“Want us to search her, sir?” someone asked eagerly.
“Later. Young woman, I want to see your military ID.”
“Okay,” I said. Then I remembered that I’d taken it out of my pocket and put it in my ditty bad and my ditty bag was long gone—back at Hue’s village. “Oops,” I said. “It got lost.”
“Very convenient. Men, I want you to hear this. Our enemies are very clever. There is a report that a Lieutenant Kathleen McCulley went AWOL about two weeks ago. She went down in a Huey headed for Quang Ngai. She, the pilot, and crew chief and all presumed dead. It’s an open secret, been talked about over the phone, over the radio. Now here is this girl, claiming to be McCulley. How could a lone girl have made it this far? And didn’t you say, private, that when you found this woman she was being shielded by one of her comrades? Doesn’t that tell you something? You know, all Communists are not Vietnamese. There are even American women in the employ of the enemy. Now, I would hate to think that an American Army nurse might have been so foolish as to have succumbed to Communist propaganda, but these women aren’t real troops, after all. They can be scared and intimidated. The giveaway with this one is that she killed her leader over there before he could tell you anything about his operation, himself—or her. Gentlemen, I think we’re dealing with a traitor here. I have my doubts if this woman ever was Kathleen McCulley, but if she was, five will get you ten she lured that chopper into an ambush and then rejoined her VC buddies.”
“Wait a minute, sir,” Zits said. “Sounds like you’re going to court-martial her.”
“Well, that would be one option, private.”
“Sir?”
“If this gets into the press, it will cast a shadow over all of our loyal girls in the service, all of our brave nurses and other female personnel. You men wouldn’t want to see that happen, would you?”
There was a lot of random mumbling basically to the effect that they didn’t really give a shit.
“Well, there’s an alternative. Nobody knows about this but you men and me. Supposing this woman was killed with the rest of her comrades? Supposing for the classified files, Kathleen McCulley was killed by the enemy. For the official files, she died in a chopper crash. To spare her family, of course.”
I stared at him, hearing the words but not believing them. He had to be kidding, didn’t he? No, of course not. Generals didn’t kid. But he was coming to take me home. That’s why he was here. I was going to go back to the 83rd and have a last swim at China Beach and get my stuff together and go home and see my mom and Duncan. I had been drifting along with the shock and fatigue, thinking that I was so close to being out of all this, if not the beach, just a warm bed and a bath…
“I want to go home,” I said, but everybody else was talking and nobody heard me. That was just as well. Whining about home wouldn’t do me any good. Everybody—well, almost everybody—wanted to go home. I was being a privileged character again. The people I’d been among for the last week or so were home already and a fat lot of good it did them. I felt a little strength start to course through me, a few tendrils of anger start to warm my cold-clotted blood.
Behind the crisply uniformed general, Dinh’s body hung lifeless from the tree, like a modern version of the crucifix, his rain-diluted blood still flowing in pink rivulets down his chest, his mouth. What’s wrong with this picture? I wondered, and when I looked down at my own legs I realized: the aura was missing. It wasn’t clinging to the body as I had seen the auras do so often right after death. It was clinging to me, overlaying my wisp of muddied pink with that clear blue and yellow, and sparks of red.
No wonder the general thought I was a VC spy. I was wrapped in the late colonel’s aura, and it was a little like being wrapped in one of those cloaks of invisibility from the fairy tales, only not quite as useful. Still, I was beginning to feel a little stronger. It could be worse. What if I were Vietnamese, with no right and no desire to leave this beautiful, blighted land? If this were my home, and I had nothing to do but stay and try to fend off wave after wave of invaders while my family, the culture I knew, the very landscape rotted around me like an old silk curtain in monsoon season? Nothing to look forward to but struggle and more struggle. The last few days had been horrible, but I still had options, another home, one of my own—but I needed to snap out of it if I wanted to live long enough to see stupid TV commercials and eat Sugar Pops for breakfast again. What Colonel Dinh had said echoed back to me from what seemed like years before, but was only that morning: “Life is not meant to return to a dead limb, and now that it does, it burns….”
