The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  “Oh, not till I’m processed. And after your promotion, of course. Which is tomorrow, by the way, in case you’d forgotten.”

  “Promotion?” I asked stupidly. Even though promotion to first lieutenant was supposed to be automatic, the brass could withhold or delay it, as Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock had pointed out to me on a couple of occasions.

  “Don’t look so shocked. You’ve grown tremendously since you came here. You’re one of the best-organized charge nurses in the hospital and your rapport with the Vietnamese is outstanding. As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m putting you in for a Bronze Star and Joe is writing a commendation for your file before he leaves. And I’m recommending you for head nurse if my request for transfer goes through. So everything’s going to work out great with you getting promoted right away. Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock wouldn’t like leaving a second lieutenant as acting head nurse but plenty of first lieutenants are. So I won’t have to wait until my replacement arrives in country.”

  When I arrived at work the next day, I walked about six inches taller and chirped my way around the ward with more energy than usual.

  “Good morning, Melville,” I greeted one of the GI patients, “How’s the ankle doin’?” Melville had sprained it while stocking supply shelves. I suspected he had fallen off the ladder while stoned. He stayed stoned a lot, though nobody on the ward ever saw him smoke.

  “Oh, sir,” he said, “I think gangrene is setting in. Can I have a Darvon?”

  Usually I would have snarled. Today the milk of human kindness filled my circulatory system.

  “Of course you can, Melville. Just a sec.” It was a wonder I didn’t tell him to take two, they’re small.

  My promotion was held on the Vietnamese side, with Marge, Joe Giangelo, Sergeant Baker, Mai, and Voorhees in attendance. Meyers had been pulled to ICU.

  I stood at attention while Marge read me the paper telling me in Armyese that I had met their requirements (though it sounded, in typically inflated bureaucrat language, as if I had won the Congressional Medal of Honor instead of merely an almost guaranteed promotion) and pinned a set of shiny silver bars over the embroidered ones on my fatigues that corresponded to a second lieutenant’s butter bars. The shiny silver ones were for symbolism’s sake. You didn’t wear metal insignia on combat fatigues. I had learned this soon after coming in country, when the rationale of Army couture was explained to me by the supply sergeant. “No, ma’am. No shiny brass in the field. Sun catches on it and announces your arrival to the enemy, sure as shit.”

  But I looked at my new bars as if they were platinum and shook hands all around.

  I felt a tug at my hip pocket and turned around to see Ahn wearing an officious expression. “Mamasan, mamasan, la dai. Chung Wi Long say you come.”

  Lieutenant Long, in the bed directly across from the nurses’ station, was nodding a smiling endorsement of Ahn’s summons. Long had been with us about two weeks. He was an educated man who spoke both French and Vietnamese and sometimes translated for us on nights. He’d lost a leg but seemed to have accepted his loss with equanimity. He was glad to be out of action, I think, but I wished we could medevac him too. After all, when the NVA took over, as seemed inevitable, Long would still be in Vietnam. I didn’t think a disabled vet from the losing side would stand much of a chance.

  I followed Ahn to Long’s bed. In the next bed, Thai shifted painfully and gave me a tired smile. On the far side from us, Xe woke muttering from an afternoon nap.

  Lieutenant Long cleared his throat. “Miss McCulley, you have promotion. You are now chung wi, same-same me, yes?”

  “Yes. See my pretty new bars?” I flipped up my collar for him to admire them.

  “Very nice.” He reached under his pillow and held out a couple of small brass flower-shaped clusters, hooked together. “This is Vietnamese rank for chung wi. Please accept with my congratulations.”

  “Are these yours?” I asked.

  “Yes. I have more. Please accept.”

  “Oh, I do. Thank you very much.” And added formally, as I pinned them on my shirt pocket flap, where sometimes we wore extra little pins, unauthorized, of course, “I will wear this proudly. I feel very honored.” And I did. Even though no extra pay came with it, I was almost more pleased at being promoted by Lieutenant Long than I was at being promoted by Uncle Sam.

