“No shit,” Voorhees said. “I’m sorry, Sarge, but that Province Hospital is not my idea of a place to send sick people. Compared to it, the stock pens back home are the damn Hilton Hotel.”
“Yeah, it ain’t much of a place,” Baker agreed. “But that’s the way these people treat their own. Myself, I don’t see it, but it’s their damn country.”
“What’s so bad about it?” I asked.
“They didn’t even have any beds, ma’am,” Voorhees said, almost sputtering with indignation, “just some cruddy old mats.”
“A lot of the Vietnamese don’t sleep in beds at home, you know,” the major told him.
“Yeah, well, not ones like these. They were all soaked with old blood and pus and stuck to the floor, and the whole place smelled like an outhouse that’s been used once too often. People were lying two and three together on these damn mats, without any clothes on, or all dirty, with untreated amputations and wounds and big running sores on them. And Mrs. O’Malley—that’s one of the missionaries who was there when I took the ARVN—said they don’t even feed them. If somebody from the family doesn’t bring in meals, the patients just go hungry. I tell you, it was gross, ma’am. Bugs crawling all over people. We might as well just have shot that guy and put him out of his misery.”
I was beginning to wish I’d argued with Joe, but I’d been as mad as he was about the way Dong had treated Ahn. Still, we accepted that our own casualties would have lots of hostile feelings they worked through in pretty antisocial ways. For them, there was treatment and at least a certain amount of tolerance.
Mai, who had been charting her 1300 vital signs, chimed in. “I tell you, honest, what Gus say is true. No one get well Vietnamee hospital. Everybody go there die. That why everybody so happy come here.”
“I guess I thought Province Hospital was just like ours, only the doctors and nurses were Vietnamese,” I said. But I suddenly remembered when, right after I’d started working on ward six, I met a visiting Vietnamese doctor, an educated man with a French accent and French training, touring the ward with Dr. Riley in some kind of exchange program. While the other doctors were off consulting about something, he’d stood there looking embarrassed, and, trying to put him at ease, I’d attempted to strike up a conversation. I asked, “Are you a surgeon, sir?”
“No,” he’d said. He was smiling a mild and self-effacing smile that didn’t prepare me for his elaboration. “No, I am not a surgeon. I am not really a doctor, by your standards. I am a butcher. I work in a charnel house.” Apparently he hadn’t just been modest.
Baker shook his head and waved his cigar for Voorhees to follow him into the storeroom. I was opening my mouth to ask Mai if she’d ever worked in Vietnamese hospitals before when Heron wandered over to the coffeepot. “You know, Lieutenant, we’re always needing nurses for medcap missions. Could be you’d find that a real interesting way to spend one of your days off….” He was carefully polite this time, but I could hear him thinking: Instead of going to the beach all the time.
But dammit, I needed breaks from the hospital to keep me sane. A secondhand report of a place like Province Hospital was enough for me, thank you. My martyr complex only extended just so far.
Heron seemed to read me as readily as I’d read him. “Going on a medcap isn’t anything like going to Province, you know. We take you nurses and the doctors and supplies to the villages and you treat people right there.”
“Is that how you met Xe?” I asked. “On a medcap mission?”
“It’s how I heard of him,” he said, stirring his coffee with the butt end of a ballpoint pen. “Wherever Xe had been, we weren’t needed.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“He’s kind of a one-man AMA,” Heron said ruefully. “Only not as political.”
“Xe’s a doctor?” I asked, feeling ridiculously dismayed that we hadn’t extended the old man more professional courtesy.
“Kinda. He’s sort of a combination of doctor and priest, but I guess you’d have to say he was practicing medicine without a license, by American standards. I’ve been studying with him since I met him after he’d saved one of my people from rabies.”
“You were the one who called in the chopper when he got hit, weren’t you?”
“Umm hmm.”
“You say you study with him. Is he like your guru or something?”
He gulped the coffee and pitched the cup in the wastebasket with a basketball twist of the wrist. “Yeah, something like that. Think about what I said about the medcap, Lieutenant. Every Thursday morning.”
