miners' shacks outlaws use for hideouts in old Western movies.
I flopped down on my cot and groaned for a while. The cot was covered with another Vietnamese spread, which was, like everything else at the 83rd, habitually sandy. I had no sooner lain down than I knew I was going to have to sit up again and pry off my boots. My socks were wringing wet, my feet swollen and sore. I twisted on the bed and opened my door and dumped the sand from the boots. Mine were standard issue leather because I have big wide feet and the quartermaster couldn't find the lighter, canvas-and-steel-reinforced jungle boots in my size. The plywood floor of the room did not cool my burning soles, so I lay back down on the bed and let the room spin around for a while.
The whole hooch was about the size of my clothes closet at home in Kansas City, and it didn't have a closet. It did have, courtesy of my mother's care packages, contact-paper flowers stuck around on the bare plywood walls and a mobile of paper cats, a pop bottle with Mexican crepe-paper flowers stuck in it, also gifts from home. My hot plate, assorted food, a midget refrigerator, and a reel-to-reel tape deck, along with my folded clothing, even my underwear, freshly rice-starched and ironed by my hooch maid, were arranged on a wonderful wall of shelves constructed by the orthopedic surgeon I would soon be working with. Joe Giangelo, a doctor who had somehow managed to escape ascending to deity when he gained his M.D., was better known as Geppetto by the nurses, because of the kindness with which he deployed his carpentry skills. With Geppetto for our local architect and interior designer, the hooches of several of the nurses were pretty plush by Vietnam standards.
Correction. This whole assignment was very plush by Vietnam standards.
So what the hell was wrong with me? I wasn't being asked to build the Bridge on the River Kwai, just to do my job, for very good pay, under much better circumstances than most of the people in Vietnam. I wasn't in any foxholes, or in danger of being shot at, and even the concertina wire and sandbag bunkers were more for joshing the folks at home than taken seriously, at least by me. Of course, the work hours here were a little longer, the heat and bugs were atrocious, and I was unable to get enough sleep because of all of the above, but compared to what the average grunt went through I was living in fat city. So why was I screwing up so badly I almost killed people?
Well, actually, I wasn't almost killing just anybody, but specifically a little Vietnamese girl with a head inJury. There was a double dehumanizing factor there. She wasn't one of 'us,' of course. Didn't speak English. Was automatically suspect of being a grenade-tossing junior terrorist just because she had the gall to be Vietnamese in Vietnam.
And the head injury made it worse, because even though I knew theoretically that some of the neuro patients would get well, I could remember only a handful of encounters with patients alert enough to display whole personalities. I really wanted to blame someone else so that I didn't have to admit that I had gotten not only careless but callous.
Looking closely at why I was so mad at the doctor and the head nurse and the others who were justifiably alarmed over what had happened with Tran, I think I took the whole thing personally because I felt they didn't really care about her as much as I did. They were just tsk-tsking me to get me. Because only a couple of months earlier, it had been standard operating procedure to give the Vietnamese patients lifethreateningly dangerous care on a routine basis, when we transfused them with 0-positive blood.
Before I came to Nam I had only read about transfusion reactions in textbooks, because a routine laboratory procedure, typing and crossmatching a patient to ensure compatibility with the donated blood, eliminated most of the danger.
I began to realize the difference between wartime and peacetime nursing the night one of my Vietnamese patients went into a transfusion reaction and nobody but me was even upset about it.
The patient was a middle-aged woman who had been too near when a bomb went off, drilling a hole in her skull as well as peppering her body with frag wounds, from which she lost a lot of blood. The first unit of blood had been hung as I came on duty. My assignment was to monitor the patient for a transfusion reaction. Although transfusion reactions are rare in the States, it's routine to keep track of the patient's vital signs and general well-being for the first hour or so, just to make sure everything is okay. Only this time everything wasn't okay. The woman spiked a temp even higher than the one she was already running from dehydration, and began chilling at the same time. It's eerie seeing goose bumps rise on somebody when their fever is 104-105 and the room temperature is the same or higher. It happened so fast that she was starting to convulse before I quite realized what was happening. As soon as I did, I yanked the unit of blood, tubing and all, and replaced it with a bottle of Ringer's lactate. I put in a call for the doctor, who was, I think, in downtown Da Nang that night (though that was supposed to be off limits), and called the lab to ask them to repeat the cross match.
