The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  The colonel stood, and just for a moment the brilliant yellow of his aura flickered with indecision; then he marched us out of the village.

  I couldn’t keep up. The VC trotted through places my body wouldn’t fit, and the branches tore at me. I kept closing my eyes to try to protect them, because bent over as I was, my face was even with the backlashing brush that hit me when the others passed. Small hard bodies crowded me on all sides, shoving so that I was afraid of being trampled. Finally I fell.

  I fell forward, face down into the mud, without being able to use my hands to break my fall. My teeth bit into my lips and cheeks and my nose started bleeding. The little bastard who had been holding on to me fell onto my back and I rolled over angrily and dumped him. “Let me alone, dammit,” I squalled. “I haven’t done anything to you.” My feelings were hurt as badly as they had been in my dream when I found out I was in hell. And even while I was bellowing, I realized how stupid it all was. I was going to get killed in an undoubtedly nasty and painful fashion by people I had absolutely no quarrel with. How many of their relatives had been killed the same way? How many of my patients had survived the same sort of thing? It was all so dumb. I screamed something to that effect.

  The young soldier who had tried to help me that morning knelt beside me, placatingly, but the colonel backhanded me the way he had done his daughter. I saw the blow coming and ducked away from it. That was a mistake. He knocked the young soldier out of the way and reached for me with both hands. His aura didn’t change, except for a few sparks of red, and I knew that he didn’t really care about me personally one way or the other, but was angry that Hue had taken my side against him. And though no one else could see, I knew from the foggy gray encompassing his aura that he was mourning his wife, the woman who was killed by the snake. His movements were precise and mechanical as he cut his way through a swamp of shock and loss.

  He grabbed my hair first, but it was short and slick with mud and rain, so he switched his grip to the thong that held the amulet around my neck and jerked on it. The thong cut across my windpipe and I started to cough, then didn’t have the breath to cough, gagged, and felt my face swell with unoxygenated blood. My lungs pumped like crazy, my whole chest burning, and water streamed from my eyes and nose. My ears rang and everything started to cloud over.

  And that detached part of me thought: Oh boy, the press is going to love this one—Kitty McCulley, girl martyr. I wonder how many extra innocent people are going to get wasted as payback for me? The thought did not fill me with a savage thrill of vengeance. It just made me sadder and angrier and more frustrated with the whole miserable mess. I was going to die poorly and stupidly and senselessly. Shit.

  Deadness tried to enter through the amulet, but my own fear and anger cut through it like a red-hot chain saw.

  Oxygen flooded back into my lungs like water poured over a burn as the thong was released. My head kept swimming for several moments, but no blow, no questions followed. The little bastard with the hot-lava aura griped in a high-pitched voice and was very plainly saying something like “Let me at ’er, let me at ’er,” but nobody was touching me anymore, and I was allowed to bury my face in my hands and gasp until my heartbeat and respirations resumed something like normal function.

  When I finally looked up, the colonel was half a step from me, staring at me. He looked as shaken as I felt. When I looked at him, he looked away. Lava-aura made a disgusted noise in his throat and growled something at the colonel, which earned him a glower. The colonel did bear a family resemblance to Hue, especially in his truculent expression and the intelligence in his eyes. But he was balding on top, and his sharp cheekbones and chin triangulated to give him a closer resemblance to the snake that had killed his wife.

  He seemed to come to a decision and, elbowing aside both lava-aura and my ally, squatted down before me and spoke clearly, distinctly, and loudly—in Vietnamese. My ally protested that I didn’t know Vietnamese, so the colonel raised his voice and spoke louder. But it wasn’t necessary. While his individual words didn’t make sense to me, I still was able to catch his drift. He looked into my eyes, pointedly away from the amulet.

