The Lieutenant's Nurse

by Sara Ackerman

  Now, the way the barracks and hangars were being targeted with such precision, he thought it better to remain outside and ask God for an extra string of prayers. A bushy hedge with delicate white flowers was all that stood between them and half the Imperial Japanese Navy.

  Whoever let this happen was done for, Clark would see to that—if he made it out alive.

  “Sir, we are at war,” Jack said, as if it needed to be announced.

  Despite himself, Clark was damn impressed with the Japanese pilots. Perfect formation, perfect timing. People liked to talk about how the Japanese were an inferior breed, but he knew differently. Here was the proof.

  Never underestimate your enemy.

  The lead bomber now tucked into a steep dive and headed straight for them. “Cover your face,” Clark cried, rolling over facedown into the sandy dirt. Jack was next to him with his body over Brandy.

  He thought of Beth, and then Eva and how he’d let her slip away so easily. Idiot. Why hadn’t he fought harder for her? Tat, tat, tat, tat. Boom. Twenty feet away, half the building wall ripped off. A scream next to him. A yelp. Shards of wood and metal and stone whizzed past. He found it hard to suck in any air. Something heavy on his leg. Had he swallowed sand? And then a warm tongue licked his face, nipping and barking. For a while, he tried to stay with it, but the darkness tugged at him.

  And the smell of roses.

  PURPLE HEARTS

  A pale-faced sentry stood in front of the gate at the entrance to Pearl Harbor. He held both hands up as though he would stop the car with his own body if they tried to plow through. “Military only, we have a war going on here. You’ll have to turn around, and I’d advise you to get the hell away—fast,” he yelled.

  Time had seemingly changed directions, with the yellow morning light turning back into twilight. A smoky darkness had settled around them. Eva wondered if she’d made the right call by coming here to ground zero. Who knew if the hospital was even still standing.

  Wallace reached into his pocket and waved a badge around. “I’m a colonel in the United States Army. Let us through, boy,” he roared.

  The sentry squinted, trying to inspect the badge, but Wallace pulled it away and tossed it onto the backseat. Eva picked it up. New York Transportation System, it said.

  “Sir—”

  “Do you still want a job when this thing is over?” Wallace said.

  Joe revved the engine, forcing the sentry to jump aside and let them through. Eva wouldn’t have wanted that job any more than she wanted hers at the moment.

  “God bless you,” Wallace said as they sped past into the fury.

  When they screeched to a halt in front of Tripler, it looked like a battleground. Ambulances and American Sanitary Laundry trucks were lined up in front, unloading wounded. One truck had a bedsheet with a red cross painted on it, and even that was strafed. One hundred years of house calls and nursing school could not have prepared her for this. Men on makeshift stretchers—or no stretchers at all—were laid out in the grass out front. The line of cars hardly moved. All the while, Japanese planes were still busy crack shooting Battleship Row and Ford Island.

  Thank God Ruby hadn’t come.

  “We should have pulled over back there, at this rate we’ll never get to the front. Come on,” Wallace said to Eva, opening his door. “We’ll see you in there, Joe.”

  Neither of them were in uniform, but that hardly mattered. She followed closely at Wallace’s heels as he barged through the front door. Nurses scurried everywhere, setting up cots in the hallway and ushering newcomers into closets. There was a sickening smell of blood and burnt skin and fear.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Wallace asked the first nurse whose attention he could get.

  She shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said, turning back to the tattered soldier leaning against the wall.

  “I know where the operating room is. Follow me,” Eva said.

  A feeling of calm determination overcame Eva. Whatever it took, she would not let these boys down. She would stay here until the building blew up—a real possibility—if she had to. Moving through the hospital, Eva felt as though she were in some unearthly place. One man they passed lay moaning on a cot and hugging his severed leg like a teddy bear. There was an M and a T marked in ink on his forehead. Another appeared dead except for the gurgling coming from his chest. Eva wanted to bend down and help these men, to hold their hands and assure them everything would be fine, but there were too many just like them packing the hospital. More than she could count.

  No one wants to die alone. In the end, you just sit with them and hold their hand. Nothing is more important. Her father’s voice. And don’t be afraid to look ’em in the eye.

  Wallace announced himself at the nurses’ station outside the OR. “Dr. John Wallace, head trauma surgeon at your service. Show me where to go and I’m all yours.” He motioned to Eva. “This gal needs to be put to work, too.”

  “In there,” the nurse said to Wallace, and he was off.

  Eva explained who she was. “I’ve been assigned Maternity. But I have plenty of experience in surgery.”

  “You could be a first-year student and we’d use you. Anyway, the women and babies have all been transferred to an underground bunker.”

  “I’m not in uniform,” Eva pointed out.

  The nurse snorted. “The closet to your left. Grab one and make yourself useful.”

  “Where should I start?”

  “Anywhere.”

  The closet door was already open and on the floor lay a wide-eyed soldier with blood-soaked bandages wrapped thickly around both his arms. He looked all of seventeen. “Nurse, I think I lost my hands,” he said.

  Eva couldn’t imagine him being conscious and talking if he’d lost both his hands. “It may feel like that now, but we’ll take care of you. You just rest, you hear me?”