  Then, of course, Xinhdy and Thai and Ahn all had to admire my new rank, both American and Vietnamese. Thai bobbed her head respectfully. Ahn wanted to know if he could have my old ones. Even old Xe la daied me imperiously, gravely surveyed my new ornamentation, and nodded his approval. I patted his hand, despite his lordly air, and I thought his eyes brightened.

  Xinhdy took out her lipstick and a Kleenex and polished the bars for me. It was the kind of totally off-the-wall thing she was always doing to try to please me, just because she was a generous and outgoing girl. I never got a chance to pay her back for her attempts to make me glamorous.

  Sergeant Baker called me from the door. “Hey, Lieutenant, you got a visitor,” he said.

  I turned from Xe to see Ginger Phillips shuffle onto the ward, her hands on the shoulders of a gangly, crew-cut Vietnamese child in a faded pink dress.

  They met me before I came around the bed and the child threw her arms around my neck. I returned her hug, though I was a little puzzled.

  “Tran just wanted to say good-bye and thank you, Kitty,” Ginger said. “She’s going home today so she can spend Christmas with her folks.”

  “Cam ong, co,” Tran said softly. “T’ank you.” I had no idea what she was thanking me for, but I suspected Ginger had put her up to it. She had worked on ward six since a little before I had, and had continued to speak to me after my transfer.

  “No sweat, Tran,” I said, stroking her bristling head. The words had a hard time coming out. My throat had closed over and my eyes watered like an old woman’s.

  Ahn grabbed my hand as soon as I let go of Tran, and didn’t release it until she left.

  10

  I was promoted on Wednesday, switched to days on Thursday. Sunday morning I worked alone on day shift. I walked onto the Vietnamese ward to find Sarah still running around trying to get morning meds and charting done. Her face was set and tight with emotion and she would not look at me. There was something else, too, something awful about the ward that made me stop at the door and hesitate to look around. My eyes went first to Dang Thi Thai and Xe, but they both seemed to be sleeping. I was noticing that the old man looked even more drawn and drained than usual when Ahn sat up, saw me, and catapulted into his wheelchair like a cowboy in a movie, barely stopping himself from knocking me over by throwing his arms around my waist and sobbing. I knelt down to pet him and that was when I noticed Xinhdy’s empty bed.

  “Sarah, where’s Xinhdy?” I asked as casually as I could. She could have been in X-ray, or surgery. She was young and healthy and…

  “Xinhdy died, Kitty.”

  “Died?” I asked stupidly. “What do you mean she died? C’mon, Sarah, get real. I’m talking about Xinh, in the last bed? She couldn’t have died. All she had was a broken hip, for Christ’s sake. She wasn’t even on the seriously ill list. She wasn’t authorized to die.” I know that sounds like a bad joke to an outsider, but we had a seriously ill list and a very seriously ill list. If a patient was not on the very seriously ill list before he died, staff members were considered to be derelict in their duty.

  Sarah didn’t answer me, but Mai emerged from the bathroom. This time more than her hair was wet.

  “Mai…?” I began, still stroking Ahn’s back and shoulders. Mai looked away, then covered her face with her hands, and I knew there was no mistake.

  But there had to be. When I left the ward the night before, Xinhdy was perfectly okay. Well, she was restless and was sweating more than usual. She had a very slight temp, which I charted. I told Sarah in report I thought Xinh might be coming down with the flu. She’d been so cranky all evening Meyers had
asked very carefully if she might be on her period. She kept thrashing around, shifting from one position to another, demanding that things be moved to accommodate each shift. This from the most self-sufficient bedfast patient on the ward. When the other Vietnamese visited, she complained to them in a loud voice until they left again, disgruntled. Still, I figured it was just a little upset. Hospitalized people can get colds and the flu too. My God, had I missed the beginnings of some horrible fast-killing Vietnamese strain of pneumonia? The empty bed stared blankly back at me. I expected a gurney to be wheeled in at any moment with Xinh in her hip spica cast leaning up on one elbow to smile and wave hello like a Rose Bowl princess as she passed the other beds on the ward.

