Chapter Eleven #3
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.
“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.