The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  I dug into it and pulled out a bag of M&M’s, tilted Ahn’s head back, and popped one in his mouth. “There, babysan, numbah one, eh?”

  He wouldn’t be comforted but chewed and cried at the same time.

  “Look, honey, I couldn’t agree with you more, but we have to do something.”

  The obvious answer was directly overhead, in the branches of the trees, which I figured, despite my conviction that everything in this jungle was out to kill me, would be the best possible cover. After all, hundreds of VC snipers couldn’t be wrong, could they?

  I pointed up to Ahn and gave him a boost. He shook his head and pointed to his makeshift prosthesis. I cut the bandage away with my scissors, and immediately realized I should have unwound the gauze and tape instead and saved what I could. God alone knew what we were going to need before we were—before whatever was going to happen to us happened. With the bandage gone, I gave him a boost and he grabbed on to the lower limb and swung up on it like the monkey he resembled when he cried. There was plenty of vegetation to use for foot and handholds and I was not many years removed from my tree-climbing days on the elm in my parents’ yard, so I scrambled up after him and urged him to a higher branch.

  We settled in like a pair of geese trying to roost where the hawks would least expect to see us. I fed Ahn another couple of M&M’s and started to put them back without having any myself, since I was going to go on a diet. Then I remembered where I was and popped two, chewing them mechanically, looking out toward the red and black of the monsoon-drenched blaze. Though the area right around the chopper was still burning pretty hot, the elephant grass had charred out a fair distance from the wreck and died out, so at least we wouldn’t be fried in our sleep.

  Ahn had snuggled into a crook of a branch and fallen asleep. My bulk wasn’t so easily accommodated. At least we were out of the rain, though we were both soaked from the grass. I thought of Tony, and of what we should have been doing right now—and I thought about all the things I would have done for him before, all those little things he liked so much, if only I had known. But who would have thought such a chickenshit would turn hero on me like that? My mind was racing too much to sleep, I was too scared, too relieved to be alive, too worried, too bewildered, too aggrieved. My nerves were jumping along the back of my neck, down my spine. Or was that bugs? There were certainly enough of those in the tree, though by and large the rain kept them from being too fierce as long as it lasted.

  My ditty bag contained a change of dressing for Ahn; three bags of M&M’s, one plain, two peanut; a can of shoestring potatoes; six packets of fizzies; a comb; lipstick; change of underpants; and wallet. My fatigue pants held adhesive tape, scissors, scraps of notes I’d written to myself, a discarded medicine card, a small flashlight, pens, a pencil, several I.V. needles and a couple of syringes I’d neglected to discard, and Xe’s amulet.

  A spasm of bitterness swept over me as I fingered it. My mother hadn’t warned me about days like this. She’d never dreamed there could be days this bad: starting with Xe’s death, ending with Tony’s and Lightfoot’s, and me, an unathletic, very conspicuous uniformed woman, stranded with a one-legged child she could barely talk to in terrain she hadn’t the foggiest idea how to handle. Where were all those goddamn marines when you really needed them?

  I fell asleep wondering how I was going to explain Tony’s death to his wife—I would have to do that, I figured, if I got out of this all right. I owed him that—or maybe that was exactly what I didn’t owe him. No, no, I could lie and say I was medical escort for a critically injured child Tony was flying to emergency care and—oh, what the hell. How was the Army going to explain my death to my family? At least Ahn didn’t have that kind of problem.

  I’d been turning the amulet over in my hand like one of those jade egg-shaped worry stones I got in Taiwan. The worn old glass reminded me of Xe and the hospital and safety and of Charlie Heron, burned out and idealistic at the same time. I slipped it around my neck. It hadn’t been such hot luck for either one of them, but Xe had died an old man at least. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt. I fell asleep with it around my neck, my thumb tracing its smooth contours.

  I slept very poorly. The foliage had shielded us from the worst of the rain initially, but soon the wind changed direction and we were taking the full force of it. The poncho kept blowing up over our heads. And I had fitful half-dreams full of fear that I would make noise and reveal our position, and self-reproach that I really didn’t seem to feel all that much about Tony and Lightfoot dying. Why wasn’t I grieving? Tony and I had been lovers for three months. He given his life to save ours—well, for the time being at least.

