I hugged Ahn close to me with my free hand. Papasan breathed a deep sigh and opened his eye to fix it on us. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then the side of his mouth that was not drooping downward twitched up. His good hand nudged mine toward his chin.
“Xe want you take his joolry, mamasan. Same-same last time.”
I rallied from the impact of that compelling stare, which had made me feel almost that I was Xe instead of me. I couldn’t stop to think about it until after I’d taken his pulse, called the doctor, done what I could to preserve his life. I tried to untangle my hand from his so I could take his pulse. Refusing to release my hand, however, Xe carried it with him as he nudged at his amulet again. I had to take a set of vital signs before Krupman arrived, so I did as Xe insisted and removed the amulet. If Xe died, my logical side insisted I’d save it for Heron. I was just kidding myself—I knew there was more to it than that—but for Xe it was enough that I took it. He didn’t insist I wear it this time, and as soon as I stuck it in my pocket, he relaxed.
Krupman had barely begun his examination when Xe expired.
“Well, Miss McCulley,” Krupman said, “looks like your hangover from your little toot last night prevented you from giving decent care even to your pet gooks. He’s dead. Perhaps if I’d been called sooner—”
“If you’d been called sooner you could have sent him to Province to die, right?” I demanded.
“That’s it!” he said. “I’ve put up with you about long enough, young lady. You’re earning yourself an Article 14.”
I bit back what I would have said if I could have afforded to spend my afternoon at attention in Blaylock’s office.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said more meekly than I would have thought possible. “But I called you as soon as I could. I didn’t want to leave the patient alone.” Yeah, Doctor. Unlike you, I care about my patients.
“I want those other people out of here by tomorrow morning. And I’m discharging the amputee kid.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t agree with him or he’d be alarmed, and since I already knew what I was going to do, I had no reason to disagree with him. So I shut up.
“Lieutenant?”
“Sir?”
“I mean it. I expect these patients to be gone when I return in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and did busy work on the other side until he left the ward to go to surgery and heal the patients who deserved treatment.
Tricking Voorhees wasn’t necessary. Fortunately, Sergeant Baker had a long ward masters’ meeting and a farewell party for the command sergeant major of the hospital. So I refrained from telling the corpsmen about the transfer until the end of the shift. Then I gave the fastest report in nursing history and announced that I was going to ride along in the Jeep. But as Voorhees and I rolled Ahn’s wheelchair out the door of the E.R. toward the motor pool, Tony landed. He cut it a little close to suit me, but he was there.
“Oh, wait a minute, Gus, will you?” I said. “Tony will want to say good-bye to Ahn.”
I had to shout over the ripple of the blades. The spin and wind of them blew rainwater everywhere and lifted my poncho up over my face.
“What’s going on, L.T.?” Voorhees shouted, trailing me to the pad. I helped Ahn out of the wheelchair and handed him his crutch. I didn’t want to get Voorhees in trouble, but then, it wouldn’t be so great if he reported me as AWOL the minute we left the pad.
I leaned over and cupped my hands to the corpsman’s ear and shouted, “We’re taking Ahn to Major Canon in Quang Ngai.”
He shouted into my ear, “Krupman will have your ass.”
I shouted back, “No way. He just wants the kid gone, bic?”
Voorhees seemed to think this over for a split second, then pulled back and gave me a wide grin and a thumbs-up sign. “All right.”
I climbed aboard the chopper, pulling Ahn in after me. Lightfoot, Tony’s crew chief, handed me a pair of earphones, and the avalanche of noise around me dulled to a vibrating thunder. A splatter of CB-style radio talk passed between Tony and the ground and then we lifted off the pad like a pregnant hummingbird.
“Welcome aboard, babe.” Tony’s distorted voice crackled into the mike. “Want to sit up front? It’s more comfortable.”
“Nah, I’d better stay back here with the kid in case he gets scared.”
