The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  The door cracked and a round brown face with a hawkish nose poked in, looked mildly interested at what it saw, and backed out again. “Spec-5 Lightfoot, ma’am. I came for Mr. Devlin. We’re on red alert now. Need to—”

  “Tonto? That you?” Tony asked sharply, sitting up and pulling on his shorts and trousers as quickly as any fireman. “That’s a roger, kemo sabe. Time to saddle up. We gotta didi.”

  He did lace his boots, but he was still buttoning his shirt as he ran out the door. He ran back and dropped a kiss on my nose. “’Bye, babe. Call you later.”

  I nodded and listened until his boots hit the bottom stair.

  Still, it was a good thing I’d spent a little time in bed that evening, because the rocket attack started a short time later and I spent the rest of the night under the bed, in a T-shirt, panties, flak jacket, and helmet, keeping the cockroaches company, hugging the plywood.

  What I was actually supposed to do, what we were all supposed to do, was grab flak jackets and helmets and head for the sandbag-reinforced bunker hunching up between my barracks and the one facing it. Usually, nobody even bothered to vacate the officers’ club. We hadn’t received heavy fire in so long that the bunkers were not taken seriously. During my first rocket attack, I had dutifully reported to the cavelike little shelter to find the chief of internal medicine suavely sipping a martini and reading an Ian Fleming paperback by flashlight. By the next time, he had DEROSed (left the country) and the bunker was unoccupied. I took one look at the dismal, hot little hole and thought of coiled cobras and scorpions and snuck back up the stairs to hide under the bed.

  Which was what everybody else who paid any attention to the shelling did. I had the procedure perfected by now. I took my pillow, flak jacket, helmet, usually a paper fan and a Coke, a book and a flashlight. It was a little like playing house under the dining room table when I was a kid. Usually I didn’t mind it too much. The floor was hard, but you needed your mattress on top of the bed to shield you. That particular night I read the same sentence several times before giving up. I was plenty cool now, and I cursed Tony for being out there flying around making Vietnam safe for democracy when he should have been under the bed with me.

  Then I thought about him flying around up there with all those rockets whistling through the air, and I wished I could be working, just to take my mind off it. Over on the wards, the staff would be moving the patients who could be moved under the beds. Those who couldn’t would have mattresses piled on top of them. Several times already, I’d had to give meds on my hands and knees. The GIs with the facial injuries kept asking for their weapons, which were locked up, and I kept wishing I could slide under one of the beds, too, and huddle next to someone till morning. Even though I was supposed to be protecting those guys, I felt better knowing that they were there, under the beds.

  You could joke your way through a shelling over on the wards, and act tough. It was less funny to lie alone listening to the shrieking rockets, the mortars crumping like God stomping around out there thoroughly pissed off.

  Mentally, I composed a letter describing the rocket attack. Not to Mom and Dad, of course. I glossed over this kind of stuff when I wrote to them, knowing it would scare them a lot worse than it really scared me. But it sounded nice and dramatic when I wrote to Duncan and might make him worry about me a little, the shit. In my imaginary letter I told him about Tony, too—well, not everything, but enough to make him jealous. I’d have to get around to writing that sometime, I thought. Then, if I was ever found with shrapnel through my throat like that nurse who was killed while sitting on a patient’s bed, Duncan and Tony would both be sorry.

  I had some good moments there imagining Tony berating himself for leaving me alone, and Duncan in tears when they sent my pathetic medals home to him (of course, they wouldn’t. They didn’t send anything to people you wished were your boyfriend. They sent all your stuff to your parents). But I got tired of that eventually. I was pooped, and the noise was giving me a headache, and my own dumb game didn’t make the one going on outside seem any less stupid.

  It was fine for those guys to run around at night and shoot things at each other, but how was I supposed to work if I had to toss and turn all night on the damned plywood? Probably I’d catch my death of cold, too.

