Elizabeth Scarborough - The Healer's War

Gutlessness, maybe, being too chicken to challenge orders until I was sure of what I was doing, but that was different, even if the results were the same. Sure it was.

She had to live. She had to. What in the hell could I do to get some response out of that floppy childish body? The hard thing about somebody you've met only after they've nearly been brained is that you don't have any idea what you can promise them to induce them to do what you want. What did this kid like? What was her favorite color, her favorite toy? Did she even have any toys? Was a water buffalo a Vietnamese kid's teddy-bear substitute? How would she look in a pretty dress? Would she get a kick out of wearing a funny hat while her hair grew back? Would her hair have a chance to grow back?

And why in the hell would she listen to me anyway? I tried to concentrate on my prayers, visualizing not some holy heavenly father in a long white beard but other patients I had been close to, people I had comforted as they died. Nice people. I saw their faces as if they were watching over Tran with me. Mr. Lassiter, a kind man with a daughter a year ahead of me in nurses' training. When the doctor told him he had lung cancer, I'd held him in my arms while he cried and tried to get used to the idea. Later, when the cancer bit into his brain and he began doing weird, sometimes obscene things, I led him back to his room and talked to him and soothed him while he talked nonsense, and I remembered who he really was while he acted in ways that would have mortified him if he'd known. Mr. Franklin, an incontinent old man who was in a coma with a high fever all the time I cared for him, but who made me wonder, until he died, where he really was, and was he feeling the pain of the hideous bedsores that ate up skin and fat and muscle.

And the baby born with its insides so scrambled we couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but whom I rocked and eventually persuaded its mother to rock before it died. Those people were who I was really asking to help Tran-them and the handful of my own friends and relatives who had died before I came to Nam. I thought about all of those people, visualizing them as a cross between ghosts and angels, relieved to be free of suffering and looking down at us with a sort of benign apterest.

They wouldn't be overly anxious to have anyone, especially a child, join them prematurely. "Do me a favor, folks," I urged them. "Nudge her back this way."

Old Xe stirred, and I realized I'd been babbling aloud. I stood and stretched, my bones creaking louder than the mortars, and leaned over him. He didn't seem comatose now so much as dreaming. The fingers of his right hand still gripped the medal thing to his hairless chest. He mumbled a word and groped toward me with his left hand. I thought again of Mr. Lassiter, who mistook me for his daughter in vaguer moments, and gave papasan my hand to hold. He grasped it with a power that was surprising in someone whose bones looked like a bird's.

Whatever he was dreaming, it must have been intense, because he held on to me as tightly as if it were a matter of life and death that we remain connected. I stayed there as long as I could. It made me feel a little stronger, a little more confident, to provide even such a small measure of comfort. I thought that was what I was doing, at the time.

When I tried to pull away, his hand clenched over mine so tightly his ragged nails bit into my wrist. Well, the beds were on wheels. I tugged them a little closer together and counted Tran's respirations, then checked her pulses and pain reflexes with one hand. The old man refused to relinquish either my hand or his holy medal. The wrinkles of his forehead and between his eyes deepened, as if he was concentrating.

As I knuckled Tran, I thought I felt her stir slightly.

I was reaching for the blood-pressure cuff when the other patients started up again.

"Troi oi! Trol oi! Trol oi!" (Omigod, omigod, omigod!) The old lady from bed fourteen padded toward the desk, holding her head. "Beaucoup dau," she complained to George, who headed her off halfway down the aisle.

"Mamasan, you just have numbah one pill. No more now."

"Beaucoup dau," she insisted, showing her betel-blackened teeth. She was not used to taking no for an answer. The interpreter said she was the scourge of the marketplace in downtown Da Nang. She'd been clobbered with a rifle by an ARVN guard who wanted some trinket from her shop. She was lucky he'd hit her in the head, where she was well armored by a thick skull. If he'd hit her in the abdomen, he might have killed her.

Leaving George to handle her, I pulled away from the old man to take Tran's blood pressure. When I pried my hand loose, old Xe's hand, as if worn out from the exertion of holding on to mine, flopped between the rails and brushed my back.

I dreaded starting the neuro checks again, and my hands fumbled as I lifted Tran's lids to check her unseeing pupils. If she died, nothing would ever be all right for me again. I wished I could trade places with her. My own skin crawled when I pinched hers, my own lids twitched when I lifted hers, and I felt a knot in my chest when I knuckled her.

I apparently felt more than she did. "For Christ's sakes, Tran, that must hurt like hell. Snap out of it. Come on, kiddo, wake up." The breath eked out from between her lips with little sighs. I wanted to smack her awake, anything, just so she'd move. That would be compassionate and helpful, now, wouldn't it, nurse? Shit. I just wasn't cut out for this. I was okay with the gallbladders, cancer cases, and geriatric patients I'd cared for while I trained in Kansas City, but we just hadn't had a lot of skull fractures, traumatic amputations, or people with parts of them shot and melted away. I could take each case individually, but the collective weight was driving me down until I was simply too tired and depressed to try anymore. I was merely going through the motions, reacting automatically, leaving myself and my patients wide open to something like this.

The old man's hand brushed my hip and I swiveled around and looked at him suspiciously. He seemed the same as before, one hand still clutched at his sternum, the other now curled against my waist. Another mortar crumped and the bedlam in the ward broke loose again.

"Dau quadi!"

"Beaucoup dau, co!"

"Troi oi! Troi oi! Troi oi!"

I tucked the old fellow's hand against his side and stroked Tran's arm as if she needed soothing, not I. Through one of the three windows set high in the curve of the corrugated wall of the Quonset hut ward the sky was streaked with lemon, turquoise, and deep purple. Dawn was dawning and everybody on the ward seemed to have something loud to say about it.

"Jesus Christ, George," I said, stilling Xe's questing hand by holding it again, "can't you at least get them to do it in harmony?"

George grunted and rolled his eyes above his 4rchic comic.

Maybe the noise wasn't really loud enough to wake the dead, but then again, perhaps all that restless energy was contagious. Because this time, when I knuckled Tran, her mouth twisted and from it came a thin cry, like the kind that comes from a baby doll when you squeeze it.

I mention that incident for several reasons. I guess the first is to get it out of the way and tell it myself before anyone else does. There are those who may use that particular medication error to hint that I was an unstable nurse, which, of course, I was, and that my judgment was faulty, which it also was. However, I think it's important to note that my initial assessment of how the situation should be handled was rejected, which was also the case later, with Dang Thi That. That's what made me realize how powerless I was to do what I knew was right, and what made me take Ahn's case into my own hands. Maybe in a war situation there's no way to avoid tragedy, but I was trying, at least, to do what I thought was right. But most important of all, Tran's case was the first unknowing link between Xe, the amulet, and me, and what led to my transfer. And that, of course, led to everything else.