“A gook kid? Scared of a little chopper ride? You gotta be shittin’ me.” But he didn’t repeat the offer. Lightfoot knelt by the open door, watching the country go by. Gusts of rain swept in and I tugged my poncho tight around both Ahn and me for warmth.
Tony kept to the coastline at first, the sky drab pewter, the beach pale, the rain and sea shiny, and the jungle a brilliant ribbon of variegated green. Perfect squares of fishnets were suspended above the water all along the coast, isolated from the shoreline. I wondered how they caught fish in them. Ahn kept shouting curious questions at Lightfoot, who grinned and pointed at things.
I settled down amid the olive-drab-painted metal and webbing. Whew. So far so good. We were getting away with it. A little rush of excitement and anxiety zipped through my nervous system, only to be replaced by depression. Out of all those people I’d cared for all those months, I could save just one. Maybe. Xinh gone, Thai gone, and now Xe. When that guy said war was hell, he wasn’t just whistling Dixie. I was racking up a body count a marine would envy. Ahn flipped water from a fold in my poncho and smoothed it across my lap, before laying his head in it and falling asleep.
Seeing little but sea, most of my hearing blunted by the roar in my earphones and the occasional staticky chatter, I soon grew sleepy, too.
Some time later, Tony’s voice crackled in my ear. “Hey, babe?”
“Yeah?” I mumbled into the mouthpiece.
“You know that guy you told me to ask about—Heron?”
“Yes,” I said, a little more alert. Heron would want to know about Xe. He’d be glad I saved the amulet. Even if he didn’t want to use it himself, he’d know who should have it.
“I kinda found out and I kinda didn’t. He’s off in the field somewhere, but the mission is classified, no contact. Sorry ’bout that.”
And after another minute, “Babe? You okay?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m fine, Tony. The old man died earlier today, did I tell you that? I just wish Heron could have been around.” I fingered the cloth of my pants pocket where the amulet lay. The headphones went staticky-silent for a moment, and then Tony was humming “The 59th Street Bridge Song.”
I was sleeping again when we got hit. I felt the chopper lurch and snapped awake, thinking for a moment we’d landed. It was too noisy to hear the round striking the bird. But when my eyes flew open, I saw Ahn’s head raise up for a split second. His eyes glittered like a trapped animal’s, then his skinny little arms covered his burr crew cut and he curled into a protective ball.
The round hadn’t wakened Lightfoot and I thought it should have. Surely when Tony started dodging bullets the crew chief would have duties. And sure enough, Tony’s voice called, “Tonto? Hey there, kemo sabe—Ben?” and he started to turn around. But I realized it was too dark for him to see anything and too dangerous for him to let go of the controls, so I unbuckled myself and crawled over to the crew chief, shaking his foot to wake him, as I had learned to do with the combat troops.
The foot flopped and I noticed that one of Lightfoot’s arms was dangling out the door. I thought we ought to close that sucker anyway. I started to tug on him, and then I noticed the blood on his chest. I dragged him in and felt for a pulse, found none. I didn’t expect to.
“Lightfoot’s hit,” I told Tony. “I think he’s had it.”
“Well, do CPR, for Chrissakes, while I try to find Quang Ngai….”
I was way ahead of him, working on Lightfoot even as I tried to remember what I’d been drilled on with a plastic doll but had never had to do to a human being—clear the airway, tilt the head back, pinch his nose, take a deep breath, and cover his m
outh with mine. His mouth smelled sour, and when my finger came away from feeling for the airway, it was smeared with blood. I breathed in anyway, and pumped on his chest, but all that did was force more blood out the mouth and the wound. God, Lightfoot, you could give a girl a little help here, I thought, but I knew I was working on a dead man.
“Get away from the goddamn door,” Tony barked over the roar. I started to haul Lightfoot with me, but he was a big man, awfully heavy, and his foot caught on some webbing. Then the chopper lurched again and outside I saw a red tracer round streak past us. I couldn’t help but remember what they’d said in basic about the red cross on medevac choppers making such a great target.
