“Frankie—”
She couldn’t help herself. She turned to him, and he took her in his arms and held her. She felt the tears gather in her eyes, burn, and fall; they were lost in the cotton field of his T-shirt.
He didn’t say anything, just held her until she was strong enough to pull away.
“Thanks,” she said at last, not looking at him, wiping away her tears.
“She’ll remember your kindness,” he said. “That little girl. Probably for all of her life. And she will run and play and grow up.”
The words meant so much to Frankie that she could only nod. How had he known exactly what she needed to hear?
They walked out into the sunshine. In the ratty yard, the children were playing with a ball the team had brought them, were kicking it back and forth and laughing. Not far away, the helicopter landed on the dirt road, its rotors flattening the elephant grass and stirring up the red dirt.
The medical team ran for the chopper and jumped aboard. Frankie sat in the open door, her legs hanging over the side. Every now and then, she pulled her Polaroid camera out of her bag and snapped a picture and pulled the ghostly print from the camera, waving it to dry until the image appeared, but her heart wasn’t really in it.
In the distance, another helicopter flew low over the jungle, spraying herbicide.
They landed back at the Thirty-Sixth with ease, where it was quiet.
Amazingly, there were no people running from the ER to Pre-Op to the OR, no patients in triage, no ambulances rumbling into the compound, no rain falling in sheets, no lakes of mud to wade through. She and Ethel and Barb and Jamie walked to the mess hall, where the women grabbed some sandwiches and TaBs and Jamie got a beer.
On the beach, a dozen shirtless men played volleyball. Music blared out from a set of speakers, and the sound of hammering rang out—more buildings being erected. In the distant hills, mortar rounds exploded, made a sound like popping corn. Jamie wrenched off his shirt and kicked off his shoes and joined the men at the volleyball net.
The women dragged three beach chairs out onto the sand and sat there, eating their sandwiches, staring at the white sand and blue water. And at the bare-chested men. Tonight, a movie screen would be set up out here. Rumor was that someone had gotten a print of The Great Escape.
Behind them, someone cranked up the music as loud as it would go. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” got people singing along. A pair of female Red Cross volunteers—called Donut Dollies—dressed in their skirted uniforms, pushed a cart full of drinks and cookies out to the beach. Their nickname might sound soft, but those girls were tough as nails. They traveled all over Vietnam, by whatever transport was necessary, to boost morale among the troops.
“What’s wrong?” Barb asked Frankie.
Frankie wasn’t surprised by the question. They were more than best friends, she and Barb and Ethel. The radical, the farm girl, and the good girl; back in the world they might never have met each other, might never have become friends, but this war had made them sisters. “There was this little girl at the orphanage,” Frankie said. “She’d been burned. Our medics found her by the side of the road—in her dead mother’s arms.”
Ethel gave a tired sigh.
Frankie couldn’t stop thinking about Mai, lying in a ditch, burned, still held in her dead mother’s arms. “Her village had been bombed.”
War was one thing; bombing villages full of women and children was something else. God knew there were no stories about it in the Stars and Stripes. Why weren’t they reporting that truth?
A silence fell between them; in it lay the ugly truth that none of them wanted to face. The village was in South Vietnam.
And only the Americans had bombs.
Ten
August passed in a series of hot, rain-drenched days; sometimes the air was so humid it was hard to breathe. Everything Frankie put on and took off in this monsoon season smelled like mildew and was splattered with mud. There was no way to fully clean or dry clothes. Like everyone in camp, Frankie had learned not to care.
In September, the rain finally stopped and a soul-sucking heat took its place. At the end of every shift, when she took off her mask and surgical cap, they were soaked through with sweat. The Quonset huts and hooches became oven-like. After some relaxation at the O Club, or a movie under the stars on the beach, or maybe a game of gin rummy with Ethel and Barb, she collapsed onto her cot, praying for sleep.
“Wake up, Frank.”
“No.” Frankie rolled over on her cot, taking her damp sheet with her.
A sharp jab in her shoulder came next. “Wake up. It’s thirteen hundred hours.”
Frankie groaned and rolled over. Her eyes opened slowly, painfully. Last night’s mortar attack had gone on for hours; the explosions had rattled the hooches so hard that drops of red mud splatted down from the flat ceiling and landed in blotches on Frankie’s cheeks.
Frankie threw an arm over her eyes. “Go away, Ethel. We only went to bed an hour ago.”
“Two, actually,” Barb said. “Think for a moment about what day it is.”
Frankie pushed herself to a half sit, anchored up on her elbows. She saw the calendar tacked up on the wall above Ethel’s bed, with all the days Xed off. “Ethel’s DEROS.”
“That’s right, sports fans,” Ethel said, pulling the pink curlers out of her hair. “’Nam is losing the best nurse ever to serve in this man’s Army. I’m going back to the world. And I am not leaving this hellhole after two tours of duty with a pizza party at the O Club. Get your swimsuit on, Sleeping Beauty. I have a bird waiting for us.”
“Swimsuit?”
Frankie could hardly believe it. Yesterday, they’d worked for fourteen straight hours, on their feet for all of it; she’d spent most of those hours in surgery. Her back and knees hurt. And now … She glanced at her wristwatch. They were going to go swimming at some Officers’ Club … at 1300 hours on their only day off in two weeks?
Ethel yanked the covers back, revealing Frankie in her T-shirt and panties. She wore socks to bed, even in this heat, to save her toes from bugs and other creepy crawlers. Truth be told, it was why she wore panties, too.
Frankie climbed out of bed. (It took effort; her legs felt like jelly and her feet felt as if wild dogs had chewed on them while she slept.) She put on her two-piece belted red swimsuit, stepped into her sneakers, and headed to the latrines.
The smell hit her halfway there. Human shit and smoke. Some poor FNG was on shit duty. Literally. His job was to empty the latrines and burn the waste in fifty-five-gallon metal barrels.
She followed the plank walkway to the showers. This time of day, the water was almost warm, heated as it was by the sun. Still, she showered quickly and towel-dried her body. Not that she needed to in this heat.
“Finally,” Ethel said when Frankie strolled back into the hooch. “A damn debutante takes less time to get ready.”
“What do you know about debs?” Frankie said, buttoning her cutoffs and bending over to lace up her sneakers. Then she grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked at the hair around her face. There was no mirror in the hooch, which Frankie figured was just as well.
Barb covered her short Afro with a bandanna, tied it in the back, and then took the scissors from Frankie. Without a word, she took over cutting Frankie’s hair. Frankie let her do it, completely trusting. Such was the nature of the friendships Frankie had formed over here. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that she trusted Barb and Ethel with her life.
“Come on, country club deb,” Barb said to Frankie, tossing the scissors on the dresser. “The boys’ll be waiting.”
“Boys?” Frankie crammed some clothes into her pack and the trio left the hooch.