  And instead of thinking nice thoughts to send him to heaven with, an ungrateful bitch inside me kept muttering, Women and children first, huh? Thanks a lot, Tony. Now what do I do? You’re the one with the survival training, the combat conditioning, all that good shit. What am I supposed to do when people try to kill me? Punch ’em with my bandage scissors? My recruiter told me this would never happen to me. The Army wouldn’t let it—guess we outsmarted the Army, huh? They probably told you you’d never get knocked off those gorgeous pins of yours by a helicopter prop either. And I would try to make myself cry, forcing up memories of those long legs storking about my hooch as he sipped a beer or smoked a joint, the smell of his skin, the feel of his curls, the way he felt inside me. Funnily, all I could remember of his eyes right then was those damned mirrored shades.

  I knew it was healthy to cry, and this might be my only chance, but I just kept wondering hopelessly how we were going to get out of there. How I didn’t even have the pioneer woman’s traditional last round to use on myself if capture became inevitable. And even if we never saw a VC, what would we eat? Where would we sleep? How would we keep from being blown to pieces by all of the things that were all the time blowing my patients to pieces? And we would get nowhere fast—Ahn’s prosthesis, which worked well enough on the level concrete floors of the hospital, was going to be a problem in mud and rough terrain.

  I opened my eyes in the middle of this rambling anxiety attack passing itself off as a dream and realized that I must have been sleeping in spite of everything. It was now fully night, with a steady hard pour. Across the elephant grass the chopper sat in a blackened circle, glowing with heat and little interior fires. And around it other things glowed, like huge fireflies. I could see the lights clearly through the rain, the elephant grass, and the darkness, but the funny thing was that many of the colors were not bright or light ones but dulled down—a brown glow, a taupe one, wine-colored, teal, brown with red spots, olive, rust, and even, I swear it, a black glowing deeper and hotter than the blackness around it. These mixed and wavered and changed often, but they danced around the chopper like so many Tinker Bells. And as my eyes adjusted, I saw within the glow people in military hats a little different from ours, with rifles in their hands. They were digging around the helicopter, looking for the bodies, I supposed, or usable debris.

  I jumped as something touched me on the shoulder, and looked up to see Ahn, encased in a pale green glow sparked with grayed violet, putting his finger to his lips. I nodded.

  The fireflies poked around for some time, then fanned out, looking up and down, side to side, rifles ready. I always knew where they were, however, thanks to old Xe’s handy-dandy cosmic gizmo. Everybody was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  A teal-blue glow stalked through the elephant grass, toward us, then below us, and at first I wanted to shut my eyes so the woman with the rifle couldn’t see me. Because light was pouring from me, too, just as it was from Ahn, who was wrapped tightly around his tree limb, gray-violet rays of radiant fear leaking from him.

  But the closer the woman got, and somehow I knew it was a woman, a girl really, even through the blinding rain and her personal light show, the more I felt I knew about her: Poor kid, she’s so heartbroken she doesn’t even know how scared she is. And the closer she got, the more the light grew distinct, into separate colors,
brown overpowering the teal, gray-violet overpowering both, all three colors blending into one another before bleeding from her into the darkness, not in beams, the way you’d think light should, but in droplets, like tears. And the whole time her rifle was at the ready, waiting for us to make a false move.

  We didn’t, though. We lay there barely breathing for what seemed like hours, until, when I looked around cautiously, I could no longer see any of the nine glows I had counted—two mostly teal, three mostly brown, an amber, a rust, a black, and a dull red.

  I patted Ahn on the arm and the little brat yawned at me. He’d gone to sleep, rain and all. “Come on, babysan, I think we better didi mau.”

  His purplish gray had been superseded by a brighter red and green which I knew, don’t ask me how, were much healthier colors for a growing boy. The green was a shade that spoke of growing things, similar to the faint phosphorescence that was the aura of the tree that hid us, the plants all around us; the red, vital and strong, qualities in Ahn that were obvious watching that one-legged boy shinny back down the tree.

