Why was it that when I was called on the carpet I felt as if John Wayne and every grain of sand on Iwo 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 e-ven 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 more 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, Khrushchev 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.
Vietnam had been a pimple of conflict when I entered training, but by the time I was a senior, it was obviously another of those undeclared wars like Korea. The military actively recruited student nurses. I was short on money to finish my senior year, and tired of being broke. I was restless, too, and wanted out of Kansas City. I didn’t approve of war, God no. But Vietnam seemed to be a comparatively piddly conventional war with men and guns and tanks and stuff, like most of World War II, instead of nuclear warheads. I was so grateful that the world was restraining itself that I felt a rush of patriotism unmatched since the last time I’d watched the old movie about George M. Cohan. Surely, if I joined up and took care of casualties, I wouldn’t be helping the war, I’d be repairing the damage as it occurred and doing my bit to keep the war contained until we could win it, without recourse to monster bombs. I never thought I’d actually end up in Vietnam. I’d have to volunteer for that, I was told. But on my first assignment, I ran afoul of one of those colonels I mentioned before, and discovered that I had been volunteered whether I liked it or not.
My mom had a fit, but after six months at Fitzsimons taking care of casualties and hearing my patients’ war stories, I was curious to find out what really was going on in Vietnam. And it wasn’t as if I’d actually be risking my life, really, not the way the men were. Female nurses were stationed only in the more secured areas, well protected by several thousand of our finest fighting men. I’d be able to test my ability under emergency conditions, be in the thick of things.
My skill had gotten tested, okay, and I’d flunked. Instead of getting sharper, I seemed to be losing what efficiency I’d had when I graduated second in my nursing school class. I had not, even at first, conned myself into thinking I was going to be another Nightingale, but neither had I anticipated becoming the Beetle Bailey of the Army Nurse Corps.
Apparently the distress from that notion showed in my face sufficiently to satisfy Blaylock, for she was now ready to deliver her coup de grace.
“After giving it some thought,” she said, “I’ve decided to transfer you to another ward.” She said “transfer,” but her face said “banish.” “Major Canon needs help on ward four. You’ll start tomorrow, on days.”
Ward four? Glory hallelujah, I must have overprayed. God not only helped Tran but delivered me from mine enemies as well. I felt like falling to my knees and begging Blaylock to please, please, Brer Colonel, please don’t throw me in that brier-patch, just so she would be sure not to change her mind and spare me. Ward four was orthopedics. All the patients there were conscious. You could actually talk to them. You could actually watch some of them get better. You didn’t run the risk of nearly killing them every time you gave them a cotton-pickin’ pill.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying to hide my smile and refrain from clicking my heels together until I was safely away from her office.
“Dismissed,” she said.
I felt so giddy with relief that I was ashamed of myself, so I chastised myself by sneaking back onto neuro for another look at Tran. Chalmers and Cindy Lou were at the far end of the ward.
Tran was making up for her lack of activity for the preceding twenty-four hours. She’d wriggled halfway to the foot of the bed, her feet pushing the sheet overboard to drag the floor. I slid my arms under her hot little back and boosted her up again. She was so light she felt hollow. She let out an irritating but relatively healthy wail. I smoothed her covers and wiped the sweat from her knotted forehead. “Give me hell, sweetie, but thanks for not croaking,” I whispered to her.
In the next bed, old Xe lay quietly with his hands over his chest. The deep frown lines I had noticed earlier were smooth now, his wrinkles gentle as the furrows made by wind through a wheat field. The dreams that had disturbed him earlier seemed to have quieted, and his sleep was peaceful.
Chalmers and Cindy Lou trotted up the ward with bundles of charts tucked officiously under their arms, the two of them looking for all the world like Dr. Dan and Nancy Nurse. They exchanged a look that pointedly did not acknowledge my unclean presence.
2
I tramped up the wooden stairs of the barracks and down the landing to my own hooch too tired to spare a glance for Monkey Mountain or the South China Sea, and unsure whether I wanted to continue to beat my breast, lick my wounds, or gloat. What I really wanted to do was sleep, but as soon as I opened the door to my hooch I knew that was going to present a problem.
The sun glinted blindingly off the tin roof of the building, giving my room the climate of a kiln. I had nailed a Vietnamese bedspread, an institution-green brocade of a phoenix, over my window in an attempt to provide myself with shade and privacy. Otherwise the hooch’s decor was a scant improvement on the miners’ shacks outlaws use for hideouts in old Western movies.