I didn’t much like Charlie Heron. He was a little holier-than-thou. He made me feel like some stupid debutante who never did anything but polish her nails and have her hair fixed all day. What did he think I was doing in the hospital anyway?
What Heron hinted about Xe was intriguing, though, especially since the old man seemed to have amazing recuperative powers. The day after Ahn’s surgery, the old man spotted someone using a wheelchair and nothing would do until Mai and Voorhees lifted him into it. He wheeled himself around the ward as if he were indeed making rounds and afterward returned to bed exhausted.
Later, Ahn moaned in his sleep and I took him a pain shot. The kid rolled over without a peep and, after I’d given him the injection, rolled onto his back again. His sheets had worked loose, so I began to straighten them and hauled him up in bed, lifting him with an arm under his shoulder, another under his hips. As I pulled my arms out and started to straighten, his good arm tightened around my neck and he buried his face against my shoulder for a moment.
The next morning, Marge was still off. Voorhees got pulled to ICU and Sergeant Baker spent most of the morning in his ward masters’ meeting. Joe was in surgery with Dang Thi Thai. There was a new technique for skin grafts using cadaver skin to cover wounds like hers, and Joe was anxious to try it out.
I went through my morning routine and checked the charts for the orders Joe had been writing while we were in report. On Dickens’s chart was a new order: the dressings on his crushed legs were to be changed daily.
Remembering the man’s behavior when he first arrived on the ward, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
Most of the new casualties had pretty well stabilized by then, and were relaxed, shouting obscenities back and forth across the ward, sometimes throwing stuff at one another. When I took them their meds or changed their dressings, most of them seemed anxious to talk now, to tell me about their wives or girlfriends or mothers or dogs, even, to talk about what a mess it was back in the unit, to gossip about things they’d heard in the bush. Some of them talked so much you couldn’t get away from them—they had what is called in psych a “pressure of speech,” so much stuff was waiting to come out, a way of releasing adrenaline, of coming down. A few still stayed silent and I worried about them a little bit more. But there was nobody else like good old Private Dickens, thank goodness.
He hadn’t mellowed a bit since he first came on the ward, and I approached him for the dressing change in much the same spirit he might have approached a squad of Vietcong. I’d given him a pain shot first thing that morning and he’d fallen asleep soon afterward, but the rattle of the dressing cart woke him to all his snarling glory.
“Dr. Giangelo wants your dressings changed this morning, Private Dickens,” I announced with false cheerfulness, and before he could say anything began scooting Chux, the blue paper-diaper-like absorbent pads, under his legs, eliciting a howl and several unflattering references to my sexual and scatalogical practices.
When I poured the peroxide over his old bandages, he squirmed and hissed as if it were boiling oil. Of course, it was cold, and it bubbled, but most patients didn’t seem to feel that even on very raw wounds it really hurt—not like iodine, for instance. But when I pulled the first layer of gauze away he woke anyone who might possibly be dozing with a bloodcurdling yell. The scream went straight from his mouth into my eardrum and almost deafened me. My hands shook with the longing to backha
nd him, but I gritted my teeth, having already decided that I was going to be gentle and compassionate with this obnoxious jerk if it killed me.
“What are you anyhow, some lousy VC, what the hell do you think you’re doing to me, what did I ever do to you, why the fuck did this happen to me, oh shit, be careful, oh God, you’re killing me…” and then, as I began removing the most encrusted layers of gauze, soaking them with peroxide as I went and being as careful as my shaking hands would allow, he began writhing and screaming piercingly in my ear.
With my eyes on the wound and my ears full of his screams, it’s no wonder I didn’t notice the wheelchair gliding up until it was almost too late.
Dickens bucked up on the bed like a frightened horse and tried to climb the wall backward, his screams intensifying.
At the foot of the bed, Xe sat in the wheelchair and regarded the patient with a mixture of calm and bewilderment. Then he lowered his eyes and mumbled to himself as he spread his hands over the spoiled meat of Dickens’s legs.
“Get that gook away from me, oh God, he’s going to kill me!” Dickens screamed.