  “But my hands,” he said, this time more softly.

  His eyes closed. Eva quickly slipped off her dress and stepped into the crisp white uniform she pulled from the shelf. Whose dumb idea had it been for nurses to wear white? The dress was for someone twice her size, but it was the only one left. She took the belt from her own dress and cinched it around, feeling half-ridiculous but ready to get to work.

  This time, back at the nurses’ station, a woman directed her to the front lawn. “We need help with the new arrivals. We can’t keep up.” She handed Eva a tray with syringes. “Give them a shot of morphine, and if they aren’t critical, or if they’re beyond saving, keep them outside. And don’t forget to put an M on their foreheads.”

  Eva wanted to do more. She knew she could. “But I have experience in anesthesia.”

  The nurse eyed her. “Maybe later. We need you outside now.”

  The wounded kept pouring in. Civilian automobiles, grocery trucks, you name it. Eva went about greeting them and directing them where to go. Most of the time, she managed to keep her expression even. Never show them how bad it is, her father used to say, even when you want to turn around and make a break for it, or throw up your breakfast. But every so often, one was so awful, tears began to leak out of her eyes. She said an extra prayer for those.

  A few raindrops began to fall and she cursed. Not now, for heaven’s sake, not now. The cloud soon passed. With every arrival, she was almost afraid to look for fear of seeing Clark’s face among the dead. In most cases, she could tell right away just from their size. A strange mixture of relief it wasn’t him, and sorrow for the injured man. Some were so far gone, she directed them to be carried to the far side of the field, where the dead were being laid out and covered in blankets or any available material. They were probably the lucky ones, who never knew what hit them.

  Sometime in the next half hour or so, Grace ran up to her. “Eva, you’re alive! We could see the fires from church and it looked like Queen’s Hospital had been hit.”


  They hugged briefly, but tightly. Grace still smelled of lavender and soap. Eva thought how easy it would be to collapse into a sobbing mess. She ordered herself to hold it together.

  “I could use a hand. Go grab me some more morphine syringes and blankets and anything else you can find that would be useful out here,” she said.

  Grace darted off.

  “Miss, can you help me?” said a man on a litter. His whole left side was crinkled like pink parchment paper and he was stark naked but for a towel draped over his groin.

  No, I probably can’t.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “My buddy Ralph. Is he here?”

  “What does he look like?” she said, taking hold of his good hand.

  “Like a bulldog. Black hair, freckles.”

  Ralph could have been one of hundreds. “Tell you what, I’ll see if I can find out. In the meantime, you just keep on being a hero, okay?”

  “I’m no hero, miss. Ralph is the one who pushed me into the boat. He gave me his spot,” the man said.

  Suddenly, the whine of an engine grew louder and louder. She turned to see a plane trailing thick black smoke beelining toward them. The red circles under the wings were like big fat targets. Everyone just stood and stared, frozen in place.

  Eva was caught between wanting to run and wanting to scream, and doing neither in the meantime.

  Where were all the antiaircraft guns? Or American fighters?

  “He’s gonna crash!” someone yelled.

  The plane came so low—just skimming the kiawe trees—that Eva saw the pilot’s face crack into a smile. One gold tooth. Burning fuel stank up the air. At the last minute, the pilot waved and pulled the nose up so it squeaked past the roof of the hospital by a hair.

  “Someone kill that motherfucker!” the man she had been helping screamed.

  If only Eva had a gun now, she would put her shooting skills to good use.

  A few minutes later, Grace came back with a white face and a tray of syringes. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she announced.

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  Grace’s voice cracked. “Eva, there are arms and legs in the hallway and the blood is two inches thick on the floor in there.”

  “How do you think the men feel? Hold yourself together for them. They need you at one hundred and twenty percent,” Eva said softly.

  Grace’s lip quivered and her pale blue eyes scanned the mess around them. Broken men, burned men, dead men. Eva silently prayed. Please, God, stand by us here, we need all the miracles You’ve got.

  “We better get to work,” Grace finally said, standing up straighter and pulling out a tube of lipstick.

  Eva gave her a puzzled look.

  “They’re out of markers,” Grace said.

  They took turns injecting morphine and tetanus vaccines and marking foreheads with lipstick. An M and a T. Wounds were cleaned and debrided and sprayed with sulfa. Clouds came and went and the skies were quiet once again. It seemed like the Japanese planes had flown back out to sea. For the moment. The boys were saying it was only a matter of time before the ships came to shore and then the real trouble would begin.

  Soon, more burn victims started coming in, in droves, and Eva and Grace returned to the hospital. Men had been dipped in fuel head to toe. You could smell them coming a mile away. Grace disappeared and came back with a bucketful of tannic acid. They ended up dipping the gauze into the acid and draping it over the burned body parts. In some cases that meant the whole body.

  “We need plasma to treat these burns,” Eva said.

  “Good luck. We’ll never have enough.”

  At some point, Grace, who wasn’t even in uniform, took a good look at Eva. “Why is your dress so big?”

  “It was all they had.”

  A flicker of a smile. “You look like you’re playing dress up.”

