The Healer's War - Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page 0,4

his way off the ward and the head nurse was in a more human frame of mind and I asked her….

Had Tran been anesthetized already, she would have certainly died. The overdose I had already given her, combined with her head injury, was potentially lethal as it was. She was quiet as death when she returned to the ward, and I had been at her bedside ever since, watching for some sign of reprieve for both of us.

I couldn’t just blame the doctor and Cindy Lou for the orders. I had to blame myself, too, admit that maybe I was getting rattled, after three long months in what was vulgarly known among staff members as “the vegetable patch.” Maybe it was the Army’s fault for sending a sweet young thing like me to Nam. But one thing for sure: it wasn’t Tran’s fault, and she was the one who was going to die. I tried to explain all of that to God to account for the impure static in my prayers. Unfortunately, there were a lot of distractions that kept me from formulating a really good defense.

“Beaucoup dau!” This time it was bed seven, a fourteen-year-old boy whose Honda motorbike had collided with a tractor-trailer unit. The boy had a broken arm as well as a busted head. Once more George’s jungle boots slapped wearily down the concrete floor.

Somewhere in the distance, mortars crumped. Outgoing. I knew the difference now: what was incoming, what was outgoing. After 124 days in country, I was fairly blasé about anything that wasn’t aimed specifically at me, despite the fact that another nurse had been killed by a piece of a projectile just before I arrived in Nam. Mortars bothered me no more than receding thunder, ordinarily.

But, God, it was hot! This had to be the only country in the world that didn’t cool off at night. I finished Tran’s neuro checks and vital signs again and tried to touch my toes with my fingertips. My uniform was sticking to my skin and my hair stuck out at all angles, I had run my hands through it so much.

Pain boomed through my skull louder than the mortars and probed at the backs of my eyeballs. The odors of the ward were making me faintly nauseous. The smell of disinfectant and an Army bug spray so strong that when I accidentally used it on the telephone it melted the plastic was bad enough.

But the reek of pot drifting in from the Vietnamese visitors’ tent, a shelter set up between the neuro side of ward six and the general-surgery side of ward five for the families of our critical patients, was potent enough to give an elephant a contact high from half a mile away.

At least the disinfectant and the pot smoke covered up the aroma of the scenic beach, which stretched beyond the hospital perimeter, between the barbed wire and the South China Sea. It was off limits to us because it was used as a latrine by the residents of the villages on either side of the compound.

The smells were something everyone complained about a lot. When George had gone on his R&R to Australia, he said he’d felt light-headed getting off the plane and figured out it was because he wasn’t used to clean air anymore. He said he had to poke his nose into a urinal for a while until he could adjust to the change in air quality.

My own headache made me wonder about how Tran’s head felt, with all that pressure in her brain. By now the bone fragment pressing into her head could have been gently lifted, she could have been recovering.

Since they’d brought her back, I’d replayed the scene in my head hundreds, thousands of times, hearing bits of their snippy put-downs. Next time they could write down their goddamned orders as they were supposed to, so a person could read them, or give the medicine themselves, and the hell with Army wrist-slapping and nasty pieces of paper with snotty words like “insubordination.” Better to go head to head with them than this. At the same time, in the back of my mind an accusing voice wondered if I hadn’t overdosed Tran while entertaining some adolescent subconscious desire to “show them”—Chalmers and Cindy Lou—what happened when they didn’t listen to me. The idea scared the hell out of me, and I shoved it away. I was a nurse, a helping person, a healer. The whole thing was a