A patient named Miller, with one arm in a sling, jerked the wheelchair sideways and sent it flying with a kick. The chair careened down the hall, the old man trying to get control of it by grabbing for the wheels. He succeeded only in making it veer into one of the beds, where it crashed, sending its fragile old occupant sprawling.
Two more of the patients leaped from bed and started after Xe. I didn’t think they were going to help him up.
I saw Meyers running, as if in slow motion, across the hall from the Vietnamese side of the ward. God, he’ll never make it, I thought.
Just then an ungodly clatter drew everyone’s attention to the Navy corpsman, Ken Feyder. “Oops,” Ken said. “Dropped my bedpan,” as if nothing else had been happening. He turned his trunk lazily toward the hyperventilating Dickens. “Hey, doggie, whatsa matter? The old guy just heard you bawlin’ about your legs and wanted to trade ya. Me too, anytime, pal.”
Meyers reached Xe and used his own bulk to shoulder himself in between the angry patients and the old man.
Dickens’s mouth opened, then he stared at Feyder’s stumps. His eye strayed to where Meyers easily hefted Xe’s legless body and deposited it back in the wheelchair. He swallowed hard and clamped his lower jaw shut like a snapping turtle. I quickly finished his dressing change while Meyers returned Xe to the ward. I didn’t say another word and, blessedly, neither did anyone else. If they had, I’d have exploded.
I rammed the dressing cart against the wall, stripping off my gloves so fast I broke the rubber and made the powder fly. I had to make sure Xe was all right, call Joe and tell him about the incident so he could check the old man over, and fill out an incident report.
“Ma’am?” Feyder’s soft voice stopped me in my tracks as I stalked past his bed. “Ma’am, would you hand me my bedpan? I can’t reach it.” I picked it up and held it out to him. It wobbled up and down in my shaking hand. His voice was low as he spoke to me. “Don’t be too hard on them, Lieutenant. The unit I was with when this happened to me? Their interpreter took off just before we got hit.”
I grunted, still too furious to talk. My second day alone on the ward and I have a fucking race riot. Jesus.
“How is he?” I asked Meyers, who was standing by Xe’s bedside. “Did you get his vital signs? Is there any bleeding?”
“His vital signs are okay, dressings okay too, but maybe there’s somethin’ wrong with his head. He’s just starin’ into space. Pretty shook up, I guess. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I was down washin’ bedpans like Sarge told me. I didn’t see him go over there.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, though I wished I could blame it on him. Xe lay there with his arms limply at his sides, staring into space. I checked his clipboard. His vital signs did look okay.
“Can you feel this?” I asked and touched his arm with the tip of my finger. He shook me off as if I were a fly, and kept staring. I wished Mai were there. I wished Heron were there. What was wrong with Xe was very clear to me. His feelings were hurt. Heron said Xe was considered a doctor among his own people, and he’d heard Dickens screaming and come to help, only to be attacked. “I know how you feel,” I said. “Dickens is almost as bad to me too, but he’s an asshole. Don’t let him get you down. We’re not all like that, honest. Feyder tried to help. And I kept this safe for you, didn’t I?” I didn’t even mean to touch the amulet, just to point at it. I knew how sensitive he was about it. But he moved and my finger made contact with the glass for an instant. Now I know it wasn’t a physical sensation I felt, but then I thought it might have been something like static electricity. Because pain shot up my arm and into my chest, like angina in reverse. And that blade of pain cut a swath for the hot surge of shame and anger that swept over me, leaving the nauseatingly bitter aftertaste of failure in its wake.
Xe’s eyes fastened on mine as I stepped back, his eyes brimming with a feeble old man’s leaking tears.
My hand was on my chest, but as soon as I stepped away, the pain within me disappeared. It was as if I was feeling all over again what I’d felt that night by Tran’s bed, only worse, much worse. And it was all there, in that old man’s face.
I returned to my desk and filled out the incident report.
“What did you do when the incident occurred?”
“I attempted to calm and restrain Private Dickens while Spec-4 Meyers assisted Mr. Xe.”
“What could you do to prevent such an incident from recurring?”
