The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  “I’ve given you an order, Lieutenant. I expect it to be carried out. Do I make myself clear?”

  “But, sir, when you’ve been in country awhile and seen what Province Hospital is like—”

  “See here, young woman, I’m not listening to any more of these crappy war stories by you so-called old-timers. I want that woman out of here and I want her out of here now. Sergeant!”

  He was talking to Baker. “Yes, sir,” Baker said. “Voorhees!”

  Voorhees dropped the thermometer he was about to put in Dinh’s mouth. “Sergeant?”

  “You heard the doctor. Get an ambulance and transfer the patient in bed four to Province Hospital ASAP.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I glared at Sergeant Baker, but he didn’t meet my gaze.

  Voorhees moved slowly, rebelliously, but he was up for promotion, so he got the ambulance and he got the stretcher and he started loading Dang Thi Thai onto it. I went over to help, to try to reassure her. I don’t remember where Mai was, but she wasn’t there to translate or I would have tried to find someone else, a friend, a relative, to let them know about Thai’s departure. I took her hand and said, “New doctor say you well, mamasan. Send you Province Hospital.”

  I hadn’t gotten the words out of my mouth before she grasped my arm with both hands, digging in frantically with her fingernails. Her face, which had reflected slow and agonizing suffering for so long, was suddenly suffused with terror. “No, co! No!” She started climbing my arms, crying and begging. “Kitty, no—” Her eyes pleaded with me to change things, not to betray the hope and trust I had—we all had—encouraged her to have in us.

  I held on to the stretcher, but Voorhees was pulling it away. Thai’s nails grazed my arms as her hands lost their grip. Sergeant Baker tugged gently at my shoulders. “Come on, Lieutenant. No need to get hysterical over this,” he said. “How many ladies like her you think are out there ain’t had nobody to look after them?”

  “No, Kitty! No!” Thai cried, but now Voorhees, who looked about to cry himself, was patting her and trying to calm her. He pulled the cart away from me and rolled her down the hall. I looked after them. Voorhees was still comforting, but Thai was silent now, her arms folded across her chest, her streaming eyes turned toward the ceiling.

  I whirled around to glare at Krupman, but the bastard hadn’t had the guts to stick around and hear her cry, so I glared at Baker instead.

  “Thanks for the backup, Sarge,” I said sarcastically.

  “Don’t go gettin’ huffy on me, L.T. I just saved your butt. That doctor outranks both of us, and he said she goes, she goes. I didn’t like it neither, but this is a war we got goin’ on here. Lots of folks got less chance than Mrs. Dang out there on their own. At least he sent her to the hospital.”

  “You heard what Voorhees said about that place! She’ll die there and she knows it.” I was still shaking, so I concentrated on licking my finger and smudging the bloody tracks Thai’s nails had left on my arms.

  “You don’t know no such thing, ma’am. It’s the place these people would go to if we weren’t here. They got their own ways, you know.”

  “I guess so,” I said, and turned away because I didn’t want him to see me crying. I was sitting at the desk watering the charts when I felt something warm close by. I turned slightly and Ahn leaned against me, nodding his head wisely, his eyes filled, not with fear, but with a mixture of cynicism and the sort of pity an adult gives a child the first time the child has a toy his father can’t fix.

  We got in a push of GIs later that week, and Krupman was too busy enjoying being a combat physician to banish any more of the native patients. I did my job and was barely polite, but as I worked with him that week and the next I couldn’t help realizing that with the GIs he was a good doctor, caring, skillful, and thorough. I had to close my eyes and see Thai’s face to remind myself what an ass he was. But I was beginning to be almost able to stand the man when Voorhees returned from the orphanage.

  “We stopped by Province Hospital on the way back, Lieutenant,” he said.

  I was afraid to ask but I did anyway. “Did you see Thai? How is she?”

  “She died a few days after she was admitted. Wound infection.”

  “Shit,” I said, but that was all.

  Mai returned from her daily shampoo in time to hear me. “What the mattah?” she asked, looking from me to Voorhees.

  He told her.

  I just sat there, and when I started to move, I felt as if I’d had a great big novocaine shot that affected my entire body.