  “What was it, Sarah?” I asked. “Did she—was it some kind of flu? Were you able to get Joe?”

  “Not till it was too late,” she said. “He was over at that generals’ mess at I Corps and didn’t get back till later. Captain Schlakowski came over at eight and checked her but thought she was okay. Then we got three new patients on the GI side, and when I came back to do midnight meds Xinh was having trouble breathing. I was taking her pulse when she arrested. I started CPR while Ryan called a code and tossed me the ambu bag. The team got here right away but it was just too late.”

  “How could she arrest?” I asked. “She’s twenty-two years old.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, her voice getting softer and softer. “Joe came in to pronounce her. He said it was a fat embolism. Sometimes it happens with bad hip injuries who are bedridden for a long time. I never heard of that before, did you?”

  “No—I—where’s Joe?”

  “In surgery with one of the GIs. I don’t know how he can do it, Kitty. He was more upset than anybody. Except maybe Xe. He woke up when the team brought the crash cart and I guess he was confused by all the commotion. He tried to get out of bed by himself and fell, then kept crawling toward us. It was awful,” and now Sarah started to cry and I put my free arm around her. “I’m filling out an incident report now….”

  “Old guy’s more trouble than he’s worth, isn’t he?” I said, but my voice cracked.

  I didn’t cry until toward the end of the day, though. You aren’t supposed to cry in front of the patients, but that wasn’t it. I just couldn’t believe she was gone. Well, gone, yeah, but dead? I kept wandering back to her bed. The silence, without Vietnamese TV, was oppressive. Mai simply made herself scarce except when she had specifically assigned duties. The other patients slept, except for Thai, when I did her treatment, and Ahn, who clung to me and wanted me to carry him all day.

  The day passed in a haze until mail call. I opened a care package from home when I got back to the ward. A nest of fat, bright yarn hair ties lay in the bottom and I pulled them out. My first thought was Xinhdy will love these; and then I looked at her stripped bed and gaping bedside table. My throat clamped down. I dumped Ahn in his wheelchair and bolted for the nurses’ bathroom on the GI side. I don’t know how long it took me to stop crying, but when I did, the fog had lifted and the pain had definitely set in. I wish I could say that I nobly comforted everybody else, but we all handled it as we handled most things in Vietnam, isolating ourselves from one another until we could convince ourselves that the anguish was nonsense, that war was a tough situation and you just had to do the best you could. The patients slept. Mai went home early. The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker furiously cleaned the ward as if the President were visiting the next day. Joe was a pain in the ass when he made rounds, ordering all kinds of useless things for patients he hadn’t done more than cursory exams on for months.

  On Monday, Sergeant Baker plopped a wad of R&R pamphlets on the desk in front of me. “Forms are right there, Lieutenant. Pick your spot, fill ’em out, and get the hell away from here while you still got the chance.”

  I leafed through them. The waters of the Great Barrier Reef looked abnormally blue, the mountains of Japan steep, and I already had a camera and a stereo coming from the Pacex catalog. As for the shopping of Singapore and Hong Kong, who needed sleazy silk clothes or outdated beaded sweaters? I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm, yet I knew that Sarge was right, I needed to leave, and soon.

  Heron was leaning against Xe’s side rails when I returned from passing meds to the new GI casualties that day. He looked tired and ungainly, his body angling off in several directions to bring his face close to the still one of the shrunken old man. Xe’s left hand fluttered like a moth until it lit in the medic’s palm. As I approached them, the old man’s eyes opened. His face was agonized as he looked up at Heron, like a dog asking to be put to sleep.

  Without turning around, Heron asked, “How long has he been like this?”

  “Since last night. He fell out of bed. He was trying to—um, he was—” I broke off and bit my lip, swallowed, and continued, “One of our long-term patients died last night. She was—a friend of Xe’s. I think he was probably so scared for her he forgot he couldn’t walk—”

  “Who was it?”

  “Xinhdy—Xinh. The girl in the last bed. It was—a sort of freaky thing….” My voice died away as my throat closed off again. “I think—I think he’s grieving—”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Heron said bitterly. Then he turned to face me. “Sorry, McCulley. But you have no idea how special this man is.”

