A Pledge of Silence (14 page)

Evelyn murmured, “Playing poker, no doubt. Isn’t that what men do when women aren’t around?”

Margie wanted to believe that. She tried to picture Royce chomping on a cigar, laughing, and enjoying hands of poker with his doctor buddies, but the rumble of bulldozers and the crash of falling trees kept her rooted in reality. She drifted to sleep listening to noises queer to her ears.

In the great leafy caverns, workers erected nipa huts, the largest enclosing eight surgical stations. Smaller huts held the dental clinic, records room, and housing for the officers. Generators provided power for lights over the operating tables, and a chlorinated reservoir purified water. Using oil drums for tubs, Filipinos created a laundry to boil hospital linens with clotheslines strung along the riverbank. Craftsmen built beds, tables, stools, and shelving from the plentiful bamboo, and supply trucks arrived by the dozens. A newfangled hospital took shape while everyone worked and watched. The 35 nurses assigned to it had responsibility for setting up the open-air wards.

“The what?” Margie asked.

“Open-air wards. Like under the stars. Like I’ve got a bullet in my belly, so let’s go camping and really rough it,” Evelyn said.

“Even the records room has a roof.”

“Well, the army has its priorities.”

The women arranged 1,500 cots in the dappled light of acacia trees. They distributed wastebaskets, urinals, ashtrays, and flyswatters, and stocked storage units with linens and medical provisions. Lister bags for sterilizing water hung from tree branches. Margie saw Evelyn digging a trench with a shovel. She asked, “What are you doing?”

Evelyn wiped sweat from her brow. “You don’t want to know.” She pointed to the containers of morphine, quinine and vitamins that needed burying to protect them from bombardment and the monkeys.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” Margie said. She grabbed a shovel to help. While they worked, clouds of insects swarmed in the oppressive air. Snakes, spiders, rats, and iguanas slithered through the vines and thorny undergrowth on the edges of the clearing. Knobby with gnarled roots and stinking of rotting vegetation, dirt from the forest floor covered their shoes with black slime. Margie turned in a circle, looking around. “I can’t even describe this place. There’s not one familiar thing here—not one sight, not one smell, not one sound, not one feeling.”

That night, a convoy of Red Cross ambulances delivered the first wave of patients. Margie held the IV as medics eased a gurney from the ambulance. The occupant moaned, and she took his hand. “Welcome to Walter Reed East, soldier. You’re our first customer, so you get the best bed.”

Miss Clio Kermit arrived with the convoy to take charge of her staff. She inspected the open-air wards, the nurses’ bus-quarters, the mess, and supply huts. She talked to the women and conferred with the doctors. She ordered permanent quarters built adjacent to the river, fenced and private, with a latrine and bathing area.

Margie and Evelyn dragged their belongings from the bus to the tent they would share with Gracie and Ruth Ann. In the cramped space, four cots took up most of the floor. Just a few hours earlier, Filipino girls had stuffed the mattresses with rice straw. Gracie lay on hers. “Try the bed. It isn’t bad.”

Ruth Ann fashioned a clothesline from vines. Margie hung their one luxury, a small mirror, and Evelyn pulled out a fifth of gin. “To home, be it ever so humble,” she said, toasting the crude abode and passing the bottle around.

Japanese troops relentlessly pounded the front line with artillery fire. Wounded men arrived in droves, over a hundred of them the first night, with chests ripped open, head traumas, abdomens half blown away, and limbs pierced with shrapnel. They came in buses, on trucks, in horse-drawn carts, and on the backs of mules, all of them stinking of blood, grime and sweat. Moans, screams, and questions from still-lucid soldiers competed with a cacophony of sirens, transports, barked orders, and clanking instruments.

“Take a deep breath,” Margie instructed, covering a soldier’s nose with ether-soaked cotton. His body went limp. Margie monitored his heartbeat and blood pressure while the surgeon and nurse assistant probed deep in the young man’s gut, searching for bleeders or holes in the delicate viscera.

“I need a clamp here,” Dr. Corolla called out.

The medic searched in the Lysol-filled bucket of instruments that all the surgical tables shared.

“Too late! We’ve got a gusher! Get me suction,” the doctor barked.

The nurse suctioned inside the wound until the doctor found the damaged blood vessel and clamped it off. Following the trajectory of the bullet, he checked through the abdominal cavity, looking for nicks in the bowel. “We’re good here. How is he doing, Margie?”

