two units of blood for the old guy and scheduled him for surgery as soon as he was judged strong enough to withstand anesthesia.
We were moderately busy those first few days I worked ortho. One morning the husband of the woman with the fractured clavicles simply appeared and packed her off. Marge called Joe, and Joe, with help from Mal, tried to talk the man out of it, but the husband just gave a tight bow and a tight thanks. Mal said the woman would feel better with her own people and would want to be present at the funeral of her children.
Personally, I thought the woman looked as if she would die of grief very soon and the man looked as if he blamed us for the tragedy and himself for ever becoming involved with 'our' side. Which irritated me. 'Our'
side was supposed to be the side of most of the South Vietnamese, wasn't it? We were helping them, not the other way around. And he wouldn't even let us try to repair some of the damage.
Nor was he the only one who didn't want our help. The day was scheduled for surgery, the O.R. tech wheeled him away and then, a short time later, came back scratching his head, wondering if we'd seen the boy.
Voorhees and Sergeant Baker divided up the hospital and started searching, but a few minutes later a sergeant I vaguely recognized carried a wailing Ahn back onto the ward. 'I understand this might belong to you ladies,' the sergeant said. I showed him where to deposit the bor while Marge tried to call Joe in O.R.
I took Ahn's vital signs, thinking Joe would want to know, but I couldn't hear much. The kid shrank from my hands and bellowed at me, all the time watching me with a mixture of fear and loathing. I couldn't understand it. I hadn't done anything to him.
The ARVN in the next bed blew a smoke ring and smirked at us as we passed.
The sergeant said, 'Say, you're the lady we brought home from the club.'
I rounded the nurses' desk and he poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned over the chart rack.
Marge looked up and said, 'The O.R. supervisor says Ahn will have to be rescheduled. When they couldn't find him, they gave the room to Dr.
Stein for a gut wound. Some vertebral damage, so Joe's scrubbed in with him. He said he's glad we found the little darling, though. Guess we can call for a tray.'
The sergeant, who looked vaguely like an Irish prizefighter, was giving Marge an appreciative once-over. 'This major looks like a nice lady to me, Lieutenant. Have you asked her yet about the weekend?'
'Not yet-'
'What about the weekend?' Marge asked.
'Well, ma'am, we're having a sort of a special do over there, and my executive officer has asked me to extend an invitation to you for Saturday night but was hoping we could have the loan of this young lady over at the company so's she could do a little flight training in a crane-kind of a goodwill mission. He's already checked about the guest room with the commanding officer. It's our anniversary weekend. Hell, we even got a Filipino band.'
'What time's the party?' Marge asked.
'We'll send birds to pick the ladies up at 1900 hours. Skip evening mess and we'll barbecue you some numbah one steaks.'
'You want to go, lieutenant?' she asked me.
'Sure,' I said. 'I just thought, since I hadn't been here very long, I might not be up for a weekend yet-'
'Shoot, girl, you make it sound like you just got in country. I hadn't planned on getting you, so I didn't count on you for the weekend. Go ahead and have it off, but if we have a big push the minute you get back we'll know who to blame.'
Things were definitely looking up. Nobody looked over my shoulder or breathed down my neck and somehow I managed very well without the supervision. Even the noontime sessions with Blaylock weren't all that painful, though she looked mildly insulted when I did know the answers to the math questions she drilled me on. Voorhees just happened to mistakenly order an extra lunch tray every day I missed my turn at the mess hall.
Friday evening during my shift, Tommy Dean came to the ward and spent the last hour drinking coffee while I finished report. I collected my swim tote, into which I'd packed a couple of dresses and 'letr'es,
'nclud'ng the Shalimar perfume I got for under ten dollars at tol the PX. The chopper was waiting for us on pad by the back doors of the emergency room. The dust flew higher than our heads as we ducked under the thundering blades. Tommy Dean flew in the copilot position and I took the backseat, accepting earphones from the crew chief with mimed thanks.
