The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Just one of them people that’s been here every day since you got here. Head nurse ran ’em off but said we had to call them as soon as you were strong enough.”

  I wasn’t strong enough. Nobody is strong enough to put up with the kind of shit I took from those intelligence people day in and day out for weeks after that. They made Hennessey’s accusations sound like “Tsk tsk.” One guy in particular started getting really hostile. They were trying to break me down, and that was easy. I’ve never been able to bear mental battering. But it didn’t do a lot of good. I was confused and whiny, and weepy, and even to me my story never sounded exactly the same each time I told it.

  But Marge came to visit me once. I told her as much as I could about where Ahn was and said if she could find Heron, I was sure he could find Ahn. I just wanted to know he was okay. She listened to me carefully and nodded noncommittally. On her way out, she stopped and chatted with the head nurse, and after that when the interrogators came, one of the ward nurses made it her business to be nearby.

  Otherwise, most of the staff steered clear of me, except for treatments. I was at the end of the ward, and a curtain was drawn between me and the other patients, so I could hear them but I couldn’t see them. I even had a guard, usually a woman, so she could go right into the bathroom with me, if necessary. I was surprised they spared the handcuffs, but at least having a guard meant there was someone I could talk to. I suppose that’s what they counted on, but since I didn’t have anything incriminating to reveal, it didn’t do much good. Some of my guards ignored me pretty much to flirt with the corpsmen or the patients, but one WAC in particular was someone I thought I’d have liked for a friend under other circumstances. She reminded me a little of Hue, short, tough, and very quick, deceptively young-looking, with an aura of bright yellow intellect, creative lavender, and idealistic blue slightly overlaid with deceptive gray-green. I almost told her about the amulet, once, but then I remembered what the inside of a mental hospital is like and knew that that was not where I wanted to spend my first few years back in the world. Also, in the back of my mind, I kept hearing what Colonel Dinh had said about the way the government would use the power to prolong the war. I thought, if Charlie Heron turned up before I left, maybe I would give it to him. But he never did.

  Sergeant Janice Mitchell, the one who reminded me of Hue, never grilled me. She just sat inside the curtain and chatted with me, leaving only long enough to light up a smoke away from the oxygen I had flowing through a cannula into my nose, as therapy for the pneumonia. She listened to what I said sympathetically, not as if she was about to indict me for every word. Every time I had another session and she was there, I’d blow off what little steam I had left or whimper in her direction, so we went over the same story almost as often as I did with the interrogators. Maybe more. Besides, we got to talking about home. She was a Midwesterner too, from Nebraska, and had joined to get out of Nebraska and to be near her brother, who had been up at Phu Bai until he was injured. She was dating several guys, but she didn’t elaborate, except in general terms. I gathered maybe she wasn’t supposed to talk about that. I told her about Duncan, repeating some of his stories, and about my family. But somehow the conversation would always drift back to what had happened after my fight with Krupman.

  I wasn’t trying to lie, but I didn’t want to talk about the amulet, nor did I want to be obviously withholding anything. So I told her about the villagers, okay, but I downplayed the injuries and upgraded the available equipment slightly. We had been talking for two weeks before we ever got past the ambush. I started telling her about what happened afterward, what Hennessey had said.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” she said. “You trying to tell me that the general tried to talk these men into killing you? You have witnesses?” She looked a little like a pointer who found a scent just then.

  “Well, yeah, like I told you, William Johnson was there, but he got there after the general said most of that stuff. And Zits and Maryjane but—no real names.” I shrugged helplessly and stared down at my sheet. “Wait a minute. There was the radioman. A black guy. His name tag said Brown. He’d tell you.”

  “I’ll check on it,” she said ruefully. “There’s probably only a couple thousand men named Brown in the area.”

  She stood up abruptly, flipped back the curtain, and stood at the foot of my bed. I heard the click of her lighter, saw her shadow take three short steps one way, three short steps the other, back and forth.

