As I passed my P.M. meds on the Vietnamese side that night, I felt something tug at my fatigue blouse. “Mamasan, la dai [come here]. Mamasan…” I turned and there was Ahn, enthroned in his chair, one hand tugging at my shirt, the other pointing at an I.V. about to go dry.
“Why, thanks, Ahn,” I said, and hurried to replace the bottle.
Sergeant Baker looked up from the bedpan he was cleaning and shook his head. “My, my, looks to me like you done got yourself adopted, Lieutenant McCulley.”
7
I chattered to Tony about Ahn, Xe, Xinh, and Heron in the Jeep on the way to the PX Monday.
“Yeah, those little gook kids are cute okay,” he said when I told him about Ahn. “Just as long as you watch your wallet.”
“Well, I think it’s pretty amazing how fast a little hooligan like that can start acting like a normal kid once he’s treated like one,” I said smugly.
His arm was around my shoulders and he rubbed his hand back and forth, his long fingers curling and uncurling. It felt good, exciting and comforting at the same time.
“And did I tell you about Xinhdy?”
“Who?”
“Her real name is Xinh. She’s a Vietnamese girl on the ward, really sharp. Mai’s been teaching her English. She’s always talking and laughing and polishing her nails and stuff—she reminds me of this girl I was in training with, Cindy Schroeder. So I called her Xinhdy the other day, just sort of teasing. She got real offended and said, ‘No Xinhdy, Xinh.’ I asked Mai to tell her she reminded me of my friend in America whose name was almost like hers, and that was why I called her that. Yesterday one of her friends came to visit her and called her Xinh, and she was so funny, Tony. She stuck her nose in the air and said, ‘No Xinh. Xinhdy.’”
He turned his head toward me a little and I saw my face reflected in his sunglasses. “Yeah, well, babe, you want to watch getting too close to these people, y’know? Don’t get me wrong, I know how you feel. Our hooch mouse is a great gal, and it’s hard not to feel sorry for some of those poor bastards we pick up in the villes. But we’re going to be pullin’ out of here one of these days, and these folks will be on their own. You better hope your friends are carrying rockets for the VC at night if you care about what happens to them later.”
He wasn’t telling me anything new, but I was trying to amuse him with human-interest stories and he was insisting on turning it into hard news. Nobody wanted to talk about that. I’d already asked him about his background and family and how it went in the field and he was vague about everything. What was left? Talking about helicopter chassis?
“Hey, cheer up,” he said, giving my shoulder an extra-hard hug. “Have I got a surprise for you.”
“What?”
“Wait till you see.” He led me inside the PX, a hangar filled with counters and shelves holding junk food—nonmeltable candy like M&M’s and Pay Days, potato chips and sticks, canned chocolate milk, sodas—paperback books, mostly either smutty or the action-adventure kind all about what fun war is, and magazines whose illustrations looked like a day in the gyn. clinic from the doctor’s point of view. They also had cheaply priced expensive watches, which was good because the sand worked its way through watch cases, and I’d ruined two already, and perfume. The only other items for women were beaded sweaters from Hong Kong that looked like costumes for midget leading ladies in forties movies. In the back of the building was a walled-off section set up as a snack bar, where a Vietnamese entrepreneur offered anemic hamburgers certified by the PX to be beef instead of dog, and a plate of cold chips. That was where Tony steered me. But at the last moment he blocked the door with his body and said playfully, “What’s your favorite Italian food?”
“Spaghetti?”
He shook his head.
“Pizza,” I moaned.
“How long since you had some?”
“What’s this all about?” I thought he was teasing me. It was a favorite game when the ward was quiet to dream of American junk food: “I’d give twenty dollars for a taco.” “I’d give thirty dollars for a slice of pizza.” Though we got spoiled rotten on steak and lobster regularly, we lusted for cuisine from McDonald’s, Shakey’s, and Taco Bell. One doctor, returning from R&R in Hawaii with his wife, had built a little shrine of a Big Mac Styrofoam container, foil wrapper from fries, and a fried-pie box.