  The sky lightened a little in one direction and the sun peeped out beyond the rain, splashing a rainbow across the sky. It seemed inappropriate, under the circumstances, but it had its uses. I didn’t know if Vietnamese kids were ever boy scouts, but I thought they might have survival skills little girls who were bookworms in Kansas City might not have mastered. “Ahn, can you tell from the sun which way is the sea?”

  “Sure. Sea that way,” he said, and pointed toward the wrecked chopper.

  I wondered how he knew, but even if he was wrong, it was someplace to start. I had about abandoned hope that another helicopter would arrive to find out what happened to the first one. If it did come, I hoped the will-o’-the-wisps from the previous night would be far away.

  I found a stout stick and handed it to Ahn. “Babysan, you use this for crutch.”

  “No want stupid stick!” he said, his face screwing up for a good cry as he poked through the underbrush below the tree until he found the piece of crutch that had been his prosthesis. “Want leg Bac si Joe make for me.”

  Kids. I humored him. Let him determine for himself what was going to work for him. I rewrapped his stump and bandaged it into the cup of the makeshift prosthesis.

  The elephant grass gave off a faint greenish radiance, punctuated now and then by varicolored sparks as insects and lizards darted past us. I was glad for the cooler, damper weather and the wind. The bugs weren’t so bad now as they had been earlier in the year. I took the lead, with Ahn just behind me. I watched the ground carefully for the sort of traps patients had told me about: punji sticks, trip wires, any trace of recently disturbed earth where mines could be buried. The VC might hope as I did for a second helicopter to investigate the loss of the first one. If I’d been them, I would have laid a trap for it.

  I was not reassured when I didn’t spot anything. After all, most of my patients had had far better training than I had before they became patients, and obviously they hadn’t spotted anything either. I stopped short of the charred remains of the chopper. Fortunately, it didn’t look as if anything remained that would have been of any earthly use to us, because I sure wasn’t going to wade through that mess of smoldering wire and metal to find out if the wreck had been mined.

  Ahn tried to take my hand, but it was shaking so hard he had trouble catching hold of it. His was small and hot in mine but reassuring nevertheless. My knees kept trying to fold and I had a queer, dizzy sensation. The color around me was mostly gray, though Ahn’s aura by now showed a little less gray, a little more red, and he patted my hand with his free one and looked gravely into the wreckage, not because he cared, I thought, but because I did.

  The red cross was not burned all the way off the bottom and I kept seeing it, feeling it against my shoulder as I scraped by, seeing the blade drop, seeing Tony fly apart, seeing the chopper scream by me and feeling the impact of the explosion, then all over again, from the time I first turned Lightfoot over to the lightning bug people last night, and again, and again.

  A faint orange glow still shimmered near the bottom of the wreckage—the last embers of the fire? I scarcely noticed it at first, as my mind replayed the last few hours, but then I couldn’t help but notice that the glow drifted against the wind, toward us. My own aura bristled around me, a fearful gray shadow, growing wider the longer I stood there, but the orange crept into it, warming it, interpenetrating it until my aura and a portion of Ahn’s mingled with the brightness. My knees rebraced and my head settled down. My trembling fell several points on the Richter scale. And the instant replay stopped while inside my head a more sensible voice said: Could be worse. You’re alive, the kid’s alive. Now try to stay that way. Ol’ Tony didn’t get greased helping some dumb broad who folds up when it gets a little tough. These woods are thick with VC, but they’re thick with our troops too. Stay loose.

  And I suddenly realized what a great target I made and shook myself free of what was no doubt a major hallucination induced by fear and the weird psychogenic power of the amulet. I had no choice now but to accept what the amulet showed me, and be glad of it. Heron was right. Old Xe had known a thing or two and, bless his heart, had somehow in that last long look managed to pass some of it on, maybe knowing how much we would need it. If he could read me the way I read Ahn, read the VC woman last night, then he could have known. And however much his amulet confused me with the feelings and reactions it stirred in me, it had the quite practical ability to light up any human being in the vicinity as if that person were a shop window, and I couldn’t think of a more useful tool to have when marooned in a jungle war, not even an M-16.