I chewed on my pencil for a long time over that. Maintain strict segregation of patients? Gag all overwrought patients during dressing changes? Never start a dressing change until the riot squad is handy for backup? I gave it an appropriately vague answer in bureaucratese: “In the future ensure that all patients understand ahead of time that they are not to interfere when staff members are treating other patients.”
That night I went straight to the club from work and systematically proceeded to get very, very drunk.
In spite of my hangover, the following day started out a little better. Marge and Joe took care of Dickens’s dressing change during Joe’s morning rounds, and I learned that most of this particular batch of casualties would be transferred to Japan the next day.
Sergeant Baker kept Meyers and Voorhees scurrying all morning cleaning up the ward. Blaylock informed Marge that VIPs would be touring the hospital later on. And sure enough, sometime around noon a handful of colonels and a general or two arrived with little jewelry boxes full of medals, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, and so on.
We all stood at attention and they handed Marge a list of patients to be decorated. I was supposed to help prepare everybody to be honored.
Ken Feyder was up for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. He was basking his buns under the heat lamp when the VIPs started their rounds. “C’mon, Ken, time to turn over and get your just reward,” I kidded him. I couldn’t be more pleased for him. After yesterday, I didn’t need anybody to tell me he was a hero. And I always liked my heroes to be nice people, too. But I was a lot more thrilled by his official recognition than he was. For the first time since he’d arrived on the ward, Feyder was less than cooperative.
“Just have ’em pin it on my butt, Lieutenant,” he said, and withdrew and refused to discuss it, pretending to be asleep. They finally presented it to his pillowcase.
A surprise came when Heron appeared on the GI side that afternoon and had a long visit with Ken Feyder.
“Okay if I take Feyder for a little wheelchair ride, L.T.?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. He’s got those wounds on his hips and Joe hasn’t authorized—”
“Do me a favor, will you? Call Joe, ask him. Ken’s about to go nuts in here with the heat and the noise. He’d sure like to go out for a spell.”
He was giving me his most helpful good-ol’-country-boy routine, his eyes trying hard to look round and sincere.
“Are
you and Feyder old buddies or something?” I asked. “I thought you were only interested in Xe.”
“I heard what happened yesterday. You know, surely? Meyers said you were standing right there.” The way he said “standing right there” made it clear he thought I should have been doing more than that. And he was right, of course. But I had been so taken by surprise I hadn’t known which way to move or how fast. “Meyers could come too, for that matter,” he continued, hurrying past the reproachful jab at me, no doubt having been told by his Southern mama that he could get more flies with molasses than with vinegar.
“Oh, okay, just a minute,” I said. Joe okayed it, providing the chair was amply padded with Chux and heavy dressing pads. I asked Ken if he wanted a pain shot and saw him look toward Heron, who shook his head, very slightly, which I thought was a little odd. Meyers and Heron loaded Ken in the chair and the three of them left by the back door.
I passed them on the way to pick up my mail. I’d have missed them except for the wheelchair. The three of them were huddled behind some canvas and scaffolding between two of the wards. I saw only their feet, but I caught a strong whiff of pot as I passed. I could have confronted them then, I suppose. As Meyers’s superior officer, I should have. I didn’t condone smoking pot on duty. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was just Heron, who wasn’t on duty, and Ken Feyder. And I really didn’t want to get Feyder in trouble after all he’d been through. I kept walking, and decided to send Sergeant Baker out to collect Feyder later on. Discipline was the ward master’s province mostly, anyway. However, by the time I returned, Feyder was in bed sleeping and Meyers had resumed his duties, though he was wielding the mop in a very dreamy fashion. Heron had wisely made himself scarce.
When I made rounds with Joe that evening, the doctor tried to encourage Xe to try the wheelchair again, but the old man folded his arms stubbornly and refused to so much as look at the chair, which was about what I expected. But when we came to Ahn’s bedside it was a different story. The boy said, “Mamasan, mamasan,” and pointed at the chair, then, “Ahn, Ahn,” patting himself on the chest. We got the point and Ahn got the chair.
The Healer’s War Page 11
