The Healer's War (9 page)

Stein for a gut wound. Some vertebral damage, so Joe's scrubbed in with him. He said he's glad we found the little darling, though. Guess we can call for a tray."

The sergeant, who looked vaguely like an Irish prizefighter, was giving Marge an appreciative once-over. "This major looks like a nice lady to me, Lieutenant. Have you asked her yet about the weekend?"

"Not yet-"

"What about the weekend?" Marge asked.

"Well, ma'am, we're having a sort of a special do over there, and my executive officer has asked me to extend an invitation to you for Saturday night but was hoping we could have the loan of this young lady over at the company so's she could do a little flight training in a crane-kind of a goodwill mission. He's already checked about the guest room with the commanding officer. It's our anniversary weekend. Hell, we even got a Filipino band."

"What time's the party?" Marge asked.

"We'll send birds to pick the ladies up at 1900 hours. Skip evening mess and we'll barbecue you some numbah one steaks."

"You want to go, lieutenant?" she asked me.

"Sure," I said. "I just thought, since I hadn't been here very long, I might not be up for a weekend yet-"

"Shoot, girl, you make it sound like you just got in country. I hadn't planned on getting you, so I didn't count on you for the weekend. Go ahead and have it off, but if we have a big push the minute you get back we'll know who to blame."

Things were definitely looking up. Nobody looked over my shoulder or breathed down my neck and somehow I managed very well without the supervision. Even the noontime sessions with Blaylock weren't all that painful, though she looked mildly insulted when I did know the answers to the math questions she drilled me on. Voorhees just happened to mistakenly order an extra lunch tray every day I missed my turn at the mess hall.

Friday evening during my shift, Tommy Dean came to the ward and spent the last hour drinking coffee while I finished report. I collected my swim tote, into which I'd packed a couple of dresses and 'letr'es,

'nclud'ng the Shalimar perfume I got for under ten dollars at tol the PX. The chopper was waiting for us on pad by the back doors of the emergency room. The dust flew higher than our heads as we ducked under the thundering blades. Tommy Dean flew in the copilot position and I took the backseat, accepting earphones from the crew chief with mimed thanks.

The routine was familiar to me. Some outfit or the other was always inviting a group of nurses to their party and sending a chopper as cab service. Most of the time the chopper came because someone owed someone else a favor. Scrounging and barter were as big a part of the economic system for the military in Nam as the black market was for the Vietnamese. So I knew how to put on my earphones and listen through the bone-shaking throb of the chopper and the crackle of static to the wisecracks and CB-type lingo exchanged on the radio. The crew chief was often also the crew, especially on the smaller birds, and he was the one who took care of anything that happened in the back end of the chopper, manned the door gun, and sometimes took care of patients in medevac situations.

I've never been afraid of heights and I enjoyed looking out at the ground as we flew past China Beach and over Highway I to several miles of cleared ground devoted to hangars, barracks, other ugly buildings, barbed wire, sandbags, and row after row after row of every imaginable kind of helicopter.

I didn't really know what to expect of that weekend. At Fitzsimons, I had gotten into deep trouble with an unreasonable colonel for having a man in my apartment after midnight. We weren't doing anything, but my roommate, a professional virgin who was irked to come home and find Willie there, and the colonel refused to believe me. I was called a slut in front of several other senior officers, and the colonel promised me she would personally drum me out of the corps if I ever again disgraced the sacred name of the Army nurses with such depraved behavior. Shortly after that, I got orders for Nam. I hoped her spies were watching, writing back, "Oh sure, she says she's just going to learn about flying cranes, making 'friends' with the men, while staying chastely in the guest quarters." I'll admit it seemed a little unlikely, but that's exactly what happened. Well, mostly, anyway.

Friday night, after jake had met us and escorted me to my room so I could change into a dress for the sake of troop-and my-morale, we barbecued steaks on a quadrangle the men had constructed. The C.O.

liked funky country and western songs, such as "Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women," and I knew quite a few myself, so we took turns playing C-F-G on his beat-up guitar while the troops sang along with varying degrees of tunefulness and ethanol-enhanced enthusiasm. It reminded me of the Texas bars I had loved while I was in basic at Fort Sam, and we sang and played until 0100 hours, when jake told me I was going to have to get up early if I wanted to fly a mission in a crane.