“Well, young woman, if you have any explanation I’d like to hear it. What were you doing in the company of the enemy?”
“I was a prisoner, sir,” I said. “That’s why my hands were tied.” Obviously. Jerk.
“Yeah, but what about that guy on top of you, sweetheart?” Maryjane asked nastily. “Looked to me like he was takin’ your share of the heat. Some enemy.” Maryjane’s tone had raised in pitch to the shrill and malicious end of the scale.
“And that guy.” Zits jerked his thumb at the colonel’s corpse. “Why’d you off him? Like the general says, we coulda got valuable information out of him.”
“You didn’t want valuable information,” I spat back. “You’d already tried questioning him and you knew he wasn’t going to say anything. You just wanted to hurt him.”
“So? What was it to you? Hadn’t he hurt you? Or maybe you liked it, huh, baby?”
“No, I just don’t like to see people mistreated.”
Somebody laughed harshly. “Well, lady, you are in the wrong war, then.”
From being protective and solicitous, the men had become hostile, aggressive. Looking up at the general, who wore an expression of smug satisfaction that must have been much the same as that worn by an early witch-hunter, I saw what was happening with graphic clarity. The blackness in the general’s aura cannibalized the other colors that had been present in it, and grew, webbing out to touch the blackness that was the primary component of Maryjane’s aura, to sprout more blackness in Zits, to web with the hatred and anger that had become part of every man’s aura, and where the blackness met blackness, it was amplified, until the clearing was filled with it. General Hennessey sure was a leader of men, okay. He just didn’t have much use for women.
One of them looked at the other while the general thumbed his side arm. Maryjane gave me a lopsided grin and pulled out his machete. “You know, General, if the Cong had done her, they’d have made it hurt.” He grinned and winked at me. Big joke. Very funny.
“Oh, great, soldier,” I said. “What did you do when you were a kid? Rip the legs off of frogs? Did I take away your toy and—” I was stopped in mid-sentence by a commotion on the perimeter. The sentry was yelling something and somebody else was yelling back. Several of the men ran over to see what was going on. The general merely turned around, annoyed at the distraction.
“Goddamn, sir, will you look at that? They must be havin’ a fuckin’ sale on ’em today,” Maryjane said as two men wrestled a third between them into the clearing. The third man wore crossed bandoliers slung over his bony shoulders and prominent rib cage.
He was still fighting, and one after another flung the men who held him away from him and jumped Zits, trying to wrest his weapon from him. Three more men pulled him off and held him down. Zits covered him.
The general came out from behind a tree he had just happened to step behind. “What seems to be the problem here, men?”
“We found this dude pokin’ around the dead gooks, sir. We started, you know, rappin’ with him, and he fuckin’ attacked us.”
“I was gonna off him, but Darby said since he was American we should, like, try to bring him in,” the other man said.
“Okay, soldier, what have you got to say for yourself?” the general demanded.
What was left of William spit and a glob landed right in the middle of the shiny gold buckle. The red and black aura was strobi
ng like crazy and so was the aura surrounding Zits.
“Goddamn it, cut it out,” I said. “He’s dinky dao. He thinks you’re VC. Leave him the hell alone.” I pushed past Maryjane’s machete and knelt beside William. He spat at me, too, but I’d seen lots worse lately.
I didn’t have much aura left to share and there was nobody I much wanted to touch, but the general solved that problem for me. He came and stood so that his leg brushed my back.
“Do you know this man, young woman?” He was trying to intimidate me, but his well-fed, rested energy was what I needed. Only nothing happened. No change took place and William spat at me again.
So I slapped him, and glared at him.
He rolled his head back and forth, back and forth, trying to shake that aura. After what seemed like forever to me, it receded and he opened his eyes.
“Lieutenant Kitty, baby. Hey, girl, what’s happenin’? I thought you was takin’ babysan down to the ville.”
I sighed, sat back on my heels, and buried my head in my hands.
“You know this woman, soldier?” the general asked. “What are you doing in this sector? Where’s your unit?”