  “I’m starting to. You’ve spoken of it before. And—some things have happened.”

  “Like the deal with the men on the other side of the ward?”

  “Heron, I want you to know it wasn’t that I didn’t mean to help Xe. But I saw Meyers coming and I still had to dress Dickens’s legs and I don’t think the men would have really—”

  He gave me a disgusted look. “Of course they would have. But I understand when you’ve got two patients who both need you, your inclination would be to stay with the white guy.”

  “That’s a goddamn lie,” I said.

  “Okay, okay, cool it. Can you get someone to relieve you? Good. Then let’s go for a nice walk. If you really want to know about Xe, I’ll tell you. But I don’t want to talk anymore in front of him and I don’t much like spending time in rooms full of people. It makes me jumpy.” He stopped, said something in soft Vietnamese to Xe, and bowed slightly. The old man wearily inclined his head and closed his eyes, his hands crossed on the amulet in the gesture I’d seen so often. Only this time it reminded me of the classic pose of a corpse holding a lily.

  I let Sergeant Baker know I was going to be off duty for a few minutes and led Heron through the screen door at the back of the ward, through the curtain of rain draining off the roof of the building and onto the streaming sidewalk between the perimeter fence and the back row of Quonset hut wards. It wasn’t raining hard then, but we were both wet in patches before either of us spoke again. A cool green smell wafted in from the perimeter, of ozone and fresh growth.

  Outside I saw that Heron was in worse shape than I was, though not as bad as Xe. His eyes were infrared maps, and in the blue circles lining the sockets a large vein jumped. His mustache, waxed to ferocious points like the toes of Turkish slippers, twitched.

  “Heron, I do care about Xe and I wouldn’t have let anything more happen to him, you’ve got to believe that. I guess I just don’t think on my feet that quickly and Meyers and Feyder were quicker. But I’m getting ready to go on R&R. Can Marge or someone on the ward contact you if anything happens to Xe?”

  He shook his head dismally. “Nope. That’s why I came over today. To say good-bye. I’m being reassigned to the field next week. I got in a little trouble I couldn’t talk my way out of.”

  “Was it with drugs? Because I know you use pot—I saw you with Meyers and Feyder….”

  “Did you?” He looked mildly amused. “Is this a bust?”

  “Come off it. What I mean is, you use drugs, well, pot anyway, you have access. I just need to know. The drugs aren’t part of this power of Xe’s you’re talking about, are they? I mean, you don’t have to be on something to see it
? He doesn’t, like, give people something…”

  He stared me down. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. You tell me Xe is some kind of native doctor and I’ve seen him get hurt twice trying to help other people, but the experiences I’ve had with him were like how I’ve heard LSD trips described. So when I saw you pushing pot to my corpsman and one of my patients, it made me wonder, you know?”

  He looked down at his foot and nodded, his lips compressed. “Yeah, well. The smoking’s got nothing to do with Xe, but I’ll tell you how that is for me. I think we need a little light anesthetic sometimes to get through this war. A man who’s good and stoned isn’t so uptight he’s going to go shooting up whole villages, you bic? But that’s my thing. Xe doesn’t need drugs for the kind of high he generates.” He turned his back on me as if he had had the last word, and started walking back toward the ward.

  I walked backward until I caught up with him, passed him, faced him. The sun came out behind him and I had to squint up. His lantern jaw shuttled back and forth beneath the pointy mustache. “Fine. I won’t argue with you. Listen to me a minute, okay? Let me tell you why I even asked about drugs.”

  I told him about the ball of multicolored light around Xe and about the day I’d worn the amulet. “But was it really just that I was sick, or did I see something? Father O’Rourke said it could have been auras. Is that right? And if it is, why did I see them on everybody that one day when I wore the thingy he has around his neck, but then the other time I just saw his aura, but brighter, without wearing the necklace?”

  “He allowed you to wear the amulet?”

  “He insisted. He was going to surgery, and Xinh—I—he told her he wanted me to wear it if he was going to take it off.”

  “And you saw colors?”