He stepped aside and gestured. “Voilà. An authentic Vietnamese pizza parlor.”
They’d tried. Under a nylon parachute awning, two skinny men and one bewildered-looking girl, wearing white aprons and chefs’ hats, industriously made dough and popped things into ovens. The product was nothing for the Italians to worry about. It consisted of a crust, floury enough to make you pucker, topped with a little ketchup and pieces of hot dog. They’d completely missed the point about cheese. But we ate it and laughed and pretended it was the real thing.
We went to the beach for a couple of hours and swam and played in the water and lay on the sand. I enjoyed it more than I ever had before, because nobody interrupted us or tried to hustle me with Tony there. He acted as if he owned me, which was just fine under the circumstances. I was delighted to be with such a good-looking, sexy guy. I knew that back in the States I wouldn’t have such a knockout for a boyfriend. It was just that in Nam the competition was all among the men. I wondered if there was any way I’d be able to hang on to such a fellow when we returned home. Shared experience maybe? I was pretty sure my family would like him and Duncan would be absolutely mute with jealousy—if not on my account, then because Tony was everything Duncan just talked about being.
We drove back to the compound. My hooch maid bobbed at us as she emerged from my room. I turned on the fan. He put Joni Mitchell on the tape deck. And there was a lot more trying each other on for size in every conceivable erotic position. Instead of being all steaming flesh, as it said in the novels, it seemed to me that we were more all knees and elbows with no place on that narrow cot to go without being in the way. I started giggling and he growled, “What’s so funny? Why don’t you close your eyes?”
I thought he had to be kidding. I shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes sex just strikes me as funny. Why?”
He didn’t answer but finished soon after that and grabbed enough clothes to run over to the doctors’ shower. I rinsed off too, but I returned to the room before he did. Well, hell. Sex was sometimes funny to me, but mostly because I was having a good time and having a good time always meant laughing, as far as I was concerned. Jesus, I couldn’t summon up all that dead-serious panting passion you saw in the movies. Tony was serious enough for both of us. At some points I’d felt like a patient getting a particularly thorough examination. I had the sneaking suspicion the whole afternoon would go on my chart with detailed graphs of my anatomical assets and failings. But I didn’t want it to end. I just wanted him to think I was flawless for a little while before he started criticizing. I picked up my guitar and started playing a song I’d learned from a Tom Paxton songbook. Sarah poked her head in my door. “Do you know ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ Kitty? There’s one chord I can’t get.”
We sat on lawn chairs on the porch trying to figure it out, and by the time Tony joined us I was feeling better. The South China Sea was gleaming beyond the beach, the palms were waving on Monkey Mountain. Judy, who was also off for the day, and the corpsman she was illegally dating joined us, chiming in on the choruses as they sat on the porch swinging their legs off the side to the rhythm as we sang.
“I’m just learning this one,” I said. “We could do the chorus together.” I sang a couple of verses of “The Last Thing on My Mind” and Judy and Sarah tried it with me, but Tony hissed in my ear, “Why do you have to grandstand? You could sing something we all know.”
I didn’t much feel like singing after that. Or talking to Tony either. I retreated to my room while they sang outside. He was doing something nobody else knew either. Pretty soon Sarah and Judy and her friend drifted away. I sat against the wall in the corner, with
my knees drawn up and a book I wasn’t reading propped up on them. Tony lingered in the doorway. “I’d better get back over to the unit.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound indifferent instead of disappointed. “’Bye.” This time he didn’t kiss me.
But he called later that night and said he had to go in the field for a while but would miss me and wanted to see me when he got back. His voice was warm and tender and I decided I got my feelings hurt too easily.
One side benefit of my new relationship was that I could now fit right in when the other girls were bitching or bragging about not just men in general but a man, the man each of them was going with, in particular. Carol told me she thought her boyfriend might be a little bit more married than he’d told her to begin with. Judy was mad that she and her corpsman had to sneak around because the brass had ruled against nurses seeing enlisted men. Sarah’s long face was wistful when she talked about her doctor boyfriend going home to his wife.