  Behind me, I heard the Vietnamese talking, but I didn’t pay any attention. When it was time for dressings, I missed doing Thai’s as I had every day since she’d left. Forty patients on the census, and I missed dressing one hollow hip.

  When it was Xe’s turn, I bent over to dress his stumps and felt his hands come up at the sides of my head. The numbness there began sliding away, and a deep ache replaced it.

  “What are you doing?” I snapped, but then I looked at him to find in his face a perfect counterpart of my own pain and sense of failure. And I knew what had been slowly killing him. We were in the same boat, but his was sinking faster. We were both there to help, and he, who according to Heron had once been so much more powerful than I, was now even more powerless.

  His hands, transparent as paper, hovered on either side of my head and he ignored my question but kept watching me. Something silken and balmlike touched the burning edges of the ache, then fell away. The sorrow in his eyes deepened even as he lowered his hands.

  But the ache in my head receded and the numbness returned.

  I walked away from the hospital, the cold afternoon drizzle soaking through my uniform. I didn’t even bother with my poncho. I went straight to the club and knocked back three straight tequilas. The tequilas weren’t so much to bolster my courage as to tranquilize me so I didn’t attack Krupman with my bare hands. Usually booze just makes me sleepy, but that night I had to quit drinking before I calmed down. The anger swelled up inside me till there was no longer room to swallow. I wanted Krupman to come into the club. I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to ream him out in front of everybody. But he didn’t come, the bastard, so I staggered over to his hooch and stood there pounding on the screen while rivulets of water poured off my boonie hat and down my arms. The doctor was inside, headphones enveloping his ears while his reel-to-reel deck rolled shiny tape from one cylinder to another. He looked up, and no one could accuse him of undue sensitivity or second sight.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked, almost amiably. “An emergency?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I just wanted to give you something to celebrate. I thought you’d like to know that poor woman you sent to Province Hospital accommodated you by dying. That seems to be what you wanted—”

  He had lifted the headphones when I started to talk; now he tore them off his head and flung them on his bunk. “I didn’t want anything one way or the other, Lieutenant. I just didn’t give up my practice to treat slants.” He picked up a photo of a group of people, and I admit I didn’t register what they looked like because I thought he might be planning on using it as a weapon. “You see this boy in uniform here? That’s my baby brother. He volunteered to be an American adviser and help these goddamn people and they let him walk into an ambush.

  “I came over here to help boys like him and keep them from dying in this idiotic war. How people like that Giangelo guy and you can make pets out of the locals when you see what they do to your own people is a mystery to me, but as long as I’m in charge of orthopedics we are treating Americans, and the gooks can take care of their own. I’ll tell you something else, Lieutenant”—his face was perfectly calm through all this and his voice was as even as a numbed-out marine’s, though not as loud—“as soon as I have a little free time from the men who need me, I’m going to clean that place out, starting with those panhandlers who’ve been using up American medical supplies for the past few months. So
you might as well start getting used to it.”

  He slammed the screen, then the inner door, in my face. As the door slammed, I saw him slip his headphones back on.

  I could have pounded all night and been hauled off by the MPs, I suppose, but instead I sloshed back through the rain to the club to continue getting drunk. It wasn’t my day. Tony was there. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, except coming and going a couple of times from Julie’s hooch. Carole had mentioned that they’d broken up and that Tony had cornered her and Tom to cry on their shoulders.

  “Kitty, I have to talk to you—”

  “Not now,” I snapped. “Not ever. Let me alone, Tony. Take whatever you’ve got to say and put it in a letter to your wife.”

  “Don’t be that way, babe. I didn’t know it mattered to you. You were seeing Jake when I met you.”

  “I was not ‘seeing’ Jake,” I began and then was just too tired to finish. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Baby, I miss you. We’re getting fired on all the time now. I almost got creamed last time.” From his tone and the slight tremble of his perfect fingers around his drink, I thought he meant it this time. Usually, despite his fondness for military melodrama, Tony had as much faith in his own immortality as most of my patients had before they qualified as patients. But I, for one, did not give a shit what he believed.

  “Tony, I’m sorry about that, but I have a few other things on my mind, all right? I’m cold and wet and I just finished talking to a so-called physician who cheerfully accepted that he murdered one of my patients and intends to go on murdering them, all perfectly legally and with the Army’s blessings, because he blames my patients and maybe me for the death of his brother.”

