Chapter Nine
Nine
Frankie had stopped being afraid every time she walked into the OR.
She was still often uncertain, but, like the turtle they’d called her on her first night, she’d developed a hard shell to protect her heart from what she saw and the confidence to move past her own fear in order to help the men—and women, and children—who ended up in the OR. It was the only way to survive.
Patty, in her last weeks at the Thirty-Sixth, made it her mission to give Frankie every skill she’d learned during her tour, and of course Barb was always ready to lend a hand in the OR, regardless of how little sleep she’d had the night before. And Ethel was there for emotional support.
Now, on a hot, rainy June day, as she assisted Jamie in surgery, she heard the whirring of choppers overhead.
More than one. It didn’t even surprise her anymore, the escalating number of wounded coming through the OR, the growing number of pushes.
The U.S. and ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, had pushed into the Demilitarized Zone that separated the Communist North from the American-aided South, and the fighting was brutal.
She wished Patty were still here, but she’d gone home last week. With a hell of a send-off.
“Shit,” Jamie said, through his mask. He was elbow-deep in the kid’s abdomen. “His spleen’s ruptured.”
Frankie picked up a clamp and handed it to him.
Moments later, the OR doors banged open. Barb, masked and gowned, wheeled in another casualty from Pre-Op. “Doc, sucking chest wound. It’s bad.”
Jamie cursed under his breath. “I’ll get to it…
we gotta get this spleen out…” He reached out, took instruments from Frankie, and handed them back, working quickly.
Sweat appeared on his brow; droplets slid down to his mask.
Finally, he stepped away from the table.
“That’s it. You’re on your own now, McGrath. ”
“Me?”
Jamie took off his gloves and reached for a new pair. As he started on the chest wound, he said, “You can close, McGrath. You’ve watched me do it enough. Just take nice, wide bites of fascia, put in all of the stitches, tag them, and tie the sutures with five square knots. Count ’em. Five.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Damn it, McGrath. We don’t have time for fear. You’re good enough. Do it.”
Frankie nodded, swallowed hard, moving in closer to the patient’s draped, sliced-open abdomen.
“It’s just like sewing, McGrath. Don’t all you nice sorority girls know how to sew? You can stitch.”
Frankie took a deep breath and released it. You can do this.
She took another moment to focus, to tune out the noise and mayhem, the sound of the rain hitting the roof; when she’d calmed, she gently began to close the kid’s fascia, one stitch at a time. She counted each knot, kept careful track of them.
“Good,” Jamie said, glancing over at her. “I knew you could do it.”
Frankie had never focused on anything so intently in her life.
The din in the OR faded away. She felt her own heartbeat, the flicker of her pulse, the air moving through her lungs.
The whole world compressed into the bloody space in this kid’s belly.
By the time she’d closed the fascia, she was sweating profusely, but she kept working.
Finally, she let out a long breath and closed the wound and stared down at her work: the sutures were perfect. She had never felt so proud.
This, she thought. This is who I came here to be.
“I’m done here,” Jamie said to Frankie.
“Me, too,” she said.
They both looked up at the same time. Even though he was masked, she could tell that he was smiling.
“Told you, McGrath.”
She could only nod.
“Now move,” he said. “I just heard another Dust Off land.”
In late June, monsoon season hit with a vengeance; the weather was like nothing Frankie had ever seen.
Howling winds ripped off roofs, tore away signs.
Rain fell in sheets, blown sideways by the wind.
The red dirt turned to a viscous, clinging mud that oozed into the OR from outside, mingling with blood on the concrete floor.
It was a constant job to shovel it away.
Frankie and the other nurses and the medics, and anyone else they could wrangle into picking up a shovel, spent time trying to push the mud outside.
And it was cold .
Frankie stared down at the patient in front of her, his guts split wide open, his chest covered in frag wounds. Tonight’s storm battered the Quonset like a kid continuously hitting a toy barn with a hammer.
“He’s gone,” Jamie said, then cursed under his breath.
She looked at the clock for time of death, reported it in a quiet voice.
She had been on her feet for twelve hours.
Monsoon season made every part of life more difficult.
Or maybe it wasn’t the weather that was bad; maybe it was the increased number of wounded that came through these doors.
Last week had been mostly quiet, with lots of downtime for the nurses; not so this week.
