The Healer’s War
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The Healer’s War
A Fantasy Novel of Vietnam
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
This book is specifically for Lou Aronica, who asked the right questions.
It is also for my fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead, male and female, military, civilian, and pacifist, American, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Australian, Dutch, Laotian, Cambodian, Montagnard, Korean, and Chinese. And for our children, in hopes of arming them with hard questions to ask leaders selling cheap glory.
Contents
Glossary
Prologue
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART TWO
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
PART THREE
23
Why I Don’t Tell It Like It Is, Exactly
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Glossary
Spellings are phonetic and meanings are approximate, not literal, translations. Many terms are not actually Vietnamese but pidgin. My apologies to any Vietnamese speakers for inaccuracies. I wish I had had your assistance when compiling this.
Ba: Vietnamese term for a married woman.
Bac si: Vietnamese term for a doctor.
Beaucoup: French for “much” or “many,” used in pidgin Vietnamese-English.
Bic: Vietnamese term for “understand.” (Bicced is author’s Americanizing of past tense.)
Cam ong: Vietnamese term for “thank you.”
Cat ca dao: Vietnamese term meaning “cut off head.”
Chung wi: Vietnamese term for a lieutenant.
Co: Vietnamese term for an unmarried woman or girl.
Com bic?: Vietnamese term for “Come again?” or “I don’t understand.”
Dao: Vietnamese term for “head.”
Dau: Vietnamese term for “pain.”
Dau quadi: Vietnamese term for “much pain.” (Dau quadied is author’s Americanizing of past tense.)
DEROS date (military jargon): The day a person can leave an assignment; in Vietnam, when one leaves country.
Didi or didi mau: Vietnamese or pidgin used often by GIs and Vietnamese; approximate meaning “Go” or “Go quickly.”
Dinky dao: Vietnamese or pidgin for “crazy.”
Dung lai: Vietnamese term for “Stop.”
Em di: Vietnamese term for “Shut up.”
La dai: Vietnamese term for “Come here.” (La daied is author’s Americanizing of past tense.)
Mao: Vietnamese term for a cat.
Mao bey: Vietnamese term for a tiger.
MOS: Military Occupational Specialty.
Sin loi: Vietnamese term for apology.
Tete or titi: Pidgin for French word petit.
TPR: Temperature, pulse, and respiration.
Triage: As used in medical emergency situations, this term refers to the process of sorting victims of a mass casualty situation or disaster into categories, i.e., those who can be treated and released, those who can be saved by quick intervention, and those who will need more extensive help if they are to recover. The last category are those so seriously injured they will probably die without immediate, extensive care and may die anyway. In triage situations, patients are treated in the order listed, the worst injuries requiring the most care left until last so the greatest number of people can be treated.
Prologue
The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can haul myself out of one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked sheet under me is not wet jungle floor, that the pressure against my back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle or a terribly wounded Vietnamese but my sleeping cat. When someone in a suit or a uniform frowns at me, it doesn’t always make me feel as if the skin over my spinal column were being chewed away by pointed teeth. Sometimes I can just shrug, and recognize the authority in question as an uptight asshole with no legitimate power over me—none that counts, that is, nothing life-threatening.
Still, most of the time, I retain the feeling that it’s the nightmares that are real and my life here and now that is a dream, the same dream I dreamed in the hospital, in the jungle, in the Vietcong tunnels. I’m always afraid that someday I’ll be dragged out of this dream, back to Nam, to a war that goes on and on for real in the same way it replays itself in my memory.
“That is what stops your power, Mao,” Nguyen Bhu tells me. “You cannot provide a clear path for the amulet’s power until your own mind is clear. When you turn your face from your fear, that fear bloats with the power you give it. Look it in the eye, and it will diminish into something that is part of your life, part of your memory, something that belongs to you rather than controls you.”
Nguyen Bhu sweeps the floor at his cousin’s grocery store. Charlie says he’s a former Cao Dai priest, a mystic like old Xe, and the wisest man to escape from Vietnam. He is sixty and looks ninety, has lost three fingers from his right hand, has more sense and is far less expensive than a psychiatrist whose lifelong concern has been to avoid obesity rather than starvation.
And most important, Nguyen Bhu knows what I have to say, and insists that it is not too much to ask people to believe and forgive. Charlie knows part of it, but he has his own nightmares to chase. Of the others who know, I keep hoping that at least one or two survived, and that someday I might see and recognize them among the refugees. One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and find me, and we can heal together.
Part One
The Hospital
1
I didn’t know old Xe was a magician the night I began to be aware of his powers. If anybody had told me there was anything magical going on that night, I’d have told them they were full of crap, and assumed they either had a sicko sense of humor or had been smoking too much Hanoi Gold.
I was in the worst trouble of my life, to date, and had brought someone with me. An eleven-year-old kid lay comatose, barely breathing, on the bed by my chair.