  “He killed your patient?”

  “Yes. It was Dang Thi Thai.”

  “The old lady with the hip?”

  “I’m surprised you remembered. You never liked me to talk about my patients, if I recall. They weren’t as interesting as your goddamn helicopters.”

  “Okay, okay, I deserve that, I guess. Carole tried to tell me a little how you felt, and believe me, I never thought you were cheap or anything. It’s just, we were so good together I couldn’t see why you couldn’t just be happy with that. Why dwell on the war all the time?”

  “I wasn’t talking about the goddamn war. I was talking about my patients. The same way you talk about your fuckin’ helicopters. It’s my work and—and that bastard is destroying everything….” I started bawling again, and could have shot myself for it.

  But Tony had made up his mind to be charming, and I had forgotten how good at it he could be. He ran his hand up the back of my neck and kneaded, comfortingly, warmingly. “God, babe, I’m sorry. Tell me about it, come on. Let’s go back to your place, or you won’t be in any shape to do anyone any good.”

  I stopped crying before I told him because I didn’t want to give him an excuse to hold me, much as I wanted to be held. He was unexpectedly concerned, however, and I remembered that a lot of my patients had been his patients first, in a way. He had delivered them. And Tony was a lot of things I didn’t like, but for Vietnam, he wasn’t much of a racist.

  “Now he says he’s going to do the same thing to the others—”

  “Can’t you head him off?”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Where are they from?”

  “Somewhere near Tam Ky.”

  “Okay, I’ll check it out. If we can get some relatives up here, your patients will have someone to look after them at Province anyway.”

  He was talking about an awfully long shot and we both knew it. Uninjured Vietnamese were even lower priority than injured ones.

  “Christ,” I said. “It’s like triage. It’s bad enough for the new people, but old Xe and Ahn…” He reached over and stroked my cheek with that beautiful hand and gave me a melting look from those beautiful eyes and I almost fell into his arms. But I wasn’t about to. Maybe he wasn’t a complete rat, but Thai’s death was the issue here, not my sex life or his.

  “Don’t they have anyone?”

  “Nobody. Ahn’s an orphan and Xe—Tony, do you know a Special Forces type named Heron?”

  “Heron, Heron…no, babe. Sorry. I don’t—sounds familiar, but…” He let his arms raise and drop and the pungency of his sweat rose up between us from the darkened green patches under the arms of his fatigue shirt.

  “Will you ask around for me? Please? He’s a friend of the old man’s. He got sent back to the field, but he might be able to pull some strings and get Xe sent home. But I don’t know what to do about Ahn. If Marge were here she’d know what to do.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In Quang Ngai, with her buddy Hal, who runs the hospital. If she hadn’t left, that bastard Krupman would never have gotten away with this.”

  “She knows the kid, Ahn, huh?”

  “Sure. She knew all the long-term patients. Ahn’s not so sick, but his stump isn’t all that healed over yet, even though he has that prosthesis Joe cobbled out of an old crutch. We’ve been waiting for a real prosthesis.”

  “He’d just sell it on the black market,” Tony said.

  I started to swing on him.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. But he doesn’t have any place to go or any chance.”

  “You could say that about half of Vietnam.”

  “Yeah, well, half of Vietnam doesn’t call me mamasan. Tony, I can’t let him die like Thai, I just can’t. Shit. If only Marge were around.”

  “Well, hell, if she’s the answer to everything, why not take the kid down to her?”

  “I can’t. I—”

  “I could. I go down there every once in a while. We could go down and visit your friend and you could drop the kid off.”

  “Is that—I mean, is it okay to carry a Vietnamese civilian?”

  “I do it all the time.” He grinned. “Part of my job description, babe, remember? And why do you care about okay? You’re the one who needs to get around regs now. Just tell me when to pick you up.”

  “Well, I couldn’t go—I mean, I’m on duty.”

  “You could go after, couldn’t you? You’re head nurse now. Rewrite the schedule. Give yourself a day off. Nobody will know. I’ll have you back day after tomorrow night, and if not, hell, what can they do, send you to Vietnam?”

  “But couldn’t you just find Marge once you get there and get her to admit Ahn?”

