Chapter Eight
Eight
Dear Frances Grace,
I can hardly believe you’ve been there for more than a month.
In your absence, the country has gone mad.
Sit-ins. Protests. Raised fists. Believe you me, more than a few of these free love girls are going to wake up in trouble, and where will their dirty-footed lovers be then? In prison or long gone, I’d say. The world changes for men, Frances. For women, it stays pretty much the same.
The President says the protests are prolonging the war.
Your father and I watch the news every night, hoping for a glimpse of you, however silly that is. The soldiers seem to be in good spirits.
With love,
Your mother
PS. I saw an old friend of yours, I can’t recall her name, the frizzy-haired girl from St. Bernadette’s that played volleyball so poorly— anyway, I saw her in a televised picket line in San Francisco.
Her breasts were moving so fast they looked like Sonny Liston’s boxing gloves doing battle under a dirty T-shirt.
Can someone please explain to me how bouncing breasts advance the cause of freedom?
As her shift neared its end and night began to fall, Frankie sat in a chair beside one of her patients, a young man from Oklahoma. She’d been promoted to the day shift two weeks ago.
She closed the book from which she’d been reading aloud. Sometimes a Great Notion.
“Well, Trevor,” she said to her patient, “I’m beat. Gotta hit the showers and mess and then bed. It was so dang hot today that the water might be lukewarm.” She touched his hand. “You’re heading out to the Third tomorrow. I’ll miss you.”
She gave his hand a squeeze and then went from bed to bed, saying good night to each of her patients with a touch and a whispered, “You’re safe now. We will get you home.” It was all she could think of to say to men so broken. Then she grabbed her warm can of TaB and headed for her hooch.
It was a hot, dry day in May. The blistering sun had baked the dirt to hardpan and dried out her skin and hair. She was constantly scratching and sweating.
In the hooch, she found Ethel and Barb dressed in civilian clothes—Ethel in a summery dress she’d had made by a Vietnamese woman in Saigon, and Barb in a custom-made black silk ao dai.
Frankie saw her dress laid out on her bed, the one she’d bought at Bullock’s: a pretty blue sheath with a Peter Pan collar and matching belt. Something out of the last decade. Her mother had insisted she take it to war “for parties.”
Frankie pushed the dress aside and plopped onto her bed. “I’m exhausted.”
Ethel looked at Barb. “Are you tired?”
“Dead on my feet.”
“Are you going to sleep or go to Captain Smith’s goodbye party?”
“That’s tonight?” Frankie said, her shoulders slumping. “Darn.”
“Move it, Frank,” Ethel said.
There was no argument to be made. Captain Smith had been an amazing teacher and superior officer.
He’d shown Frankie kindness and patience in teaching her the skills needed to care for the patients in Neuro.
She had spent countless hours with him in the ward, even shared a Coke with him a time or two in the O Club.
She’d oohed and aahed over pictures of his kids back in the world.
No way she would miss a chance to say goodbye.
“That’s our ride?” Frankie said, frowning as they approached the helipad. Choppers might be big and maneuverable, but they were targets, too. The enemy loved to shoot them out of the sky, and when a chopper exploded midair, there were often no remains to be found. She knew that too well.
Hot air whooshed from the rotors, whipped up dirt, stung her eyes.
Ethel shoved Frankie forward; a soldier swung her into the chopper. Frankie scrambled for the back, took a seat, and pressed herself against the wall.
Barb and Ethel each sat in one of the open doorframes, their feet swinging over the edge, laughing as the helicopter rose into the air and shot forward, nose down, tail up.
The noise inside the chopper was earsplitting.
As they banked left, Frankie saw Vietnam through the open doorway: The flat green swath of jungle, a brown ribbon of water, dotted with boats. White sand beaches bordered the turquoise waters of the South China Sea. Verdant mountains in the distance reached up into the blue cloud-strewn sky.
There was destruction, too. Concertina wire that caught the light and sent it back in a thousand glints of color.
Giant red holes in the earth, trees fallen or cut down.
Scrap metal heaps strewn along roads. Helicopters swooping across the landscape, firing at the ground, being fired on.
The constant whir of their rotors, the pop-pop-pop of mortar attacks.
Tanks rolling on dirt roads, throwing up red clouds of dust. These days, the U.S.
constantly bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Up in the mountains near a village called Pleiku, there was fighting.