We confided in one another, and on the ward, during quiet times, I confided in Marge. She was older, had an upbeat but sensible attitude, and played the field. Or so I thought until she came back from mail call with her boots floating a couple of inches above the linoleum, a letter on Army stationery clasped to her bosom, and a silly grin on her face.
“Good news?” I asked.
She sighed. “It’s from Hal. I knew him in Japan. What a guy! He’s going to be reassigned here.”
“Here? To the 83rd?”
“No, but in Vietnam. We can see each other sometimes. He’s really a kick, Kitty. You’d like him.”
“Is he a doctor or what?”
“An MSC officer. He’ll probably be a hospital administrator somewhere. But between my contacts and his contacts, we’re bound to be able to get choppers back and forth once in a while.”
“When’s he coming?”
“In a couple of months. God, I hope he gets assigned somewhere close. Too bad Colonel Martin just got here.”
“Marge! You’d be the scandal of the post, making it with the boss—tsk tsk.”
She grinned. “Yeah. I would, wouldn’t I?”
Being rather young, I believed that if I was not the model-perfect specimen portrayed in the fashion magazines, no man would have me, so Marge’s romance came as a revelation to me. She was probably in her late thirties to early forties and a long way from being a beauty, though her pleasant personality and warmth made you forget that. She was even tolerant of the Army, a difficult thing for a reasonable woman to be, I thought. She had the same attitude toward it that many nice women married to men who are jerks but good providers seem to have toward their husbands. It’s a living, and he means well. She had lots of buddies and was friendly with both enlisted men and officers, married and single. But it was obvious that this was far from your casual kind of affair. You could almost see little hearts popping out of her head, the way they did in the cartoons.
And for a while there was ample time to daydream. We admitted casualties in twos and threes instead of bunches, and saw men with bad backs and twisted ankles. Most of them wanted rest or drugs or both.
Mai was teaching Xinhdy English in her spare time and Ahn hung out with them when he wasn’t following me around. I decided to join them and see if I couldn’t learn more Vietnamese in the process. I didn’t, as it turned out, but provided everyone with a lot of amusement as I tried to pronounce Vietnamese words. Ahn and Xinhdy were both much better pupils. Sometimes we watched the Vietnamese TV station, which featured singers of wavery-tuned songs doing what seemed like a cross between the oriental version of grand opera and soap opera against backdrops that were strictly from Sunday school skits. It wasn’t very interesting to me and sounded like fingernails on a blackboard after a while, but it was better than the bullshit you saw on Armed Forces TV. Mai, Marge, Sarah, and I sometimes had mock battles over who got the honor of changing Dang Thi Thai’s dressing. Thai would watch us with her eyes dancing, and laugh through the painful procedure, encouraged by the healing she could see for herself if she twisted far enough. Soon she could be grafted, and once that took, we could start physical therapy in earnest and maybe get her back on her feet.
If Ahn had adopted me as his mother, he took to Xe as a grandfather. He’d sit by the old man’s bedside and chatter at him, bring things to show him, try to involve him in conversations. Xe wasn’t interested for a long time, but finally Ahn and Mai convinced him to join them at Xinhdy’s bedside to chat.
This sort of thing went on intermittently for several weeks at a time, you understand. New patients were admitted and discharged, but our long-term patients were the core group and watched one another and us for entertainment the same way we watched them. But a lot of the time they slept or vegged out in front of the TV, and those times were pretty trying. Hectic as the pushes were, they were easier to deal with in some ways than the weeks and weeks of twelve-hour shifts that dragged by while you tried to find something to do.
When the patients were napping, the last roll of tape was neatly lined up with the next on the dressing cart, the bedpans were cleaned, and the empty beds gathered dust, the day shift sat around the nurses’ station and talked to each other.
Sarah and I alternated on nights, so I rarely got to work with her, since the head nurse, Marge, had to be on days all the time. We were supposed to have another nurse, but she had yet to arrive. If she’d been there, she’d have been as bored as the rest of us.