William blinked several times, as if trying to focus on me. His entire aura extended only about a quarter of an inch from him and was as wavery and uneven as the EKG of a patient with a myocardial infarction. “What the fuck is goin’ down here? Man, I was trackin’ you dudes, only I wasn’t always certain if it be you or if it be VC, dig? So I sort of follow along. Then, I dunno when, I see some other dudes humpin’ through the bush and I’d have thought it was you only they was draggin’ the lieutenant like she be the doggie in the window, if you can dig that? And then, man, I don’t know. I was layin’ down fire at someone and then somebody else opened up, but I’ll be damned if I know who the fuck I was shootin’. I got like hit, see?” He touched the back of his head, and when he held up his fingers, they were bloody. “When I come out of it, I go to look at the bodies and then these other dudes come at me and—oh shit, man, was that you? Lieutenant Kitty, you right on, girl. I must be dinky dao as shit to take these dudes for gooks. Ain’t no gooks that ugly. That’s a joke, man.”
The black radioman guffawed and two other black guys snorted.
“He may be dinky dao but he ain’t blind,” one of them said.
But William was taking stock of his surroundings now, and the same instinct that had told him when to roll under the bed sent blue-gray needles of alarm prickling from his aura. “Oh hey, man, hey, now, look, I didn’t—I mean, no way did I off one of our guys, did I? I—”
The general cleared his throat and Zits and Maryjane glared at him, but the black soldier leaning against the tree said, “No, man, nothin’ like that. Just seem like the jungle full of lots of folks ’sides Charlie out for a walk today.”
“I told you we were both lost—” I began wearily, but William cut me off with a nervous spate of chatter. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen before, another defense, I suppose, besides an automatic weapon or a stranglehold.
“Man, I dig. This is really wild. ’Cause I can tell you for dead sure I never expected to see this woman alive again. How’s babysan, Lieutenant?”
I shrugged and mumbled, “He’s at the village.”
William plunged right on over my words. He was sitting up now, while the medic, who was one of the other black men, cleaned and bandaged his wound. His arms flew around as he talked so that the man had trouble bandaging him as he told the story of his unit being overrun.
“Yeah, I heard about that. Numbah ten, man. We didn’t know nobody got out.”
“Why didn’t you report to headquarters, soldier?” the general demanded.
“General, man, that’s what I be tryin’ to tell you. I be tryin’ to report back for weeks, man. But you know, I got me no radio and you the first bunch of dudes I see and I’m not sure most times whether you ours or theirs.”
“But you managed to contact Lieutenant McCulley.”
“Wasn’t like she was in no headquarters, though. She was lost, just like me.” He frustrated the medic by scooting away from him to put his arm around me. “But hey, girl, we made it, didn’t we? Here we be, safe and sound in the bosom of whatever the fuck this unit be.” He gave me a squeeze. “Now, I want you dudes to take notice of this woman here. She be one amazing chick. I see this chopper crash, see, and here comes mamasan, deely-boppin’ through the jungle with a one-legged kid, tellin’ me her boyfriend got greased in the crash and do I know the way to the nearest Howard Johnson’s. Then she decides my company is too rough for her and goes down to this village to park the boy and ask to use a phone. I thought she’d be dogmeat for sure by now, but here she is and she sure is somethin’, ain’t you, mamasan?”
“Soldier, I want your name, rank, and serial number and your unit,” Hennessey said.
“Whoa, there, sir, lighten up,” said the radioman, whose aura was veined with mauve that had been deepening as he listened to William.
“I want to know your connection with this woman, soldier,” Hennessey persisted.
“Connection? Got no connection. Don’t you listen, man? I done told you my connection. Her an’ me is friends, ain’t we, Kitty? My unit got overrun and her boyfriend’s bird crash and here we be in the jungle together. Only she had this kid to look out for, see, so we decide to split up—she goes to the ville to dump the kid and I come lookin’ for you dudes. Only she beats me here.”
“She was found in the company of a party of Vietcong,” the general said.
“No shit? Baby, you all right?”
