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 Chloro-mycetin. 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 clearly filled them with awe. Most of them remained somewhat subdued, but relief was at least as prevalent as dismay in their reactions to their situation. The magnitude of their losses, the full impact their wounds would make on their lives, didn’t hit most of them right away. It was like jet lag. One minute they were in one piece in the middle of a firefight, the next they were safely tucked in at the hospital, not feeling sick but with some part of them they had come to take for granted broken, crushed, full of holes, or missing. But that was the bad news, and it would take time to sink in. The good news was that the show was over and they were going home. It was as if they thought that when they went home, everything would be made okay again. They’d be given their DEROS papers and their medals along with those pieces of themselves they would need to make it back in the States. I don’t think it dawned on very many of them at first that those pieces had to stay behind, in the field, on the E.R. floor. Back in the States, they’d begin to realize they’d been gypped.
I’d already seen that side of it back at Fitzsimons, on the orthopedics (read “amputee”) ward.
My civilian experience with amputees had been with elderly diabetics who lost limbs to wound infection. The guys I treated at Fitz were not elderly. They were all about nineteen, and before getting wounded every damn one of them thought he was immortal, that getting hit was what happened to the other guy. And their wounds were not gradual. Overnight they lost their mobility, their manual dexterity, their futures, their self-respect, and, in their own minds at least, their manhood. Sometimes they lost their families. Strong young men weren’t supposed to be cripples.
And there I was, barely twenty-one years old, fresh out of a dorm full of other girls, knowing nothing about war, and damned little about men, maybe less about myself, or what kind of messages I was sending, or how to handle the responses I got.
The idea was I was going to be professional, tough but understanding. I wasn’t going to mind a little old thing like a missing limb. I was a nurse, after all, I saw whole people, not just wounds or the space where parts that were missing were supposed to be.
It didn’t quite work out how I’d planned it. My patients at Fitzsimons were experts on tough. I tried being seriously empathetic, but that was taken for pity and I was told angrily by a man who almost believed it, “Hey, I got nothing to feel sorry about. Sure I lost a leg, but you know how much they’re gonna have to pay me for that sucker? Man, thousands and thousands. I’m set up for life!” And I didn’t know how to take it when somebody offered me a necklace of Vietnamese ears, showed me pictures of mutilated bodies, or told me about the torture of prisoners.
The one that bothered me most was the handsome young guy with football muscles who purred in my ear the whole time I was wrapping the stump of his right arm, telling