The Healer's War (3 page)

As I knuckled Tran, I thought I felt her stir slightly.

I was reaching for the blood-pressure cuff when the other patients started up again.

"Troi oi! Trol oi! Trol oi!" (Omigod, omigod, omigod!) The old lady from bed fourteen padded toward the desk, holding her head. "Beaucoup dau," she complained to George, who headed her off halfway down the aisle.

"Mamasan, you just have numbah one pill. No more now."

"Beaucoup dau," she insisted, showing her betel-blackened teeth. She was not used to taking no for an answer. The interpreter said she was the scourge of the marketplace in downtown Da Nang. She'd been clobbered with a rifle by an ARVN guard who wanted some trinket from her shop. She was lucky he'd hit her in the head, where she was well armored by a thick skull. If he'd hit her in the abdomen, he might have killed her.

Leaving George to handle her, I pulled away from the old man to take Tran's blood pressure. When I pried my hand loose, old Xe's hand, as if worn out from the exertion of holding on to mine, flopped between the rails and brushed my back.

I dreaded starting the neuro checks again, and my hands fumbled as I lifted Tran's lids to check her unseeing pupils. If she died, nothing would ever be all right for me again. I wished I could trade places with her. My own skin crawled when I pinched hers, my own lids twitched when I lifted hers, and I felt a knot in my chest when I knuckled her.

I apparently felt more than she did. "For Christ's sakes, Tran, that must hurt like hell. Snap out of it. Come on, kiddo, wake up." The breath eked out from between her lips with little sighs. I wanted to smack her awake, anything, just so she'd move. That would be compassionate and helpful, now, wouldn't it, nurse? Shit. I just wasn't cut out for this. I was okay with the gallbladders, cancer cases, and geriatric patients I'd cared for while I trained in Kansas City, but we just hadn't had a lot of skull fractures, traumatic amputations, or people with parts of them shot and melted away. I could take each case individually, but the collective weight was driving me down until I was simply too tired and depressed to try anymore. I was merely going through the motions, reacting automatically, leaving myself and my patients wide open to something like this.

The old man's hand brushed my hip and I swiveled around and looked at him suspiciously. He seemed the same as before, one hand still clutched at his sternum, the other now curled against my waist. Another mortar crumped and the bedlam in the ward broke loose again.

"Dau quadi!"

"Beaucoup dau, co!"

"Troi oi! Troi oi! Troi oi!"

I tucked the old fellow's hand against his side and stroked Tran's arm as if she needed soothing, not I. Through one of the three windows set high in the curve of the corrugated wall of the Quonset hut ward the sky was streaked with lemon, turquoise, and deep purple. Dawn was dawning and everybody on the ward seemed to have something loud to say about it.

"Jesus Christ, George," I said, stilling Xe's questing hand by holding it again, "can't you at least get them to do it in harmony?"

George grunted and rolled his eyes above his 4rchic comic.

Maybe the noise wasn't really loud enough to wake the dead, but then again, perhaps all that restless energy was contagious. Because this time, when I knuckled Tran, her mouth twisted and from it came a thin cry, like the kind that comes from a baby doll when you squeeze it.

I mention that incident for several reasons. I guess the first is to get it out of the way and tell it myself before anyone else does. There are those who may use that particular medication error to hint that I was an unstable nurse, which, of course, I was, and that my judgment was faulty, which it also was. However, I think it's important to note that my initial assessment of how the situation should be handled was rejected, which was also the case later, with Dang Thi That. That's what made me realize how powerless I was to do what I knew was right, and what made me take Ahn's case into my own hands. Maybe in a war situation there's no way to avoid tragedy, but I was trying, at least, to do what I thought was right. But most important of all, Tran's case was the first unknowing link between Xe, the amulet, and me, and what led to my transfer. And that, of course, led to everything else.

Tran's vital signs had stabilized by the time the day shift came on, and she was reacting to painful stimuli again. She was rescheduled for surgery that afternoon. I was scheduled for a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Ixtitia Blaylock, the Chief Nurse of the hospital, that same morning.