“His vital signs are stable.”

“All right. Nurse, close him up. Who’s next?”

“It’s a chest case,” the nurse said. “Ready on table six.”

“How many more are out there?”

“Fifty-four, and there’s another bus coming.”

Margie prepared another young man for surgery, removing field dressings from his left ear and eye. Talkative and loopy from morphine, he told her of a fanatical enemy as she cleaned mud off his face and painted it with antiseptic.

“They live by the Code of Bushido. Death in battle’s the highest honor. Suicide’s nobler than being captured. Nothing stops them.” He winced when she got too close to the wound.

“Sorry.”

“S’okay.” He continued, “Once I saw them charge into an electrified fence. The troops behind just climbed over the dead bodies. I’ve seen a lot. That’s no way even close to human. Think I’ll lose my eye?”

She examined the messy gash extending from ear to eyelid. “You’ll have a scar. Dr. Gillis will fix you up. Are you in pain? I can give you another shot.”

Wounded soldiers kept coming. Margie’s adrenaline-charged body kept going, whether in the heat of the day when sweat rolled down her legs and into her shoes, or at night when blackout blinds trapped rank air in the surgical hut, making breathing difficult.

When the onslaught abated, she slept like a drugged person, waking with a headache each bake-oven-hot morning. Disoriented, she tried to count the number of days she’d been here, but they all melted together.

Snatching her towel off a vine, she trod the short path to the river to bathe. Leaving her clothes at the water’s edge, she immersed her body in the tepid water, enjoying the feeling of it sloshing over her. She washed with a bar of soap she found on a rock, scrubbed her scalp, her hair dry and brittle from lack of care. She slipped out of her underwear and washed that too. Wrapped in her towel, she sat on the riverbank to dry in the sun.

“Hey, Boots,” she said to a woman nicknamed after her red patent leathers. She wore her black hair in an attractive blunt cut, compliments of the unit’s talented barber.

“How’re you doing, Margie?”

“I’ve been so busy, I don’t even know. What day is it?”

“Friday, I think. They all blur together.”

“I may have slept through a day, but I’m not sure. It’s a weird feeling.”

“You didn’t miss anything. The surgery’s been quiet.” Boots lay back on her towel. “The wards are crazy though. They opened Ward 8 yesterday.”

“Eight? I thought there were six wards.”

“You need to get out of the surgery more, kid.”

“That would be 2,400 wounded men! Are you sure?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Who’s staffing them?”

“Medics mostly, and some nurses transferred in from the hospital on that island south of us, Corregidor.”

“I hadn’t heard,” Margie said, wondering what other news she had missed. “Has anyone arrived from Sternberg?”

Boots spoke languidly. “Gosh, no. I hope you’re not expecting someone.”

A prickle of anxiety stirred. Royce had said he would be just a few days behind her, but more time than that had passed.

Boots sat up. “Is Royce still at Sternberg?”

“As far as I know. Why?” She didn’t like Boots’ tone.

“You need to talk to Dr. Corolla, Margie.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just talk to Dr. Corolla. I saw him going out to Ward 6.”

Margie tightened her towel, picked up her soiled clothes, and hurried back to the tent. She dressed quickly, then hitched a ride on a jeep going to the wards. Speeding along the bumpy path, the driver pointed upward. Margie saw a limp body caught in the tree branches. The driver shouted, “A Nip sniper. Some get behind our front line. Watch out for them.”

As far as she could see, a hodgepodge of cots stretched out under the trees, their lower branches laden with boots, rucksacks, helmets, gas masks, ponchos, and pajamas. Skinny men mending from an assortment of corporal insults or sick with jungle-rot diseases slept deeply or fitfully; read numbly; paced nervously; played games with homemade cards or dice; or just sat, staring dully into space. Some of those diagnosed with battle fatigue cried as they lay in fetal position, while others howled strings of obscenities. Birds squawked loudly and continuously, and monkeys looking down offered their opinions.

Nurses quietly moved from man to man, washing off grime and sweat with water from the Real River, cleaning open wounds with green soap, and treating them with sulfa powder. They changed soiled linens, plumped pillows, and watched their charges for fever, rashes, sores, pallor, pain, or mental confusion. They offered water for thirst, food for hunger, medicine for pain, and comfort to the frightened in this primitive setting. They worked like dogs. The men called them Angels.

