The Healer's War (14 page)

"Okay. Then, if not before. Gotta go. 'Bye, babe." I said good-bye to a dial tone.

Both the ARVN and Ahn were gone, I noticed. I'd passed Joe's order on to Sergeant Baker, who'd said he'd take care of it. Apparently he had.

Even as I was thinking Ahn was a long time returning from surgery, recovery room called and said they were sending him back to US.

Heron sat on the edge of Xe's bed, talking to him in a Southernfried version of Vietnamese. The old man listened and nodded and said something once in a while. Heron's large hand covered the old man's frail one. Xe's other hand was, as usual, stroking his amulet.

Sergeant Baker called for Meyers to come and help him lift someone on the GI side, so I took Ahn's vital signs myself, and made sure he turned, coughed, and took deep breaths, all of which he did so cooperatively I wondered if they'd sent us another kid by mistake.

Dang Thi That's hip needed attention next. The woman gave me a watery smile as I swished the irrigating fluid around in her wound. The wound wasn't as red as it had been, and before long might be r eady for skin grafts. I returned her smile and with forceps removed the light gauze covering the surface of the large wound and replaced it with fresh. Her breath sucked in with a sharp hiss, but as soon as I was done, she released it with a sigh and tried again to smile, although her eyes were brimming. Her face reminded me a little of that of an aunt of mine, a good woman who had a strong will, a hard life, and a lot of Indian blood. If this kind of thing had happened to Aunt Do, I could see her taking it the same way as Mrs. Dang.

While I was passing meds, Sergeant Baker, carrying his supply list, tromped onto the ward, followed by Meyers and Voorhees. Voorhees looked slightly sick.

"Pretty bad, huh?" Baker asked, chewing on his cigar while he scanned the shelves as if daring them to be short of anything we needed. When he found something, he marked it down, frowning as if he were giving it a demerit.

"No shit," Voorhees said. "I'm sorry, Sarge, but that Province Hospital is not my idea of a place to send sick people. Compared to it, the stock pens back home are the damn Hilton Hotel."

"Yeah, it ain't much of a place," Baker agreed. "But that's the way these people treat their own. Myself, I don't see it, but it's their damn country."

"What's so bad about it?" I asked.

"They didn't even have any beds, ma'am," Voorhees said, almost sputtering with indignation, "just some cruddy old mats."

"A lot of the Vietnamese don't sleep in beds at home, you know," the major told him.

"Yeah, well, not ones like these. They were all soaked with old blood and pus and stuck to the floor, and the whole place smelled like an outhouse that's been used once too often. People were lying two and three together on these damn mats, without any clothes on, or all dirty, with untreated amputations and wounds and big running sores on them. And Mrs. O'Malley-that's one of the missionaries who was there when I took the ARVN-said they don't even feed them. If somebody from the family doesn't bring in meals, the patients just go hungry. I tell you, it was gross, ma'am. Bugs crawling all over people. We might as well just have shot that guy and put him out of his misery."

I was beginning to wish I'd argued with Joe, but I'd been as mad as he was about the way Dong had treated Ahn. Still, we accepted that our own casualties would have lots of hostile feelings they worked through in pretty antisocial ways. For them, there was treatment and at least a certain amount of tolerance.

Mai, who had been charting her 1300 vital signs, chimed in. "I tell you, honest, what Gus say is true. No one get well Vietnamee hospital.

Everybody go there die. That why everybody so happy come here."

"I guess I thought Province Hospital was just like ours, only the doctors and nurses were Vietnamese," I said. But I suddenly remembered when, right after I'd started working on ward six, I met a visiting Vietnamese doctor, an educated man with a French accent and French training, touring the ward with Dr. Riley in some kind of exchange program. While the other doctors were off consulting about something, he'd stood there looking embarrassed, and, trying to put him at ease, I'd attempted to strike up a conversation. I asked, "Are you a surgeon, sir?"

"No," he'd said. He was smiling a mild and self-effacing smile that didn't prepare me for his elaboration. "No, I am not a surgeon. I am not really a doctor, by your standards. I am a butcher. I work in a charnel house." Apparently he hadn't just been modest.

Baker shook his head and waved his cigar for Voorhees to follow him into the storeroom. I was opening my mouth to ask Mai if she'd ever worked in Vietnamese hospitals before when Heron wandered over to the coffeepot. "You know, Lieutenant, we're always needing nurses for medcap missions. Could be you'd find that a real interesting way to spend one of your days off......... He was carefully polite this time, but I could hear him thinking: Instead of going to the beach all the time.