  Ahn had wandered off. The rain was somehow colder and harder, but even though the orange light had bled away, that around me was no longer the pure gray it had been, but was flushed a somewhat healthier mauve.

  I skirted the wreck to the forest beyond, watching silently for Ahn. A faint glint in the underbrush caught my eye and I stooped toward it. Tony’s mirrored shades winked up at me, one earpiece broken. I picked them up and tucked them in my pocket.

  I caught Ahn’s glow in the brush ahead of me and quickened my step just a fraction to catch up with him, though I still moved as quietly as I could and kept my eyes moving.

  Then the glow dipped and he fell with a rustle of brush and a sharp Vietnamese swearword.

  He was no sooner down than another glow, one I hadn’t noticed in my scrutiny of my surroundings, my pursual of Ahn, stepped into my line of vision and dove toward Ahn.

  The hell with trip wires. I plowed through the brush toward them.

  Ahn cried, “No, Joe! No. Me good boy. Me no VC.”

  “Hold still while I’m killin’ you, you little muthahfucker,” someone demanded unreasonably.

  But he was demanding in black American English.

  “Wait!” I called. I didn’t mind being loud now. If one GI was here, his unit couldn’t be far behind. No doubt they’d seen the crash and come to investigate and we were rescued already. “Wait! Don’t hurt him. He’s okay. He’s with me.”

  A tall black man with his shirt tied around his waist unbent until he was standing, staring bug-eyed at me. Ahn scuttled out from under him and half crawled back to me. His prosthesis was dangling at an angle from his stump and he was crying again. I picked Ahn up, pulled the prosthesis off, and threw it in the brush.

  “Shame on you for picking on a little sick boy,” I said to the GI, wiping Ahn’s tears away. “He’s a patient of mine. I was medevacing him to Quang Ngai when the chopper went down.” The man kept staring at me and I began to feel uneasy. “Wow, are we glad to see you,” I said. “Where’s the rest of your guys?”

  He looked blank, and wary.

  “The rest of your unit, where is it?”

  He took a step toward me and I noticed his aura then. It was peat-brown and ash-gray—he was deathly afraid, even of me. I took a step forward to meet him. “I’m Lieutenant McCulley—Kitty McCulley—
from the 83rd Evac at Da Nang,” I said, trying to radiate all the warmth and gratitude I could. The mauve shadow around me deepened and was tinged with darker streaks of magenta. The first gray tendrils mixed with it, and the man stopped, and stared some more. “Two of the guys from Red Beach were taking me to Quang Ngai with little Ahn, my patient, here. But we got shot down. I’m so glad to see you.”

  He took one more step and the mixture continued. He swallowed. I swallowed and slowly lifted a wrinkled brown package out of my ditty bag. “We wouldn’t have had enough M&M’s to last much longer, but now that we’re rescued, we can use them to celebrate. Want one?”

  He took it slowly, a red one, and popped it into his mouth, and looked mildly surprised when his tongue met the candy. Then he backed up a pace, still surrounded with gray, and started marching back into the forest.

  “Hey, just a minute!” I said. “You can’t leave us here. This little boy is crippled and I—I don’t know where I am, and—” and I knew all of a sudden that something was badly wrong with this man—I wasn’t sure we weren’t safer without him, but he was an American. He must know where there were more. He must have come for us—

  The soldier stopped, turned around, and picked Ahn up as easily as if he were a rifle and hoisted him onto one bare shoulder. “Lady, that just about make it unanimous,” the man said.

  We walked into the forest together and the GI remained silent, his aura still mostly gray, though it seemed the green of the plants showed through now and then.

  We could hear the rain pouring harder, but under the forest canopy it took its time reaching us. Sometimes it was a fine mist, sometimes a steady drip, and now and then a downpour. The noise of the rain on the leaves was quiet compared to what it had been while Ahn and I were in the tree. The soldier’s head rotated constantly, back and forth, side to side, up and down, and changing so he never got into a pattern, watching the ground, the trees, and air in front of him, the spaces on either side of him. I found myself doing the same thing.