simultaneously holding up his camera and slurping a noodle. 'Look, we've been here half the day and nobody's tried to snitch my camera.'
'Most of the folks you meet in town and around the hospital are refugees. They steal to get by. These people are farmers, but take away their land and their livelihood and they'd do the same thing, or worse, to put food in their family's mouths,' Heron said. 'Our mission is to make sure they don't have to steal to get by. Some of that livestock you saw, some of the clothes, cooking utensils, the men here bought for the villagers out of their own paychecks.'
'Hey, that's really nice of you guys,' I said.
'Naw, not really, ma'am,' Sergeant Hernandez said. 'It's like, see, well, last night a rocket landed out there and we went running out with our Band-Aids and Merthiolate. When one landed too near us a couple of weeks ago, the people were there to help us in a minute and a half. We figure what happens to them happens to us and vice versa, which is how this whole fuckin' war-excuse me, ladies-how this whole war should have been fought to begin with.'
'If at all,' said a thin-faced man with granny glasses.
'No shit, man,' another marine said with feeling.
I seemed to have stumbled into a bunch of leatherneck Lancelots, no less-men who actually believed that there were good Vietnamese who were not dead Vietnamese. I can be flip about it now, but I had to look at my noodles to keep from 'gettin' a little misty,' as Maynard G.
Krebs, the beatnik character from 'Dobie Gillis,' used to say. I also felt a little disoriented-why did some marines give their paychecks to better the lives of some South Vietnamese while others, and maybe even the same ones, earlier in their tour of duty, dedicated themselves to obliterating villagers who couldn't have been very different from these people?
guess you can mostly only do this because it's so close to Da Nang and protected and everything,' I said. 'I mean, out in the bush, people who need medical attention have to be medevaced, right?'
Heron abandoned his cool altogether. He waved his hands negatively and almost choked on his noodles, trying to gulp them down in his haste to set me straight. 'No way. See, what you don't understand, L.T., is what a lot of people don't understand. This is my third tour. Last year, Da Nang was hotter than any little old village. Of course, some places we just don't have the supplies or men to do much-'
'That's where dudes like Sergeant Heroil here come in,' Hernandez said.
'You know what this character's idea of a combat mission is, ma'am? He's the medic, right? He walks point into some hostile damn ville and starts patchin' people up before anybody can pop a shot off. Guy's got to have a charmed life.'
'Hey. Sarge, I been wonderin' about that. Is it true you even sleep in the villages sometimes?'
'Mostly the Montagnard ones,' he said, as if that was different.
'Holy shit.'
'But you're not doing that anymore?' I asked. 'You're involved with this now?'
'I do a lot of things,' he said. 'Helping the Marines matchmake these guys and this villaGe is what I do lately.'
'You beaucoup dinky dao, Doc,' one of the men said.
'Yeah, I bet there's bets going' down on the black market who's going'
to nail your ass first, Doc, the brass or Charlie,' the guy with the granny glasses said approvingly.
'We've got a little something for Joe, haven't we?' Heron said, changing the subject. The mamasan was clearing the dishes, and as soon as she finished, Hernandez returned with a moldy bottle, which he handed to Joe.
'Homegrown penicillin?' Joe asked.
'It's one-hundred-day wine. They make it from sticky rice buried between banana leaves for a hundred days. Try it. I hear tell this is a very good year.'
Joe did himself proud. His lips squirmed a little when he finished the wine, but he managed to pull them up into a smile and a thank you worthy of a ham actor taking a curtain call.
As we left the village, he photographed everything in sight. I shot a few pictures, too, of a young man in a straw hat who had infected sores on his legs but a beautiful face, a young girl holding her little brother, a water buffalo and its tender, a mamasan with her loads balanced at the ends of a pole.