But dammit, I needed breaks from the hospital to keep me sane. A secondhand report of a place like Province Hospital was enough for me, thank you. My martyr complex only extended just so far.

Heron seemed to read me as readily as I'd read him. "Going on a medcap isn't anything like going to Province, you know. We take you nurses and the doctors and supplies to the villages and you treat people right there."

"Is that how you met Xe?" I asked. "On a medcap mission?"

"It's how I heard of him," he said, stirring his coffee with the butt end of a ballpoint pen. "Wherever Xe had been, we weren't needed."

"Why? What do you mean?"

"He's kind of a one-man AMA," Heron said ruefully. "Only not as political."

"Xe's a doctor?" I asked, feeling ridiculously dismayed that we hadn't extended the old man more professional courtesy.

"Kinda. He's sort of a combination of doctor and priest, but I guess you'd have to say he was practicing medicine without a license, by American standards. I've been studying with him since I met him after he'd saved one of my people from rabies."

"You were the one who called in the chopper when he got hit, weren't you?"

"Umm hmm."

"You say you study with him. Is he like your guru or something?"

He gulped the coffee and pitched the cup irl the wastebasket with a basketball twist of the wrist. "Yeah, something like that. Think about what I said about the medcap, Lieutenant. Every Thursday morning."

I didn't much like Charlie Heron. He was a little holler-thanthou. He made me feel like some stupid debutante who never did anything but polish her nails and have her hair fixed all day. What did he think I was doing in the hospital anyway?

What Heron hinted about Xe was intriguing, though, especially since the old man seemed to have amazing recuperative powers. The day after Ahn's surgery, the old man spotted someone using a wheelchair and nothing would do until Mai and Voorhees lifted him into it.

He wheeled himself around the ward as if he were indeed making rounds and afterward returned to bed exhausted.

Later, Ahn moaned in his sleep and I took him a pain shot. The kid rolled over without a peep and, after I'd given him the injection, rolled onto his back again. His sheets had worked loose, so I began to straighten them and hauled him up in bed, lifting him with an arm under his shoulder, another under his hips. As I pulled my arms out and started to straighten, his good arm tightened around my neck and he buried his face against my shoulder for a moment.

The next morning, Marge was still off. Voorhees got pulled to ICU and Sergeant Baker spent most of the morning in his ward masters' meeting.

Joe was in surgery with Dang Thi That. There was a new technique for skin grafts using cadaver skin to cover wounds like hers, and Joe was anxious to try it out.

I went through my morning routine and checked the charts for the orders Joe had been writing while we were in report. On Dickens's chart was a new order: the dressings on his crushed legs were to be changed daily.

Remembering the man's behavior when he first arrived on the ward, I knew it wasn't going to be easy.

Most of the new casualties had pretty well stabilized by then, and were relaxed, shouting obscenities back and forth across the ward, sometimes throwing stuff at one another. When I took them their meds or changed their dressings, most of them seemed anxious to talk now, to tell me about their wives or girlfriends or mothers or dogs, even, to talk about what a mess it was back in the unit, to gossip about things they'd heard in the bush. Some of them talked so much you couldn't get away from them-they had what is called in psych a "pressure of speech," so much stuff was waiting to come out, a way of releasing adrenaline, of coming down. A few still stayed silent and I worried about them a little bit more. But there was nobody else like good old Private Dickens, thank goodness.

He hadn't mellowed a bit since he first came on the ward, and I approached him for the dressing change in much the same spirit he might have approached a squad of Vietcong. I'd given him a pain shot first thing that morning and he'd fallen asleep soon afterward, but the rattle of the dressing cart woke him to all his snarling glory.

"Dr. Giangelo wants your dressings changed this morning, Private Dickens," I announced with false cheerfulness, and before he could say anything began scooting Chux, the blue paper-diaperlike absorbent pads, under his legs, eliciting a howl and several unflattering references to my sexual and scatalogical practices.

When I poured the peroxide over his old bandages, he squirmed and hissed as if it were boiling oil. Of course, it was cold, and it bubbled, but most patients didn't seem to feel that even on very raw wounds it really hurt-not like iodine, for instance. But when I pulled the first layer of gauze away he woke anyone who might possibly be dozing with a bloodcurdling yell. The scream went straight from his mouth into my eardrum and almost deafened me. My hands shook with the longing to backhand him, but I gritted my teeth, having already decided that I was going to be gentle and compassionate with this obnoxious jerk if it killed me.