  She and Sergeant Llewellyn, the ward master, struck up quite a friendship while I was there. He had mentioned once when he was handing me an emesis basin that Janice had been with me most of the week I was out with my fever. They’d gotten well acquainted at that time, I supposed. I heard him ask her if she wanted a cup of coffee and she ducked her head in and said, “Kitty, I’m going to the nurses’ station for coffee. Want a cup?”

  I shook my head. Later I heard whispers from the station and then voices raised in argument. I caught the words “your career” in a male voice and then “about as subversive as you are” in Janice’s clarion tones, followed by “my career” and mumbles of grudging agreement.

  Before day shift ended that day, Llewellyn, a lanky, rawboned 91-Charlie who had Cherokee cheekbones and a Tennessee accent, lingered by my bed after picking up my supper tray. His aura was a rather muddied mauve, the healing rose overlaid with anxious gray violet just at the moment, belying his casual tone.

  “Well, how are you this evening, ma’am?”

  I sighed and tried to smile, but the smile drained away before it got to my mouth. “I’ll do.”

  “Yeah, well, it sure is exciting having you around here, y’know that? All these visitors and such. Why, it’s the most excitement we’ve had in this place since the My Lai thing and all those newsmen and investigators all over the place. Sergeant Mitchell was on that one, too, but I didn’t know her then. Noticed her, though. I don’t know how you folks felt up there, but we thought ol’ Calley sort of took a fall for somebody higher up. Gotta hand it to General Hennessey, though, he was right in there cryin’ atrocity with everybody else, even though I met this fellow used to work in the general’s mess?” His voice rose in the Southern interrogatory that means “you know?” but puts in the question mark and leaves out the words. “He said Hennessey was in favor of wipin’ out the entire population. Not that that’s an unusual idea. But it’s commonly held that if it takes wipin’ out all of us to wipe out all of them, he’s gonna be right in there wavin’ the flag and talkin’ about the domino theory. Between you and me, the man ain’t fishin’ with a baited hook. He’s been around a couple of times to pass out medals and he’s downright rude to the female personnel. Why, I remember last spring one lieutenant got raped by a troop under Hennessey’s command and she had to go to the I.G. and have her mama write her congressman to keep from being thrown out of the service for bein’ a loose woman. Useful thing, the I.G. I believe General Torelli, same officer that was in charge when Lieutenant LaVeau had her trouble, is still OIC. Between you and me, I think he might like to get somethin’ on that bastard.”

  My brain was not working at rapid speed, but the man had practically drawn me a picture. I had been too harassed and too out of it to wonder, but suddenly I realized I had had no letters, no calls, no solicitousness of any kind from home since my return. Nothing forwarded. I wondered what my family had been told.

  “Well, I’d write home,” I said wearily, “but I suppose it would be intercepted.”

  “It might be—unless you found a way around it. I think you better try, ma’am.”

  I did, because I knew he was taking a risk, and Janice was taking a risk, to try to help me. I didn’t care all that much by then. It didn’t seem to matter what I told anyone, they put their own connotations on it. I had always been a “gook lover,” back on the ward. All my co-workers said so, the interrogators told me. I had no feelings for the GIs. And when had I learned good enough
Vietnamese to see me through my alleged ordeal? I was sick of it, but no sicker than I was of everything else, and I was getting used to being sick of things. Having an easy time of it, having people in power be reasonable, being allowed to get well and go back to my job began to seem like a naïve dream of Disneyland proportions.

  But from what Llewellyn said, Hennessey was even more of a crazy man than I thought, and could do a great deal more damage to a great many more people. So I wrote some more letters and filled out more papers and eventually answered more questions. An official inquiry was conducted, one that included other high-ranking people than General Hennessey. Janice told me they located Brown in Quang Ngai, just before he was medevaced to Japan for removal of half his radio from his back. Words were bandied, more papers filled out. William had been reassigned to III Corps, she said. They were still looking for him. The possibility of a court-martial hearing for me was discussed.

