The sergeant introduced himself first as a two-tour Vietnam veteran. We didn’t really need to be told. And it was looking at his face, with its tired eyes, at his stance that was at the same time very casual and very tense, that made me realize that this part was not just more Army melodramatic bullshit. “Now I’m going to tell you something and I know you’re going to think this is a cruel and inhuman thing to say and all that, but I got my reasons. You women, if it ever appears as if you are in a situation where capture appears inevitable, the best thing you can do is to kill yourself. You men, if you are in a situation with one of these women and it looks as if she may be captured, do her a favor and kill her. Because the tortures are atrocious.” Then he showed us pictures.
I was a little shaken, but still thought to myself: Oh, what a load—there they go playing John Wayne again, the old saving the last round for the schoolmarm bit. The horribly hurt people in the pictures were shoved to the back of my mind with icky pictures out of medical books after a while.
At Fitzsimons, I met the nurse who told me her system for handling overseas romance. She had served in Nam during Tet too, which made her crazy enough to like me, I suppose, and try to help me out when the brass and all the other head nurses were so down on me. The day I got orders for Nam, she gave me the big-sister talk about men and we split first one, then two bottles of wine.
Toward the bottom of the second bottle, she started talking about the part of Nam she hadn’t told me about: not the beach parties and the inconveniences, but her work. She had been triage nurse at Cu Chi during Tet and was talking about the way the Vietcong overran the place at one point and of some of the awful things that came through her E.R., the mutilations, the deaths. I asked, carefully, because we’d been warned not to mention it outside the room, “Did you get that talk about enemy torture before you went over there?”
She nodded. “Yep. I wish someone had told the civilians the same thing, because they were right on. We had a couple of American nuns come in; the VC had tortured those women till—well, one of them died, and I was praying to God the other one would too.”
I thought about that while I huddled under the lip of that ridge. I could still see my friend’s face. This wasn’t something she had heard. She had seen it. American women like us. Only they were civilians. Surely it would be even worse, if there was worse, for military. And then there were all the officers trying to scare us, saying, “They know your names. They know who you are. The VC have you on a hit list.” I thought about all the hideous things I had heard first- and secondhand, the Vietnam folk myths and the stories from other nurses, about torture victims, mutilations, Vietnamese and Vietcong women who had been sickeningly abused by either us or them, and I felt my own body, achy and sore because it was soft, easily pierced, of how I screeched if I stubbed my toe. Jesus Christ, what was I doing here?
The bugs were torture enough—my arms were sore from swatting at them, and big lumps itched and burned all over my face and arms and underneath my clothing. Even though I sat on my poncho, I was saturated to the bone with rain and plant sap and mud. How did the grunts take it out here in this shit? No wonder people got vicious—the discomfort alone was enough to drive you nuts.
There had to be better things to think about, but I’d never stood guard duty before. What would Duncan do if he were with me? Probably say that if he had his old .30-06 he would pick off the entire NVA, but since he didn’t, he’d probably leave me alone “just for a minute, kitten, while I check something out,” and go off with some Vietnamese floozy. Ahn whimpered in his sleep and crunched himself into a tight ball. I wanted to whimper too. I wanted my mother. I could just hear her saying, “Now, Kathleen Marie, it’s not that I don’t love you, honey, but you got yourself into this. Neither your daddy nor I, nor even the Army, forced you to go over there, so now you’re just going to have to handle it the best you can.” Thanks a lot, Mom.
She’d also tell me it was no use getting morbid. Good advice, but a little hard to follow. I tried to mentally construct a letter she would be able to relate to.
Dear Mom,
A funny thing happened on my way to transfer Ahn to a different hospital. The darn chopper broke down and Ahn and I had to jump into the jungle. Tony, good captain that he was, went down with his ship, but we met this colorful character named William who’s on his way back to civilization to get reassigned, since his last post was terminated. Little Ahn has been learning lots of new American expressions from him and woodcraft tricks I’m sure will stand him in good stead if he joins the Vietnamese Boy Scouts later on.