'Why?' asked the stoned young thing on the other end.
'Because the unit you brought me was wrong-it almost killed my patient.'
'Then so would anything else I bring you. 0 poz is all we got for gooks, lady.'
'What do you mean by that remark, soldier?' I asked in my best John Wayne growl. 'The woman almost bled to death already. We surely aren't going to bring her in and just finish her off with bad blood.'
I meant to be sarcastic, but the fellow was full of herbally induced patience.
'It ain't bad blood, Lieutenant. It's good ol' American universaldonor blood. The gooks are lucky to get it. American donors donate for
'Mericans, get it? There'd be hell to pay if they knew their blood was going to keep some gook alive. But bein' the Good Samarit-the kindhearted suckers we are-we let 'em have a little of the cheap-and-easy brew.'
'If 0 positive is the universal donor, why is she reacting to it?'
'Oh, it ain't all that universal. Lots of AB types don't handle it real well, and uh-AB is a lot more common among the gooks than it is with us.
oops, gotta date with a hot centrifuge. Have a nice night, Lieutenant.'
The doctor was even more offhand than the lab tech, who was indeed repeating hospital policy. Nobody said in so many words that they didn't care if the Vietnamese patients lived or died. But the lifers, the career Army sergeants and senior officers, were fond of reminding us new recruits that anyone who had served in the Pacific in WW II or Korea could tell you gooks didn't value human life the way Americans and Europeans did.
It wasn't until the neurosurgeon left and a fill-in, a doctor who had been serving in the field, was reassigned to us on temporary duty that something was done about the problem. Dr. Riley was a very logical man. He decided that if gooks bled, gooks could give blood. He grabbed a handful of tourniquets, needles, and syringes and he and Major Crawley, our head nurse at the time, raided the visitors' tent and availed themselves of its walking Vietnamese blood bank. Most of the visitors didn't mind donating. Nobody had ever thought to ask them before.
I had thought myself above the kind of bigotry that had willfully overlooked what was so obvious to Dr. Riley; the human body works pretty much the same no matter what kind of upholstery you put on it.
Now I had to seriously question whether I hadn't at least inwardly begun to buy into all of that 'anti-gook' stuff. Had I harmed Tran because I secretly didn't give as much of a damn about her as I did about my
'professional image'?
Was I really more concerned with stupid appearances than I was with hurting somebody who was so totally helpless and dependent on me?
Oh well, so I'd screwed up. Nobody had been making it exactly easy for me. Let them transfer me to an easier assignment. What did I care?
Except-except that I still hated like hell that I had failed, that I hadn't measured up. Because I wanted to do more, not less. I really wanted to be in a field hospital, as a surgical nurse, doing the rough stuff. But of course, after my screwing up like this, there was no chance of that. So I'd have to accept what they told me and watch myself and make sure that it never, ever . . .
I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. I was furious with myself now, not just with everybody else, and it was a cold kind of furious that made the center of my chest ache as if I had pleurisy. My throat was as gritty and parched as the beach. I trolled with my fingers until I found the refrigerator door, and popped it open long enough to extract the dregs of a flat Coke. I popped two Benadryls and chased them with the Coke.
It tasted metallic, and there were little solid pieces at the bottom, like worms. Probably from having been shipped and stored so long. But there were all those stories floating around about the Vietcong taking the tops off pop bottles and putting ground glass in the Coke, then recapping and resealing it. I couldn't help wondering if their evil little minds hadn't dreamed up a similar way of getting into cans. I generally tried to drink 7-Up or Shasta, but with the PX, you took what you could get.
Despite the Benadryl, I couldn't get comfortable. My elbows and knees were in the
