“Hey, pretty,” the patient said to her, his voice slurring, his eyes lowering heavily. He was a Marine, undergoing anesthesia. “Are you here to watch my game?”
She looked at his dog tag. “Hey, Private Waite.” She kept her gaze on his face, careful not to glance down, where both of his legs had been severed mid-thigh. Thick yellow tubes were draining the blood from his chest wound, pumping it into a suction machine at Hap’s blood-splattered boots.
Another rocket hit. Close.
“They’re targeting us!” someone yelled. “Mandatory blackout in three … two … one.”
The lights clicked off.
“Get down!”
“Lower the table,” Hap said.
“Put me in, Coach,” Private Waite mumbled. “I can score.”
Frankie and Hap lowered the operating table as low as it would go. The nurse-anesthetist lay on the floor, monitoring the gauges with a flashlight.
Frankie knelt in the blood and turned on her flashlight, held it in her mouth.
For the next ten hours, she followed Hap from surgery to surgery in the blackout darkness; they peered at each other through flashlight beams.
The wounded kept coming, wave after wave of men brought in broken and in pieces after the fighting at Dak To.
There were South Vietnamese incoming, too: soldiers and civilians. Children. Filling the wards, the hallways, the morgue, overflowing outside.
Finally, Frankie noticed a lessening of the noise.
No Dust Offs landing or hovering, waiting to land. No bombing. No ambulances rumbling toward the OR.
The lights in the OR snapped back on, jarringly bright.
Hap pulled off his surgical cap and lowered his mask. He was older than she’d thought, fleshy, with large-pored skin and a dark shadow beard that had probably sprouted during the push. “Hey, McGrath, good job. First day at Pleiku and a mortar attack.”
“Is this what it’s always like here?”
Hap shrugged. It had been a stupid question: Frankie knew there was no always anything in ’Nam. Everything moved, changed, died; people and buildings came and went overnight, roads were built and abandoned. Hap tossed his surgical garb into an overflowing waste bin and left the OR.
Frankie stood there, unable for a moment to move; she felt people around her—nurses and medics, cleaning up, moving things around, rolling out gurneys.
Move, Frankie.
It took an act of will to simply lift her foot, to take a step. She felt dazed, overwhelmed.
She walked out of the Quonset hut. The squishing of her socks told her that—impossibly—there was blood inside her sneakers. Her feet hurt from standing for so long, and her knees ached from kneeling.
Outside of Post-Op, she saw dead men on litters, overflowing from the ER, out into the walkway. She’d never seen so many wounded in one MASCAL.
The morgue was worse. Black body bags stacked up like cordwood.
The darkness popped with noise and distant rocket fire. Here and there, beyond the glimmering silver of concertina wire, she saw blots of yellow light moving through the jungle. The enemy was just beyond the wire, barely out of machine gun range, watching them, planting bombs and trip wires.
Rounding the corner of the Quonset hut, she saw Barb sitting in the dirt, knees drawn up, back resting against the metal wall, her green canvas boonie hat drawn low on her forehead.
Frankie slid down the hut’s wall to sit in the dirt beside her.
For a long moment, neither said anything. The distant pop-thud of the war raging in the mountain underscored their breathing.
“This is not the vacation we signed up for,” Frankie finally said in an uneven voice. “I want my money back.”
Barb’s hands shook as she took a joint out of her pocket and lit it up. “We were promised champagne.”
“Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. I feel like Frodo in Mordor,” Frankie said.
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It means give me that joint.”
Barb looked at her. “You sure, good girl?”
Frankie took the joint from her friend and drew in a big lungful of smoke and immediately started coughing. She laughed for a second, said, “Look, Ma, I’m doing the drugs,” and then she was crying.
“Jesus, what a night,” Barb said.
Frankie could hear the trembling in Barb’s voice and knew her friend needed her tonight, needed Frankie to be the strong one. She wiped the tears from her eyes and leaned sideways, put an arm around Barb. “I’ve got you, girlfriend.”
“Thank God,” Barb said quietly. And then, even more softly, under her breath, she said, “How will you do this alone?”
Frankie pretended not to hear.
Twelve
There were more than 450,000 American men in Vietnam now and God knew how many deaths and casualties. You certainly couldn’t find that answer in the Stars and Stripes. Many of the new troops in-country had barely six weeks of training. Unlike in World War II, when soldiers had trained together in platoons and went to war alongside men with whom they’d trained, these new recruits came alone and were dropped in wherever they were needed, without the support of a platoon, without men they knew they could depend on. Army Basic Training had been shortened to get the men in combat sooner; Frankie wondered who in the hell decided that less training for war was a good idea, but no one had asked her opinion.
There were good days, though, when few wounded came in and the sound of helicopters was far away; days when the nurses played games and read novels and wrote letters home and organized MEDCAP trips to local villages to offer medical services. On bad days, Frankie heard the distinctive roar of the twin-engine Chinook helicopter, the workhorse behemoth that could hold more than two dozen injured, and knew trouble was on its way. Sometimes the pushes were so intense, the numbers of incoming and their injuries so bad, that Frankie and Barb and Hap and the rest of the doctors and nurses worked for eighteen hours straight on both soldiers and civilians, with barely a break for food or drink.
Frankie had learned to think fast and move faster. She could do more than she’d ever imagined; she could initiate a surgery or close a wound or put in a chest tube. Hap trusted her with morphine administration and talked her through all of his surgeries, teaching her every step of the way. And some of this took place under direct rocket attack and mandatory blackout conditions, in a pouring rain.
Now it was just past 0300 hours, and the last surgical patient had been wheeled to Post-Op.
No sound of incoming choppers. No mortar attack. No red alert siren.
Quiet. Not even a sprinkling rain.
She reached for a mop, began to clean blood off the cement floor. It wasn’t her job, but she did it anyway. She was both dead on her feet and full of buzzing adrenaline.
She shoved the mop forward, through the blood, pushing it away. It slimed right back where it had been.
Hap entered the OR, nodded at the corpsman at the desk doing paperwork. He approached Frankie slowly, touched her shoulder. “You don’t need to mop, McGrath.”
He was giving her that look—she knew it now—sadness wrapped in compassion, wrapped in understanding. It was how they all looked at each other after a MASCAL, when all you could really count were the men you’d lost.
In the past ten days, most of them rainy, Frankie had spent well over a hundred hours across an operating table from this man. She knew that he never sweated, no matter how hot it was or how tough the surgery was; she knew that in easy moments, he hummed “Ain’t That a Shame” under his breath, and in harder times, he made a clacking, angry sound in his jaw. She knew he wore a wedding ring, and that he loved his wife and worried about his oldest son. She also knew that he made the sign of the cross every time he finished a surgery, and that, like her, he wore a Saint Christopher medal next to his dog tags.
He smiled tiredly. “Get out of here, Frankie. I thought I heard dancing at the Park. Let off a little steam or you’re going to blow.”