this was what a real honest-to-God wartime romance was like before I, too, dropped off.
I don't know how much later it was that someone pounded on the door. I woke up a little disoriented, felt Tony next to me, and thought, Oh shit, it's the colonel. 'Who is it?' I asked.
The door cracked and a round brown face with a hawkish nose poked.in, looked mildly interested at what it saw, and backed out again. 'Spec-5
Lightfoot, ma'am. I came for Mr. Devlin. We're on red alert now. Need to-'
'Tonto? That you?' Tony asked sharply, sitting up and pulling on his shorts and trousers as quickly as any fireman. 'That's a roger, kemo sabe. Time to saddle up. We gotta didi.'
He did lace his boots, but he was still buttoning his shirt as he ran out the door. He ran back and dropped a kiss on my nose. ' 'Bye, babe.
Call you later.'
I nodded and listened until his boots hit the bottom stair.
Still, it was a good thing I'd spent a little time in bed that evening, because the rocket attack started a short time later and I spent the rest of the night under the bed, in a T-shirt, panties, flak jacket, and helmet, keeping the cockroaches company, hugging the plywood.
What I was actually supposed to do, what we were all supposed to do, was grab flak jackets and helmets and head for the sandbag-reinforced bunker hunching up between my barracks and the one facing it. Usually, nobody even bothered to vacate the officers' club. We hadn't received heavy fire in so long that the bunkers were not taken seriously. During my first rocket attack, I had dutifully reported to the cavelike little shelter to find the chief of internal medicine suavely sipping a martini and reading an Ian Fleming paperback by flashlight. By the next time, he had DEROSed (left the country) and the bunker was unoccupied. I took one look at the dismal, hot little hole and thought of coiled cobras and scorpions and snuck back up the stairs to hide under the bed.
Which was what everybody else who paid any attention to the shelling did. I had the procedure perfected by now. I took my pillow, flak jacket, helmet, usually a paper fan and a Coke, a book and a flashlight.
It was a little like playing house under the dining room table when I was a kid. Usually I didn't mind it too much. The floor was hard, but you needed your mattress on top of the bed to shield you. That particular night I read the same sentence several times before giving up. I was plenty cool now, and I cursed Tony for being out there flying around making Vietnam safe for democracy when he should have been under the bed with me.
Then I thought about him flying around up there with all those rockets whistling through the air, and I wished I could be working, just to take my mind off it. Over on the wards, the staff would be moving the patients who could be moved under the beds. Those who couldn't would have mattresses piled on top of them. Several times already, I'd had to give meds on my hands and knees. The GIs with the facial injuries kept asking for their weapons, which were locked up, and I kept wishing I could slide under one of the beds, too, and huddle next to someone till morning. Even though I was supposed to be protecting those guys, I felt better knowing that they were there, under the beds.
You could joke your way through a shelling over on the wards, and act tough. It was less funny to lie alone listening to the shrieking rockets, the mortars crumping like God stomping around out there thoroughly pissed off.
Mentally, I composed a letter describing the rocket attack. Not to Mom and Dad, of course. I glossed over this kind of stuff when I wrote to them, knowing it would scare them a lot worse than it really scared me.
But it sounded nice and dramatic when I wrote to Duncan and might make him worry about me a little, the shit. In my imaginary letter I told him about Tony, too-well, not everything, but enough to make him
'Jealous. I'd have to get around to writing that sometime, I thought.
Then, if I was ever found with shrapnel through my throat like that nurse who was killed while sitting on a patient's bed, Duncan and Tony would both be sorry.
I had some good moments there imagining Tony berating himself for leaving me alone, and Duncan in tears when they sent my pathetic medals home to him (of course, they wouldn't. They didn't send anything to people you wished were your boyfriend. They sent all your stuff to your parents). But I got tired of that eventually. I was pooped, and the noise was giving me a headache, and my own dumb game didn't make the one going on outside seem any less stupid.
It was fine for those guys to run around at night and shoot things at each other, but how was I supposed to work if I had to toss and turn all night on the damned plywood? Probably I'd catch my death of cold, too.
If something was going to hit me, I wished it would just hit me.
Otherwise, the whole war should just shut the hell up so a person could get some sleep. All that noisy crap was just a nuisance anyhow. Nothing evej hit inside the compound. The VC couldn't afford to hit the 83rd.
Who else would they be able to trick into taking care of their wounded?
Once when George spent the night on guard duty and got pulled to work the E.R. the next day, he returned to the ward shaking his head and muttering, 'They had a gunshot wound of the buttocks down there? Man, I swear that looked like the same ass on the same sapper I hit last night.
Friendly as hell this morning, though. Loves baseball, apple pie, and Elvis like you wouldn't beeleeve.'
Finally, about 0300, choppers began thudding onto the pad, and their steady drone lulled me to sleep.
When I went to work that morning, the ward was transformed. The day before, we'd had only two beds on the GI side filled; now we had only two empty. Twelve bottles dangled from poles and Sarah sprinted from one to the other upending bottles long enough to squirt meds into the rubber caps or inject them straight into the new, special little chambers that came with some kinds of tubing.
The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker ferried wash water, razors, and cigarettes from the nurses' station to the patients.
'Hey, Sarge, can this dude have a drink of water?' Meyers called.
'Private Garcia here wants a cigarette, but he's got a chest tube and bottles. What d'ya think?' Voorhees called.
Sarah rehung a bottle, then consulted her clipboard. 'No, he's going to surgery he called to Meyers. 'Absolutely not. Not till he's Off 021'
she said to Voorhees. 'But you can give him a drink of water if he wants. They operated on him last night.'
Marge grabbed an armload of charts and threw a clipboard at me. We followed Sarah through the ward and she gave us a running account of each patient's wounds and what had been done for him.
The patients were mostly quiet, not saying much. They were fresh from the field, from the ambush or firelight or whatever it was that got them. Most of them had been waiting wounded for a chopper, then waiting on the chopper and in the E.R. to see if they were going to die or not, how much of themselves they were going to have to lose to get out of the war. Some were still groggy from surgery, others groggy from pre-ops before going to surgery. They all looked a little dazed, pale under tans or sunburns.
The ward buzzed with a kind of macabre carnival frenzy like the feeling I'd always had in Kansas after a long hot spell when the wind blew up and the radio blared cyclone warnings. My adrenaline rose to the occasion, jerking me from being half-awake to a clarity of mind that damn near amounted to X-ray vision. Sergeant Baker and the corpsmen, and even Marge, rushed from one end of the ward to the other, frowning with concentration but with a lively urgency to their voices and movements, making little jokes with one another and the patients.
I scribbled fast notes and started preparing the next I.V.s, slapping bottles onto the counter and decapitating them, injecting sterile water into dry powdered antibiotics and shaking ampoules until my hands were streaked with white grainy leakage of ampicillin, Keflex, and Chloromycetin. I picked up some of the manic feeling from the others.
We looked like a recruiting poster, selfless healers doing our bit for the boys.
As the patients began to wake up, from sleep or shock or anesthetic, they mostly seemed fairly happy, and in spite of their wounds, there was some 'Justification for it. They would be out of it now-out of the boonies, out of range, out of Vietnam. Clean sheets and a bath and a pain shot were more comfort than some of them had had in a year and