  “Baby, I don’t give a shit about Ahn, or Marge. I’m in this for ulterior motives, remember? I want my best girl back.”

  “Tony, you’re married,” I said wearily. “And you lied to me about it.”

  “Well, so what? She’s not here and you are. Is it a deal or not?”

  Thai’s face flashed in front of me again and Ahn’s sad, knowing eyes as Tony’s scent smoked up my nostrils and his hand brushed my cheek again. “What you say, babe? Deal? Huh?”

  “Okay.”

  “Seal it with a kiss?” His mouth came close to mine and his arms slid up mine.

  “Tony, believe it or not, I’m just not in the mood right now.”

  He grinned. “I bic, baby. That’s okay. I know a guy in Quang Ngai I can kick out of his hooch for the night. See you tomorrow.”

  “Tony?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You think this will work?”

  “Sho ’nuff, baby. No sweat.”

  12

  The atmosphere on the ward the next morning was as dismal as the weather. Navy-gray clouds rolled in from the South China Sea like tons of concrete, dropping rain in thick splats. The din of rain on a tin roof can be rather pleasant if you’re inside. But combine the din with the discordant notes of those same drops plonking into basins and bedpans inside your shelter and the cursing of personnel tripping over the basins, and it’s too noisy to think.

  Sergeant Baker glowered at me when I came in and Voorhees declined to meet my eyes. I made old Xe
’s bed with him in it that morning. He was still asleep when I brought his medication, but his respirations were loud enough to be heard from several feet away over the rain. His chest sounded like a rattle. Ahn sat in bed and watched, his eyes as round as if he’d never seen anyone sick or hurt before. I thought again how quickly he had begun to act like a normal child. I wondered if I had done him any favors by convincing him that he could afford the luxury of a childhood, however brief.

  The sheets I bunched under the old man were damp. Ahn slid out of bed, grabbed his crutches, and helped me. Watching Mai and the corpsmen, he’d learned to make hospital corners as sharp as any probationer’s, and while he tucked, I rolled Xe toward me. When I rolled him onto his back again, his eyes were open—one of them, anyway. The other lid drooped heavily over the eye and the side of his mouth tugged at the corner. I grabbed a blood pressure cuff, but there was no particular change. At some point, while he slept, Xe had had a stroke. It could have happened to anybody his age, but combined with his amputations and the rattle in his lungs, it was ominous.

  “Aw, shit,” I muttered, half to myself, half to Ahn, who had moved to my side and was watching the old man as if he might explode. “Now I have to call Krupman in early.” I couldn’t help but take a hard look at Ahn.

  “No, mamasan, no call bac si. He cat ca dao papasan, same-same Ba Thai. Mamasan, you make papasan numbah one.”

  “No can do, Ahn. Sin loi,” I said, and started for the phone as Ahn continued his protests in ever-shriller Vietnamese. Xe’s right hand curled over his chest like a claw, but his left one whipped out and grabbed my arm in a viselike grip.

  He moved his mouth, but nothing save a dribble of spittle emerged.

  “What did he say, Ahn?” I asked. “Does he need anything?”

  “Papasan say he fini pretty quick.”

  “Give me a break, kid. You sound like Krupman now.”

  The right hand stayed hovering over the chest, but the left one steered my hand to the old man’s neck and the thong, and my fingers found the amulet. Together we steered it back to its place over his sternum, and his good hand clamped mine over his bad one and the amulet. A violet-gray light oozed from him like a slowly spreading hematoma. I started to check his pupils, but suddenly life—real, knowing, painful life—leaped back into his good eye like a revived candle flame and focused on me. I felt as though we had clasped hands across a deep crevasse. I had seen, felt, such a thing from patients before, when they prepared to die, especially those who couldn’t talk—this is who I am, remember me, it said. But never before with the bruising strength of will that flowed from Xe. In those eyes were my grandfather, great-grandmother, my favorite teachers at their wisest, my mother and father, Charlie Heron as I had last seen him, and another, stronger presence, a man who had been young and whom the war had made old, a man who had been even more than he was now—much more—and who was finally losing what was left. Those eyes held me fast, and then the power and the personality drained from them until only a stagnant pool was left in the good eye, which wearily closed for a moment.