The Healer's War (6 page)

The club was half-empty at five, which was a little early for dinner. I really wanted to be alone to mope, but that was a sure way to attract even more attention than usual. I looked around for someone I knew.

Just anybody harmless and familiar.

Even as messy as I looked then, I no sooner stepped inside than the clatter of stainless and restaurant pottery died to an occasional clink and the muted conversations stopped altogether. I felt like the Fastest Gun in the West entering a saloon just before High Noon, but I pretended not to notice. Since coming to Nam, I had gotten used to stopping traffic. Literally. I had always considered myself attractive in a sort of wholesome, moon-faced way. I had nice hazel eyes and brown hair carefully kept reddish, and a figure that ten pounds less made "stacked"

and ten pounds more made "fat." But none of it mattered, because the attention was nothing personal. It was not my sheer breathtaking gorgeousness or incredible charisma that was causing apnea among the male diners. The standard female reproductory equipment and round eyes were all that was required to be the Liz Taylor of China Beach.

I just stood there kind of dazed from the sun and sleepy and tried to decide what to do. The very idea of all those men just made me tired right now.

One reason I hadn't minded coming to Nam so much at first was that I had already talked to a lot of bewildered boys my age who didn't want to go but saw no other choice. It seemed unfair that they had to serve, just because they were men of the right age. Like discrimination. I thought, if this war was for the benefit of the U.S., why were men the only ones who had to go? The North Vietnamese, or at least the VC, had women troops, and so did the Israelis. Of course, two days after I was in country it was pretty clear that no American, male or female, should have had to be there. If I had to enlist again, nothing short of the invasion of Kansas City would have gotten me into uniform. Furthermore, I knew that many of the men who had been gung ho before they got to Nam agreed with me. Even the South Vietnamese stayed out of the military if they could, and it was their damned war.

Nevertheless, there I was, and my idealistic notions of brotherand-sisterhood failed to prevent me from being an exotic novelty item in the war zone, no matter how much I wanted, or was able, to contribute. Most of the guys most of the time were okay, even downright gallant. But there were those like Mitch who decided that we nurses were just working twelve-hour shifts, continually suffering from Iick of sleep and incipient heatstroke, as a sort of hobby. What we were really in Nam for, of course, was to get laid. By them.

Nurses, Red Cross workers, entertainers-we were all nymphos if not actually whores, according to the predominant mode of wistful thinking.

Even fairly nice men swore to us nurses that all doughnut dollies were making big money as prostitutes, and apparently the same men told the same story about us when they were talking to the Red Cross workers. I remember having a conversation with one of the Red Cross girls at Marble Mountain. "Funny, you don't seem as-ah-you know she said at one point, when we had been talking about what we were doing in Nam. "I know," I said. "You don't look like a hooker to me either."

Thewhole thing made me want to smack somebody, but unfortunately, most of the people I could smack here would outrank me.

But basically, as long as the guys kept their cruder notions to themselves, I could handle it, and even enjoy the attention. What really got to me was the ones who made Mitch look like Mr. Suave. On Carole's birthday, one of her boyfriends had brought four of us girls to the club to celebrate. Drunken marine officers had converged upon us to woo us with obscenities and innuendos delivered with typical Corps couth, which vies with that of convicted multiple rapist-murderers for gentility. "No, thank you,"

"I'm not interested...... Please go away or I'll tell my boyfriend, King Kong...... I'm engaged," and "I'm married" did not deter them.

Neither, at first, did "Get your goddamn hands off me," and "Fuck off and die," until voiced with sufficient volume to attract the interest of other officers, who wandered over to reinforce Carole's boyfriend. Our rescuers then stayed around for drinks and any possible demonstrations of eternal gratitude. Most of them were somewhat better behaved than the marines. One of them suggested that we had had no call to get so mad, since if we didn't want marines lusting after us, we wouldn't be there.

