“You okay in there?” I asked, knocking on the door. More sobbing. “Look, can I help you? Are you ill? I’m a nurse. Please, just answer me.” But the sobbing grew louder.
Oh hell, I wouldn’t catch anything on the floor of the L.A. airport I hadn’t already caught in Nam. I lay down and peered up under the door. A skinny Vietnamese girl squatted with her feet on the toilet seat. As I watched she leaned back against the flush button and shrieked again. To go through a war, and refugee camps, and a brave new world, only to be freaked out by plumbing. I wriggled under the door, unlatched it, and helped her down from the seat. She couldn’t have been more than seven. She tugged at my hand and I squatted down beside her so I wouldn’t look so tall, and scooped her up, then showed her how the toilet flushed.
“Where’s mamasan, huh, kiddo?” I asked her, and carried her to the sink and showed her how to wash her hands, then carried her out into the lobby. I had Shirley’s number, but I didn’t need it. Shirley, carrying a toddler, came barreling back through the door, followed by a frightened-looking young woman with a child on each hip and another toddler clinging to her skirts. When Shirley saw us she stopped and put her free hand over her heart, panting exaggeratedly. “You found her.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking for someone with a free hand to hold her. There wasn’t anyone and it would have needed a crowbar to dislodge her fingers.
“Mrs. Huong has too many kids to keep track of, I think. Would you mind walking with us out to the van?”
“Sure,” I said. It didn’t look as if I had much choice. When everyone else was seated, Mrs. Huong reached for the little girl. The child clung to the thong around my neck until she was sure her mother had her, and as I released her, her fingers touched the amulet. A warm rush went through me as we formed a triangle, and the energy formed a circuit; a tentative mauve-pink light, a little grayed down, but definitely growing brighter, sprang up among us. Mrs. Huong did not smile, but her expression lightened with relief at another hurdle overcome. Life after war. It happened. I had seen hundreds of people in the last few days who had lived through it, who were still trying to live. And there was nothing I had seen that most of them hadn’t seen, nothing I had had to do that many of them hadn’t had to do, and maybe worse. I couldn’t contaminate them, I couldn’t shock them, and yet a kid who had been born and raised amid all that ugly, numbing horror had more awe and wonder at push-button flush toilets than I had at the idea of Disneyland. I watched the van depart and then headed back to the hotel. Shirley would pick me up tomorrow morning, to see some of the temporary facilities her group had arranged for the refugees, and to take me to the airport to meet more. They needed a lot of help, she said. Meanwhile, I had things to do, preparations to make. I wondered if Charlie Heron was still stoned all the time, if he was alive, if he was interested in making a trip to L.A., and if I still had his number.
Why I Don’t Tell It Like It Is, Exactly
When I visit the Vietnam War Memorial in April this year for the first time, unlike a lot of veterans I don’t expect to recognize any of the names. My GI patients were in and out of our MUST unit hospital in Danang so fast that I never really got to know them. Besides, when they left, they were going back to “The World”—to Okinawa or Japan to stabilize and then back to the United States. The names I remember are not likely to appear on any memorials, although the people they belong to may by now be dead. The names I remember are almost all Vietnamese, the names of civilians I worked with sometimes for months because there was no place other than our hospital that was safe enough to give them the time to heal. I doubt any of my patients made it to the United States as refugees, even if they had wanted to come, because they were not officials or people with jobs important to us; they were mostly farmers and shopkeepers and people caught in the middle.
The Healer’s War is as much about these people as it is about American nurses and helicopter pilots and ground troops. I told the story through the perspective of a girl very much like the girl I used to be because I felt that even in fiction it would be difficult for me to understand exactly the depths of pain, fear, and conflict my patients and other Vietnamese people experienced. Especially because there are so many Vietnamese refugees living in the United States now, I wanted to share what I knew of their stories. I hope it will give their new neighbors some insight into the world the refugees left. The only parts of The Healer’s War that are not heavily fictionalized are the stories of my Vietnamese patients.
