He pointed to the Quonset hut nearest the helipad, yelled, “ER. That one’s Pre-Op.” He kept walking and talking and came to another Quonset hut, its entrance stacked in sandbags: “OR.”
“There’s a large air base nearby,” he went on, “as well as the village of Pleiku. Don’t go to either without an escort.” He led them deeper into the camp, where personnel moved in a rush. There wasn’t much here—some Quonset huts, a row of dilapidated wooden huts, tents. Everything was stained red and surrounded by barbed wire and protected by armed soldiers in guard towers.
“The morgue,” he said, pointing left.
Frankie saw a tired-looking medic pushing a wheeled litter with a body-bagged soldier through a pair of double doors. Inside, she saw body bags stacked on tables and cots and a few even on the ground.
“I know it looks shitty compared to the Thirty-Sixth,” Sarge said, not stopping. “And the rainy season lasts for nine months up here, but we have our benefits.” He showed off an area he called “the Park,” which was a stand of rotting brown banana trees, their giant fronds bent over and decayed, and an honest-to-God aboveground swimming pool full of brown water and leaves. Off to the side was a tiki-style bar, complete with torches and a sign that read HULA SPOKEN HERE. Beside it, a sandbagged bunker and a dozen portable chairs waited forlornly for partiers. “The officers have some kick-ass parties here at the Park, ma’am. You can find someone here most times if you’re feeling angry or blue. Ain’t much space between those emotions here in Rocket City.”
He pointed out the commanding officers’ trailers and walked past a row of unimpressive wooden huts. Up ahead were the latrines and showers. “By fifteen hundred hours, the water feels almost warm,” he said. At the final wooden hut, built up on blocks and layered in sandbags, he stopped and turned to them. “Home sweet home.”
“Get settled in, Lieutenants,” he said. “This quiet? It won’t last. The fighting in Dak To has been brutal this week. Your duffels will be delivered ASAP. Shifts are oh-seven-hundred to nineteen hundred hours, six days a week, but if we’re short on staff … and hell, we are always short … we work till we’re done.” He opened the door.
The smell made Frankie almost gag. Mildew. Mold.
Insects and dust motes thickened the air. Inside the small, stinky space were two empty cots, upon each of which sat folded woolen blankets and a pillow that she already knew neither of them would use, and two rickety chests of drawers. Red dust coated everything, even the ceiling. For the first time, she thought kindly—and nostalgically—about her hooch at the Thirty-Sixth.
Frankie turned back to thank the sergeant, but he was already gone.
She followed Barb into the hooch.
They stood there, shoulder to shoulder. “My mother would pass out,” Frankie said at last.
“Spoiled white girl,” Barb said.
Frankie tossed her purse and travel bag on the empty cot nearest her. They landed with a squeak of metal that did not inspire her confidence for a good night’s rest. She felt insects feasting on her bare arms and legs. Slapping her own thigh, she unpacked a few belongings and carefully arranged her family photographs on the rickety dresser. Then she tacked up a picture of Jamie; in it, he was leaning against a post, holding a beer, giving her the kind of smile that lifted everyone’s mood. She stared at it longer than she should have, then felt the start of tears and turned away.
Barb unpacked her posters. Unfurling them, she tacked them up on the wall, a trio of her idols: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted, with the words I AIN’T GOT NO QUARREL WITH THEM VIET CONG stamped across his body.
Frankie opened the creaking, makeshift dresser drawer, saw that it was full of rat droppings. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that literally. Shit.” She started to laugh and then heard an incoming chopper.
Frankie slapped her thigh again. Her hand came back bloody.
“And here I was thinking we had time for a little gin rummy,” Barb said.
“Or to do our nails,” Frankie answered, stripping out of her shorts. She put on her fatigues and gathered her supplies: a lighter, a roll of bandages, scissors, a flashlight, chewing gum, and a felt-tipped pen. She looped a length of Penrose tubing through her belt loop, in case she needed to start an IV, and snapped a Kelly clamp on her bagging waistband. You never knew when supplies would be lacking, and being prepared could save a life.
Outside, the whump-whump of the helicopters was deafening.
Frankie and Barb ran past the helipad, where wounded were being offloaded from a Dust Off and coming in by ambulance. Men covered in mud and blood, working together, shouting at one another beneath the thwomping rotors. In the air, a row of helicopters hovered, waited their turn to touch down.
A grizzled-looking Black medic was running triage in the ER, determining who would be seen when. Sawhorses were being set up quickly, to hold the men on litters. A screen in the back corner shielded the expectants. “Lieutenants Johnson and McGrath,” Barb said. “From the Thirty-Sixth. Surgical nurses.”
He looked at their bloody, stained fatigues. It meant they’d been in the shit. “Thank Christ,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the din of yelling men and helicopters landing and taking off. He pointed to a Quonset hut. “OR 1. Report to Hap. If he doesn’t need you yet, try Pre-Op.”
Frankie and Barb were halfway there when the red alert siren sounded. Seconds later a shell exploded on the ground not far away from them. A sound like pelting gravel hit the Quonset hut. The air stank of smoke and something strangely acrid.
Something whistled over Frankie’s head and thudded behind her. At OR 1, Frankie wrenched the door open.
Inside: Bright lights. Men waiting for surgery, lying on tables.
She and Barb washed their hands, then grabbed scrubs and caps and masks and gloves and found Harry “Hap” Dickerson, a lieutenant colonel, operating without assistance on a deep belly wound.
“Lieutenants McGrath and Johnson, sir. Reporting for duty.”
“Thank God. Cart’s there,” Hap said to Frankie. “Johnson, that’s Captain Winstead over there. He’ll need you.”
“Yes, sir.” Barb ran toward the other doctor.
Another rocket blast, this one close enough to shake the Quonset hut. The lights dimmed and went out.
“Shit! Generators!” Hap yelled.
Frankie pulled out her flashlight and flicked it on, directing the narrow yellow beam on the wound.
Seconds later, the lights came back on, accompanied by the hum of the emergency generators.
The rounds kept falling, raining fire on the camp. Thud. Whump. The explosions were so close they rattled Frankie’s teeth.
The noise was excruciating and heightened Frankie’s sense that hell had broken loose here. Helicopters coming and going, the mortar attack that went on and on and on, the hum of suction machines, the drone of the generator, the snapping of lights on surging electricity, the hissing of respirators.
“Hap! It’s Reddick. He’s in trouble,” someone shouted above the melee.
“Can you close?” Hap said to Frankie, stepping back from the patient.
“Yes,” Frankie said, but her hands were shaking. Stitching up an incision was one thing; doing it with too few doctors and nurses, unreliable electricity, and bombs landing nearby was a whole other world.
She closed her eyes, brought Jamie to her mind, then Ethel. She felt them beside her.
No fear, McGrath.
She heard Jamie’s voice in her head. It’s just like sewing, McGrath. Don’t all you nice sorority girls know how to sew?
Frankie closed out the chaos and the attack; when she felt calm, she closed the belly wound, then handed the patient off to a medic, washed her hands, put on new gloves, and followed Hap to another table.