That was so unfair. I for one had been expecting a different Marine Corps altogether-the one with the lofty Latin motto, the one my dad had Joined in WW II. He had had such a good time with those other marines, and often told long, funny stories about the adventures of his group of lads on Ishi Shima. They never, in Dad's stories, killed anybody, they just camped out in the rain a lot and scrounged and gave candy to children and nylons to women and converted POWs through sheer kindness and wrote home to Mother. And they certainly didn't say "fuck" every other word. Of course, by now I did. Dad would be very shocked at all of us, I supposed.

Maybe from this you can gather that our lives were a bit on the schizophrenic side. While we were on duty, we were responsible for the lives and deaths of our patients, for calming their fears and administering treatments that could cure or kill them. Off duty, we were treated as a sort of cross between a high-ranking general who deserved to be scrounged for, taken around, and generally given special treatment, and a whore. It was a little like that old saying of water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. All those men and you could still be so lonely.

On a date, after you talked about where you were both from, your escort would brag about his aircraft or his unit or, God forbid, his body count. If he was feeling disgruntled, you were supposed to keep up his morale. But you were expected to do the same attentive little cupcake act the football players had expected in high school. Nobody wanted to hear about your day at work. Some of the girls dated doctors, who at least had some idea of what the rest of their life was like. I was awfully glad I didn't. All I'd have needed just then was to have to spend my offduty time, too, explaining what I'd done to Tran. Dating doctors, to me, was a good way to screw up both your social life and your work life. Besides, doctors were married.

A nurse captain I'd met at Fitzsimons who had been to Nam twice and Okinawa once told me her prescription for handling one's love life on overseas duty.

"Keep it light, honey. Keep it light. What happens is you have these real killer romances and then the love of your life leaves country, promising to write, and all that shit, then he goes back to his everlovin' wife or his real girlfriend, and forgets all about you. It's just not real, see, whatever it feels like. The partying is great, but you can't take it seriously. What you do is you find a nice guy who has about three months left in country, just long enough to have a little fun. You don't tend to get so involved when you know how soon the end is coming. You date him and meet his friends, and when he goes, you take up with the nicest of the friends who have only about three months left in country, and so on. It's the only way to keep from being burned."

I agreed and tried to maintain a properly cynical attitude, but naturally, I hoped she was wrong in my case, and that I would find true and requited love just for being so goddamn noble. Oh well, at least I was drawing combat pay.

A rugged-looking fellow sporting a blond crew cut and a lightweight flight suit marched up to me and smiled, showing enough teeth to look friendly and not enough to look as if he were about to bite. "Excuse me, ma'am, but if you're not with anyone, my buddies and I would appreciate it if you'd be our dinner guest."

"Well, I was sort of . . ." I glanced around the room again, but it was full of strangers. "Okay."

"I'm Jake."

"I'm Kitty. Where you from, Jake?" I asked, the usual opening conversational gambit in Nam. Everybody wanted to talk about where they were from. Damn few wanted to talk about where they were at.

"Florida originally, but my family lives in Tennessee now. Where you from?"

"Kansas City," I replied and decided as he led me to his table that he was probably okay. Mentioning his family in the first sentence and not hiding his wedding ring were good signs. Whatever else he was, he was not that bane of the single military nurse, the geographical bachelor.

The table was on the veranda, and at it were two more men in flight suits, one sitting and one standing, his feet spread as if he were about to straddle his chair, his hands on the back of it, his face shrouded in mirrored aviator glasses. Those lenses hide a lot, but I felt them locked on me as surely as if they were the sights of a sniperscope. He wore his hair longer than the other two and it was dark, with a rather rakish forelock brushing the tops of the glasses. He was tanned and rangy and his grin was lopsided and only slightly tobacco-stained.

"Pay no attention to this fellow, ma'am," jake said. "He's just one of your run-of-the-mill dust-off pilots. We let him eat with us, hoppin'

he might learn how to conduct himself in proper company. Tony, you don't propose to eat standin' up, I suppose?"

"Nah. Not that I don't appreciate educational opportunities, sir, but I ate already, as I would have explained if you hadn't gone trotting off after the prettiest girl in the room like a-well, anyhow, I got to get back to Red Beach. I'm on alert. But I wouldn't pass up an introduction."