  In the meantime I received a letter from home. My mother was so glad to hear from me. She’d sent an inquiry through the Red Cross when I stopped writing, but hadn’t had an answer as yet.

  Then gradually the interrogators, even Janice, stopped coming by, except to ask the odd, enigmatic question here and there. The silence made me more anxious than their presence had. I thought this was never going to end. I was never going to be allowed to go home.

  One morning the head nurse, Major Hanson, personally took my vital signs and tenderly took me in a wheelchair to the shower, straightened my bed, and helped me into a clean patient gown. I had been walking to the shower and changing my own bed for about a week, so I knew something official was going on. I wondered if my last meal was going to show up on the breakfast cart, and I about knocked myself out in the shower trying to pick up the soap, which kept slipping out of my unreliable hands.

  General Hennessey, a bird colonel, and a major proceeded down the aisle of the ward and stopped at my bed. The major ruffled a document and handed the general a box. The general opened the box and extracted something.

  “Lieutenant McCulley, in honor of your…”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. I was too busy flinching backward when I saw the pin he was aiming at my infected breast. Meanwhile, he was less saying the words than sputtering them, and started waving the pin around. The bird colonel, who wore insignia from the inspector general’s office, took the object away from him and laid it on my pillow. My Purple Heart, I thought, without looking at it. Big fucking deal. Instead of court-martialing me, they were giving me a medal. An hour and a half later I boarded an orange Braniff freedom bird, back to the world.

  Part Three

  Coming Home

  23

  The airplane ride back was like a big, long, raucous party, but I curled up in my seat and pretended to sleep. I didn’t have any money on me when I got to Fort Lewis, and I was wandering around trying to think what to do when a warrant officer tapped me on the shoulder. A woman who looked about to explode was standing nearby, watching, trying to restrain two boys about eight and five.

  “You lost, Lieutenant? The real world’s that way.” He pointed to the doors. I looked at him and saw Tony, who should be meeting his wife. It took me a moment to refocus.

  “I forgot to get paid,” I explained finally. “I need to get home and I forgot to get paid.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Kansas City.”

  He looked as if he was going to say the hell with it and leave me standing for a moment, then he said, “There’s a Western Union office at SeaTac airport. If we give you a lift that far, have you got somebody you can call to wire you the money?”

  I nodded. They dropped me off and loaned me a quarter. I called my folks collect and talked to the woman in the Western Union office. She had teased hair and her uniform skirt was a mini.

  I thought, it’s good to be back in the world. A woman with Mary Travers hair and wire-rim glasses and a boyfriend toting a guitar passed me in the broad hall, and I smiled at them experimentally. The woman twitched the skirt of her granny dress carefully aside and looked pointedly at the fatigues and combat boots one of the nurses had loaned me for the trip home.

  I wandered into one of the clothing shops in the airport. All kinds of batiks and cotton-gauze ethnic things were on sale there. And gorgeous long dangly earrings, the kind you could never wear on duty. I wished I had my back pay.

  “Is there something I can show you?” the young woman behind the counter asked. She had on a nice silky dress of some sort.

  “No, I’m sorry. I wish I could afford something, but I just got back from Vietnam and they didn’t give me my pay before I left.”

  “You were over there? It must have been terrible.” I felt like snapping that no, it had been a lot of fun, really, but restrained myself. She was just being pleasant. “What were you doing there?” she asked.

  “I was a nurse,” I said, and added, “I took care of GIs and also a lot of Vietnamese civilians.” I didn’t want her to think I was a baby burner.

  “How interesting.” The loudspeaker came on, announcing a flight, and she leaned forward over the counter. I leaned toward her to hear what she had to say. “You must have learned a lot about the people, then. Did you get your necklace there?” and she reached out and touched the amulet before I quite knew what she was doing.

  She let go of it fast, the bright mustard and green of her aura darkening like snow after a slop bucket has been emptied on it. She backed off. “Well, if you don’t want anything, excuse me. I have to finish this inventory.”