  If something was going to hit me, I wished it would just hit me. Otherwise, the whole war should just shut the hell up so a person could get some sleep. All that noisy crap was just a nuisance anyhow. Nothing ever hit inside the compound. The VC couldn’t afford to hit the 83rd. Who else would they be able to trick into taking care of their wounded? Once when George spent the night on guard duty and got pulled to work the E.R. the next day, he returned to the ward shaking his head and muttering, “They had a gunshot wound of the buttocks down there? Man, I swear that looked like the same ass on the same sapper I hit last night. Friendly as hell this morning, though. Loves baseball, apple pie, and Elvis like you wouldn’t beeleeve.”

  Finally, about 0300, choppers began thudding onto the pad, and their steady drone lulled me to sleep.

  When I went to work that morning, the ward was transformed. The day before, we’d had only two beds on the GI side filled; now we had only two empty. Twelve bottles dangled from poles and Sarah sprinted from one to the other upending bottles long enough to squirt meds into the rubber caps or inject them straight into the new, special little chambers that came with some kinds of tubing.

  The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker ferried wash water, razors, and cigarettes from the nurses’ station to the patients.

  “Hey, Sarge, can this dude have a drink of water?” Meyers called.

  “Private Garcia here wants a cigarette, but he’s got a chest tube and bottles. What d’ya think?” Voorhees called.

  Sarah rehung a bottle, then consulted her clipboard. “No, he’s going to surgery,” she called to Meyers. “Absolutely not. Not till he’s off O2,” she said to Voorhees. “But you can give him a drink of water if he wants. They operated on him last night.”

  Marge grabbed an armload of charts and threw a clipboard at me. We followed Sarah through the ward and she gave us a running account of each patient’s wounds and what had been done for him.

  The patients were mostly quiet, not saying much. They were fresh from the field, from the ambush or firefight or whatever it was that got them. Most of them had been waiting wounded for a chopper, then waiting on the chopper and in the E.R. to see if they were going to die or not, how much of themselves they were going to have to lose to get out of the war. Some were still groggy from surgery, others groggy from pre-ops before going to surgery. They all looked a little dazed, pale under tans or sunburns.

  The ward buzzed with a kind of macabre carnival frenzy like the feeling I’d always had in Kansas after a long hot spell when the wind blew up and the radio blared cyclone warnings. My adrenaline rose to the occasion, jerking me from being half-awake to a clarity of mind that damn near amounted to X-ray vision. Sergeant Baker and the corpsmen, and even Marge, rushed from one end of the ward to the other, frowning with concentration but with a lively urgency to their voices and movements, making little jokes with one another and the patients.

  I scribbled fast notes and started preparing the next I.V.s, slapping bottles onto the counter and decapitating them, injecting sterile water into dry powdered antibiotics and shaking ampoules until my hands were streaked with white grainy leakage of ampicillin, Keflex, and Chloro-mycetin. I picked up some of the manic feeling from the others. We looked like a recruiting poster, selfless healers doing our bit for the boys.

  As the patients began to wake up, from sleep or shock or anesthetic, they mostly seemed fairly happy, and in spite of their wounds, there was some justification for it. They would be out of it now—out of the boonies, out of range, out of Vietnam. Clean sheets and a bath and a pain shot were more comfort than some of them had had in a year and clearly filled them with awe. Most of them remained somewhat subdued, but relief was at least as prevalent as disma
y in their reactions to their situation. The magnitude of their losses, the full impact their wounds would make on their lives, didn’t hit most of them right away. It was like jet lag. One minute they were in one piece in the middle of a firefight, the next they were safely tucked in at the hospital, not feeling sick but with some part of them they had come to take for granted broken, crushed, full of holes, or missing. But that was the bad news, and it would take time to sink in. The good news was that the show was over and they were going home. It was as if they thought that when they went home, everything would be made okay again. They’d be given their DEROS papers and their medals along with those pieces of themselves they would need to make it back in the States. I don’t think it dawned on very many of them at first that those pieces had to stay behind, in the field, on the E.R. floor. Back in the States, they’d begin to realize they’d been gypped.

