while I talked. More plums. It was a wonder the poor baby could walk.

"Bubonic plague? No shit? In this day and age? Wait, let me get my camera. Damn, not enough light."

"Mamasan, if this is what I think it is, we'd better check you out too,"

I told the mother. Li didn't need to translate. The mother pulled her paiama top off and raised her left arm, pointing to the purple "owie"

underneath.

Joe examined the nodules and whistled. "I dunno, Kitty. Your junk reading may have come in handy. Anyway, the kid's fever is enough to have her admitted and we may as well take the mother too."

While the patients gathered their belongings and arranged for their departures, Heron drove us to the marines' quarters, on the outskirts of the village. Wonderful cooking smells waited toward us. The mamasan who looked after the marines had prepared a lunch of stewed chicken, rice noodles, and mushrooms in broth. The marines and Heron were already experts with chopsticks, but Cathie, Joe, and I all needed lessons. I began to wonder whether the Army chose olive drab for the uniforms of its Asian-based troops because the color went so well with chicken broth.

Heron sat next to me, which made me even clumsier and more uncomfortable: exactly what he intended, I was sure. "I can see where Xe might be right about you," he said. "You don't go much by the book, do you?"

"Only bestselling novels," I admitted.

"I mean, you're more intuitive. I can see where he'd find you interesting."

He sounded so ridiculously, deliberately mysterious that I barely suppres sed a desire to tell him that the rumors about me and Xe were completely false, that we were just good friends.

But my opinion of him had risen a little bit. After the incident with the marijuana, it would have been hard for it to get much lower. Still, the way the men behaved toward Heron and the villagers, and the obvious affection, even adoration, that the villagers greeted him with, made me realize that maybe the man could be more than a lot of talk.

"I can't get over how much different these people seem from the ones you see in Dogpatch and Da Nang," Cathie said.

"Uh huh," Joe agreed, simultaneously holding up his camera and slurping a noodle. "Look, we've been here half the day and nobody's tried to snitch my camera."

"Most of the folks you meet in town and around the hospital are refugees. They steal to get by. These people are farmers, but take away their land and their livelihood and they'd do the same thing, or worse, to put food in their family's mouths," Heron said. "Our mission is to make sure they don't have to steal to get by. Some of that livestock you saw, some of the clothes, cooking utensils, the men here bought for the villagers out of their own paychecks."