"What are you anyhow, some lousy VC, what the hell do you think you're doing to me, what did I ever do to you, why the fuck did this happen to me, oh shit, be careful, oh God, you're killing me . . ."

and then, as I began removing the most encrusted layers of gauze, soaking them with peroxide as I went and being as careful as my shaking hands would allow, he began writhing and screaming piereingly in my ear.

With my eyes on the wound and my ears full of his screams, it's no wonder I didn't notice the wheelchair gliding up until it was almost too late.

Dickens bucked up on the bed like a frightened horse and tried to climb the wall backward, his screams intensifying.

At the foot of the bed, Xe sat in the wheelchair and regarded the patient with a mixture of calm and bewilderment. Then he lowered his eyes and mumbled to himself as he spread his hands over the spoiled meat of Dickens's legs.

"Get that gook away from me, oh God, he's going to kill me!"

Dickens screamed.

A patient named Miller, with one arm in a sling, jerked the wheelchair sideways and sent it flying with a kick. The chair careened down the hall, the old man trying to get control of it by grabbing for the wheels. He succeeded only in making it veer into one of the beds, where it crashed, sending its fragile old occupant sprawling.

Two more of the patients leaped from bed and started after Xe. I didn't think they were going to help him up.

I saw Meyers running, as if in slow motion, across the hall from the Vietnamese side of the ward. God, he'll never make it, I thought.

just then an ungodly clatter drew everyone's attention to the Navy corpsman, Ken Feyder. "oops," Ken said. "Dropped my bedpan," as if nothing else had been happening. He turned his trunk lazily toward the hyperventilating Dickens. "Hey, doggie, whatsa matter? The old guy just heard you bawlin' about your legs and wanted to trade ya. Me too, anytime, pal."

Meyers reached Xe and used his own bulk to shoulder himself in between the angry patients and the old man.

Dickens's mouth opened, then he stared at Feuder's stumps. His eye strayed to where Meyers easily hefted Xe's legless body and deposited it back in the wheelchair. He swallowed hard and clamped his lower jaw shut like a snapping turtle. I quickly finished his dressing change while Meyers returned Xe to the ward. I didn't say another word and, blessedly, neither did anyone else. If they had, I'd have exploded.

I rammed the dressing cart against the wall, stripping off my gloves so fast I broke the rubber and made the powder fly. I had to make sure Xe was all right, call Joe and tell him about the incident so he could check the old man over, and fill out an incident report.

"Ma'am?" Feuder's soft voice stopped me in my tracks as I stalked past his bed. "Ma'am, would you hand me my bedpan? I can't reach it."

I picked it up and held it out to him. It wobbled up and down in my shaking hand. His voice was low as he spoke to me. "Don't be too hard on them, Lieutenant. The unit I was with when this happened to me?

Their interpreter took off just before we got hit."

I grunted, still too furious to talk. My second day alone on the ward and I have a fucking race riot. Jesus.

"How is he?" I asked Meyers, who was standing by Xe's bedside. "Did you get his vital signs? Is there any bleeding?"

"His vital signs are okay, dressings okay too, but maybe there's somethin' wrong with his head. He's just starin' into space. Pretty shook up, I guess. I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I was down washin' bedpans like Sarge told me. I didn't see him go over there."

'It's not your fault," I said, though I wished I could blame it on him.

Xe lay there with his arms limply at his sides, staring into space. I checked his clipboard. His vital signs did look okay.

"Can you feel this?" I asked and touched his arm with the tip of my finger. He shook me off as if I were a fly, and kept staring. I wished Mai wre there. I wished Heron were there. What was wrong with Xe was very clear to me. His feelings were hurt. Heron said Xe was considered a doctor among his own people, and he'd heard Dickens screaming and come to help,'only to be attacked. "I know how you feel," I said. "Dickens is almost as bad to me too, but he's an asshole. Don't let him get you down. We're not all like that, honest. Feyder tried to help. And I kept this safe for you, didn't I?" I didn't even mean to touch the amulet, just to point at it. I knew how sensitive he was about it. But he moved and my finger made contact with the glass for an instant. Now I know it wasn't a sensation I felt, but then I thought it might have been something like static electricity. Because pain shot up my arm and into my chest, like angina in reverse. And that blade of pain cut a swath for the hot surge of shame and anger that swept over me, leaving the nauseatingly bitter aftertaste of failure in its wake.