The Healer's War (18 page)

"Hey, that's really nice of you guys," I said.

"Naw, not really, ma'am," Sergeant Hernandez said. "It's like, see, well, last night a rocket landed out there and we went running out with our Band-Aids and Merthiolate. When one landed too near us a couple of weeks ago, the people were there to help us in a minute and a half. We figure what happens to them happens to us and vice versa, which is how this whole fuckin' war-excuse me, ladies-how this whole war should have been fought to begin with."

"If at all," said a thin-faced man with granny glasses.

"No shit, man," another marine said with feeling.

I seemed to have stumbled into a bunch of leatherneck Lancelots, no less-men who actually believed that there were good Vietnamese who were not dead Vietnamese. I can be flip about it now, but I had to look at my noodles to keep from "gettin' a little misty," as Maynard G.

Krebs, the beatnik character from "Dobie Gillis," used to say. I also felt a little disoriented-why did some marines give their paychecks to better the lives of some South Vietnamese while others, and maybe even the same ones, earlier in their tour of duty, dedicated themselves to obliterating villagers who couldn't have been very different from these people?

guess you can mostly only do this because it's so close to Da Nang and protected and everything," I said. "I mean, out in the bush, people who need medical attention have to be medevaced, right?"

Heron abandoned his cool altogether. He waved his hands negatively and almost choked on his noodles, trying to gulp them down in his haste to set me straight. "No way. See, what you don't understand, L.T., is what a lot of people don't understand. This is my third tour. Last year, Da Nang was hotter than any little old village. Of course, some places we just don't have the supplies or men to do much-"

"That's where dudes like Sergeant Heroil here come in," Hernandez said.

"You know what this character's idea of a combat mission is, ma'am? He's the medic, right? He walks point into some hostile damn ville and starts patchin' people up before anybody can pop a shot off. Guy's got to have a charmed life."

"Hey. Sarge, I been wonderin' about that. Is it true you even sleep in the villages sometimes?"

"Mostly the Montagnard ones," he said, as if that was different.

"Holy shit."

"But you're not doing that anymore?" I asked. "You're involved with this now?"

"I do a lot of things," he said. "Helping the Marines matchmake these guys and this villaGe is what I do lately."

"You beaucoup dinky dao, Doc," one of the men said.

"Yeah, I bet there's bets going' down on the black market who's going'

to nail your ass first, Doc, the brass or Charlie," the guy with the granny glasses said approvingly.

"We've got a little something for Joe, haven't we?" Heron said, changing the subject. The mamasan was clearing the dishes, and as soon as she finished, Hernandez returned with a moldy bottle, which he handed to Joe.

"Homegrown penicillin?" Joe asked.

"It's one-hundred-day wine. They make it from sticky rice buried between banana leaves for a hundred days. Try it. I hear tell this is a very good year."

Joe did himself proud. His lips squirmed a little when he finished the wine, but he managed to pull them up into a smile and a thank you worthy of a ham actor taking a curtain call.

As we left the village, he photographed everything in sight. I shot a few pictures, too, of a young man in a straw hat who had infected sores on his legs but a beautiful face, a young girl holding her little brother, a water buffalo and its tender, a mamasan with her loads balanced at the ends of a pole.

But the good feeling I retained from that experience was eclipsed that night when I was pulled to help Carole in ICU. She had only a few patients, but one of them was an old woman, an ARVN general's wife, who had been sitting on her front porch when some sort of incendiary bomb was lobbed onto it, burning her over 100 percent of her body, mostly third-degree. Carole was devoting all of her time to that patient, while her corpsman covered the rest of the ward.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"The POW is the other critical one. He's a burn case, too, not as bad, but he's got a collapsed right lung and a fresh trach."

He also had a guard, who had a green heret and a gun and who shifted as nervously as if he were surrounded by armed VC instead of standing over a relatively helpless one. He glowered at me as I approached. He was no more like Charlie Heron than Heron was like Barry Sadler.

He watched my every move as I extracted the prisoner's trach tube to clean it in a basin of hydrogen peroxide. Halfway through the cleaning process, the prisoner began gurgling, bubbles of accumulated phlegm collecting at the hole in his throat. I took off the gloves I'd already contaminated, put on a fresh glove, and reached for the suction tubing.