  I yearned to see Mom and Dad throughout the five-hour trip, but when they hugged me, I had to fake returning their hugs. I wasn’t quite up to their smiles, so very soon those smiles faded. Kansas City looked as if nothing else were going on in the whole world. Trees grew unmolested, people dressed in suits and hats with veils and high-heeled shoes that would have made running impossible. It didn’t look real to me.

  When we reached our old driveway, I felt like a teenager again. The wind chimes sang cheerily in the breeze. The pine tree in the front yard looked a little taller. All of the pets were long dead. My brother was there, and my grandma and grandpa. I didn’t know what to say to anybody. I went upstairs to my room, sat down on the bed, and stared at the pink Chinese print paper I’d picked out when I was fourteen. The last of my cat collection, a couple of Avon bottles, sat on the blond dresser Mom and Dad had bought secondhand for me. I walked over to the dresser and picked up one of the glass cats, to stroke it for comfort. Its surface was cool and smooth, but it felt warmer than I did. I felt as if my insides had been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop, cold, numb, and empty. I couldn’t see my aura anymore. I thought the muddiness I saw in the mirror probably was real dirt. It had been a long trip.

  I took off the amulet and tucked it inside my old jewelry box. I wouldn’t need it here in the world. I put on a pair of jeans that had been too small for me when I left and were now miles too big, and one of Daddy’s shirts, a pair of Mama’s shower shoes. At least I’d lost weight. Maybe I could make money introducing the Exotic South China Sea Dieting Miracle—amebiasis and tapeworms. Most of them had been flushed out of my system by various antibiotics, fungicides, and other medications, but some of them were not easily gotten rid of.

  Mom made my favorite foods: steak and homemade French fries, corn on the cob, and fresh green beans and tomatoes. My aunt made my favorite cake, buttermilk chocolate, and put on it the peppermint boiled white icing that only she seemed to know how to do. I couldn’t eat much of it. I didn’t say, “Pass the fucking salt,” as I’ve heard some of the guys say they did, but I didn’t say much of anything else either.

  So when Mom found the medal, she thought it was a topic of conversation. “Honey, this is a Silver Star, isn’t it? You didn’t tell me you’d won a medal. Can I call Mr. Mingel at the Kansan and tell him? He’s been wanting to interview you when you came home.”

  I should have unpacked it myself, before she got aroun
d to it. The fatigues I had been in when I was admitted were still in there, and that’s not the kind of thing you want your mother to see. But my attitude was “burn the whole damned thing.” My stuff from Da Nang was being sent later.

  Mama’s eyes were troubled when she opened the box someone had packed the medal in. I hadn’t brought it along. I guess whoever threw my stuff in my bag had done it. I wished Janice had come back to say good-bye. Or Llewellyn.

  “Silver Star, huh?” I asked, and glanced at it. Sure enough. I guess the general felt I needed a little higher bribe than a simple Purple Heart to keep my mouth shut. Those things take months to review and award normally. It made me a little sick to think that they were trying to buy me off with something most people earned with the loss of one or more limbs, or maybe their lives. “Don’t mean nothin’, Mama. Please don’t call the newspaper man. I don’t have anything I want to tell him.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” she said uncertainly, then patted me on the cheek. “You know your daddy and I love you and we’re very proud of you, honey.”

  I felt as if she’d hit me. Tears stung the backs of my eyes. Proud of what?

  I’d killed a man, had been the cause of death for two others, and had abandoned the little boy I’d been trying to save in a Vietcong village. Nothing had turned out right. The medal was a mockery. A Hollywood happy ending. Fuck. I’d give it to Duncan. He liked that kind of shit. I’d make up a funny story about it, and give it to him. And then later, maybe he’d hold me and I could tell him how it really was. If I could just tell everything to him, I could really start to feel at home again. That was a good idea. If I could talk to him, he’d make me feel better and then I could be a little more normal around the folks. He was living in Independence, Missouri, now, according to the third and final letter I’d received from him. I sat down on my folks’ bed and tried to call, but nobody answered.