The relative quiet of the Neuro ward was the perfect place for Frankie to improve her nursing skills. She was able to breathe here, to concentrate, to ask questions of Captain Smith, and with practice came the start of confidence. There were few emergencies on this ward; the patients’ wounds had already been cared for in the OR. The patients were comatose, but most had other wounds that needed care, too. The quiet gave her time to think, to process, to read the detailed care notes she wrote after checking each patient. The job at the Thirty-Sixth Evac was to get the patients stable enough to go to a field hospital for treatment. Pain management was the task Frankie took the most seriously. Because her patients couldn’t speak, she took extra care with each one to assess—and assume—their pain levels.
From a distance, the ward seemed to be full of young men stuck in the hinterland between life and death. Most had little or no reaction to any stimulus, but as Frankie learned the skills it took to care for these men, she began to see them not merely as bodies in pain, but as men hoping for something more. Each soldier made her think of Finley. She spoke to them softly, touched their hands. She imagined each patient lying here, locked in the black void of a coma, dreaming of home.
Now she stood at the bedside of nineteen-year-old Private Jorge Ruiz, a radio operator who had saved most of his platoon. Captain Smith had placed him in the back of the ward, which meant that he wasn’t expected to live long enough for transfer.
“Hey, Private,” Frankie said, leaning down close, whispering directly into his ear. “I’m Frankie McGrath. I’m one of your nurses.”
She pulled a stainless steel cart closer. It was stocked with sterile gauze, peroxide, and adhesive tape. She’d need to replenish it all for the shift change. The overhead lights blared down on her, making her eyes ache.
She reached gently for his leg, wondering if he had any sensation of being touched as she unwrapped the bloodstained gauze.
“This might hurt,” she said gently as she began to pick at the crusty, dried gauze, pulling it out of the pink, jagged wound. She wished she could dampen the gauze to make it free easier, but this way the wound bled, and bleeding was good.
Beneath the gauze, she looked for blackened bits of tissue or green pockets of pus. She leaned forward to smell the wound.
All normal. No infection.
“Looking good, Private Ruiz. A lot of the boys in this room would be envious of a healing like that,” she said as she re-bandaged the wound.
Beside her, the ventilator rose and fell, whooshed and thunked, inflating and deflating his sunken chest.
A commotion at the doors interrupted the quiet. Two bloodied soldiers in dirty, ripped fatigues walked into the ward, shoulder to shoulder.
“Ma’am?” one of them said, stepping close to Private Ruiz. “How is he?”
“He’s in a coma,” she said.
“Will he wake up?”
“I don’t know.”
The other soldier stepped in beside his friend. “He saved our lives.”
“He wanted to go home and be a fireman. Some shit-ass border town in West Texas. I told him he’d never pass the test.” He looked at Frankie. “I gotta tell him I was just yankin’ his chain.”
“He’s hanging on,” she said. It was all the hope she could offer. And it was true. With life, there had to be hope.
“Thank you, ma’am, for taking care of him. Could we take a picture of you with him? For his mama?”
“Of course,” she said quietly, thinking how much a picture of Finley would have meant to her family. She moved closer to the young man, held his limp hand in hers.
The soldier snapped the shot.
“He’s lucky to have friends like you,” Frankie said. “Tell his mother he wasn’t alone.”
The soldiers nodded solemnly. One of them took a pin off of his pocket—an insignia of some kind—and handed it to Frankie. “Thanks, ma’am.” He stared at Ruiz for a moment longer, then left.
Frankie pocketed the pin and looked down at her patient. “You have some good buddies,” she said, replenishing his IV.
By the end of her long night shift, it was all she could do to stand upright. With barely a glance at Debbie John, the nurse who’d come in to replace her, Frankie stumbled out of the ward. It was early in the morning and already the sun beat down on her. She bypassed the mess hall—not hungry—and the O Club—no desire to party—and headed to her hooch. She could tell by the sound of small arms fire and helicopters in the distance that there would be patients incoming soon. She’d better sleep while she could. Thankfully, the hooch was empty. Barb and Ethel worked days, mostly. For weeks she’d barely seen her roommates.
Grateful for the relative quiet, Frankie untied her boots, put them in her locker, and lay down on her cot. She was asleep in minutes.
* * *
“Rise and shine, princess.”
“Go away, Ethel. I’m sleeping.” Frankie rolled onto her side.
“Nope. Babs and I have talked about it and we are taking you under our wing. Wings?” She looked at Barb, who shrugged.
Frankie groaned and put the pillow over her head. “Cool. Starting tomorrow.”
“Starting today, Frank. You’ve been hiding out with the gorks for six weeks. We haven’t seen you in the O Club in weeks. Who comes to ’Nam and plays with no one?”
“I’m learning to be a competent nurse.”
“That’s what today’s all about. Now get up before I pour cold water on you. Put on your fatigues. We’re going on a field trip. Bring your camera.” Ethel yanked the blanket off of Frankie, revealing her bare legs.
Grumbling, Frankie stumbled out of bed and dressed in a T-shirt and fatigue pants that were still new-looking, unmarred by bloodstains. There weren’t a lot of bloody emergencies in Neuro.
Ethel and Barb waited for her outside the mess hall. “We’re off to see the wizard. Word is that no wounded are incoming,” Barb said, smiling. She handed Frankie an olive-green canvas boonie hat. “You’ll need this.”
Outside, the camp was blissfully quiet, no helicopters delivering wounded, no mortars exploding in the distance. Men were throwing a football back and forth as a water truck rolled past.
Ethel and Barbara led the way to a two-and-a-half-ton truck—a deuce and a half—that was parked near the gates of the hospital. They climbed up into the back, along with Captain Smith. Several men from an infantry unit stood among them, carrying rifles.
“Climb in,” Barb said to Frankie. “They’re not gonna wait forever.”
Frankie climbed up into the truck’s bed and took a seat on the metal floor, beside the gunner. The big truck rumbled to life, shook, started to roll forward.
“Where are we going?” Frankie asked.
“MEDCAP,” Ethel said as the deuce and a half rumbled past the guarded gates and out into the countryside. Was it safe out here? “The Medical Civic Action Program. We provide medical care to locals. I’m sure you’ve seen them in the wards. Captain Smith organizes these outings whenever he can, says they remind him of his practice back home.”
They drove through a village that was not far from the hospital compound, saw fatigues and uniforms and olive-green T-shirts hanging from laundry lines. And then they were out in the country, jungle to the left, dirty brown river to the right. A bunch of kids floated downstream on a tire, laughing and shoving each other.
Frankie used her Polaroid and snapped a photograph of a young boy herding a black water buffalo along the water, and one of an old woman dressed traditionally in a long, split tunic over slim pants, which Frankie had learned was called an ao dai, carrying a woven basket full of fruit.
The soldiers standing in the back of the truck straightened, their guns aimed at the lush jungle in the distance. “Stay sharp,” one of them said, adding: “Snipers.”
Frankie stared out at the jungle, lowering her Polaroid camera to her lap. A team of enemy shooters could be hiding out there. She imagined men squatted behind stands of elephant grass, their guns pointed at the truck. She scrunched down, held the hat on her head, started to sweat.
The truck rumbled down a muddy, potholed road and through the green countryside. Evidence of war was everywhere—burn scars on the land, sandbags, rows of concertina wire, explosions sounding in the distance, choppers flying overhead. In a huge patch of jungle, leaves were dying and had turned orange; Frankie knew it meant that the U.S. had sprayed the area with an herbicide, Agent Orange, to kill the vegetation and limit the enemy’s ability to hide.