I flopped down on my cot and groaned for a while. The cot was covered with another Vietnamese spread, which was, like everything else at the 83rd, habitually sandy.
I had no sooner lain down than I knew I was going to have to sit up again and pry off my boots. My socks were wringing wet, my feet swollen and sore. I twisted on the bed and opened my door and dumped the sand from the boots. Mine were standard issue leather because I have big wide feet and the quartermaster couldn’t find the lighter, canvas-and-steel-reinforced jungle boots in my size. The plywood floor of the room did not cool my burning soles, so I lay back down on the bed and let the room spin around for a while.
The whole hooch was about the size of my clothes closet at home in Kansas City, and it didn’t have a closet. It did have, courtesy of my mother’s care packages, contact-paper flowers stuck around on the bare plywood walls and a mobile of paper cats, a pop bottle with Mexican crepe-paper flowers stuck in it, also gifts from home. My hot plate, assorted food, a midget refrigerator, and a reel-to-reel tape deck, along with my folded clothing, even my underwear, freshly rice-starched and ironed by my hooch maid, were arranged on a wonderful wall of shelves constructed by the orthopedic surgeon I would soon be working with. Joe Giangelo, a doctor who had somehow managed to escape ascending to deity when he gained his M.D., was better known as Geppetto by the nurses, because of the kindness with which he deployed his carpentry skills. With Geppetto for our local architect and interior designer, the hooches of several of the nurses were pretty plush by Vietnam standards.
Correction. This whole assignment was very plush by Vietnam standards. So what the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t being asked to build the Bridge on the River Kwai, just to do my job, for very good pay, under much better circumstances than most of the people in Vietnam. I wasn’t in any foxholes, or in danger of being shot at, and even the concertina wire and sandbag bunkers were more for joshing the folks at home than taken seriously, at least by me. Of course, the work hours here were a little longer, the heat and bugs were atrocious, and I was unable to get enough sleep because of all of the above, but compared to what the average grunt went through I was living in fat city. So why was I screwing up so badly I almost killed people?
Well, actually, I wasn’t almost killing just anybody, but specifically a little Vietnamese girl with a head injury. There was a double dehumanizing factor there. She wasn’t one of “us,” of course. Didn’t speak English. Was automatically suspect of being a grenade-tossing junior terrorist just because she had the gall to be Vietnamese in Vietnam. And the head injury made it worse, because even though I knew theoretically that some of the neuro patients would get well, I could remember only a handful of encounters with patients alert enough to display whole personalities. I really wanted to blame someone else so that I didn’t have to admit that I had gotten not only careless but callous.
Looking closely at why I was so mad at the doctor and the head nurse and the others who were justifiably alarmed over what had happened with Tran, I think I took the whole thing personally because I felt they didn’t really care about her as much as I did. They were just tsk-tsking me to get me. Because only a couple of months earlier, it had been standard operating procedure to give the Vietnamese patients life-threateningly dangerous care on a routine basis, when we transfused them with O-positive blood.
Before I came to Nam I had only read about transfusion reactions in textbooks, because a routine laboratory procedure, typing and cross-matching a patient to ensure compatibility with the donated blood, eliminated most of the danger.
I began to realize the difference between wartime and peacetime nursing the night one of my Vietnamese patients went into a transfusion reaction and nobody but me was even upset about it.
The patient was a middle-aged woman who had been too near when a bomb went off, drilling a hole in her skull as well as peppering her body with frag wounds, from which she lost a lot of blood. The first unit of blood had been hung as I came on duty. My assignment was to monitor the patient for a transfusion reaction. Although transfusion reactions are rare in the States, it’s routine to keep track of the patient’s vital signs and general well-being for the first hour or so, just to make sure everything is okay. Only this time everything wasn’t okay. The woman spiked a temp even higher than the one she was already running from dehydration, and began chilling at the same time. It’s eerie seeing goose bumps rise on somebody when their fever is 104-105 and the room temperature is the same or higher. It happened so fast that she was starting to convulse before I quite realized what was happening. As soon as I did, I yanked the unit of blood, tubing and all, and replaced it with a bottle of Ringer’s lactate. I put in a call for the doctor, who was, I think, in downtown Da Nang that night (though that was supposed to be off limits), and called the lab to ask them to repeat the cross match.
“Why?” asked the stoned young thing on the other end.
“Because the unit you brought me was wrong—it almost killed my patient.”