I was trying to dislodge Lightfoot’s boot from a piece of webbed strap when another round hit, and Lightfoot’s body jerked again. The chopper lurched and I fell backward as another round exploded through the metal floor of the chopper’s belly, right behind me, and another. I abandoned Lightfoot and grabbed for Ahn, huddling against the metal pole that held the rotor.
The rounds kept coming and Tony was trying to fly us out of range, but something was wrong with the rhythm of the blades. Even I could tell that. Instead of a steady “thucka-thucka-thucka” there was a jarring grind every few beats. I lifted my earphones. I could feel the chopper’s damaged heartbeat through the floor, through the walls, through my skin, and deep inside my guts—my hips and the backs of my thighs tightened every time that beat missed, every time a round hit. Ahn grabbed for my neck like a drowning boy just as the chopper wallowed onto its side, the open door yawning beneath my boots. Lightfoot’s body was lodged between me and the opening or I would have fallen out then. Somehow we had left the ocean and were now heading over tall elephant grass toward an endless tangle of trees.
The taste of Lightfoot’s blood in my mouth made me want to vomit, but Ahn had hold of me and I had grabbed on to one of those webbed straps and was pulling myself up as Tony righted the chopper.
“You okay, babe?” Tony’s voice, crackly and almost unrecognizable, came through the earphones.
“Yeah—I think so,” I said. Okay considering the circumstances. I fumbled as I talked. The wire to the headphones had wound around my neck and the mouthpiece, and I had to untangle it and pry Ahn loose before I could move freely.
“Kid too?”
“Him too. How about you? You okay?”
“That’s affirmative.”
I drew a deep breath. Good. Tony would get us out of this. He had been in plenty of scrapes before. This was only going to be a tragic delay. Everything was under control.
“Babe?”
“Yeah?”
“Listen, there’s a field of elephant grass up ahead. I want you to push the kid out and jump, got it?”
“Jump?”
“Do it, dammit.”
“Yeah, but…” What about him? He must have some idea how to maneuver the bird to safety but couldn’t do it with us aboard. He wouldn’t ask us to leave unless he had a plan. He’d get us out of this somehow. He wanted to get laid, didn’t he?
The chopper jerked and shuddered over the elephant grass, and blades licked the sides of the open door. Ahn clutched me convulsively. I crawled over Lightfoot’s body, trying not to step on him, wishing I didn’t have a corpse to stumble over.
The broad grassy valley swept beneath us, the elephant grass rippling from the wind of our blades, spewing rainwater everywhere. The patients had shown me pictures of themselves in the elephant grass. The grass, which looked so soft, stood a good three feet above the heads of the tallest men.
The chopper convulsed and Ahn twisted away from me and dove through the door, the end of his crutch peg leg disappearing last. I grabbed for him—he couldn’t jump with just one leg like that, surely—but the headphones tugged on my ears. I ripped them off and turned to set them behind me and saw Tony turn and rise in his seat, his mouth forming a scream: “Jump!”
From overhead came a horrible grinding and the floor fell out from under me as a blade sheered through the front windshield, metal, controls, and all, and through Tony, vertically, spraying me with his blood and burning me with its speed as it brushed past me and cut into the floor.
I didn’t have to jump. The floor was somewhere to my right and down a foot or so and the chopper in a roll. I tumbled through the open door, scraping against the raw edges of the new holes in the red cross on the chopper’s belly and dropping past the remaining prop, still swinging like some berserker’s sword blade as it sliced the air and grass where my body had been just before.
The ground smacked up with a bone-jarring thud, and for a moment I was caught between the hard ground and a flattening wind as the chopper crashed past me, mowing a path through the elephant grass before exploding with a roar of flame and shrapnel that made the ground buck up under me again. The stench of hot grease, hot metal, and gasoline and the stomach-churning stink of burning flesh boiled into my eyes and nostrils, so I started choking and crying at the same time. One of the chopper blades poked out of the flames like the handle of a saucepan from a campfire.
