The Healer's War (42 page)

"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, tell.in' 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 taking 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 reas signed to another unit, but beyond that I've never been able to find out what happened to him.

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 Ngal, which was set up for emergency surgica I 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 wer& 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 I 10-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."

"Oh? Who?"

"Just one of them people that's been here every day since you got here.

Head nurse ran 'em off but said we had to call them as soon as you were strong enough."

I wasn't strong enough. Nobody is strong enough to put up with the kind of shit I took from those intelligence people day in and day out for weeks after that. They made Hennessey's accusations sound like "Tsk tsk." One guy in particular started getting really hostile. They were trying to break me down, and that was easy. I've never been able to bear mental battering. But it didn't do a lot of good. I was confused and whiny, and weepy, and even to me my story never sounded exactly the same each time I told it.

But Marge came to visit me once. I told her as much as I could about where Ahn was and said if she could find Heron, I was sure he could find Ahn. I just wanted to know he was okay. She listened to me carefully and nodded noncommittally. On her way out, she stopped and chatted with the head nurse, and after that when the interrogators came, one of the ward nurses made it her business to be nearby.

Otherwise, most of the staff steered clear of me, except for treatments.

I was at the end of the ward, and a curtain was drawn between me and the other patients, so I could hear them but I couldn't see them. I even had a guard, usually a woman, so she could go right into the bathroom with me, if necessary. I was surprised they spared the handcuffs, but at least having a guard meant there was someone I could talk to. I suppose that's what they counted on, but since I didn't have anything incriminating to reveal, it didn't do much good. Some of my guards ignored me pretty much to flirt with the corpsmen or the patients, but one WAC in particular was someone I thought I'd have liked for a friend under other circumstances. She reminded me a little of Hue, short, tough, and very quick, deceptively young-looking, with an aura of bright yellow intellect, creative lavender, and idealistic blue slightly overlaid with deceptive gray-green. I almost told her about the amulet, once, but then I remembered what the inside of a mental hospital is like and knew that that was not where I wanted to spend my first few years back in the world. Also, in the back of my mind, I kept hearing what Colonel Dinh had said about the way the government would use the power to prolong the war. I thought, if Charlie Heron turned up before I left, maybe I would give it to him. But he never did.

Sergeant Janice Mitchell, the one who reminded me of Hue, never grilled me. She just sat inside the curtain and chatted with me, leaving only long enough to light up a smoke away from the oxygen I had flowing through a cannula into my nose, as therapy for the pneumonia. She listened to what I said sympathetically, not as if she was about to indict me for every word. Every time I had another session and she was there, I'd blow off what little steam I had left or whimper in her direction, so we went over the same story almost as often as I did with the interrogators. Maybe more. Besides, we got to talking about home.

She was a Midwesterner too, from Nebraska, and had joined to get out of Nebraska and to be near her brother, who had been up at Phu Bai until he was injured. She was dating several guys, but she didn't elaborate, except in general terms. I gathered maybe she wasn't supposed to talk about that. I told her about Duncan, repeating some of his stories, and about my family. But somehow the conversation would always drift back to what had happened after my fight with Krupman.

I wasn't trying to lie, but I didn't want to talk about the amulet, nor did I want to be obviously withholding anything. So I told her about the villagers, okay, but I down played the injuries and upgraded the available equipment slightly. We had been talking for two weeks before we ever got past the ambush. I started telling her about what happened afterward, what Hennessey had said.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," she said. "You trying to tell me that the general tried to talk these men into killing you? You have witnesses?" She looked a little like a pointer who found a scent just then.

"Well, yeah, like I told you, William Johnson was there, but he got there after the general said most of that stuff. And Zits and Maryjane but-no real names." I shrugged helplessly and stared down at my sheet.

"Wait a minute. There was the radioman. A black guy. His name tag said Brown. He'd tell you."

"I'll check on it," she said ruefully. "There's probably only a couple thousand men named Brown in the area."

She stood up abruptly, flipped back the curtain, and stood at the foot of my bed. I heard the click of her lighter, saw her shadow take three short steps one way, three short steps the other, back and forth.

She and Sergeant Llewellyn, the ward master, struck up quite a friendship while I was there. He had mentioned once when he was handing me an emesis basin that Janice had been with me most of the week I was out with my fever. They'd gotten well acquainted at that time, I supposed. I heard him ask her if she wanted a cup of coffee and she ducked her head in and said, "Kitty, I'm going to the nurses' station for coffee. Want a cup?"

I shook my head. later I heard whispers from the station and then voices raised in argument. I caught the words "your career" in a male voice and then "about as subversive as you are" in Janice's clarion tones, followed by "my career" and mumbles of grudging agreement.

Before day shift ended that day, Llewellyn, a lanky, rawboned 91Charlie who had Cherokee cheekbones and a Tennessee accent, lingered by my bed after picking up my supper tray. His aura was a rather muddied mauve, the healing rose overlaid with anxious gray violet just at the moment, belying his casual tone.

"Well, how are you this evening, ma'am?"

I sighed and tried to smile, but the smile drained away before it got to my mouth. "I'll do."

"Yeah, well, it sure is exciting having you around here, y'know that?

All these visitors and such. Why, it's the most excitement we've had in this place since the My Lai thing and all those newsmen and investigators all over the place. Sergeant Mitchell was on that one, too, but I didn't know her then. Noticed her, though. I don't know how you folks felt up there, but we thought ol' Calley sort of took a fall for somebody higher up. Gotta hand it to General Hennessey, though, he was right in there cryin' atrocity with everybody else, even though I met this fellow used to work in the general's mess?" His voice rose in the Southern interrogatory that means "you know?" but puts in the question mark and leaves out the words. "He said Hennessey was in favor of wipin' out the entire population. Not that that's an unusual idea.

But it's commonly held that if it takes wipin' out all of us to wipe out all of them, he's gonna be right in there wavin' the flag and talkin'

about the domino theory. Between you and me, the man ain't fishin' with a baited hook. He's been around a couple of times to pass out medals and he's downright rude to the female personnel. Why, I remember last spring one lieutenant got raped by a troop under Hennessey's command and she had to go to the I.G. and have her mama write her congressman to keep from being thrown out of the service for bein' a loose woman.