Anyhow, we’ve been spending the day on this wonderful nature hike. Your African violets would really take to this country. The place looks like one big greenhouse, crammed with angel-wing begonias, spider plants, ferns, mother-in-law’s-tongues, all kinds of vines and ivies and flowers, most of which look as if they want to eat you. Seriously, though, it’s very beautiful, if in bad need of a good pruning, and you’d enjoy the bird-watching and identifying all the kinds of spiders and lizards. We’ve heard monkeys too. Though we haven’t seen them, I know that’s what they are because they sound just like the sound track of a Tarzan movie. There’s supposed to be even bigger wildlife around, but so far none has crossed our path. Fortunately, it’s not too hot because this is the rainy season now. A little wet, but don’t worry, I remembered my raincoat! Love to Daddy and all…”
I wouldn’t mention the amulet. She might not like me accepting jewelry from strange men, especially patients.
I wondered if the amulet would give me aura-enhanced nightmares. At least the glow from the greenery was fainter at night than during the day, probably because, with the whole sun-chlorophyll reaction, plants put out more energy during the daytime. That was good because all of that unaccustomed visual stimulus had given me a peculiar headache in the middle of my forehead.
Something rustled between the tree trunk and the ridge, where William was lying. At least good fortune had brought him to us, I thought, raising myself to my knees to peer over at him as if he were one of my night-shift patients. Something hard caught me across the throat and slammed my head back against the bank.
William’s face loomed above me, his forearm pinning me by the throat to the bank. He wore a strange expression not of hatred or anger so much as concentration. Fortunately, the bank was crumbly and gave under my head, or I think he would have killed me right away. I kicked out and felt my boot scrape Ahn.
“Cut it out,” I said, though it didn’t sound like that when it came out. “William, dammit, stop!”
Ahn flew into him, pounding him silently with bony little fists, dragging at his arm. William released me long enough to backhand the boy halfway down the rest of the ridge.
I couldn’t wait to get my breath back, but gasped, “William, goddammit, what the fuck’s the matter with you?”
He started to grab me again but I blocked him, rather feebly, with my own arms, and looked into his eyes again, trying to find out, before I died, what in the hell was going on. My arms were surrounded by a dingy mauve light that fused with his dull maroon glow and diluted it. He sat back on his haunches abruptly, overbalancing himself so that he tumbled backward a pace or two. He threw out his hands and grabbed a branch, sat up, shook himself like a wet dog, and blinked.
Ahn scrambled around him up the hill and hid behind me, rubbing his stump tenderly and sniffling. But he hadn’t uttered a single cry throughout.
William crawled back up the hill. I scuttled back and nearly knocked Ahn over, but William just said, “’Bout time you got some sleep, girl. I’ll take watch.”
“Oh, no thanks,” I said, determined not to sleep a wink around him lest I inadvertently die before I wake.
“What you mean, ‘no thanks’?” William asked. “Thass crazy. You gotta sleep.” He said the last like a mother cajoling a youngster.
“I’m crazy?” I hissed. “You just tried to kill me.”
He looked blank.
“Yeah,” Ahn chimed in. “You numbah ten, GI. You get mamasan like this and…” He parodied choking himself and made a terrible face, then dropped his hands to his sides. “Hey, William, you some kinda VC?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I did what? Is this child jiving me or what?”
“You tried to kill me, William,” I said, and relaxed enough to try to figure it out, now that I was pretty sure he was himself again. “Maybe you were having a dream or something about being back at your unit again, do you think?”
“Yeah, yeah, could be. Hey, I’m real sorry—” He extended his fingers to my neck as if to stroke away the bruise I could feel rising. “I didn’t mean—shit, I’m real sorry.” His voice broke and I realized he was crying. He reached out a rather large paw and grasped Ahn’s hand. “Sin loi, babysan.”
Ahn gave him a measuring look that was older than he was, and nodded, dismissing the whole thing.
“It’s okay, William,” I said. “It’s over.”
But none of us slept, and as soon as it was light enough to move without falling over our own feet or tripping on one of the knots of roots and vines crisscrossing our path, we started walking again.
“Where are we going, William?” I asked.
“Hell if I know. I was just told, when you out in the bush, you keep movin’. So we movin’.”
