The CO called us all back to our positions, and we went. I assumed my place at the operating table. I switched on the light, and the brightness startled me. I stared up into the light, like I’d never seen such a thing, and then dropped my eyes and shook my head to clear my vision. Captain Steigler was at my table. He looked at me and asked if I was ready. I nodded. He nodded back. They brought the first casualty in. I still had spots in my eyes, so that when I looked at him parts of him seemed to glow, and then that was gone, and I really saw him. Really saw, for the first time, what waits on the other side of ordinary life.
The first thing you notice is the dirt. Never in your life have you seen wounds so dirty. The mud, the grass, and the way it’s everywhere, everywhere. And the blood. The sheer volume of blood. This boy’s legs had been blown off just below the knee, tourniquets tied just above. Beneath the dirt you could see the pallor of his flesh. You could see sinew stringing down into the place where there used to be a foot, blood, tissue, little strands of muscle mixed in, a horror like you’d never seen before. You want to give in to the revulsion, Jennifer, but you can’t, and so you split in two, or maybe more pieces than that, so you can do what you have to do.
He was awake. He was maybe eighteen. He asked Captain Steigler, “How’s my buddy? How’s my buddy?” and Steigler of course had no idea who his buddy was. There was a boy bleeding out from an abdominal wound on the table next to ours—Kay’s table. Was that his buddy? I hoped not. Steigler said, “Let me get you taken care of and then we’ll find out.”
The boy said, “Am I going to die?” Before anybody could answer, he spotted me. He stared at me. He asked, “Are you a girl?”
I took his hand. I said, “Yes, I am.”
It’s such a strange thing about being female. He thought I was an angel, just because I was a girl.
Another nurse was behind him, getting ready to administer the ether, but he kept on staring at me like I had a holy glow. Then he said, “I must be all right, then. It must be safe here, if there are women. I must not be going to die. You’re not going to let me die, are you? You’re not going to let me die.”
And I said no, no I wasn’t, and I meant it, even if I was lying. I had to debride what was left of the legs. I poured water, I picked out dirt and fragments, while the surgeon worked above the tourniquet to see how much of the legs he could save. Bone fragments were embedded in his pelvis. We had to extract those to save the thighs. I’d never done anything like this before, and yet I did it.
I’d been in operating rooms. I thought I had seen some things. I’d never seen anything like this. Our next patient required an amputation. The strangest part was not the cutting through but the moment when the limb actually came off. That first day I carried a whole arm away from the table. I held it by the elbow. The fingers on the hand were still flexed, as though reaching for me, saying, Hold on a minute, wait, wait. The arm was surprisingly heavy. You don’t think about what an arm weighs when it’s still a part of the body. And then when it’s off, it’s waste. It gets burned with the rest of the waste.
Parts of your body can come off, Jennifer. You can have a hole in your back so big a man can put his fist inside it.
I hadn’t seen anything.
Later I’d see all of this, do all of this, many times, without sparing a thought to the oddity of it all. This time I’d moved into the extraordinary but hadn’t yet learned how to live there. This wasn’t even a hospital as I’d ever known one, with hallways and wards and nurses in white, but a tent full of blood and guts and screaming. There should have been some other name for it, but we didn’t have one and so we applied the old one, and after a while when I thought “hospital” what I pictured was a tent or an abandoned schoolhouse, sawhorses for the stretchers, and all the patients boys.
How could I know that soon, shockingly soon, I’d come to think of injuries like that first boy had as lesser ones? I’d say things like, “He’s only lost both legs.” Only. Because you can keep somebody with a missing limb alive longer than you can somebody with a gut wound. They bleed out slower. My boy was a low priority compared to the one on Kay’s table, the one bleeding out so fast they couldn’t save him, and he died. I don’t know if he was my patient’s buddy. I don’t remember. I can’t remember everything, you know, and what’s more I wouldn’t want to. In my opinion the human mind is a messed-up thing, the way your memory unleashes these scenes upon you, sixty-plus years after the fact, when you can’t even summon up what you had for lunch today.
Some people cried, after. I didn’t cry, and neither did Kay. We were probably more proud of that than we should have been. I wrote to my mother, Am finally doing what I came over to do – It’s so different it’s fun.
Topsy-turvy. But you can get used to anything.
Day after day I soldiered through the work I had to do. I cleaned dirt from torn flesh. I picked metal from someone’s insides, where it should never, ever be. I cut a slice in burned skin so a twenty-year-old boy could breathe. I told boys on the operating table they wouldn’t die, even when I knew they would. I lied. Then I did the next thing, and the next thing, and the next, and no matter what, no matter how tired I was or how hungry or how bone-deep weary, no matter how awful the thing I had to do, I could always do it.
I could always do it, Jennifer. No matter how awful it was.
What about you?