foot back to the garrison.”
Tsahai and his comrades had siphoned gas from the trucks, then hid the one working vehicle in the bush, stuffed with uniforms, ammunition, and weapons to be retrieved at another time. The real prize was the heavy gun and shells which they brought with them, everything carried on foot.
WE SET OFF after fifteen minutes. Before daybreak we reached a well-hidden, tiny bunker carved out of the side of a hill. I didn't think I was capable of walking as far as I had. It helped that my fellow walkers carried five times my load without complaint.
Luke and I stayed in the bunker. The others hurried on to a forward position, risking daylight and being spotted by the roaming MiG fighters because there was some urgency to reassemble the gun.
I slept until Luke woke me. My legs felt as if a wall had collapsed on them. “Take this,” he said, giving me two pills and a tin mug of tea. “It's our own painkiller, paracetamol, manufactured in our pharmacy.”
I was too tired to do anything but swallow. He made me eat some more of the bread, and I slept again. I awoke with less pain, but so stiff I could hardly get off the floor. I took two more of the paracetamol pills.
Five fighters arrived to escort us onward when it turned dark. One of them had a partially withered leg: polio, I knew. Seeing his swinging, awkward gait, his gun serving as a counterbalance, made it impossible for me to think of my own discomfort.
The second march was half as long as the first, and gradually my legs loosened. We arrived long before dawn at some scruffy hills. A narrow trail led to a cave, its entrance completely hidden by brush and by natural rock. Wooden logs framed the opening. A steep wooden ramp went down to more rooms, deep within. The trail on the outside led to other caves up and down the hill, all the openings cleverly concealed.
I was taken inside to a stall. I removed my shoes, and fell asleep on a straw pallet. It felt luxurious. I slept till late afternoon. Luke walked me around. I was stiff again, but he seemed fine. The base was empty of fighters because of a major operation going on elsewhere.
I suppose I should have admired these fighters, who could flit through the dust like sandflies. I should've admired their resourcefulness, their ability to manufacture their own intravenous fluid, their own sulfa, penicillin, and paracetamol tablets stamped out by a handpress. Hidden in these caves and invisible from the air or ground was an operating theater, a prosthetic limb center, hospital wards, and a school. The degree of sophistication in those surroundings was even more impressive for being so spartan. The quiet discipline, the recognition that the tasks of cooking, caring for children, sweeping the floors were as important as any other, convinced me that they would one day prevail and have their freedom.
I watched a fighter relaxing outside the bunker. The sun filtering through the acacia tree formed a changing mosaic of light on her face and on the rifle across her lap. She hummed to herself as she scanned the skies with binoculars, looking for MiGs, which were flown by the Rus sian or Cuban “advisers” to Ethiopia. America had long supported the Emperor, but it withdrew its support of Sergeant-President Mengistu's regime, halting weapons and parts sales. The Eastern Bloc stepped in to fill the void.
The fighter, who was about our age, reminded me of Genet in the way she arranged her limbs, in the ease with which she occupied her body. Despite the lethal weapon in her hand, her movements were delicate. She wore no makeup, and her feet were dusty and callous. Seeing her I was grateful for one thing: my Genet dream was gone forever and good riddance. Id been so stupid to sustain a one-sided fantasy for so long. The honeymoon in Udaipur, our own little bungalow at Missing, raising our babies, setting off to the hospital in the morning, doctors working side by side … It would never happen. I never wanted to see her again. And I probably never would. She was surely in Khartoum, still basking in the glory of her daring operation. There was no going back to Addis for her either. Soon she would join these fighters, live in these bunkers, and fight alongside them. I hoped I would be long gone by then. I resented having to be in their camp at all, even more having to turn to her comrades for help.
That night I woke to the sounds of MiGs overhead and bombs dropping far away, but close enough for us to hear the rumble. Also the fainter thuds of artillery. No lights were allowed anywhere near the mouth of the cave.