But the good feeling I retained from that experience was eclipsed that night when I was pulled to help Carole in ICU. She had only a few patients, but one of them was an old woman, an ARVN general's wife, who had been sitting on her front porch when some sort of incendiary bomb was lobbed onto it, burning her over 100 percent of her body, mostly third-degree. Carole was devoting all of her time to that patient, while her corpsman covered the rest of the ward.
'What do you want me to do?' I asked.
'The POW is the other critical one. He's a burn case, too, not as bad, but he's got a collapsed right lung and a fresh trach.'
He also had a guard, who had a green heret and a gun and who shifted as nervously as if he were surrounded by armed VC instead of standing over a relatively helpless one. He glowered at me as I approached. He was no more like Charlie Heron than Heron was like Barry Sadler.
He watched my every move as I extracted the prisoner's trach tube to clean it in a basin of hydrogen peroxide. Halfway through the cleaning process, the prisoner began gurgling, bubbles of accumulated phlegm collecting at the hole in his throat. I took off the gloves I'd already contaminated, put on a fresh glove, and reached for the suction tubing.
The guard held his arm over the patient.
'Let him strangle,' he said.
'What?'
'Let him strangle for a while. We're trying to get information out of him. We can't do it if you coddle him.'
I glared at his arm and brushed past it. 'I'm not coddling him, soldier. I'm suctioning his trach tube so he doesn't die. If you wanted to torture or kill him, you should have thrown him out of a helicopter when you had the chance. Once you bring him here, he's not just a prisoner. He's my patient and he is by God going to get the same care as any other patient in his condition, meaning the best I can give him.'
The slurp of the suction machine drowned out the guard's protests for a moment. When I pulled the tip of the tubing out of the POW's throat, I glared at the guard. The muscles in his jaws bunched and relaxed, bunched and relaxed, as if he were chewing on a particularly tough nail.
Finally he said, 'Your kinda attitude is going to cost Americans their lives. This guy has information-'
'Bullshit,' I said. 'He can't tell you a damn thing if he's dead. You let us get him stable enough to talk, and then if you want to ask him questions, you do so under our supervision until the man is well enough for you to murder him. You bic?'
The only reason he didn't call me a stupid cunt was because I outranked him and could have had his stripe, and women were rare enough in Nam that fragging them was severely frowned upon even by gung-ho comrades.
So the guard merely growled, but he got out of my way and didn't interfere again. The guard who relieved him was less zealous and sipped his coffee in peace.
The patient might not have been too with it, but he did seem to relax a little when the first guard left. Carole finished spreading a fresh coat of sulfonamide cream on her patient's burns. I thought I should warn her about the surly guard.
'Yeah,' she said. 'But you can understand how he feels. He may have seen buddies get blown away by that guy.'
'I guess.'
'God, I'm sick of burns,' she said, tossing her dirty gloves in the trash bag. 'We had another guy last week worse off than this woman. He was a villager doing some painting for a civilian contractor, and this CIDG guard decided he wanted some of the paint. Apparently the guy told the guard that he'd have to ask the boss and the guard tossed a lit cigarette into the paint. Of course, the worker was already covered with paint and stuff and went up like a torch. His friends rolled him in the dirt and finally put him out, but he was third-degree over 90
percent of his body. He only lasted a few hours.'
The night finally ended, and none too soon to suit me. A patient who needs constant suctioning requires you to be on your feet a lot, and mine hurt. I checked my boot again, but there was no rock, just a red place on my toe where I thought one might have rubbed. In spite of having been up for twenty-four hours, I had trouble sleeping the next day. The heat was a problem as usual, and I couldn't seem to get my foot into a comfortable position. Besides which, my mind was squirreleaging with a turmoil of impressions and conflicting emotions from the events of the day and night. Also, I came fully awake every time the phone by the staircase rang. The few dreams I had were confusing, more troubled than restful.
I gave up finally and had time for a shower before work. My sore toe did not want to fit inside my boot, but I thought, all I have to do is make it through the night. I'll probably be able to sit at the nurses'
