Lou. But it was stupid of Blaylock to ignore Chalmers's share of the responsibility for bullying me out of verifying his order. If he could do it to me, he could do it to others, with results just as disastrous. I was not the only insecure, half-baked nurse who would ever work at the 83rd.
On the other hand, she wasn't in charge of him, she was in charge of me.
And he was the doctor. Anything I said would only make it look as if I was being defensive, not taking criticism cheerfully, as they say on evaluation forms. I had only to look at Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock's face and listen to her voice to know that the arguments clenched behind my teeth would be construed as sniveling and caviling.
Why was it that when I was called on the carpet I felt as if John Wayne and every grain of sand on 1wo jima would descend upon my head if I tried to explain myself? When I tried the colonel's roughshod tactics on some of my alleged subordinates, like the guys in the lab, they told me to stick it in my ear, it didn't mean nothin', and they weren't even going to listen to no butter-bars lieutenant. Maybe I ought to take lessons from them instead of the colonel, I thought. I was no good at totalitarianism. My voice betrayed my age and inexperience. In my taped messages to my folks, my lisp made me sound like a third grader.
Obviously, I wasn't the kind of officer men or anybody else followed to hell and back. If Blaylock had been chewing out John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, they'd not only convince her to exonerate them and court-martial Chalmers, but would come up with some new strategy that would win the war. Those kinds of guys never have to question how much of the blame is theirs. They're never wrong.
But right then it was rapidly dawning on me that I was wrong about rnpre than Tran's Phenergan dosage.
Why, oh why, had I ever gone into nursing and joined the Army?
When I was a kid, I'd dreamed of being either a world-famous mystery novelist or a Hollywood costume designer. I wrote stories and doodled elongated models in glamorous getups during idle time in school. But what I wanted to be when I grew up was eclipsed by wondering if I'd get the chance.
Almost every week we'd have civil defense drills at school. The fire bell would ring and our teachers would herd us into the corridors, assumed to be the safest during bombings, or direct us to huddle under our desks. We listened to the mock alerts on the radio and memorized the conelrad call letters. At home, my mom and dad wondered if the cellar, which made a good tornado shelter, would also be effective against atomic bombs. On TV, Russia threatened us, then we threatened Russia, Khrushchey pounded his shoe on the table, and nobody seemed to be able to get along. War with the Reds was inevitable. I'd be walking home from school, enjoying brilliant autumn leaves or a fresh snow, and all of a sudden hear a thunderous explosion that rattled nearby windows.
I'd check the sky, see the telltale jet stream, and relax.
just a jet breaking the sound barrier again. But I was afraid that one day I'd hear a sound like that and there'd be no more leaves, no more houses, no more cellar, no more school, no more Mom and Dad, and no more me or anything else. No matter what paltry precautions the adults tried to take, from what we kids had seen of the films of Hiroshima and read about the new, improved destruction perfected by atomic tests, nothing was going to do any good. If they dropped the Big One, the only thing to do was bend down, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass good- bye.
Later, I read On the Beach and began thinking about what I would do if I wasn't vaporized. I'd have to be useful, that was for sure.
Know how to do something the other survivors couldn't get along without.
If I was designing costumes or writing stories, I'd be one more mouth to feed. But if I went into nursing, like my mother, and knew how to take care of people, I'd be valuable.
Vietnam had been a pimple of conflict when I entered training, but by the time I was a senior, it was obviously another of those undeclared wars like Korea. The military actively recruited student nurses. I was short on money to finish my senior year, and tired of being broke. I was restless, too, and wanted out of Kansas City. I didn't approve of war, God no. But Vietnam seemed to be a comparatively piddly conventional war with men and guns and tanks and stuff, like most of World War II, instead of nuclear warheads. I was so grateful that the world was restraining itself that I felt a rush of patriotism unmatched since the last time I'd watched the old movie about George M. Cohan.
Surely, if I joined up and took care of casualties, I wouldn't be helping the war, I'd be repairing the damage as it occurred and doing my bit to keep the war contained until we could win it, without recourse to monster bombs. I never thought I'd actually end up in Vietnam. I'd have to volunteer for that, I was told. But on my first assignment, I ran afoul of one of those colonels I mentioned before, and discovered that I had been volunteered whether I liked it or not.
My mom had a fit, but after six months at Fitzsimons taking care of casualties and hearing my patients' war stories, I was curious to find out what really was going on in Vietnam. And it wasn't as if I'd actually be risking my life, really, not the way the men were. Female nurses were stationed only in the more secured areas, well protected by several thousand of our finest fighting men. I'd be able to test my ability under emergency conditions, be in the thick of things.
My skill had gotten tested, okay, and I'd flunked. Instead of getting sharper, I seemed to be losing what efficiency I'd had when I graduated second in my nursing school class. I had not, even at first, conned myself into thinking I was going to be another Nightingale, but neither had I anticipated becoming the Beetle Bailey of the Army Nurse Corps.
Apparently the distress from that notion showed in my face sufficiently to satisfy Blaylock, for she was now ready to deliver her coup de grace.
'After giving it some thought,' she said, 'I've decided to transfer you to another ward.' She said 'transfer,' but her face said 'banish.'
'Major Canon needs help on ward four. You'll start tomorrow, on days.'
Ward four? Glory hallelujah, I must have overprayed. God not only helped Tran but delivered me from from mine enemies as well. I felt like falling to my knees and begging Blaylock to please, please, Brer Colonel, please don't throw me in that brier-patch, just so she would be sure not to change her mind and spare me. Ward four was orthopedics.
All the patients there were conscious. You could actually talk to them.
You could actually watch some of them get better. You didn't run the risk of nearly killing them every time you gave them a cotton-pickin'
pill.
'Yes, ma'am,' I said, trying to hide my smile and refrain from clicking my heels together until I was safely away from her office.
'Dismissed,' she said.
I felt so giddy with relief that I was ashamed of myself, so I chastised myself by sneaking back onto neuro for another look at Tran. Chalmers and Cindy Lou were at the far end of the ward.
Tran was making up for her lack of activity for the preceding twenty-four hours. She'd wriggled halfway to the foot of the bed, her feet pushing the sheet overboard to drag the floor. I slid my arms under her hot little back and boosted her up again. She was so light she felt hollow. She let out an irritating but relatively healthy wall.
I smoothed her covers and wiped the sweat from her knotted forehead.
'Give me hell, sweetie, but thanks for not croaking,' I whispered to her.
In the next bed, old Xe lay quietly with his hands over his chest. The deep frown lines I had noticed earlier were smooth now, his wrinkles gentle as the furrows made by wind through a wheat field. The dreams that had disturbed him earlier seemed to have quieted, and his sleep was peaceful.
Chalmers and Cindy Lou trotted up the ward with bundles of charts tucked officiously under their arms, the two of them looking for all the world like Dr. Dan and Nancy Nurse. They exchanged a look that pointedly did not acknowledge my unclean presence.
tramped up the wooden stairs of the barracks and down the landing to my own hooch too tired to spare a glance for Monkey Mountain or the South China Sea, and unsure whether I wanted to continue to beat my breast, lick my wounds, or gloat. What I really wanted to do was sleep, but as soon as I opened the door to my hooch I knew that was going to present a problem.
The sun glinted blindingly off the tin roof of the building, giving my room the climate of a kiln. I had nailed a Vietnamese bedspread, an institution-green brocade of a phoenix, over my window in an attempt TO
PROVIDE myself with shade and privacy. Otherwise the hooch's decor was a scant improvement on the