It was good enough for me. Only I wished I was sure we were moving toward a hot meal, a nice bunk, and lots of ugly wire and sandbags between us and other people’s bullets.
Ahn clung to my hand all morning, but suddenly he slipped away, looking very excited, and peered intently along the side of the trail. I stopped and he took hold of the tail of my uniform shirt for balance and jabbed at something with his crutch stick. I thought it was a snake, but when Ahn shuddered backward I decided it might be even more dangerous.
“William?” I whispered. He was walking point. We were several yards behind him on the trail, though we were going as fast as we could and he as slow as he could.
“Yeah?”
“I think Ahn found a mine.” I snatched Ahn back when he leaned forward to poke again, but he wriggled from my grasp and once more extended his crutch.
William rejoined us and caught the stick in mid-thrust, pulling it out of Ahn’s grasp so that he fell back against me.
“You VC, kid? Try to blow us all up?”
“No VC,” Ahn said. “Look,” and he made eating motions, as if he were scooping rice out of a bowl into his mouth.
I took about four hasty giant steps backward as William prodded the mound of earth this time. I could vaguely see little round shapes at the top. “What are they?” I whispered as William dug at the mound with a stick and flipped something loose that rolled to his feet. “They look like Sterno cans. Homemade bombs?”
“Don’t seem like it, but almost as bad. Beans and muthahfuckers.”
“Huh?”
“Beans an’ hotdogs. See here? Some dudes, when they out in the field and they got C rats they hate, they just buries ’em. How you get along with lima beans?”
William had the Army equivalent of a church key in his pocket. A few hundred yards farther down the ridge we found a stream, shallow-looking and only about fourteen feet wide. We choked down the cold food straight from the can.
“Wisht I had my canteen cup and a little c-4,” William said. “I could heat this shit.”
“What’s c-4?” I asked.
“You know, plastic explosive.”
We filled the cans with water over and over till our arms ached from dipping and lifting. The morning had been hot and muggy and the water felt wonderful when it splashed me. William waded into the water. “You wanna get wet, lady? Come on ahead, then. We gotta cross this fucker anyway.” He waded across without blowing anything up.
Ahn looked dubiously at the rushing waters of the stream. I stepped into the bone-chilling water and could see right away that he was going to have a problem. The force of it was enough to knock you off your feet. “Come on, Ahn. Hang on to me.” I let Ahn hold on to my shoulder while I dipped down to my knees to get wet and cold all over. The night before, I’d thought I’d never be warm again, but now I couldn’t believe how great it felt. Then we sloshed out. William, just ahead of us, began ripping off his clothes.
I scarcely had time to wonder what in the hell he was up to when I saw for myself. An inch-long leech was fattening itself on my forearm. I dumped Ahn unceremoniously on the bank and started stripping too. So did he. I started batting at the bloodsuckers, trying to pull them off.
“Don’t do that,” William said. “You’ll break the head off in there and it make you sick. Break up a salt tablet, put on its back. It’ll pull out. Cigarette works better, but mine are long gone.”
Ahn, bare as the day he was born, bent over his clothes and pulled a rather soggy pack of Kools out of his pants pocket. He also produced a Zippo, with which he expertly lit the cigarette he gave me. William was already at work on his crop of bloodsuckers with the salt. For his own, Ahn just plucked them out. You aren’t supposed to be able to do that, but he did, pinching them up near their heads. It worked, anyway. When we were done, we had a total body count of about forty-eight leeches.
I turned my back on the men while I did a search-and-destroy mission on the leeches in my lingerie. I am really not all that shy, but guys who are not your lovers can be more modest than somebody’s grandma, on your behalf as well as theirs. It is often ridiculously difficult to get a male patient to accept a urinal from a female nurse. I waited until I had my fatigue blouse on again to turn back around. Sure enough, William was buttoning up as rapidly as he could. Ahn was sitting in the grass, smoking a Kool with the savoir faire of James Bond.
In a debonair manner, he offered a smoke to me, to William.
“No thanks, kid. I tryin’ to quit,” William said.