The guard held his arm over the patient.

"Let him strangle," he said.

"What?"

"Let him strangle for a while. We're trying to get information out of him. We can't do it if you coddle him."

I glared at his arm and brushed past it. "I'm not coddling him, soldier. I'm suctioning his trach tube so he doesn't die. If you wanted to torture or kill him, you should have thrown him out of a helicopter when you had the chance. Once you bring him here, he's not just a prisoner. He's my patient and he is by God going to get the same care as any other patient in his condition, meaning the best I can give him."

The slurp of the suction machine drowned out the guard's protests for a moment. When I pulled the tip of the tubing out of the POW's throat, I glared at the guard. The muscles in his jaws bunched and relaxed, bunched and relaxed, as if he were chewing on a particularly tough nail.

Finally he said, "Your kinda attitude is going to cost Americans their lives. This guy has information-"

"Bullshit," I said. "He can't tell you a damn thing if he's dead. You let us get him stable enough to talk, and then if you want to ask him questions, you do so under our supervision until the man is well enough for you to murder him. You bic?"

The only reason he didn't call me a stupid cunt was because I outranked him and could have had his stripe, and women were rare enough in Nam that fragging them was severely frowned upon even by gung-ho comrades.

So the guard merely growled, but he got out of my way and didn't interfere again. The guard who relieved him was less zealous and sipped his coffee in peace.

The patient might not have been too with it, but he did seem to relax a little when the first guard left. Carole finished spreading a fresh coat of sulfonamide cream on her patient's burns. I thought I should warn her about the surly guard.

"Yeah," she said. "But you can understand how he feels. He may have seen buddies get blown away by that guy."

"I guess."

"God, I'm sick of burns," she said, tossing her dirty gloves in the trash bag. "We had another guy last week worse off than this woman. He was a villager doing some painting for a civilian contractor, and this CIDG guard decided he wanted some of the paint. Apparently the guy told the guard that he'd have to ask the boss and the guard tossed a lit cigarette into the paint. Of course, the worker was already covered with paint and stuff and went up like a torch. His friends rolled him in the dirt and finally put him out, but he was third-degree over 90

percent of his body. He only lasted a few hours."

The night finally ended, and none too soon to suit me. A patient who needs constant suctioning requires you to be on your feet a lot, and mine hurt. I checked my boot again, but there was no rock, just a red place on my toe where I thought one might have rubbed. In spite of having been up for twenty-four hours, I had trouble sleeping the next day. The heat was a problem as usual, and I couldn't seem to get my foot into a comfortable position. Besides which, my mind was squirreleaging with a turmoil of impressions and conflicting emotions from the events of the day and night. Also, I came fully awake every time the phone by the staircase rang. The few dreams I had were confusing, more troubled than restful.

I gave up finally and had time for a shower before work. My sore toe did not want to fit inside my boot, but I thought, all I have to do is make it through the night. I'll probably be able to sit at the nurses'

station and put it up most of the time. It should be better in the morning.

It wasn't, of course. I got so sick that night that my memories of ieven the ordinary events are fairly surreal. Then Xe decided to intervene on my behalf and things got even weirder.

Though I secretly believed that wishing, willing, and praying would sometimes help some patients get well, I had been trained in a scientific tradition. Any energy I put forth could be nothing more than a random supplement to real help, such as antibiotics, surgery, and intravenous fluids. My feeling was just that any little extra effort I could throw in at a critical time couldn't hurt, so why not? Xe's perspective was the exact opposite.

I think that Xe must have already been considering using meboth from what Heron said and from what happened later. Some of Heron's antagonism toward me was because he had been passed over by the old man.

We've talked about this, and he says he knows now that it wasn't a question of unworthiness. It was just that the old man could see clearly and graphically how much Heron's energy was depleted by the war.