I wasn't afraid of Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock by that time. As long as Tran didn't die from my carelessness, there wasn't really very much the Army could do to me that would be as hard to take. And after twenty-four hours of bedside-hovering, I was too drained to take much of anything except sleep seriously, least of all the good colonel.

A couple of weeks after Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock arrived at the 83rd there'd been a mass casualty situation-one of the biggies with chopper after chopper of mutilated people, both Vietnamese and Americans. One corpsman covered all but the most hard-pressed wards while every other available person spent the night in the E.R., cutting bloody clothing off patients, applying pressure bandages, starting I.V.s, giving meds, and going over surgical checklists. By the time I finally returned to neuro, it was almost time for the day shift to come on and I was drinking coffee, catching my breath, and waiting. The new patients were all taken care of, all I.V.s, catheters, and chest tubes were patent, and I felt we'd all done a good night's work. Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock arrived early for an inspection of the ward, her carefully smoothed, former-model-perfect features contracted in the barest hint of a frown; I was sure I couldn't be the cause, as hard as I'd been working that night. She toured the ward slowly and stopped several times to look at patients. In the middle of the ward she lifted her arm to summon me to the bedside of an elderly rice farmer who had been hit in the head by a bomb fragment.

"Lieutenant McCulley, I would like to know why this man's toenails are so filthy," she said sternly.

"Because he's worked in the rice paddies all his life, I guess, " I said. "He's been bathed, like everyone else."

ma am, "That is not enough," she said, her voice soaring above my fifteen new I.V.s. "I want these Vietnamese patients properly cleaned.

It is our original mission to take care of these unfortunate war casualties, as you no doubt know, since you have been in country longer than I."

What do you say to a colonel who insists on a damn-fool thing like that when you come to the end of an awful night? "Yes, ma'am," I said, but neither I, nor other personnel to whom she had amply demonstrated her deficient grasp of priorities, had much respect for her.

Nevertheless, she was the Chief Nurse. And this time she had something legitimate to yell at me about.

Yelling, however, was too coarse for the colonel. Instead, when she had released me from my stance at attention and bade me be seated in the metal folding chair allotted visitors to her office, she smiled a smile of sweet patient understanding. That made me far more nervous than if she'd yelled. I had learned to beware of smiling colonels at Fitzsimons, where I inadvertently got caught in a political battle between two of them.

I sat. The metal folding chairs used throughout the hospital compound in deference to our unit's "semimobile" status always reminded me of funeral parlors. When I was little, every time you went to an ice cream social at church or a school assembly, the folding chairs brought in to seat the multitudes were stamped with the name of the Peaceful Passages Funeral Parlor, from which they had been borrowed. They seemed an amenity particularly suited to Nam, where Uncle Sam and Uncle Ho were running such an enormous wholesale client-procurement racket for the funeral business. Although, in country, disposal of the dead was not expedited by agencies like Peaceful Passages with hushed tones speaking of loved ones. Here the departed were shoved into body bags, if there was enough left to bother with.

I suppose sleeplessness and release from tension caused me to drift into such thoughts instead of the trouble at hand. Because when I had composed myself, I saw that the colonel's smile was wearing pretty thin.

She blinked, the dried glue of one of her false eyelashes giving way and detaching itself a teensy bit at the edge. The colonel had been a runway mannequin in New York before going into nursing, as she was fond of saying at parties, little realizing she gave us much fodder for cruel puns back in the barracks. Her modeling experience had to have been fifteen or twenty years ago, though, sometime before her makeup had petrified into varnish. Still, her years of charm school had imbued her with a poise that wasn't even challenged by dealing with delinquent second lieutenants.

I would have found a firing squad led by General Patton infinitely more reassuring than that Vogueish smile.

"You do realize, do you not, lieutenant, that you are a dangerous nurse?"

"Well, yes, ma'am, but I did ask for a written order-" I began.

"The doctor gave you an order, Lieutenant McCulley. You were supposed to follow it. Instead, you administered ten times the prescribed medication. Didn't they teach you dosages and solutions in nursing school?"