Luke said that a massive raid had just been completed on a weapons and fuel depot. It had included Tsahai and the group of fighters we met on the first night. They had penetrated using a stolen army truck. Once inside, they set charges, but their comrades outside had been surprised by a reinforcement convoy that attacked them from the rear. It had not gone exactly as planned. Nine guerrillas including Tsahai were dead and many more wounded. The Ethiopians’ losses were much larger and the fuel depot partially destroyed. Our casualties would arrive at the cave by early morning.
I woke to voices, the activity and urgency unmistakable. I heard moans and sharp cries of pain. Luke took me to the surgical ward.
“Hello, Marion,” a voice said. I turned to see Solomon, whod been my senior in medical school. Hed gone underground as soon as he finished his internship. I remembered him as a chubby, well-fed intern. The man before me had hollow cheeks and was as lean as a stick.
I followed Solomon, stooping down in a low-ceilinged tunnel where stretchers were arranged in pairs on the floor, triaged so that those most in need of surgery were closest to the operating theater at the end of the tunnel. The entrance to the theater was a cloth curtain.
The wounds were ghastly. One barely conscious man whispered last instructions into the ear of a friend, who hovered over him, writing furiously. Intravenous fluid and blood bottles dangled from hooks embedded in the cave walls. The attendants worked squatting next to the stretchers.
Solomon said hed gone close to the battlefront for this mission. “Usually I stay here. We resuscitate at the battlefield. Intravenous fluid, control bleeding, antibiotics, even some field surgery. We can prevent shock just like the Americans in Vietnam. Only we don't have their heli copters.” He slapped his thighs. “These are our helicopters. We carry our wounded by stretcher.” He scanned the room. “That man over there needs a chest tube,” he said, indicating with his head. “Please do it. Tumsghi will help you. I'll go ahead to the theater. That comrade cannot wait.” He pointed to a pale soldier lying near the curtain with a bloody pad over his abdomen. He was conscious, but barely, breathing rapidly.
The fighter who needed the chest tube whispered “Salaam” when I squatted by him. The bullet had entered his triceps, then his chest, and miraculously missed the great vessels, the heart, and the spine. When I tapped with my bunched fingers above his right nipple it was dull, quite unlike the boxy, resonant note on the left. Blood had collected around the lung in the pleural space, compressing the right lung against the left lung and the heart in the confined cavity of the chest. Working just behind his right armpit, I injected lidocaine and anesthetized the skin, then the edge of the rib and deeper into the pleura, before making an inch-long cut with a scalpel. I pushed a closed hemostat into my incision till I felt it pop through the resistance of the pleura. I put my gloved finger into the hole, sweeping around to ensure space for the chest tube—a rubber hose with openings at side and tip—which I fed into the hole. Tumsghi connected the other end to a drainage bottle with water in it, so that the tube emerged under the water level. This crude underwater seal prevented air going back into the chest. Already dark blood was emerging, and the soldier's breathing improved. He said something in Tigrinya and pulled off his oxygen. Tumsghi said, “He wants you to give his oxygen to someone else.”
I joined Solomon in the operating theater in time to see his patient come off the table. The man's chest didn't move. There was about a five-second silence. One of the women, fighting back tears, knelt and covered his face.
“Some things are beyond us,” Solomon said quietly. “He had a laceration to the liver. I tried mattress sutures. But he also had a tear to the inferior vena cava where it goes behind the liver. It kept oozing. I couldn't stop it unless I clamped the inferior vena cava, which would kill him. You remember Professor Asrat used to say that injuries to the vena cava behind the liver are when the surgeon sees God? He used to say things like that that I didn't understand. I understand now.”
The next patient had a belly wound. Solomon systematically sorted out what to me looked like an impossible and dirty mess. He pulled out the small bowel, identified several perforations which he oversewed. The spleen was ruptured and so this was removed. The sigmoid colon had a ragged tear. He cut out the segment, and then brought the two open ends to the skin in a double-barrel colostomy We irrigated the abdomen vigorously, left drains in place, and did a sponge count. The field looked so neat compared with its condition when we started. Solomon must have read my mind. He held up his hands to show me his stubby fingers and his hammer thumbs: “I wanted to be a psychiatrist.” Over the eight hours, that was the only time I saw him smile behind the mask.