By the time I met him, the medic was on his third tour. He needed every scrap of energy to keep himself whole, and didn't have enough of himself left over for Xe's work. By the time I got sick, Xe was beginning to realize the full cost of his own wounds. He already had his eye on me, I think, because, of all the healthy people he was in contact with, I was the one who was already on his path, even though I'd never thought of it that way. Facts, figures, and procedures have always been more difficult for me than for most of the people I work with, so I'd always tried to compensate with some of the less tangible skills I'd tried with Tran. Unaugmented, of course, they didn't always help. But they were developed enough for Xe to pick up, even through the physically induced fog of a coma. He needed me well and strong and I think, if he had been a little stronger himself and time had been less limited, would have started trying to teach me. When I got sick . . .

But I'm ahead of myself.

The shift started at 1900 hours. The night started out to be even more hectic than the one on ICU. I was glad, in a way, because I was so sleepy that I wouldn't have kept awake otherwise. Sarah was on days alone and had received four fresh GI casualties at six, and had no time to settle them in before the shift change. I had their orders to carry out, two I.V.s to start, and a slew of paperwork. Besides that, Dang Thi That had had her skin graft surgery earlier in the day. The graft had to be "rolled," or smoothed down with a sterile Q-tip, every fifteen minutes to help it adhere. So I was constantly running back and forth between the wards and my sore foot got sorer every time.

I disregarded it. What was a sore toe compared to what the patients, especially That, were enduring? When I ran the Q-tip around That's wound she'd flinch, clench her eyes shut and her betel-blackened teeth together, and hiss. Her left hand, with the I.V. taped to its back, would clutch toward the wound, and stop just short of my hand. It must have felt to her as if I were sticking hot icepicks straight into her and twisting. But as soon as I stopped, her hand dropped back to her waist and she lifted her sweat-soaked face a little and blinked at me.

Her mouth even tried to curve a little and she would duck her head in a sort of apologetic gesture and collapse against the pillow again. I noticed once that the case was wet where she laid her face, so I lifted her head and turned the pillow over for her, and from the look she gave me, you would have thought I'd healed her single-handedly and brought her husband back to life to boot.

Joe called around 2100 and said that, starting at midnight, That's graft could be rolled every half hour, which helped me a little.

Still, when I got up from charting my meds at one, I couldn't bear weight on my left foot and I hopped from bed to bed, and stood with my knee on a chair while I did That's treatment.

A new corpsman, Ron Ryan, was on the other side and there was no sound except the rush of the desktop fan, which didn't cool things off much but blew my charts apart unless I weighted the papers down with I.V.

bottles and coffee mugs.

I felt funny hopping along, because with each little hop my head seemed to float right up to the ceiling and take a long time coming down. I felt as if I were looking out from a long way inside my brain, as if most of me were somewhere deep inside my body, smaller, shrunken- inside myself, with the rest of me, this big ungainly shell, hopping around and sweating. Sometimes I- didn't quite keep track of where I was and I'd think I was at bed three and I was already at five. I was well lubricated by continual runnels of sweat, but they almost felt cool by now. And I was oddly, dopily happy and unconcerned. Ryan appeared at one end of the ward with a mop and I stood staring at him for a moment and, hey presto, he disappeared without moving, just as I caught myself on someone's bed rail, falling backward.

Old Xe was still awake when I hopped to his bedside. He startled me by grabbing my wrist above the flashlight. He hissed as he touched me and his fingers felt so cool I thought for a moment his hiss was a sizzle, like cold bacon on a hot pan. "Numbah ten, co," he said, giving me a penetrating look from eyes that gleamed like pools of oil in the beam of my flashlight. I realized he realized my foot was killing me.

"Damn straight, papasan," I said from inside a tunnel somewhere.

"Beaucoup dau," I agreed, but then felt a little ashamed to be telling him my troubles, telling this legless old man about my silly sore toe.

Ryan was on his break when the commotion broke out on the GI side. I limped over in time to see one of the new men standing in the middle of the aisle, swinging his pillow in a circle and shouting. Two of his buddies were wide awake, their eyes bright in my flashlight beam like the eyes of wild animals, watching him in the dark. I started toward him, and one of the others said, "Don't, ma'am. He's asleep, but he could still hurt you." But I did my best to sound motherly-"It's okay, sweetheart. You're just having a bad dream"-and talked him back to bed.