I chose to write the book as fiction because, as somebody is frequently misquoted as saying, fiction is supposed to make sense out of real life. And if there was ever an episode in my life that needed sense made out of it, it was Vietnam. In a nonfiction account, I could talk only about myself, what I saw and felt. I wasn’t very clear about that when I started writing. At the University of Alaska in Fairbanks I studied Asian history, but the first time the professor pointed to Vietnam on the map I became nauseated. Like many veterans, I had deliberately shoved the experience away, and if friends had not started asking me questions and saying, “You never told me you were a nurse in Vietnam,” I wouldn’t have realized what a black hole in my spirit the war had become. I looked at it sideways, with shame and dread, and shared only the funny stories. I remembered well how uncomfortable and sometimes hostile even people very close to me had been when I tried to talk about my life in Nam when I first returned to the United States. As I researched the book in order to give it a broader perspective, as fiction, I began to realize how many other people in all capacities shared my feelings. Foot soldiers, helicopter pilots, and nurses alike spoke of tragedies they still carried with them, twenty years later. Vietnamese people spoke of homes lost, families divided, friends betrayed. Journalists, medical people, entertainers, Vietnamese refugees, former Viet Cong, and protesters for peace, as well as foot soldiers, were as full of conflicts about the war as I was. And the children and relatives of veterans and the ones who chose not to go just didn’t understand. So I tried in this fictional work to blend my own story with the stories I had heard in Nam and later in the States from veterans and to be fair—to show the good and the bad, the help and the damage, the kindness and the cruelty, and the equally inexplicable bonds formed with an enemy and hostility from friends, which made it so impossible to deck everybody out in black hats and white hats or to know what was the right thing to do and when to do it, always supposing you wanted to do “the right thing.”
Writing the book as fantasy helped me take it even further—I realized that many of my feelings about Vietnam, much of my emotional experience, were not the result of what I personally saw, but the result of what I heard, what I learned about, the undertow of despair at not being able to make any discernible difference. I wanted Kitty to go into the jungle, not to show what a heroine she was or I wanted to be, but to provide a more vivid picture of the terror felt by the villagers, who had to try to please both Viet Cong and U.S./ARVN troops if they wanted to stay alive, and the fear and bewilderment of American soldiers who wanted to be like their World War II vet fathers and give candy and nylons to the nice Vietnamese and kill the enemy Vietnamese, but who had no way of knowing which were which. In a true story, or a straight realistic novel, honest writing would have required that an unarmed American woman in hostile territory with only a Vietnamese child amputee as a companion be killed within the first couple of pages after the helicopter crash, which would have made The Healer’s War a damn short book.
Writing a fantasy about Vietnam, however, allowed me to keep my protagonists alive by having a wise old Vietnamese healer give Kitty a variation on the standard magical enabling device. The device, unfortunately, cannot help Kitty destroy Evil, as most magical enabling devices are able to do. It can, however, help her recognize danger and try to avoid it, and it helps her recognize sickness and damage and try to change it.
In the course of researching The Healer’s War, one day I watched a movie about American prisoners of war. That night I dreamed tha
t I was taken prisoner in a place I knew was Tibet and put into a largish room with a whole lot of other prisoners, all of whom I knew to be heroes of some sort—astronauts, medal of honor winners, etc. It was a rather sexist dream—everyone else in the room was male and a hero except me. But the story that unraveled in the dream was so powerful for me that I woke up remembering it vividly. I won’t say too much more about it here since that might spoil the story (it does have a bit of one of those O. Henry twists that I’ve always enjoyed so much but are so often deplored these days). But, ever the mercenary free-lancer, I decided before the goose bumps the dream had evoked had faded to write it up as a short story with the idea of selling it to the late, lamented Twilight Zone magazine.