  “Don’t I wish that was the case. And that this whole thing was make-believe. I keep expecting to wake up at any moment.”

  “I feel like I should be doing more,” Grace said as they moved down the hallway to the next room. There were more soldiers than beds. Several of the men had blackened skin and they went to them first.

  “There’s only one of you and hundreds of them,” Eva pointed out. “But I know what you mean, especially because I have experience with anesthesia.”

  Grace looked surprised. “You do? Why didn’t you mention it?”

  “Long story.”

  One of the men passed out the minute Eva shot him up with morphine, which was probably a good thing, since his legs looked like used campfire wood. Grace followed up with the soaked gauze.

  “You should be helping with the surgeries.”

  “I know. But they sent me here.”

  “Go back and tell them for heaven’s sake.”

  “I can’t tell them,” Eva said.

  “Why not?”

  Eva sighed. “Because I had to lie to get here. I promise I will tell you everything later, and trust me, it’s not what you think.”

  Grace didn’t press it. “It’s bound to be chaos. They’re probably desperate for your help. Just act like you’re meant to be there and no one will know the difference.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  Eva left Grace to sort through the injured. Half past ten and every room and every bed in the hospital was now full. It was the first time she had looked at her watch since the first plane flew over her at five past eight. In a little over two hours the world had gone from a lazy Sunday morning to a desperate fight for survival. Nothing would ever be the same.

  She looked through the rooms for Dr. Wallace, but couldn’t locate him. Upstairs, two doctors and Judy Walton came out of the operating theater with down-turned faces. Judy gave her a worn-out look. One doctor was saying, “Any abdominal or thoracic wound needs to be brought in right away.”

  The nurse nodded toward the line. “Every one of these is an abdominal or thoracic wound.”

  “God help us,” the one with his back to her muttered.

  Whether or not people figured out she hadn’t been totally honest was irrelevant at this point. She straightened her hat. “Excuse me, but I’m here to help in surgery. Willa sent me.”

  No one argued.

  “Help me get this man in here, then, and check his vitals,” he said, turning to face her. “I’m Dr. Izumi.”

  Eva felt her cheeks flush. Once the initial shock wore off, she realized he might be Japanese, but he was also on their side. Up until this morning, he was simply a man being a doctor on a Pacific island.

  Throughout the first surgery—removing shrapnel from Bobby Angelo’s arms and chest—Dr. Izumi maintained a steady hand and calm demeanor. They worked in near silence, oblivious to the other surgeries going on just feet away. He used just the right dose of ether and gave Eva a certain amount of autonomy. It wasn’t until the third patient that things went south.

  “Get him away from me!” the wounded soldier on the table screamed. “No Jap is gonna touch me. He’s a spy!”

  Eva and Dr. Izumi locked eyes. Luckily, most of the patients in the room were in some form of unconsciousness, otherwise the whole place was liable to chime in.

  “Dr. Izumi is not a spy and if you let him, he’ll save your life,” she said coolly.

  The man tried to sit up, but fell back down, clutching his stomach and wailing, “Murderer! I don’t want to die...” His voice faded away.

  They quickly got to work, pulling a piece of metal the size of a small saucer from his side. By some miracle, his spleen was still intact and he hadn’t bled out. Eva was loading him with gauze when she noticed rivulets of sweat pouring down Dr. Izumi’s forehead. The words surely had struck a chord, and she felt for him.

  At the end, he said to h
er, “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “How many lives have you already saved?” she asked.

  “I’ve lost count.”

  “There’s your answer,” she said, surprised that he was talking to her, of all people, about this. “That soldier was talking from fear. I don’t know if you’ve been outside, but those pilots have been flying so low you can see the whites of their eyes.”

  A nurse wheeled over another patient, and they immediately stopped talking. “He’s bad, Doc, severed left leg and a crushed pelvis. Jack Singer is his name,” she said.

  The man—a kid, really—was whiter than the sheet, and Eva could barely find a pulse. Something about him reminded her of Tommy Lemon, and her heart picked up speed. She could tell he wanted to open his eyes by the way they kept fluttering, but couldn’t muster the strength. Finally, he succeeded.

  “Brandy,” Jack moaned.

  Eva touched his shoulder and leaned close. “We have something even better, it’s called morphine.”

  “Where’s Brandy?” he said even louder.

  Eva felt something rub against her leg. “What the—” A second later, a small sooty dog stuck its nose out from under the table and began a barely audible whine.

  Jack’s hand dropped down and the dog licked it lovingly. “Can you make sure my Brandy is okay?” he said, staring as deep into Eva as he possibly could, diving past her defenses. A pleading I know I’m not going to live kind of look. She’d seen it one too many times today.

  “Don’t you worry, Jack, you’ll be able to take care of her yourself,” she assured him.

  Lacking any strength, he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  What was she doing? Making promises she couldn’t keep to a dying kid. Over the years, this same kind of weakness in her father had turned their home into a sanctuary for orphaned animals.

  Across the table, Dr. Izumi had attached a plasma bag and was readying the anesthesia. When he turned and saw Brandy, he froze. “How did that dog get in here?”