"I didn't think you would, somehow," jake snorted. "Kitty, this is Warrant Officer Antonio Gutierrez Devlin."

Warrant Officer Devlin gave me the full impact of that slightly snaggle-toothed grin and swept my paw to his lips. "Very pleased to meet you. What was the name? Kitty what?"

"McCulley," I said.

"From over at Single Parent?"

"What?"

"Single Parent, the 83rd. You're Army, aren't you? Your code name over there is Single Parent."

"No shit?"

"I kid you not. Also referred to more casually as Unwed Mother. Where do you work?"

"Uh-ward four, ortho, as of tomorrow."

" Hmm-"

"Didn't you say you were just leaving, Tony? Urgent mission?"

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry, Kitty. I have to go rescue stranded casualties, unlike these heavy-machinery haulers. Since we all work so closely together, I'm sure I'll be seeing you real soon." He tilted his sunglasses down to the tip of his nose and gave me a meaningful look out of hazel-green eyes with curly dark lashes that should have been outlawed on a man, then did a smart about-face, swiveled around again, and said to Jake, "Make sure she comes to the party, Cap'n, sir," then sauntered through the door. Have I mentioned that not all of the masculine attention we girls got was unwelcome?

I was catching my breath when jake gently lowered me into a chair and continued introductions.

"This fine gentleman here is Tommy Dean Kincaid. Say hello to the pretty lady, Tommy Dean."

"Hello, pretty lady. Ain't it awful what you meet on your way to Grandma's house in the middle of this war?"

These two were definitely going to be all right. They sounded like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on The Road to Da Nang, with me as Dorothy Lamour.

Of course, what I was really wondering about was the Errol Flynn type who had just left, but the comic relief was comforting. I was still feeling a little too fragile to withstand the kind of internal fireworks Tony generated.

But these two good old boys really were good. Like Jake, Tommy Dean mentioned his wife within the first fifteen minutes, and asked my advice about what kind of a present to send her for her birthday. We told each other where we were from, and later jake and Tommy Dean, between mouthfuls of steak and baked potato, talked about aircraft while I ate in what I hoped passed for awestricken silence. I'm a fast eater, though, being used to institutional half-hour lunch breaks during which fifteen minutes was spent in a cafeteria line, and I finished before either of the men.

"What did Tony mean about you guys hauling heavy equipment?

You are pilots, I gather?"

"Yes, ma'am, " Tommy Dean said.

"Fixed-wing?"

"Goodness no."

"What do you fly, then? Cobras? Hueys? I rode in a Chinook when I first got here. The guys up at Phu Bai had us up for a party. Boy, are those things noisy."

"Honey, you ain't seen nothin' yet," jake said proudly.

"You seen anything flyin' around in the air looks a little like a big grasshopper?" Tommy Dean asked.

"Well . . . I can't say as-"

"You'd know if you'd seen it. It's a flying crane. Looks a little like this." He pulled a pen from one of his zippered pockets and drew a picture that did indeed appear to be the product of a marriage between a helicopter and a grasshopper.

I examined the picture, wondering if this might be another one of those strange in-country jokes to impress newcomers and girls. Finally I handed it back and asked, "Why in the world would anybody build a chopper that looks like that?"

"It's a flying crane, Kitty," Jake said, and then, of course, I understood. I had been associating the word "crane" with the bird, or with the long, spindly legs of the Disney version of the Ichabod Crane who saw the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow. Jake eagerly pointed out the features of his aircraft to me. "This space under here is for a cable to haul cargo. Watch the air sometime. You may see one carrying a tank or another chopper." His face lapsed into an expression of almost paternal fondness as he spoke.

"Aw, seein' it from the ground is nothin' compared to watchin' something swinging from its belly."

"I can imagine," I said honestly, because I was by now as intrigued as it is possible for me to be by a piece of machinery.

"If you'll come over for that party Tony was talking about, maybe we can take you for a ride," jake said.

"I'm changing wards right now," I told them and found my voice was a little unsteady at the reminder. "I don't know my schedule."