Chapter Seven
Seven
She saluted. “Lieutenant McGrath, Major.”
“I heard you were as much help in the ER as a tiara,” the major said, and opened a manila folder.
“A nursing degree from some small Catholic women’s college and almost no clinical experience.
And you’re young.” She peered at Frankie through black horn-rimmed glasses.
“What on earth brought you here, Lieutenant?”
“My brother—”
“Never mind. I don’t care. But I hope to God you aren’t here to say hi to a brother.
” Major Goldstein pushed her glasses higher up on her nose.
“The Navy and Air Force won’t even let a girl like you in ’Nam.
They require training .” She closed the folder, sighed.
“Anyway. You’re here. Unready, unprepared, but here.
I’m assigning you to Neuro. Night shift. How much damage can you do there?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Uh-huh. Welcome to the Thirty-Sixth Evac Hospital, McGrath. Be the best version of yourself.”
Housed in a Quonset hut near the OR, the Neuro ward was a brightly lit, domed space filled with Stryker frame beds.
Frankie had never seen the specialized beds before, but she’d learned about them in school and in Basic Training: beds for paraplegics, for patients with pelvic fractures, burn patients, or others who couldn’t handle much manipulation.
Two rows of beds were separated by a wide aisle.
Metal tubing ran the length of each wall for hanging IVs.
The amount of equipment at each bed was staggering: ventilators, cooling blankets, monitors, IVs.
Frankie didn’t even recognize most of the machines.
The overhead lights were blaringly bright.
She heard the whooh-thunk of ventilators, the buzz of EKG monitors.
In the front left corner, an older man in faded fatigues sat at a desk, writing. The only other soldier she saw (standing) was a corpsman at the far end of the ward; he was checking on a patient.
Frankie straightened her posture and tried to look more confident than she felt as she walked over to the man at the desk. “Second Lieutenant McGrath, reporting as ordered, sir.”
The man looked up. He had the tiredest eyes she’d ever seen and a face that showed a history of acne. Heavily jowled cheeks blurred his jawline. “Frances, right?”
“Frankie, sir.”
“Captain Ted Smith. Doctor. How much nursing experience do you have, Frankie?”
“My RN, sir. And… some time on the night shift at my local hospital.”
“Uh-huh.” He stood up. “Walk with me.” He strode forward. At the first bed, he paused. Beside him lay a young Vietnamese man, his head wrapped in bandages, through which blood had seeped in a red-brown burst.
“He’s Vietnamese,” Frankie said, surprised.
“We treat the villagers who are brought in,” Captain Smith said. “Anyway, Frankie, every patient in here is brain-damaged. Most have no pupillary response. You know what that means?”
Before she could answer, he took a slim flashlight out of his breast pocket and shone it into the patient’s eyes. “See that? No reaction. Fixed and dilated. You’d note that in his chart, along with the time and date.”
He showed her where and how to make the notation and then handed her the flashlight and walked on, took her past one young American soldier after another who lay naked beneath pale sheets, staring at nothing; most were on ventilators.
There were several Vietnamese patients. “This one walked into a rotor,” he said at the bed of a man with half his head bandaged and one arm gone.
The last bed was occupied by a Black man covered in bandages.
He writhed, babbled unintelligibly. Then he screamed as if in pain.
“He’s not comatose but not fully conscious, either. He has a chance at some kind of recovery. Most don’t, honestly. We’ve developed the skills to save their bodies, but not their lives,” Captain Smith said.
Frankie looked out over the many beds, a split sea of white and metal and men and machines. Each one someone’s son or brother or husband.
“We monitor and change dressings and keep them breathing until they can see a neurologist at the Third Field Hospital. You’ll learn to see subtle changes in their conditions. But this is an evac hospital. They won’t be here long.”
“Can they hear me?”
“Good question. Yeah, Frankie. I think they can. I hope so, anyway. You can start an IV?”
“In theory, sir.” She felt her own incompetence like a scarlet letter on her fatigues.
“Don’t worry, Frankie. You’ve got heart, I can tell. Skills, I can teach.”
April 14, 1967
Dear Mom and Dad,
Hello from the 36th Evacuation Hospital!
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write.
It’s hard to express the speed of life over here.
I’m either terrified or exhausted most of the time.
When my head hits the pillow, I’m out. Turns out you can learn to sleep through anything if you’re tired enough.
I’ve been focusing on improving my nursing skills, which were, to put it kindly, subpar.
I work long hours on the Neuro ward, where I’ve been assigned.
I’m learning so much! I spend my shift shining bright lights into my patients’ eyes, marking down any pupil dilation, or lack thereof, changing surgical dressings, suctioning wounds, monitoring ventilators, changing IVs, turning paralyzed patients every few hours, pinching or poking places on the bodies to see if they can feel pain.
It is every bit as glamorous as it sounds, and Mom, you would definitely have something to say about how I look these days, but my skills are improving. Slowly.
I’ve made two friends over here. Ethel Flint, an ER nurse from Virginia, and Barb Johnson, a surgical nurse from Georgia. They’re keeping me sane. My superior, Captain Smith, is great, too. He’s from a small town near Kansas City. You would love him, Dad. He collects watches and loves backgammon.
I miss you. Send me news of the real world. All we get for newspapers over here is the Stars and Stripes, and the only radio is Armed Forces Radio. Suffice it to say that we don’t get news about the latest Burton-Taylor brawl. Please write back soon!
Love you,
Frankie
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.”