Every fifteen minutes I repeated the same routine.
Right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, I pulled up a spare lump of flesh from each of the little girl’s limbs and pinched hard, silently daring her to kick me or slug me. Then I ground my knuckles into her chest, counted to ten, and prayed for a sign of pain.
A kick or a slap, a whimper or a wiggle, even a grimace would have gladdened my heart. But the kid just lay there, her disproportionately long limbs limp as wet rags, her breathing so shallow that it barely stirred her skinny ribs a quarter of an inch up or down.
I peeled back her eyelids one at a time and dazzled them with the beam of my flashlight, checking to see if the pupils contracted at the same rate, to the same size, or if they expanded at all. If they stayed fixed, or if one was the size of a dime while the other stayed the size of a pencil lead, both of us were in truly deep shit. I had to try them five or six times before I could be sure they were not contracting more slowly than they had fif
teen minutes before. I’d been performing this same cruel routine continuously since she had been wheeled back from O.R., already deeply unconscious. Thank God, they had not yet anesthetized her for surgery.
“Come on, baby, come on,” I prodded her encouragingly, as if she were my kid up to bat at a Little League game, and pumped up the blood-pressure cuff that circled her skinny upper arm. I had to pump it and release it three times before the faintest throb of pulse came through the membrane of my stethoscope. Partly that was because her pulse pressure was so weak. Partly it was because the papasan in bed five had started up again.
“Dau quadi,” he whined (“much pain”), twisting in the padded cuffs binding him to the side rails. He sounded like a night in a haunted house, with the rails rattling like hail on windows, his sheets thrashing like those of a particularly agitated ghost, his bedsprings squeaking like unoiled ancient portals.
“Dau quadi!” he shrieked this time, his voice shrill with the hostility head injuries inevitably display when and if they start to heal.
All eleven of the patients then on ward six, the neurosurgery ward, were Vietnamese with some kind of trauma to the head. Most of them were civilians, war refugees. Before, we’d had two poor GIs on Stryker frames. One was a gork—a vegetable, who didn’t know that he wouldn’t ever move by himself again. The other guy wasn’t so lucky. Both of them had been medevaced to Japan that morning, so tonight there were just Vietnamese on this side, them and George, the corpsman, and me. Ginger Phillips, who was officially in charge of the graveyard shift that night for ward six, was staying on the other half of the ward, across the hall. The EENT patients were over there, injuries and ailments of the eyes, ears, nose, and throat, a couple of GIs with sinus infections and a couple more with superficial facial wounds, as well as elderly Vietnamese suffering from cataracts and facial cancer. Men and women were mixed together on both open wards, which was true throughout the hospital. On most wards the division was between GIs and Vietnamese instead.
Papasan dau quadied again and the old man in the next bed stirred restlessly. I pulled my stethoscope out of my ears.
“Can you shut papasan up, George?” I asked. “I can’t hear a damned thing for the racket.”
George nodded, rose from his semislumped comic-book-reading position, and lumbered sleepily down the aisle between the beds. I waited while he threatened in a gentle, soothing voice to do hideous things to the old man, pulled the gnarled and squirmy body up in bed, and smoothed the sheets. Then I tried again. I could hear the systolic—140—but the diastolic eluded me until the second reading—it was 60. Up 6 points from the previous reading. A widening pulse pressure—the difference between the first throb I heard and the last—was a sign of increased intracranial pressure. But last time the spread had been 144/52, so it had decreased slightly. I hoped I could take that as a good sign.
The girl’s respirations were still so slow and shallow I had to measure the movement of her ribs against the sheet to be sure she was breathing. Her right radial pulse, before slowed to 50, was now 56, but that was not necessarily a good sign. As the pressure on her brain increased, her pulse might start racing as her squashed brain sent wild signals to her heart, panicking it into an essentially useless flurry of activity. I took pulses in both wrists, at both ankles, and at her carotid pulse, at the base of her jaw. They were within two points of one another.
Her Foley catheter was still draining urine from her bladder, her I.V.s were still dripping on course. I wrote everything down on the chart at the end of the bed, sat on the metal folding chair, and used a towel to wipe the sweat off my face and neck.
The sweat wasn’t just from the heat. It was from fear: fear that this child was going to die and I was going to have to live with it, and with myself. The fear soured in my throat and I leaned forward again and took her hand. It was clammy with sweat. How could I measure intake and output when she was sweating gallons like that, poor baby?
Her bald head was bandaged with a strip of white gauze, like an Indian headband, and her face didn’t look like a child’s. It looked like death, the high cheekbones jutting through the shiny flesh like carnival apples bleeding through caramel.
Her original problem was a depressed skull fracture. She’d tumbled off a water buffalo, something Vietnamese kids always seemed to be doing. I only wished the water buffalo had sole responsibility for her current condition. But unfortunately for us both, the poor kid had fallen right off that water buffalo into the hands of a numskull nurse, namely, me. Now I was waiting to see if my carelessness had turned her simple, easily treatable injury into something that was going to kill her or make a zombie out of her.