I don’t know how long I gasped and coughed and watched the billowing black smoke from watering eyes before the full impact of what was happening hit me in a shock wave harder than the blast of the crash.
All at once I took it in, along with the smoke, along with the heat of the flames, along with the rain: this was not me overdramatizing, this was not a movie, a joke, a stunt, or a nightmare. Tony was not going to come walking from the flames. What I had seen before I fell meant that he had died before the chopper caught fire. It’s hard to scream when you’re gasping for breath and gagging on the air, but a scream swelled up inside me and started to force its way out my open mouth. Maybe it was because that’s what women always do in the movies, but I had to cry Tony’s name, had to keen for him—
A bony arm slammed between my teeth. “Em di, co,” Ahn pleaded, his voice a low hiss. His all too familiar tears were coursing down his cheeks again, and the sight of his frightened face jerked me back to my own responsibilities, which were to the living, Ahn and me. Tony would be really pissed if he knew I blew the chance he gave us by screeching our position to whoever had fired on us, or got roasted in the Vietnamese equivalent of a prairie fire while paying noisy homage to his memory.
Ahn already had his arms around my neck and I hoisted him up, piggyback, and ran for the trees. Every time my foot hit the ground I thought about land mines and unexploded bombs and trip wires. Every yard closer to the trees I wondered who was in them, if we were already in the cross hairs of a sniper’s rifle or were running into a Vietcong ambush.
Part Two
The Jungle
13
I tried to think what to do, where to go. In the States I would wait calmly by the wreck to be rescued. Here I might not want to meet the fire department, if it did come. Quang Ngai had to be around here somewhere—maybe a few miles, maybe more—but I didn’t even know my directions here. And I couldn’t remember what the hell it was the sun did, except that at noon it was in the middle of the sky and at night it disappeared, if it bothered to appear during the day at all, during monsoon season. VC would be all over the jungle, probably, but they’d see us even quicker in the high grass, if they hadn’t already. I was glad Ahn had kept me from screaming. No need to announce that all of the occupants of our chopper hadn’t perished.
Thinking about that put me in a funk again and I stopped, a little inside the forest, and stared off into space, my mind floating for a while. I wished I could float my body right after it and float away. When I looked down, Ahn was looking up at me anxiously, and also somewhat speculatively. I frowned down at him. He was probably calculating how much an Army nurse captive would bring him from the VC. The Army had warned all of us girls that we absolutely mustn’t allow ourselves to be captured—in case any of us had been considering doing so for kicks, I guess. The propaganda value would be too great, they said. They would waste too many lives trying to get us back, they
said. And, oh yes, the enemy would do terrible things to us. No doubt. I shivered and backed off a pace from Ahn, whose face suddenly broke into one of his monkeyish mugs as he began to cry in earnest.
I pulled him to me and smothered his sobs against my fatigue shirt, as much for both our safety as his comfort. Poor kid. He’d already learned that his own parents weren’t omnipotent enough to prevent their deaths and his injuries. Just when I’d made him feel safe and cared for, my grand plan to protect “my” patient had landed us both in this godawful mess, had cost Tony and Lightfoot their lives. I wanted to comfort Ahn but I started crying too.
We couldn’t stumble through the jungle crying. We’d get blown up or caught for sure. Besides, I didn’t want to get too far from the chopper wreck. Maybe it would draw some of our guys to see what happened. And I had the vague idea that maybe, after the smoke had cleared and things had cooled down, I’d find something in the wreckage that would help us. All I had with me besides Ahn was my poncho and my ditty bag, still tied around my belt loop, where I hung it when I didn’t want to risk leaving it behind but wanted to keep my hands free.
The Healer’s War Page 19