'How can I cut off his balls if I leave him a jock? Besides, she's a nurse. She's seen it all.'
'Don't cut him there yet, man. That's too much. He'll die too soon.'
'I don't give a fuck,' he said. But he stood in front of Dinh, and when he stood away, he was holding a bloody piece of something and there was a long bleeding strip where the colonel's right nipple had been. Dinh made that braking sound.
'See, baby, that's how it works. Wanna play?' Zits said. Then, 'Hey, she's next, man.'
'Umm, yeah, I'd like to play guts with her,' someone said lasciviously.
I think he was kidding and meant something else, but my whole back convulsed. I stood up slowly and walked over to Dinh. I started to look at the knee. Touched the amulet slowly. But my eyes were drawn back to his face. His eyelids peeled back about a quarter inch from his eyes and he saw me and groaned. I stood up.
'She's takin' a long time to decide what she wants. Somebody ought to tell her it's spontaneous, like. Hey, baby, give somebody else a turn.'
'Shut up. You don't know what that slant bastard did to her.'
'No, but it's fun to imagine, huh?'
'You make me sick.' Zits came up beside me. 'Hey, baby, you need somethin' to work with, huh? A field knife maybe?'
I was looking at Dinh. His eyes struggled open a little bit more. Hue's father, who had blown up all the children in one village, murdered a family, shot one of my patients. I saw with a shock that while his screams might not have been faked, his degree of being out of it was. He was more alert than I was. And his aura, a bare thread, was.the gray of a concrete overcoat. He stared at me steadily, challenging at first, and then, in response to whatever he saw in me, imploring, pleading, demanding, calling in a debt. Without even speaking to Zits, I lifted his sidearm from its holster. He didn't seem to notice, he was watching me so hard. So was everyone. I don't know what they thought I was going to do. I pulled the gun out and, still watching the colonel's eyes, which lit with approval, his head nodding imperceptibly, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
'Damn!' Maryjane threw his helmet angrily to the ground. 'Ya see? Ya see? Women! Jesus! You let them in on something and they spoil everything!'
'Not everything, sweetheart!'
'Aw, come off it, M.J. It's just 'cause they don't get taught how to play football and like that.'
I handed Zits' gun back to him, returned to my rock, and sat there, staring at Dinh's body and the tree as if the whole thing were part of some abstract work of modern art I was trying to understand. Actually, I wasn't seeing anything. I was resting my eyes. Resting my mind.
Everybody stayed the hell away from me. The yelling died down to angry muttering. That was okay. I didn't feel like talking to anyone.
Sometime later the chunking of chopper blades drew my attention. A Huey descended to hover in the clearing, blowing the hell out of everything.
I just sat there and ate its wind, the rain, watching a fitlooking tanned guy with white hair jump out. Some other guy was there too, but I was watching the general as if I'd never seen one before. He wore a shiny gold buckle at his waist. I thought what a great target it would make. He was clean, pressed, authoritative, and handsome in a steely sort of way. Like the successful older man every secretary yearns to marry. I didn't much care for the mossy-green aura camouflaging his intentions, but at least it went nicely with his uniform.
In a couple of minutes the chopper lifted up again and swung away from us.
Maryjane and his sergeant, who looked perpetually stone-bored, walked up to the general. The general stalked up to the corpse still hanging from his bonds against the tree, and examined him, his expression growing angrier and tighter with every second, so that I thought pretty soon his skin would split open from the tension. Maryjane pointed at me.
The general strode over and stood above me like a wrathful God.
'You don't rise when a general officer addresses you, Lieutenant?' he asked.
I just stared at him. I thought about trying to straighten out my knees, stand up again. Nope. Too much effort.
'From what the men here tell me, I have to conclude that you're a VC
sympathizer,' he said as if accusing me of something shocking. I thought it over. It was at least partially correct. I had certainly sympathized with Colonel Dinh in his last moments. But generals weren't much for such nice distinctions.
'I was performing according to my MOS, sir. One of my primary goals is to relieve suffering.'
'As a member of the United States Army, Lieutenant, your primary goal is to help win this war. Do I make myself clear?' I didn't ask what war, when did we declare war. I didn't want to cause the man to have a stroke. 'I understand you just executed a valuable enemy prisoner, of your own volition, costing us the opportunity to extract vital information. Do you realize the loss of that information will result in the deaths of thousands of Americans?'
I shrugged.
The moss green in his aura erupted into a study in angry, arrogant reds and oranges, mingled prettily with the mustard of a low order of intelligence, and a swamp of deep blue and teal for fanatical devotion to selfish causes. Like his own career. His face was rapidly growing purple. He grabbed my arm and yanked and I found that I did have a squeak left in me after all. It was my bayoneted arm. It was growing increasingly edematous and inflamed. Might have to amputate that sucker, I thought idly.
He released me and wiped his hand off on his fatigues, swearing.
'Where the hell did you say you found her?' he asked Maryjane.
'I got her off a dead VC, sir,' Maryjane said.
'How do you know she's one of ours? I don't see any dog tags.'
'Want us to search her, sir?' someone asked eagerly.
'Later. Young woman, I want to see your military ID.'
'Okay,' I said. Then I remembered that I'd taken it out of my pocket and put it in my ditty bad and my ditty bag was long goneback at Hue's village. 'oops,' I said. 'It got lost.'
'Very convenient. Men, I want you to hear this. Our enemies are very clever. There is a report that a Lieutenant Kathleen McCulley went AWOL
about two weeks ago. She went down in a Huey headed for Quang Ngai.
She, the pilot, and crew chief and all presumed dead. It's an open secret, been talked about over the phone, over the radio. Now here is this girl, claiming to be McCulley. How could a lone girl have made it this far? And didn't you say, private, that when you found this woman she was being shielded by one of her comrades? Doesn't that tell you something? You know, all Communists are not Vietnamese. There are even American women in the employ of the enemy. Now, I would hate to think that an American Army nurse might have been so foolish as to have succumbed to Communist propaganda, but these women aren't real troops, after all. They can be scared and intimidated. The giveaway with this one is that she killed her leader over there before he could tell you anything about his operation, himselfor her. Gentlemen, I think we're dealing with a traitor here. I have my doubts if this woman ever was Kathleen McCulley, but if she was, five 'II get you ten she lured that chopper Into an ambush and then rejoined her VC buddies.'
Wait a minute, sir,' Zits said. 'Sounds like you're going to courtmartial her.'
'Well, that would be one option, private.'
'Sir?'
'If this gets into the press, it will cast a shadow over all of our loyal girls in the service, all of our brave nurses and other female personnel. You men wouldn't want to see that happen, would you?'
There was a lot of random mumbling basically to the effect that they didn't really give a shit.
'Well, there's an alternative. Nobody knows about this but you men and me. Supposing this woman was killed with the rest of her comrades?
Supposing for the classified files, Kathleen McCulley was killed by the enemy. For the official files, she died in a chopper crash. To spare her family, of course.'
I stared at him, hearing the words but not believing them. He had to be kidding, didn't he? No, of course not. Generals didn't kid. But he was coming to take me home. That's why he was here. I was going to go back to the 83rd and have a last swim at China Beach and get my stuff together and go home and see my mom and Duncan. I had been drifting along with the shock and fatigue, thinking that I was so close to being out of all this, if not the beach, just a warm bed and a bath . . .
'I want to go home,' I said, but everybody else was talking and nobody heard me. That was just as well. Whining about home wouldn't do me any good. Everybody-well, almost everybodywanted to go home. I was being a privileged character again. The people I'd been among for the last week or so were home already and a fat lot of good it did them. I felt a little strength start to course through me, a few tendrils of anger