So Marge and I sat around discussing such burning political issues as what we planned to order from the Pacex catalog before we went home. She also waxed lyrical recalling her tours in Japan and Okinawa, talking about the shopping in those places. If you wanted cameras or stereo equipment you went to Japan, everybody knew that. But Hong Kong was the best place for all-round shopping, tailor-made anything, fast and cheap, sequined evening clothes and sweaters, jewelry, pirate editions of the latest bestsellers.
I could almost see it in all its quarter-to-half-priced glory, and it cheered me in my hour of need, when the patients were surly, when Tony was gone or we’d had a fight. Nonmaterialism and spiritual values are all very laudable, but when you’re in a situation where everything including your job involves questionable ethics, things are the safest possible topic for conversation and food for thought, except maybe for bargains, which are even better. Talking politics, work, or morality was confusing and depressing. Talking about home was even more depressing. Armed Forces TV showed news reports of what was allegedly happening in Vietnam, but to me they always looked wrong. Exaggerated numbers of Vietnamese dead and understated numbers of American dead and wounded may have been good propaganda, but seemed disrespectful of the sacrifice made by those dead and wounded who had not been counted. And anyway, only the naïve new recruits, the terminally gung ho, and lifers believed all that crap about assisting the South Vietnamese in repulsing the Red Peril.
The Vietnamese I saw seemed more worried about getting enough to eat, keeping their families together, and not getting killed than they were about political ideals. Coming back late from China Beach, when the moonlight glistened on the flattened Miller High Life and Schlitz cans covering the Vietnamese huts with tin-into-silver alchemy, and the candlelight shone through the strands of plastic beads (a phoenix, a peacock, a dragon) curtaining the doorways, I imagined what the family gathered around the candle talked about.
“How many watches did you nab today, Nguyen?”
“Thirty-four and four very fat wallet, honorable mamasan. See here, thirty-four dollars and a J. C. Penney credit card. Do you think you can get a catalog from one of the Americans whose houses you clean?”
“I’ll work on it. Daughter, how many tricks did you turn today?”
“Fifteen, Mama. One soldier was mean and wouldn’t pay me, but then another gave me this ring. How much do you think we can get for it?”
“We’ll ask your papa when he gets home from carrying rockets for the VC. He’s had a hard day of guard duty at China Beach.�
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“I wish poor Papa didn’t have to moonlight like that.”
“War’s hell, my son.”
If I were in their shoes, I’d probably have done the same thing. Tony had hit the nail on the head. The peace marchers were eventually going to pressure the President into getting American troops out of this mess, and when they did, the people who’d been loyal to us were going to be up shit creek. It probably didn’t make much difference to them if they were growing rice for South Vietnam or for North Vietnam, as long as they were able to eat it themselves. Some of the senior officers I’d talked with said America should have supported Ho Chi Minh to begin with. And some of the guys with a couple of years of college claimed that the war was not about communism and freedom but about boosting the economy and making Southeast Asia safe for the oil companies and the international military-industrial complex, whatever that was. While that sounded pretty paranoid, it was less hokey than saying that the whole war was strictly for the sake of political ideals. The only people who said anything about political ideals recited their lines in the same way church ladies said “blood of the Lamb” and “fallen from grace,” or the Communists reputedly talked of “imperialist running dogs.”
Shallow, materialistic bitch that I was, I preferred talk about something real like stereo equipment and clothes.
We were sitting there gabbing one afternoon when Sergeant Baker wandered in with the mail, eavesdropped a moment, and while Marge opened hers gave us the low-down on Hawaii and on Thailand, where he’d spent a tour and knew all the best bars and brothels. Meyers, returning from being pulled to ward eight, chimed in that he wanted to go to Australia because he’d heard the women were real friendly. Married men like Voorhees tried to go to Hawaii to meet their wives. I wanted to go to Australia as much as anything because nobody I knew had ever been there.
The Healer’s War Page 12