“That’s Long Binh,” one of the gunners yelled.
Long Binh, Frankie knew, was one of the largest bases in-country.
Tens of thousands of people lived and worked there.
She’d heard that the PX on base was bigger than any department store back home.
From above, it was a sprawling city carved out of the jungle, built on a flat red rectangle of dirt.
Bulldozers bit at the edges, constantly making more room.
There wasn’t a blade of grass or a tree to be seen, nothing green, no patch of shade left from the jungle they’d torn down to build their temporary city.
They touched down on the helipad just as sunset turned the sky a brilliant, blazing red.
Frankie angled cautiously forward, edged out of the chopper, and followed Ethel and Barb, who knew exactly where they were going in the dirty, smelly confusion of roads and people and tanks and bulldozers.
The place was a hive of activity; a huge hospital was being built to house the rising number of wounded.
The Officers’ Club at Long Binh was legendary.
Frankie had heard stories of epic parties and fall-down-drunk fests, even of the MPs being called on occasion.
Captain Smith—who’d been in Long Binh for most of his first tour—still spoke often of the club, and said he wouldn’t want a going-away party to be held anywhere else.
Barb reached the O Club first and opened the door.
Frankie moved in beside her. She felt conspicuous in her ridiculously conservative blue dress, with her nails bitten down to the quick and her black pixie cut grown so shaggy she looked like one of the Beatles.
The headscarf she’d tied over it did little to help.
At least she had sneakers now, instead of just her boots.
The Officers’ Club was not what she’d expected. But what had she expected? White linen tablecloths and waiters in black, like the country club on Coronado Island?
In fact, it was just a dark, seedy bar. The stifling-hot air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled booze and sweat.
A wooden bar ran the length of the building; a line of men were bellied up to it.
More sat clustered around wooden tables in mismatched chairs.
There weren’t many women here, but the few that were here were on the dance floor.
She saw Kathy Mohr, one of the surgical nurses from the Thirty-Sixth, dancing with Captain Smith.
A banner had been strung above the bar. It read BON VOYAGE, CPT SMITH .
Frankie was reminded suddenly of the catered party her parents had thrown to celebrate Finley going to war.
It felt like another world ago, another time.
Appallingly naive.
Barb dragged Frankie through the clot of men, elbowing her way.
At the bar, she ordered a gin and tonic and two sodas, yelling to be heard over the din of voices and music.
A soldier stood beside her, smiling wolfishly, thrilled to see two American women.
Frankie saw the Big Red One patch on his sleeve, for the First Infantry.
Barb ignored the man and carried the three drinks toward an empty table. The music changed, became sexy. A song Frankie hadn’t heard before. “Come on, baby, light my fire.”
Frankie was about to make her way to the table when someone touched her arm.
Dr. Jamie Callahan stood there, smiling.
She remembered how he’d helped her through her first red alert, how steadying his voice had been, the kindness he’d shown her, and the night they’d talked by the latrines.
She’d seen him once or twice in the mess hall or the O Club since she’d been promoted to days, but they’d not talked much.
Tonight, in his white T-shirt and fatigues and combat boots, he was Robert Redford in This Property Is Condemned good-looking .
And he knew it. Dirty-blond hair, grown longer than regulation allowed, blue eyes, square jaw.
Anyone would have called him the American boy next door, and yet there was sadness in his eyes, a slight sag to his shoulders.
She sensed a despair in him that lay just below the surface. Grief. Perhaps he saw it in her, too.
“It’s a party now that the nurses have arrived,” he said, giving her a strained smile.
She met his gaze. The weeks she’d spent studying comatose patients had sharpened her observation skills. “Are you okay?”
The music changed. Percy Sledge’s soulful “When a Man Loves a Woman” filled the room.
“Dance with me, McGrath,” he said. It wasn’t a cocky, I’m-so-cool-and-you’ll-be-swept-away request, not what she would have expected. That kind of thing she would have laughed at.
This was a man’s plea, tinged with desperation and loneliness.
She knew that feeling well. She felt it during every shift as she moved among her comatose patients, hoping for miracles.
She reached for his hand. He led her out onto the dance floor. She fit up against him, felt the solid strength of him, and realized suddenly, sharply, how lonely she was, too. And not just here in Vietnam, but ever since Finley’s death.