Some time later, I mentioned to Janna Silverstein at Bantam/Spectra that I had this idea I couldn’t get out of my mind and it was making current projects difficult to work on. I told her about the dream, and it gave her goose bumps too. She suggested that I might want to submit the story to the Full Spectrum anthology Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy were compiling. I spoke to Lou about it in terms of deadlines, since I was just finishing The Healer’s War and trying to start another book. Lou expressed interest, if I could finish by the deadline. Meanwhile, still drained of words and emotion by The Healer’s War, I attempted to get to work on a new novel, for which I had a six-month deadline. I got out a few pages, but as the deadline for Full Spectrum approached, I felt a compulsion to set aside the novel and work on the short story.
I am not a particularly fast writer—at least not of fiction. Usually I feed my conscious mind lots of information and then my subconscious takes a long time to process it and spits out a dollop for me every once in a while, while I sort of string words together in between times. So I had forty pages of short story that wasn’t quite working and not much novel to show for two months’ work when I met Lou Aronica at Norwescon, a science fiction convention in Tacoma, last year. I asked again when the Full Spectrum deadline was and over dinner told Lou the dream I’d had.
About a month later, when I was due to take a trip to England and the Full Spectrum deadline had passed, I had to confess that neither short story nor novel had come together yet. In trying to write the short story, I was finding I had neither enough external information from the dream to make a believable setting nor enough internal information about the characters. The story I had in my head was more about abstract symbols in a surreal place, and to translate that to readers, I needed to understand the people and place and what they symbolized. When I explained this to Lou, he said he had been thinking about it and wondered if my dream wasn’t the skeleton of a novel rather than a short story. I had been arriving at a similar conclusion, and the story was still so strong for me that it continued to make work on the new novel hard. Eventually, we agreed that I would shelve what I had been working on and start working on the book about the dream.
Research had to be concentrated on two areas—the setting, Tibet, and the characters, who were prisoners of war and heroes. This was all foreign territory to me, and other than the POW movie, I couldn’t imagine why I had dreamed about Tibet of all places. Fortunately, I had recently moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, to a town full of adventurers, artists, and causes (our sister city is Jalapa, Nicaragua, to give you some idea). Unfortunately, our old library has been allowed to deteriorate, so I needed to buy the books I wanted to use for my research. To this end, I wandered into Phoenix Rising, the local New Age store, figuring it would have books about Tibetan Buddhism. It did, as well as books on adventures in Tibet, the people and history of Tibet, and an array of other esoteric information. The owner later took pity on my newcomer’s blues and invited me to her Thanksgiving party. Several of her guests had traveled to Tibet, were involved with Tibetan Buddhist groups, and had read extensively about Tibet. From these folks I got many leads on good books to read for my research.
Among these were the classics, Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer, Austrian mountaineer and former tutor to the present Dalai Lama, Warriors of Tibet, by Jamyang Norbu, a Khampa tribesman tricked into collaborating with the Chinese during the 1959 invasion, Wind Between the Worlds, by Robert Ford, a British radio operator taken prisoner by the Chinese during their invasion and imprisoned for five years in a Chinese prison camp, and Magic and Mystery in Tibet, by the intrepid Alexandra David-Neel, a French adventuress (and Buddhist) who defied the conventions of the early part of the century to travel in Tibet and learn about the Tibetan religion and philosophy and the most secret ritual magic.
I also read Neon Lotus, by Marc Laidlaw, another Spectra author, who used the background of Tibetan magic and the Chinese invasion as material for a wonderful science fiction/fantasy novel. And of course, I reread Lost Horizon, by James Hilton.
Delving into the stories of prisoners of war has been another aspect of my research. I’d read lots about the holocaust as a girl, but the prison camp in my setting is very different from that. Nevertheless, I read Terence Des Pres’s book on survivors of the death camps and learned about what sort of mentality allowed some to live, while others, perhaps initially healthier, died. Fellow writer Bill Ransom also suggested two books, one by an ancestor of his, John Ransom, who survived Andersonville Prison in the Civil War to write the Andersonville Diary. The other book he suggested was by the famous e.e. cummings, before he changed to lowercase, called The Enormous Room, about cummings’s experiences being imprisoned by French allies during World War I. The conditions of the camps, the injustices perpetrated, and the prisoners’ reactions are somewhat different, but gave me a more complete picture of the mentality of both prisoners and guards and just how much humanity it might be possible for each to keep.