  “They say you have healing hands, woman. I should cut those hands off to keep my people from falling under your spell. But my ignorant daughter says you mean no harm, that you use this power to help our people—that you are a compassionate person. If that is so, you have other power to help us. You come up North with us, you talk to your American press, you tell them that your men rape our women, murder them, but we treat you with respect. You tell them how wrong this war is. You say to them that your healing hands can make no difference when for every person you save, thousands die. You do this, woman, and earn your life. Do not think to trick us. Up North they have good speakers of English.”

  He kept looking directly into my eyes when he spoke, and I knew that he knew I understood what he was saying. I nodded. I wasn’t lying. I was so relieved I felt faint with it. Right then I wanted to please him more than I wanted to please my own father, more than I wanted to please Duncan, more than I had ever wanted to please anyone. He could have me tortured to death or he could protect me, and he had chosen to protect me, for the time being. Once we got “up North,” wherever that was, it might be another story, but for now I was going to live. I dipped my head and nodded, and snuck a glance at his face. He looked as relieved as I felt, and there was something else in his face too, something that he tried to conceal from everyone—something that embarrassed and intrigued him at the same time. Without knowing anything of my background, family, language, or customs, he now knew me as well as he knew Hue. Better, maybe. And if he killed me, he would know exactly who and what he was killing. Not that he hadn’t killed many times before, women, old people, children. But he had steeled himself not to hear those people, to think of them as something besides people, as something he had no responsibility toward, no obligation to understand. He would not be able to bullshit himself about me. Holding on to that amulet, strangling me, he’d inadvertently become closer than my mother, closer than a lover, and he couldn’t weasel out of it without damaging himself even more than he had already been damaged. While he held the charm, what I was had poured toward him and, taken by surprise, he had been unprepared to reject it. Only now, as he began to wrestle with his reaction to the amulet and to me, could I understand his share in the link.

  Gruffly he ordered me to stand, but when my former guard tried to manhandle me again, he berated him, told him to tie my hands in front of me and lead me, what did he think he was doing, hobbling me that way so that I slowed us down? He could get his jollies feeling me up when they weren’t in such a hurry.

  19

  I couldn’t keep up. My captors breezed through the jungle as if it were a city park and they were the street gang in charge. They ate a handful of rice once a day and took a drink maybe twice. I was woozy with hunger and thirst before we’d been traveling an hour. Colonel Dinh thinned his lips irritably but had my other friend give me a drink of yellowed water and a salt tablet and off we went again.

  The first night we slept in a tunnel. I’ve heard there were great complexes of them, but the one we were in was more like an underground bunker. The passage was narrow, obviously not made for an American girl’s hips. The other men preceded us, with my village ally going just before me, and the colonel just after.

  Oddly, now that I knew I was in no immediate danger from the colonel, I felt less frightened than I had at any time since I’d come to the jungle. I didn’t have to worry about booby traps or mines. These were the guys who set them. I didn’t have to worry about enemy capture. That had already happened. I had nothing to worry about except what might happen when we got where we were going, which was still a long way off, and whether or not an air strike might accidentally hit us. So with my friend from the village on one side of me and the colonel on the other, and the passage too small for any moving around, I slept better than I had since I’d left the 83rd. My captor
s could sleep soundly too. The colonel was watching the entrance. If any Americans stumbled across the tunnel, the colonel could shove me forward as a shield.

  My eyes opened on darkness, and I squeezed them shut again. I remembered that something terrible had happened, something irrevocable, but for a moment I couldn’t remember what it was and I didn’t want to. I smelled the earth, rich and musky, and something dead. I stretched out my hand and touched flesh and hair, withdrew the hand quickly. My heart pounded with panic. Was I dead? Buried? Was this another corpse in some mass grave? Slowly I forced myself to calm down, felt the area around me. Someone groaned. Someone else’s sandals were in my back. I opened my eyes. Along the tunnel passage lay the sleeping bodies of my captors, cloaked in their various-colored auras, looking for all the world like the ghosts of Easter eggs lining some subterranean nest. I tried to sit up and bumped my head on something hard. A restraining hand pushed me back down. The sandals dug into my back as the colonel sat up. A pencil-thin shaft of light fell across my eyes, then a volleyball-sized shaft, as the colonel lifted the cover away from the tunnel entrance. He climbed out and extended his hand. I climbed out after him.