The routine was familiar to me. Some outfit or the other was always inviting a group of nurses to their party and sending a chopper as cab service. Most of the time the chopper came because someone owed someone else a favor. Scrounging and barter were as big a part of the economic system for the military in Nam as the black market was for the Vietnamese. So I knew how to put on my earphones and listen through the bone-shaking throb of the chopper and the crackle of static to the wisecracks and CB-type lingo exchanged on the radio. The crew chief was often also the crew, especially on the smaller birds, and he was the one who took care of anything that happened in the back end of the chopper, manned the door gun, and sometimes took care of patients in medevac situations.
I've never been afraid of heights and I enjoyed looking out at the ground as we flew past China Beach and over Highway I to several miles of cleared ground devoted to hangars, barracks, other ugly buildings, barbed wire, sandbags, and row after row after row of every imaginable kind of helicopter.
I didn't really know what to expect of that weekend. At Fitzsimons, I had gotten into deep trouble with an unreasonable colonel for having a man in my apartment after midnight. We weren't doing anything, but my roommate, a professional virgin who was irked to come home and find Willie there, and the colonel refused to believe me. I was called a slut in front of several other senior officers, and the colonel promised me she would personally drum me out of the corps if I ever again disgraced the sacred name of the Army nurses with such depraved behavior. Shortly after that, I got orders for Nam. I hoped her spies were watching, writing back, 'Oh sure, she says she's just going to learn about flying cranes, making 'friends' with the men, while staying chastely in the guest quarters.' I'll admit it seemed a little unlikely, but that's exactly what happened. Well, mostly, anyway.
Friday night, after jake had met us and escorted me to my room so I could change into a dress for the sake of troop-and my-morale, we barbecued steaks on a quadrangle the men had constructed. The C.O.
liked funky country and western songs, such as 'Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women,' and I knew quite a few myself, so we took turns playing C-F-G on his beat-up guitar while the troops sang along with varying degrees of tunefulness and ethanol-enhanced enthusiasm. It reminded me of the Texas bars I had loved while I was in basic at Fort Sam, and we sang and played until 0100 hours, when jake told me I was going to have to get up early if I wanted to fly a mission in a crane.
I trundled off to the guest room singing my favorite new horrible song, a parody of the 'Green Berets' song by Barry Sadler. It ended with '
'cause that is where herets belong, down in the jungle, writing songs.'
I intended to send a copy of it to Duncan if I could remember all the words, and glamorize the weekend for him the way Jake and the others were glamorizing their unit for me.
The next morning Tommy Dean sat me down in the eye of the great airborne grasshopper, a glass bubble that gave me an unimpeded view of the countryside and the mission. We flew over fishnet-strung seas, lush green mountains fading to purple in the distance, golden rice paddies, and aquamarine waters. Gauzy mists puffed up beneath us, vel 'ling the valleys. It was still extraordinarily beautiful. But even from the air, the beauty was marred by the bomb craters pitting its surface, like Never-Never Land with smallpox scars. I was used to thinking of Vietnam as ugly, hot, smelly, dirty. It had never dawned on me that the Rice Bowl of the East, as they called it in social studies, would have to be lush, that a country that was once a resort area for the French would of course be lovely. What a crying shame to hold a war here.
The crane hovered over a chopper stranded on a small island. A cable was dropped, and a man below attached the great heavy hook to the stranded Huey. A short time later, the crane lifted again, bearing the swinging Huey under its belly as if the smaller aircraft were a fly intended for the larger one's dinner. There were a couple of nervous moments when they had to pause and wait for the momentum of the Huey's swing to decrease, so that it wouldn't send the crane off balance.
Watching the Huey appear at the bottom of the bubble first from one 'de, then from the other, I thought of the string-and-ring test done to si tell if a baby was going to be a boy or a girl: back and forth for a boy, round and round for a girl.
By the end of the day I had lots of pictures and an exciting adventure to write home about. My grin almost split my face when jake met me at.