LBJ kept sending more and more troops into the fray, hoping manpower would turn the tide, while the Stars and Stripes published rah-rah-America-is-winning-the-war articles every week.
She shivered hard, her stained, faded fatigues damp beneath her surgical gown.
Her pockets bulged with cigarettes and lighters.
(She always kept them on hand to give to her boys.
That was how she thought of the casualties now: as her boys.) In her breast pocket she had a small flashlight and bandage scissors.
A length of stretchy rubber tubing hung limply from one epaulet, just in case she needed to draw blood on the fly.
A Kelly clamp hung from one belt loop. A blue surgical cap covered her shaggy hair and a mask covered her nose and mouth.
All anyone could see of her was her tired eyes.
Jamie looked at her over the dead body of a kid who had probably been playing high school football six months ago. “You okay, McGrath?”
“Fine. You?”
He nodded, but she saw the truth in his eyes. He was as exhausted and dispirited as she was.
They knew each other so well now. In the past month, they’d spent more hours together than some married couples spent together in a year.
All of this hardship—the rain, the damp, the cold, the mud, the wounds, the hours spent trying to save men’s lives—had bound them together, made them into more than friends.
Sometimes, over here, the only way to handle the emotional pain was to laugh—or cry.
Frankie rarely cried anymore, but when she did, she was probably in Jamie’s arms. He was always there for her and she was there for him.
He could make her laugh in the harshest of moments.
They stood together for hours, she and Jamie, working in tandem.
She knew every nuance of emotion on his face: the way he gritted his teeth in anger when he saw a child burned beyond recognition by napalm or a soldier who worried about his friends even as he was bleeding out.
She knew he missed his beloved Wyoming ranch, with its cool nights and hot days, and its horses in the barn, and a field full of flowers just beyond his front porch.
He missed fly-fishing and horseback riding and floating down the Snake River on an inner tube, a six-pack of beer floating with him.
She knew that Sarah was a kindergarten teacher who sent him baked goods every week and worried that he didn’t write back often enough, and repeatedly asked if he was okay, and that he couldn’t write anything in answer to that question except Yes .
She fought her feelings for him, but at night, alone in her cot, she thought of him, thought, What if. It might all be a mirage, this connection between them, brought on by proximity and the horror of what they saw every day, but it felt real.
He touched her whenever he could, as casually as possible, and with a forced smile. Sometimes they found themselves standing together, or sitting side by side, just staring at each other, saying nothing, both of them feeling too much for the other and knowing that words wouldn’t ease their longing.
She peeled her gloves off and lowered her mask. Both of them had red mud in the corners of their eyes, dripping down in tears, and in their teeth. “What a day.”
“I need a drink. Maybe ten. Join me?”
Tonight, her longing for him was too sharp to hide. She needed to be away from him. “I am too tired for the O Club,” she said.
“Is that possible?” he said.
Frankie meant to smile. “Tonight it is.”
They pulled off their gowns and caps and put on their Army-issued green ponchos and walked out of the OR and into a raging rainstorm.
“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse,” Jamie said.
Rain clattered on the walkway’s roof and fell in sheets on either side of them, riveting the thick red mud.
They walked past the mess hall, and Frankie realized with a shock that it was lunchtime.
Time lost all meaning during a MASCAL, and when they were understaffed, as they were now, shifts seemed to go on forever.
She hadn’t eaten since, when? Dinner last night?
Her stomach grumbled. She didn’t signal her intention, just stumbled sideways, bumping into Jamie, pushing him aside without meaning to.
Bypassing the urn of hot coffee ( Shower was all she could think), she grabbed two donuts and stumbled back out of the mess, where Jamie stood waiting for her.
“Glazed,” she said, handing him one.
“My favorite.”
“I know.”
They crossed behind the stage, where a sign— MARTHA RAYE COMING NEXT WEEK —had been torn down by the wind and lay twisted and ruined in the mud. Frankie tucked her donut inside her poncho to protect it.
Jamie stopped in front of the sandbagged entrance to the O Club. Wind shoved the beads sideways, made them clatter against the wall. She smelled cigarette smoke. Music rose above the din. “Happy Together” by the Turtles.
Imagine me and you, I do…
“I do, you know,” he said.