  He sat on a log and lit a cigarette, offered me one. I took it. He sat staring into space for a long time. He was wearing a pistol. I could have taken it during the night, I supposed, but I’m not sure what I would have done after that. “Babe in the woods” didn’t even begin to describe my degree of total helplessness and ineptitude.

  He caught me looking at the gun.

  “Do not force me to kill you, co.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I murmured in English. He looked surprised, then wary, at my response. I don’t think he understood precisely what I said. I think his comprehension was general, in the same way that mine initially had been. I saw him wondering if perhaps I wasn’t a magician after all, because, of course, he didn’t understand the power of the amulet. He was puzzled by the sensation that he understood me, when he knew logically that he couldn’t have.

  The drizzle wet my cigarette through almost at once, and I chewed on the end of it, bringing saliva to my mouth to relieve the dryness. The jungle was thick here, the undergrowth tall and twining.

  The colonel stubbed out his cigarette, field-stripped it, put it in his pocket, and poked the man nearest the tunnel entrance with a twig.

  Before we left the tunnel site, one of the soldiers, a boy of about fourteen, rigged a mine to the entrance.

  We spent the morning climbing. My guard and I were the very last in the column, with machetes hacking up ahead of us. The trail was so steep that my thighs started throbbing with exertion after only a few steps. Gradually the ground yielded to more rocks than brush.

  At the top of the ridge we rested, or rather, the colonel ordered a halt so that I could rest. As I caught my breath, I found I was inhaling stale smoke. It was coming from the valley below us. What I had mistaken for jungle steam was still drifting up from the charred ruins of the village hit the previous night. Among the few buildings still standing or partially intact, a few people wandered dazedly. The colonel gave me a smug look. This was the village from which my patients came. We had skirted it carefully, avoiding the survivors, lest anybody be grateful enough to help me, I supposed. I shrugged at him. He’d been overly cautious. Those people below us looked to me to be too out of it to care.

  I was trying to be casual for the colonel’s benefit, but the sight of those people, homeless, grieving for who knows what losses, and alone in the jungle, shook me. Their fields were bombed and blackened. How would they eat? They were hurt. How would they work? Right now they apparently were sympathetic to the VC and taking fire from us, but it could as easily turn the other way, I knew. Would Hue’s village be bombed soon? I wondered. Or would it be invaded again—what if William found those GIs and told them about me and they returned to the village to find me gone? What would they do to the villagers? Jesus, out of the frying pan into the fire for those people. It must be like living in a Stephen King novel you can never finish—a new fate more horrible than the last on every page. Well, I’d gotten too close and now I was in it as well and I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to me—unless William stayed sane long enough to bring help.

  Ahn would try to tell a rescue party what had become of me, I was sure, but how could he do that without condemning the people who had taken him in? I wondered if he would be alive by the time help came. His wound could break open again or, worse, someone might decide he was dangerous to them and kill him. Sometimes, I heard, children who had lost limbs were poisoned. The reasoning supposedly was that they would not be able to lead useful lives and would be more abused as they grew older. I hoped Ahn’s stubborn streak and the self-interest that had caused him to flee William would stand him in good stead. Some mamasan he’d picked. I’d wanted to protect him so that I would not have to watch him die or hear of it, but how soon after I took him to Quang Ngai would he have been in a situation as bad as his present one, if not worse? They couldn’t keep him in the hospital forever. If I really cared, if I’d fought hard enough, couldn’t I have adopted him? I doubted it. Even GI fathers married to the mothers of their Amerasian children had trouble moving their Vietnamese families to the States. It was a good thing I hadn’t promised to adopt Ahn. I would never be going back to the States myself now. I stopped thinking then. It was much less painful to agonize about what would happen to Ahn and the villagers than it was to think about what would happen to me.