“Fuckit, man, I’m callin’ in medevac,” the radioman said. “My brother here, he’s hurt.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Hennessey barked. “I’m conducting an inquiry here.”
“Man, look at him,” the medic said. “He’s manic as hell, runnin’ on a scared-stiff high. He gonna burn himself out from that all by itself, you don’t get him back home. It’s not just this head, sir. This man got a bad case of exposure.”
“Me too, Washington. Send me back too,” Maryjane said, and shut up when the medic glared at him.
The radioman spoke up. “With respect and all that shit, sir, you do the rest of your inquirin’ back at HQ. You gonna hang around here long enough, somebody’s gonna come lookin’ for us.”
Maryjane stubbed out his smoke. “That’s a-fuckin’-firmative.”
Although the general tried to throw his weight around, the men were drifting away, marking notches on their helmets or openly toking on joints.
The radioman called for the medevac chopper to take us to the hospital at Quang Ngai. He gave a thumbs-up sign as we lifted off.
The general pulled his hat down over his eyes and affected sleep for the journey.
William and I leaned together on the bench seat of the chopper, but neither of us tried to speak above its noise. William had gone from wildly talkative to dead quiet. He was so weak he stayed seated only because he was strapped in. His aura was almost nonexistent. I laid my head on his arm and tried to share strength, but Dinh’s aura had deserted me and I didn’t have anything left to share. We were both carried into the hospital on stretchers, but William was taken to a different section. He gave me a tired wink as they took him inside. I know they asked him more questions about me, and that he was reassigned to another unit, but beyond that I’ve never been able to find out what happened to him.
22
Vietnamese vermin and parasites saved me more than once in the ensuing weeks. General Hennessey did not give up easily, and many times while I was in the hospital, people came in and asked me a lot of questions about what had happened in the jungle. Most of them seemed more intelligent than General Hennessey, and one or two of them even had the grace to look embarrassed. If it wasn’t obvious to the general that I had not been having a grand adventure running and playing with the Vietcong, it was obvious to almost everybody else. My skin was a mess of infected bites, my scalp lousy, and my hair falling out
. The wound on my arm had to be debrided to three times its width and depth; the superficial puncture wounds on my breasts gave me a bad case of mastitis that made breathing painful and coughing, from the pneumonia, excruciating. My feet were so covered with sores and crud I had to wonder how I’d been able to walk at all. I developed malaria from not taking my pills, and intestinal parasites. The interrogators knew that when I said they’d better clear a path, they’d better clear a path.
I had been transferred out of Quang Ngai, which was set up for emergency surgical care only, as soon as my arm was debrided, and sent to the larger facility at Long Binh. I don’t remember the switch. I was delirious with fever during that time, and stayed that way for a week. I’m not sure why it took me so long to begin to get really sick. Perhaps the anesthetic lowered what little resistance I had. Perhaps the amulet had afforded me some protection while I was using it for healing so intensely, but when I was knocked out, with no generative power for it to feed on, it conked out. Or maybe it was just the usual pattern, that my body knew while the stress was the greatest that I would not survive if it caved in, so it kept me going until the pace slowed a little.
At any rate, I was too sick to answer questions, too sick to do anything but sweat, have dreams that I knew were hideous but I couldn’t remember, and mumble.
The staff was as kind as they could be initially, as busy as they were. My doctor was one of those bloodless men who sees medicine as a science and patients as specimens. His aura was almost pure yellow, with only bits of mauve and blue, like colored thumbtacks, binding him to his career. The nurses wore white uniform dresses, which I noted with pity. Nylons in 110-degree heat will try to fuse with your legs. But my bed was dry and had clean sheets and I had been bathed. The first day I was able to shower, I tottered back toward my bed feeling dizzy and light-headed, but I stopped at the desk and told the corpsman, “That felt so good. Maybe I could rest a little while, then help you with your next set of TPRs or something?” He was another of those kids who looked as if they were fresh out of junior high, with a blond butch and a sunburned face. The face got redder when I talked to him. He wet his lips and said, “No thanks, ma’am,” then, “You have a visitor who’s been waiting for you.”
The Healer’s War Page 32