Margie found Evelyn and Dr. Corolla at the nurses’ station. Kicking a small lizard off the toe of her shoe, Evelyn greeted her with a grin. “What are you doing out here in the boonies?”

“Slumming. It looks like I came to the right place.”

“I know. It’s bad. These guys deserve better than they’re getting.”

Margie noted dark circles under Evelyn’s blue eyes, her skin sallow and bug-bitten. “You’re doing the best you can.”

“Tell that to the guy who’s lying in a pool of blood or fecal drainage.” She nudged Dr. Corolla aside with her hip, opened a bamboo cabinet, and selected a 20 cc syringe and a large needle. She carefully ran the needle over her finger to check it for barbs before sharpening it on a rock. Dropping 20 morphine tablets into the syringe with 20 milliliters of water, she tilted the syringe gently to mix the solution. “I’m making rounds to change dressings. You want to come with me?”

“Not this time. I’m here to talk to Dr. Corolla.”

He looked up from his daily log. “What can I do for you, Margie?” A cigarette dangled from his lips. His hair, thin on top, had grown shaggy over his ears and down the back of his neck.

Margie hesitated. “Do you know Royce Sherman? He’s a surgeon.”

Dr. Corolla inhaled, and the end of the cigarette glowed red. “Of course I know Royce. Are you the pretty nurse he talks about all the time?”

Growing warm, Margie figured she was blushing. “He talks about me?”

“Incessantly. The boy is smitten,” he said through an exhalation of smoke.

Margie retrieved a cigarette from her pocket, and Dr. Corolla provided a light. She liked the idea of Royce being smitten. “I expected him to be here by now. Do you know where he is?”

Dr. Corolla regarded her. “You’ve been so busy in the surgery, you haven’t heard.”

She sensed trouble and steeled herself for bad news.

In a gentle voice, he said, “General Homma marched his troops into Manila three days ago. Before we could get the medical staff out, they’d blocked the roads. Twenty-seven physicians surrendered to the Japanese.”

Not taking it in, she said, “The Japanese surrendered?”

He took her arm, lowered her to a stool, and squatted beside her. “My dear, Royce was captured by the Japanese.”

“No! Not captured! It can’t be! Is he all right?”

“I’m afraid we don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” She choked back a sob. “Someone must know something!”

“I’m sorry, Margie, but there’s nothing more I can tell you.”

She didn’t remember the jeep ride back to the nurses’ quarters. She paced in front of her tent, willing herself not to dwell on the stories of Japanese atrocities that wanted to crowd out any other thoughts. Royce is a surgeon, she reasoned. He has rare and valuable skills. The Japanese would recognize that, and he would be safe. She prayed to a higher power, “Please Lord, keep him safe!”

As the Japanese infantry pounded the front line, the spate of injured resumed, this time with the more intimate wounds of hand-to-hand combat. Margie administered anesthesia to the sliced and diced men, while surgeons and nurses stitched gashes from bayonets and swords.

Japanese warships blockaded every harbor. Supplies of medicines, provisions, and food depleted alarmingly. Rationing decreased meals to two per day.

At breakfast one morning, Margie stirred the rice in her bowl, looking for weevils, and wondering if the grayish meat was monkey or horse. Spitting out a tough chunk, she saw a spot of blood. She said to those with her, “We’re not getting the right vitamins from this diet. My gums are bleeding.”

“I’m not complaining,” Gracie said, patting the underside of her newly revealed chin. “I’ve wanted to lose this baby-fat for years. Now it’s melting away.”

“It’s not a healthy weight loss, Gracie.”

Margie ate the gray stuff in her bowl and every grain of rice, but what she craved was an orange. She would give anything for an orange, a cold, juice-dripping-down-your-chin orange! Her mouth watered.

Ruth Ann said, “The guys aren’t getting enough calories to heal. I’ve noticed an increase in beriberi and scurvy. Half have dysentery.”

“The other half have malaria.”

“What they need are oranges.”

“What they need is quinine.”

“What we need is a God who knows we’re here,” Gracie said, then covered her face with her hands. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’ll never get into Heaven.”

Tildy scoffed. “Look around you, Gracie. You think God is interested in your every thought and word? A bit arrogant of you, isn’t it?”