  I’d already seen that side of it back at Fitzsimons, on the orthopedics (read “amputee”) ward.

  My civilian experience with amputees had been with elderly diabetics who lost limbs to wound infection. The guys I treated at Fitz were not elderly. They were all about nineteen, and before getting wounded every damn one of them thought he was immortal, that getting hit was what happened to the other guy. And their wounds were not gradual. Overnight they lost their mobility, their manual dexterity, their futures, their self-respect, and, in their own minds at least, their manhood. Sometimes they lost their families. Strong young men weren’t supposed to be cripples.

  And there I was, barely twenty-one years old, fresh out of a dorm full of other girls, knowing nothing about war, and damned little about men, maybe less about myself, or what kind of messages I was sending, or how to handle the responses I got.

  The idea was I was going to be professional, tough but understanding. I wasn’t going to mind a little old thing like a missing limb. I was a nurse, after all, I saw whole people, not just wounds or the space where parts that were missing were supposed to be.

  It didn’t quite work out how I’d planned it. My patients at Fitzsimons were experts on tough. I tried being seriously empathetic, but that was taken for pity and I was told angrily by a man who almost believed it, “Hey, I got nothing to feel sorry about. Sure I lost a leg, but you know how much they’re gonna have to pay me for that sucker? Man, thousands and thousands. I’m set up for life!” And I didn’t know how to take it when somebody offered me a necklace of Vietnamese ears, showed me pictures of mutilated bodies, or told me about the torture of prisoners.

  The one that bothered me most was the handsome young guy with football muscles who purred in my ear the whole time I was wrapping the stump of his right arm, telling me with considerable relish about the rape and execution of a Vietcong nurse. I made the mistake of meeting his eyes once while I bandaged him. His eyes shone like a little kid’s on Christmas Morning and a drop of saliva dewed one corner of his mouth as he told me how they had shoved explosives up the woman’s vagina and lit the fuse, and what the mess looked like afterward. I could see him getting off on it, telling that story and watching me, putting me in her place. I wanted to slug him with the nearest bedpan. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that it was only his arm that had gotten blown off.

  That was only the one guy, of course, and now that I think of it, that and all of the other gross-outs, the coarse randiness, must have been a kind of advance revenge on females for anticipated defeats. A wounded war hero can be a romantic figure, but he’d better have nothing worse than some colorful scars or some vague disease he picked up in the tropics. He’d better have all his parts in pretty good working order if he comes home from an unpopular war and wants to impress girls with his potential as a combination lover and meal ticket. Some of the patients had already been rejected, put down hard. The worst example of that I knew of was Tommy, who had a crazy tobacco-stained grin and an ironic sense of humor, and who wheeled around visiting the new guys, giving them shit to keep them going. “Hey, babe, c’mon to the beauty shop with me,” I heard him say in his broad Brooklyn accent to a guy with a bilateral amp of the legs who was busy cussing out his physical therapist. “You need a pedicure to get in shape for swimsuit season.” And the guy laughed a little and settled down to work. Tommy could get away with that because he had lost an arm, an ear, and an eye as well as both legs. And when his family came to visit him at the hospital for the first time, his wife and his parents took one look at him and left, and that was the end of it. Atrocities were by no means confined to Nam.

  But even understanding all that, I had trouble dealing with the horror stories and with the angry, aggressive sexual advances. If you’d asked the colonel, she’d probably have told you that I invited them, that I teased the poor, helpless patients. And okay, when I say I was relatively inexperienced, I do not mean I was a virgin. I was, in fact, the black sheep of my nursing class, and all of the gently reared small-town girls in my class came to me as they got engaged and asked me where the heck to put their knees. The thing was, I didn’t consider myself easy to offend and I tried to act as if anything that was said to me was cool, that I could handle it.

  Usually I could. Usually passes were joking or wistful, frightened guys asking for reassurance that they were still men.

  There were maybe only four or five out of over a hundred patients who really gave me a hard time, but nobody told me how I was supposed to deal with it, and nobody stopped them, so I went to work every morning with my gut in knots.