I trundled off to the guest room singing my favorite new horrible song, a parody of the "Green Berets" song by Barry Sadler. It ended with "

'cause that is where herets belong, down in the jungle, writing songs."

I intended to send a copy of it to Duncan if I could remember all the words, and glamorize the weekend for him the way Jake and the others were glamorizing their unit for me.

The next morning Tommy Dean sat me down in the eye of the great airborne grasshopper, a glass bubble that gave me an unimpeded view of the countryside and the mission. We flew over fishnet-strung seas, lush green mountains fading to purple in the distance, golden rice paddies, and aquamarine waters. Gauzy mists puffed up beneath us, vel 'ling the valleys. It was still extraordinarily beautiful. But even from the air, the beauty was marred by the bomb craters pitting its surface, like Never-Never Land with smallpox scars. I was used to thinking of Vietnam as ugly, hot, smelly, dirty. It had never dawned on me that the Rice Bowl of the East, as they called it in social studies, would have to be lush, that a country that was once a resort area for the French would of course be lovely. What a crying shame to hold a war here.

The crane hovered over a chopper stranded on a small island. A cable was dropped, and a man below attached the great heavy hook to the stranded Huey. A short time later, the crane lifted again, bearing the swinging Huey under its belly as if the smaller aircraft were a fly intended for the larger one's dinner. There were a couple of nervous moments when they had to pause and wait for the momentum of the Huey's swing to decrease, so that it wouldn't send the crane off balance.

Watching the Huey appear at the bottom of the bubble first from one 'de, then from the other, I thought of the string-and-ring test done to si tell if a baby was going to be a boy or a girl: back and forth for a boy, round and round for a girl.

By the end of the day I had lots of pictures and an exciting adventure to write home about. My grin almost split my face when jake met me at.

the airstrip.

"God, that was great!" I told him, latching chummily onto his arm. "I think I could write a song about that myself."

He grinned like a father being told his newborn was adorable. "Well, good. Hope it put you in a partying mood. Meet you in about forty-five minutes and we'll all walk down to the club together, okay?"

I agreed happily and changed into my bright pink embroidered Mexican sundress and sandals. Then, feeling a little like a mascot, I walked down the road with thirty or forty of the men from the flying crane unit.

I sailed in between Tommy Dean and the C.O., captured a steak, and watched a thoroughly oriental woman who didn't look as if she spoke a word of English, and who wore a strapless sequined evening gown and high-heeled shoes on bare feet, belt a Patsy Cline song just like Patsy, twang, warble, and all. Then the dancing started and I, who had never been asked to dance at any Stateside party I had ever attended without a date, in high school or out, was in hog heaven. Marge was there, along with several other girls from the 83rd. I sat down to talk to her when the band took a break, but we couldn't hear ourselves for the noise.

As the band started again, someone tapped my elbow and I looked back and up to see my own fun-house reflection in Tony Devlin's mirrored sunglasses.

He turned his hand palm up, inviting me to grab it, and nodded toward the dance floor. I suppose in a movie the band would have been playing a Viennese waltz right then, but actually they were playing something more compelling: "Proud Mary." I never could sit still to that. Tony danced well, his knees, elbows, and wrists more than his feet keeping time, a style which is a boon on a small floor. He frowned slightly to himself as he swayed and bounced and snapped his fingers, like a Russian about ready to go into one of those numbers where they get down on the floor and kick. The frown was sexy. I'd seen it on hippie men friends who seemed to use it to say, "Sure I may be doing something frivolous like dancing, but I'm supporting civil rights" or saving the world from the bomb." In Tony's case it said, "You better believe I'm dancing while I've got the chance." I loved watching him dance, but I enjoyed playful stuff, too-pretending to be Mouseketeers with Tommy Dean, or line dances and circle dances with everybody. When I danced with Tony, I double-timed like an Indian ready for the warpath. Maybe that should have told me something.