And of course, to make the story real, I have to know not only the prison world but the world from which my characters come, an earth somewhat in the future, which makes this new book not only a fantasy but a bit of social science fiction. It seems to me that technology may be less of a factor for change than how people choose to solve certain economic, military, environmental, and social problems that exist right now. I want my characters to reflect their own backgrounds, which are, because of the nature of the story, from different periods in the development of the North American continent. The central viewpoint character is a woman who has been a perpetual student but can find little wisdom and even less application for it in her world, and who eventually, unable to find employment or to continue her education, submits to government imperatives that she leave the nicely ordered civilian world to go into the military and perform a meaningless and trivial job. Other characters are a medic who as a boy was an itinerant bird-cleaner, a test-tube baby raised by the army to accept his role as a killing machine, and a peace activist who is, as part of his job, a demolitions expert.
One sad aspect of my dream was that in its time period everything had been spoiled or exploited in one way or another. The best thing about writing the book about the dream is all of the new territory it has enabled me to explore.
ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH
Acknowledgments
The perspective, extrapolations, fantasy elements, and selection of story material in this novel are entirely my own. This story is a work of speculative fiction, not an autobiography, although some of the more mundane aspects and background are based upon my own experience as a nurse in Vietnam. This work does not, however, claim to be representative of the viewpoint of any group or of any other person but me. However, I have obtained nonjudgmental help, support, information, and reference materials from the invaluable sources listed below.
I would most especially like to thank John Swan for generously sharing his experience as a field medic, combat soldier, Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center counselor, and human being, for helping me cope with the initial stages of this book, and for introducing me to the Fairbanks Combat Veterans Rap Group. Another debt is owed to a Vietnamese lady whose perspective was of real help but who prefers to remain anonymous. Thanks also to Mack Partain; Megan Lin
dholm; Dr. Sharan Newman; Dr. Peter Cornwall; Janna Silverstein; Karen and Charlie Parr, my parents; Don and Betty Scarborough, my agent; Merrilee Heifetz, her assistant; Kathilyn Solomon and others at Writers’ House; and Walt Williams of the Seattle Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center. In addition, I owe a great debt to all of the veterans who have been courageous enough to tell their stories, whether they thought what they had to say would be acceptable or not. Without their example I would not have been able to write my story. Particular thanks to Lynda Van Devanter, author (with Christopher Morgan) of Home Before Morning; to Cheryl Nicol, a portion of whose story is in A Piece of My Heart; to Patricia L. Walsh, author of the novel So Sad the Hearts, based on her experiences as an American civilian nurse who treated Vietnamese patients in Da Nang; and to Huynh Quang Nhuong, author of The Land I Lost, a portrait of the author’s boyhood in rural Vietnam before the war. Also thanks to those who collected the stories of other veterans: Keith Walker for the excellent A Piece of My Heart; Kathryn Marshall for In the Combat Zone; Stanley Goff and Robert Sanders for Brothers: Black Soldiers in Nam; Wallace Terry for Bloods; and Mark Baker for Nam, among many others. I owe special gratitude to Robert Stone for suggesting Dispatches by Michael Herr, to Shelby L. Stanton for advice on technical aspects of the story (all mistakes are purely mine, however), to Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, and to Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann, editors of In the Field of Fire, for suggesting that writers of fantasy could have anything to say about Vietnam.
About the Author
ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH, a former nurse and a Vietnam veteran, is the author of seven other Bantam novels—The Christening Quest, The Harem of Aman Akbar, The Unicorn Creed, Song of Sorcery, The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas, The Goldcamp Vampire, and Bronwyn’s Bane—all humorous fantasy. She has recently moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Washington coast, where she is working on a new novel about prisoners of war.
The Healer’s War Page 35