The only thing I hadn’t taken off was the amulet, and now it had fallen outside my uniform blouse, flashing back the sun like a mirror. William sat down beside Ahn to pull on his boots. “Uh, Lieutenant?”
“Huh?”
“’Bout last night. I still don’t recollect much of what happened, but what I reckon is I just sort of went dinky dao from all this duckin’ and hidin’ shit. You know I don’t mean no disrespect to women, and it ain’t got nothin’ to do with black or white. I wouldn’t want you to think I—to think—”
I knew what he meant, but then it was so soon after the time when blacks were beaten for using the wrong rest room or riding in the front of the bus, when civil rights workers were being murdered, that it was awfully hard to talk about racial stuff, especially between a man and a woman, especially an enlisted black man and a white woman officer, which is just sort of too parallel to the darky-plantation belle bullshit. “William, let’s not get into that shit, okay?” I said. “I am not nearly as worried about the possibility of having you after my ass as I am about the possibility of getting it shot off. I’m real glad we found each other because I don’t know a damn thing about the jungle. But I gotta know: is there some real sure way to snap you out of your sleep, something maybe your mom used to wake you up when you were a little kid? Because you almost killed both of us last night. I know you didn’t mean to, but—”
He shook his head. “I never done nothin’ like that in my life before. I never even had no nightmares before I come to this place. Used to sleep like a rock.” He handed me the can opener. “Here. Maybe you can jab me with this if I go off again. Only be careful where you stick it, huh?” As he handed it to me, his aura wavered a little into the brown and his eyes suddenly got wet. “Goddamn, I am just fucking up all over the damn place. First I just roll under the bed and don’t warn the men and they all get blown to shit, then I try to kill you—I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me.”
Ahn tapped him on the arm and offered him a cigarette again.
“Thanks, kid.” He lit it this time and took a long drag, then offered it to me.
I don’t smoke
, but I took a drag too. “Look, man, you don’t have the corner on fucking up.” The chopper crash flashed across my mind.
I pulled on my trousers and tucked the amulet inside my shirt. William watched me with more relaxed interest now.
“What’s that you wearin’? Where’s your dog tags?”
“In my pocket. They got to irritating my neck.”
“Yeah, well, if I’se you, I’d get shed of that rank sewed onto your collar too. Officers is the first individuals Charlie try to grease.”
I cut off the ends of my collar with my bandage scissors. “William, how long do you think those C rat cans had been there? Do you think that unit is still nearby somewhere?”
“Sure. I do. Them and a whole bunch of others. And a whole bunch of VC too. Just depend on who we find first. You ain’t talkin’ to no trusty African guide, bwana. I didn’t have much call to learn trackin’ in Cleveland. Damned if I know how old them cans was. You the woman. You probably know more about canned goods than me.”
“Not if I can help it,” I said. I’ve never been the domestic type.
We walked just inside the edge of the jungle, down along the edge of a valley again that day. The valley was full of soft grass and little round fishponds and the rain blew gently across it, sweeping toward us, carrying a heady, fresh scent that reminded me of spring on Lake of the Ozarks. The jungle smelled more like a cross between the zoo, the alley in back of the A&P the day they tossed out the produce, and the aggressively green, earthy smell of a hothouse. “Can’t we walk down there?” I asked William. “It’d be easier walking, especially for Ahn.”
“Easier to get blowed away, you mean. See, some of them things hit but they don’t explode. Plus the VC likes to set booby traps round that kind of thing. No way, mamasan. This soldier stickin’ to high ground.”
When he spoke to me, mostly William seemed perfectly okay. He was one of the nicest people who ever tried to strangle me, in fact. But when he was walking point, not looking back, not staying in touch with what was going on with us, his spine would twitch and his head circled and dipped like a snake’s, sniffing the wind, looking for signs. We started climbing again, up and up into really thickly interwoven jungle with trees growing out of other trees and vines so thickly twined together that we had to stop and climb over them or separate them to climb through. Ahn and I had a tough time keeping up. The boy’s adrenaline was finally wearing off and his little face looked pinched again. He started whining. He wanted to be carried, regressing, the way sick kids do, to an earlier age, where people were supposed to take care of them.
The Healer’s War Page 22