been a runway mannequin in New York before going into nursing, as she was fond of saying at parties, little realizing she gave us much fodder for cruel puns back in the barracks. Her modeling experience had to have been fifteen or twenty years ago, though, sometime before her makeup had petrified into varnish. Still, her years of charm school had imbued her with a poise that wasn’t even challenged by dealing with delinquent second lieutenants.
I would have found a firing squad led by General Patton infinitely more reassuring than that Vogueish smile.
“You do realize, do you not, lieutenant, that you are a dangerous nurse?”
“Well, yes, ma’am, but I did ask for a written order—” I began.
“The doctor gave you an order, Lieutenant McCulley. You were supposed to follow it. Instead, you administered ten times the prescribed medication. Didn’t they teach you dosages and solutions in nursing school?”
“Yes, ma’am, but—” But that had nothing to do with it. I was not told to figure the proper dosage from the child’s weight. I had been given a specific order that was incorrectly transmitted or received, I still wasn’t entirely sure which. Had it been written, there would have been no question, and no error. But I was not going to get a chance to make even that meager point.
The colonel overrode my objections. She knew what was needed to mend the situation. Busy work. “Apparently you need a refresher course. You will report to my office during your lunch period until I am satisfied that you know how to properly compute them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Meanwhile, I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. Chalmers that despite your training in advanced medical-surgical nursing, we can’t continue to risk entrusting you with such seriously ill patients.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Well, of course that was right. I was definitely feeling too shaky to work on the neuro ward anymore, particularly with Chalmers and Cindy 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 Iwo 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 e-ven 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 more 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