“Then so would anything else I bring you. O poz is all we got for gooks, lady.”
“What do you mean by that remark, soldier?” I asked in my best John Wayne growl. “The woman almost bled to death already. We surely aren’t going to bring her in and just finish her off with bad blood.”
I meant to be sarcastic, but the fellow was full of herbally induced patience.
“It ain’t bad blood, Lieutenant. It’s good ol’ American universal-donor blood. The gooks are lucky to get it. American donors donate for ’Mericans, get it? There’d be hell to pay if they knew their blood was going to keep some gook alive. But bein’ the Good Samarit—the kind-hearted suckers we are—we let ’em have a little of the cheap-and-easy brew.”
“If O positive is the universal donor, why is she reacting to it?”
“Oh, it ain’t all that universal. Lots of AB types don’t handle it real well, and uh—AB is a lot more common among the gooks than it is with us. Oops, gotta date with a hot centrifuge. Have a nice night, Lieutenant.”
The doctor was even more offhand than the lab tech, who was indeed repeating hospital policy. Nobody said in so many words that they didn’t care if the Vietnamese patients lived or died. But the lifers, the career Army sergeants and senior officers, were fond of reminding us new recruits that anyone who had served in the Pacific in WW II or Korea could tell you gooks didn’t value human life the way Americans and Europeans did.
It wasn’t until the neurosurgeon left and a fill-in, a doctor who had been serving in the field, was reassigned to us on temporary duty that something was done about the problem. Dr. Riley was a very logical man. He decided that if gooks bled, gooks could give blood. He grabbed a handful of tourniquets, needles, and syringes and he and Major Crawley, our head nurse at the time, raided the visitors’ tent and availed themselves of its walking Vietnamese blood bank. Most of the visitors didn’t mind donating. Nobody had ever thought to ask them before.
I had thought myself above the kind of bigotry that had willfully overlooked what was so obvious to Dr. Riley; the human body works pretty much the same no matter what kind of upholstery you put on it. Now I had to seriously question whether I hadn’t at least inwardly begun to buy into all of that “anti-gook” stuff. Had I harmed Tran because I secretly didn’t give as much of a damn about her as I did about my “professional image”?
Was I really more concerned with stupid appearances than I was with hurting somebody who was so totally helpless and dependent on me?
Oh well, so I’d screwed up. Nobody had been making it exactly easy for me. Let them transfer me to an easier assignment. What did I care? Except—except that I still hated like hell that I had failed, that I hadn’t measured up. Because I wanted to do more, not less. I really wanted to be in a field hospital, as a surgical nurse, doing the rough stuff. But of course, after my screwing up like this, there was no chance of that. So I’d have to accept what they told me and watch myself and make sure that it never, ever…
I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I was furious with myself now, not just with everybody else, and it was a cold kind of furious that made the center of my chest ache as if I had pleurisy. My thr
oat was as gritty and parched as the beach. I trolled with my fingers until I found the refrigerator door, and popped it open long enough to extract the dregs of a flat Coke. I popped two Benadryls and chased them with the Coke.
It tasted metallic, and there were little solid pieces at the bottom, like worms. Probably from having been shipped and stored so long. But there were all those stories floating around about the Vietcong taking the tops off pop bottles and putting ground glass in the Coke, then recapping and resealing it. I couldn’t help wondering if their evil little minds hadn’t dreamed up a similar way of getting into cans. I generally tried to drink 7-Up or Shasta, but with the PX, you took what you could get.
Despite the Benadryl, I couldn’t get comfortable. My elbows and knees were in the wrong places, and vast patches of my skin stuck to the cot.
Someone climbed the steps to the upper porch and walked toward my room, the footfalls sending tiny vibrations across the floor and up the cot legs. A face and a pair of hands squashed against my screen door.
“Kitty? You there?”
I grunted, and Carole Swenson opened the door and plopped herself on the edge of my cot. Her ditty bag and another of the Vietnamese bedspreads slid to the floor beside her boot. “Hi. How was your night?” she asked as if it wasn’t already all over the compound how my night had been.
“Oh, you know. Long,” I said.
Carole was maybe my best friend at the hospital, but I couldn’t talk to her about this. She waited a moment for me to continue, then started pawing through her ditty bag, the little olive-drab cloth sack we all used as a purse. Triumphantly she extracted a stack of three-by-five cards. “I had a brainstorm. Lookit here.”
The Healer’s War Page 3