But I was feeling good. New friends, a new adventure, and maybe a new romance. I lasted much longer than the girls from the 83rd, and when Marge waved good night, neither of us had stopped dancing long enough to talk much. It must have been quite a while later-I was dancing with one of the crane pilots, I don't remember who-when I noticed that Tony had slipped away from the bar, and that Tommy Dean and jake were gone, too.

I saw the top of jake's head come through the door and his finger make a circle in the air. The girl singer tapped the lead guitarist on the arm and jerked her head in jake's direction, and they cut the song a chorus short and began packing up the instruments.

He stopped and said a few words to one or two guys and the club began emptying.

He started toward me and I met him halfway. "What's up?" I asked.

"I don't think anybody else is going to be able to leave tonight. Would you mind if the girls in the band shared your room? I don't want any of the guys who've had too much to drink giving them a hard time."

"Sure," I said, bewildered. "But why?"

"There's a sniper at the gate. I got Sarge to get some cots for the entertainers, but I wanted to let you know what was going on before we set them up."

"I'll help," I said. We walked back up to the quad in a tight little group, me, jake, and the crane ockeys with the Fillpina girls from the band and the Patsy Cline-clone singer mincing behind us in their toohigh heels and too-tight outfits.

The sergeant bad a stack of cots and linens set out. I started unfolding cots and sheets. I could have let the girls do it themselves, but after working in hospitals as candy striper, student nurse, and graduate for the best part of five years, I automatically tended to make any unmade bed that crossed my path. Besides, it made me feel useful in a potentially dangerous situation over which I had no control. I was used to rockets and mortars, but a sniper? Somehow that seemed a lot more personal.

I was cussing a stubborn hinge on the last cot when Tony poked his head in the door, "Jake said to tell you relax. Looks like the girls may get to go home after all. We called in an air strike from Phu Bal."

"Oh," I said, looking at my row of neatly made up cots.

"Forget that. Come on with me. I've got something to show you. I think you're going to find this real interesting."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Just to the water tower. Come on. Hurry."

He practically pulled me past the quad, where a few of the crane company were entertaining the Filipinas and vice versa, through the dark part of the compound to a squatty water tower. We climbed a rickety wooden ladder and lay face down on the top of the tower. He lay beside me with one arm flung across my back. His fatigue shirt was damp with clean-smelling sweat mingled with the odor of rice starch, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. He hugged me closer so that his forearm braced us against the top of the tower. With his free arm he pointed ahead of us.

"Watch," he told me.

"Is that where the gate is?"

"Uh huh. But watch the sky."

All I could see was buildings, trees, and stars. The occasional pop of gunfire sounded like distant fireworks, an effect heightened by the red streaks of tracers streaming into the air and bursting.

"Hear that?" he asked, and pretty soon I did: a chopper, from the rhythmic beat of the blades, but a very quiet one, as if the rotor had been muffled with oil and velvet.

"Where is it?" I whispered, the excitement of the darkness, the danger, and being half-squeezed to death by Tony making it hard to keep my voice low and serious. The whole scene reminded me of when I was about eight years old and my cousins and I played combat in Army surplus helmets and belts underneath my Aunt Sadie's bridge. Except my cousins didn't smell or feel like Tony.

Tony swung his hand in an are. Following it, I saw the outline of the slim nose of the little chopper, hovering overhead like an airborne cat watching a mousehole.

"What kind is that?" I whispered.

"Cobra," Tony said, his breath tickling my ear.

Suddenly the Cobra pounced, spitting fire, covering the area in front of the gate with burst after burst. "Jesus Christ," I said, "all that for one little guy with a gun?" It seemed like using a tank for a flyswatter.

But the Filipinas were able to go home after all, which was great, since by the time we left the water tower I had other company in the guest room.

e was scheduled for surgery my first day back. The antibiotics had helped prevent the spread of infection in his stumps, but they still had to be debrided; that is, the dead tissue had to be removed so that the new could form a clean scar.