  We ate dry handfuls of uncooked rice, a little harder to chew than unmilked Grape-Nuts, and I had another swig of water. I still needed to rest. My wind wasn’t up to this. The colonel took three men aside and started pointing things out, a few yards away from me. I was staring at my boots, feeling the mud run off me with the rain, wondering idly if part of my shortness of breath wasn’t encroaching pneumonia, when something sharp jabbed my left breast. I looked up and there was lava-aura, pointing his bayonet at my chest, grinning as if he’d done something clever.

  When I looked up he jabbed me again, on the other side. Trying to deflate me, the adolescent asshole. He jabbed again and, swinging my bound hands, I shoved the damned thing aside. It laid open the side of my arm, which bled freely since I couldn’t even put pressure on it to stop it. He smiled unpleasantly. “Let me alone, you jerk,” I said, half-sobbing. He smiled even more unpleasantly and twitched the bayonet back and forth at eye level, my blood mixing with rain and dripping off the tip.

  We had creeps like that on our side too, congenital sadists, probably, little boys whose favorite sport was tearing wings off butterflies or torturing kittens, boys who finally had a little authority and used it to abuse anyone who came under their control. And he had me good. If I screamed, he might not kill me but he could very well put out my eye, just for the fun of it. He wanted to scare me and was doing a damned good job of it, but I was getting so angry at his bullying I was beginning not to care. The balance between being afraid of mutilation and being determined to shove that damned thing up his ass was rapidly tilting toward the more suicidal choice. I didn’t have much to gain either way, except satisfaction.

  I was steeling myself to lunge at the damned thing when someone picked up my tether and jerked it sideways, slamming me down into the mud. In almost the same instant an explosion lifted my tormentor off his feet and knocked him halfway down the hill.

  I brushed the mud from my eyes as my ally helped me back onto my rock and started fussing over my cut. I lifted my hands to my neck and took the amulet in my fingers, brushing it against my guard while he examined my cut. The blue of his aura had been darkening a little, but now it brightened and grew a fragile shoot of mauve. I could not see what was happening, but I felt the bleeding stop. I dropped the amulet casually back into my shirt as the guard looked back at me, awe and guarded hope in his face. He had been with the liberation movement since the Diem government executed his family. He had thought the movement would be a way to avenge his fa
mily, help his country. He was not so sure now. Sometimes the scene he had watched from hiding—his parents, grandparents, sisters, and brothers being deliberately murdered—came back to him in the things he and his comrades did. He had wanted to be a Buddhist monk and then for a while he yearned to be admitted to the Party. He had wanted to drive out foreign aggressors and their puppet governments. Instead, as a child, he had carried bombs to blow up boys not much older than he who were sometimes trying to be kind, and “punished” villagers the way his parents had been punished. He had begun to doubt the good in anything until the night in the village. He was Hien. He would do for me what he could, but what was his unworthy protection compared to that of Colonel Dinh himself?

  The colonel frowned down the hill, his .45 already replaced in its holster. With Hien’s help, I rose to my feet. The body of lava-aura sprawled halfway down the hillside. His death aura did not change or clarify. It remained black and red, almost indistinguishable from his physical appearance—half of his chest covered in blood, a black cloud of insects already gathering around him. Was I right about his being vicious since boyhood? Was he simply a naturally talented sadistic psychotic killer? I wondered. Perhaps his aura had started out like William’s, just occasional flashes of killer craziness, and had eventually taken over his whole personality. From my standpoint, it didn’t matter much.

  “Thank you,” I said, bowing to the colonel, but he turned on his heel and walked away from me, making a small gesture that mustered the group back into action.

  Lava-aura’s body was left where it fell. I examined the auras and faces of the men around me. I was afraid some friend of his would blame me and try to kill me out of revenge.