  I wanted to do what I was taught in training and be accepting and nonjudgmental, see, or at least act as if I were. But these guys saw through me, or thought they did. What they saw was that I was rejecting them as maimed. And it was true that the stumps bothered me at first. It was true that what I found sexiest physically about Duncan was his beautiful strong hands and his long legs. But lots of guys had those and they didn’t turn me on the way Duncan did. What I loved the most about him was his wit, his passion for history and poetry, and his ability to make stories come to life, his silliness. I would still love him if he lost a limb or two as long as he kept those qualities. But I guess that was the problem, really. With rare exceptions like Tommy, the loss of limbs seemed to mean the loss of those other qualities, too—temporarily, at least. That was what I really couldn’t deal with. That and the fact I knew that if I were in their place, God forbid, I wouldn’t take it any better than they did.

  One day three of them surrounded me while I was changing a dressing and suggested that maybe since I was this helping person who cared about their problems and all, I could help them out with a little physical therapy at a local motel. In a normal setting, I’d have told them flatly that nurses don’t date patients, period. But quoting rules at them provoked the same response as spitting at them. I wanted to tell them that even if I had been the whore they seemed to think me, I didn’t do gang bangs. But then, part of me felt like, Why can’t you guys be fair? You know how this game is played. If one of you had the decency to say thanks, we appreciate your trying to help, how about coming out to dinner and we’ll get better acquainted, well, yeah, even if I wasn’t completely bowled over by your charm you might guilt-trip me into something, which wouldn’t be as good as if it was real maybe, but at least we’d both get laid, and feel moderately okay about it.

  Instead I told them I was in love. Which I was, but Duncan determinedly had nothing to do with my sex life. I thought, these guys don’t want to make love to me, they don’t even like me. They want to hurt me, they want to make me feel worse than I already do. So I said I was sorry, I was not available, then added with hypocritical nursely courtesy that maybe somebody else would be interested. They said who. I was squirming by then. And it honestly crossed my mind that maybe I just was too prudish, that maybe if I were nonjudgmental, more secure sexually, this would not sound like an invitation to rape. Whatever. The bottom line was that I threw them a sacrificial name, another lieutenant who had confided in me that she was horny. Needless to say, she never spoke to me again,
and when the story got back to our C.O., I was bawled out and accused of pimping and, what my instructor seemed to think was worse, not delivering what the men said I promised.

  But promises were being broken all around. Most of us in Nam were the children of the last war that was ever supposed to be fought anywhere in the world. All of the baby boys were promised that they would grow up and become successful and all of the baby girls were promised that someday their princes would come. Then along came the goddamn government and bingo, it sent the princes off to battle communism and issued them the right to hate anyone not in their unit. Then it sent them home in body bags, or with their handsome faces melted or blown away, their bodies prematurely aged with disease or terrible wounds, and their idealistic souls turned into sewers. And those were the survivors. Where the hell did that leave me and all the other women? Realistically, I knew that Duncan was not going to change his mind and fall madly in love with me. So what if the guy who was supposed to, my real true love, my Mr. Right, was on one of these wards somewhere, so fucked up I’d never recognize him? Worse, what if he was lying in some rice paddy decomposing under a poncho? If he was among the merely wounded, I could only hope that whoever was taking care of him was better at salvage operations than I was.

  Having to deal with all that again was part of what scared me about facing GI casualties on ward four, but as my grandmother would have said, I was borrowing trouble. Nobody offered me ears, nobody made any moves toward me except to grab my hand for reassurance, or to tell me I smelled good. Even the horror stories were somehow changed, though actually, many of them were the same garbage I had heard at Fitz. Hearing them batted back and forth across the ward among members of the same unit, I realized that some of those stories were nothing more than folktales the guys told one another to keep their courage up, make them feel like the meanest, the baddest, the worst, so bad even hell wouldn’t want to fuck with them. So I tuned it out, and watched the major and Joe and Sarge and did what they did and listened to what they said.