"Yes, ma'am, but-" But that had nothing to do with it. I was not told to figure the proper dosage from the child's weight. I had been given a specific order that was incorrectly transmitted or received, I still wasn't entirely sure which. Had it been written, there would have been no question, and no error. But I was not going to get a chance to make even that meager point.

The colonel overrode my objections. She knew what was needed to mend the situation. Busy work. "Apparently you need a refresher course. You will report to my office during your lunch period until I am satisfied that you know how to properly compute them."

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Meanwhile, I'm afraid I must agree with Dr. Chalmers that despite your training in advanced medical-surgical nursing, we can't continue to risk entrusting you with such seriously ill patients."

"Yes, ma'am." Well, of course that was right. I was definitely feeling too shaky to work on the neuro ward anymore, particularly with Chalmers and Cindy Lou. But it was stupid of Blaylock to ignore Chalmers's share of the responsibility for bullying me out of verifying his order. If he could do it to me, he could do it to others, with results just as disastrous. I was not the only insecure, half-baked nurse who would ever work at the 83rd.

On the other hand, she wasn't in charge of him, she was in charge of me.

And he was the doctor. Anything I said would only make it look as if I was being defensive, not taking criticism cheerfully, as they say on evaluation forms. I had only to look at Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock's face and listen to her voice to know that the arguments clenched behind my teeth would be construed as sniveling and caviling.

Why was it that when I was called on the carpet I felt as if John Wayne and every grain of sand on 1wo jima would descend upon my head if I tried to explain myself? When I tried the colonel's roughshod tactics on some of my alleged subordinates, like the guys in the lab, they told me to stick it in my ear, it didn't mean nothin', and they weren't even going to listen to no butter-bars lieutenant. Maybe I ought to take lessons from them instead of the colonel, I thought. I was no good at totalitarianism. My voice betrayed my age and inexperience. In my taped messages to my folks, my lisp made me sound like a third grader.

Obviously, I wasn't the kind of officer men or anybody else followed to hell and back. If Blaylock had been chewing out John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, they'd not only convince her to exonerate them and court-martial Chalmers, but would come up with some new strategy that would win the war. Those kinds of guys never have to question how much of the blame is theirs. They're never wrong.

But right then it was rapidly dawning on me that I was wrong about rnpre than Tran's Phenergan dosage.

Why, oh why, had I ever gone into nursing and joined the Army?

When I was a kid, I'd dreamed of being either a world-famous mystery novelist or a Hollywood costume designer. I wrote stories and doodled elongated models in glamorous getups during idle time in school. But what I wanted to be when I grew up was eclipsed by wondering if I'd get the chance.

Almost every week we'd have civil defense drills at school. The fire bell would ring and our teachers would herd us into the corridors, assumed to be the safest during bombings, or direct us to huddle under our desks. We listened to the mock alerts on the radio and memorized the conelrad call letters. At home, my mom and dad wondered if the cellar, which made a good tornado shelter, would also be effective against atomic bombs. On TV, Russia threatened us, then we threatened Russia, Khrushchey pounded his shoe on the table, and nobody seemed to be able to get along. War with the Reds was inevitable. I'd be walking home from school, enjoying brilliant autumn leaves or a fresh snow, and all of a sudden hear a thunderous explosion that rattled nearby windows.

I'd check the sky, see the telltale jet stream, and relax.

just a jet breaking the sound barrier again. But I was afraid that one day I'd hear a sound like that and there'd be no more leaves, no more houses, no more cellar, no more school, no more Mom and Dad, and no more me or anything else. No matter what paltry precautions the adults tried to take, from what we kids had seen of the films of Hiroshima and read about the new, improved destruction perfected by atomic tests, nothing was going to do any good. If they dropped the Big One, the only thing to do was bend down, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass good-bye.

Later, I read On the Beach and began thinking about what I would do if I wasn't vaporized. I'd have to be useful, that was for sure.

Know how to do something the other survivors couldn't get along without.

If I was designing costumes or writing stories, I'd be one more mouth to feed. But if I went into nursing, like my mother, and knew how to take care of people, I'd be valuable.