I forced myself not to brood about how unfair it was, not to worry about what they would do to me if she died, or about what I could have done to prevent it.
Instead I held on to her hand and, in my mind, held on to her spirit, apologizing over and over and begging her to stay. “Tran, come on now, baby, keep it together. You know Kitty didn’t mean to hurt you, and she’s sorry, honey, she’s really sorry. Just come on back. That shit of a doctor will fix your head and your hair will grow back and you can go back to mamasan and papasan and eat that bad old water buffalo, okay? Aw, hell, sweetheart, I’m so sorry….”
The old man in the next bed, another depressed-skull-fracture case, with bilateral above-the-knee amputations, shifted slightly in bed so that his head lolled toward us. His name was Cao Van Xe, according to the strip of adhesive that had been taped to his wrist. His arrival had caused something of a stir. Some idiot with Special Forces had called a chopper out to a really hot landing zone just to load this one old man, who was probably going to die pretty soon anyway. The pilot had given the redheaded GI who loaded the old man a piece of his mind, but the man had grinned and waved and walked back into the bush. The object of all this dissension slackened his lower jaw so that it seemed to drop into a grin.
“What’s with you, papasan? You think I’m as dinky dao as you, huh?”
Maybe it did sound crazy to be carrying on a monologue with first one comatose patient, then another, but in nursing school they taught us that hearing is the last sense to go, the first to kick back in. So I always chattered at my unconscious patients, telling them what I was doing, commenting on what was happening, and musing on life in general, as if talking to myself.
Papasan’s breath emerged in a sort of groan, and I turned in the chair and leaned toward his bed, touching his bony hand. “You okay, papasan?” His other hand fluttered like a bird to his neck and touched what I figured was a holy medal. To my surprise, the hand under mine twisted and caught my fingers for a moment before sliding back to lie flaccid on the sheet.
Well, good. At least somebody was responding. I patted his hand again and turned back, a little more hopefully, to Tran.
No dice. She hadn’t stirred. Her breath was inaudible. I held on to her hand with both of mine and concentrated. I had done this before, while trying to hang on to someone who was dying, collecting my strength, and any other strength I could suck from the atmosphere, God, or whatever, building it into a wave and flooding it through my hands into that person, almost as if I could wash her back to me, back to herself. She lay there quietly, and when I pulled my hands away, her small pale ones had red marks from the pressure of my fingers.
George clomped up, large and olive-drab, his walrus mustache drooping damply at the ends. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not good,” I told him. “BP’s a little better, I think. It’s about time for an encore.”
“I’ll do it, Lieutenant. You get a cup of coffee, why don’t you? I just made some.”
“Thanks, but I’ll do it.”
He shrugged and clomped back to the nurses’ station.
As soon as his back was turned I leaned over Tran again, but when I looked into that vacant little face I just lost it. My calm, I’m-in-charge professional mask, the one no nurse should be without when on duty, dissolved. I had to pretend I was w
iping sweat away again.
Then I repeated my routine: vital signs, neuro checks, and as many prayers as I could fit in between.
The prayers were for Tran, because I didn’t know anything else to do, not because I’m this holy, religious person. Like all my family, I’ve always been a lukewarm, nonchurchgoing, nonspecific Protestant. People like us pray only on ritualized occasions, like funerals, and when there’s a really big crisis. It isn’t nice to pray for something you want for yourself, according to my upbringing, and God expects you to help yourself most of the time. But this was for Tran, not for me—not mostly. Well, not only me, anyway.
Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe God wasn’t listening because my heart was not pure. Every time I squeezed my eyes shut and started mumbling humble apologies for my sin and error I ended up snarling that it wasn’t all my fault. Even though I knew damned good and well I was going to have to take the whole rap. Despite the fact that pre-op orders were supposed to be written, pre-op medications and all narcotic medications double-checked and double-signed. But our high-and-mighty new neurosurgeon had handed down his commands to our high-and-mighty new college-educated head nurse, the twit, who had demanded that I do it, damn it, didn’t I know enough to give a simple pre-op?
I should have. I’d done it often enough. But not pediatric doses, and not on head injuries, not that often. I hadn’t been giving meds long on this ward. And I was so mad at their sheer goddamned pompous arrogance that I kept jumbling it up in my head. I was mad a lot in Vietnam. My best mood, in the heat, with the bugs, and the lack of sleep, and these gorked-out patients, was cranky. But that day I had gotten so mad that .25 cc of Phenergan turned itself into 2.5 cc of Phenergan. And I gave it to Tran.
As soon they came to take Tran to surgery, I got to thinking that that had looked like an awful lot of Phenergan. By then the doctor was on his way off the ward and the head nurse was in a more human frame of mind and I asked her….