Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
On the way back to Pleiku, in a helicopter, flying over the Central Highlands, Frankie heard the familiar pop-pop-pop of gunfire.
The chopper swooped and swerved, leaned so far to the left, she slid into Rye.
He put an arm around her, held her close.
“Hold on, baby. Charlie doesn’t like our bird,” he yelled to be heard over the noise.
He took his helmet out of his bag and put it on her, tightening the straps beneath her chin.
She grinned at him. “Oh, that will save my life.”
He laughed. “Let me be a hero, willya?”
Later, as the helicopter descended toward the helipad, Rye pulled Frankie close and kissed her.
Frankie unhooked his helmet and handed it back to him. With one last look that seared his smile into her memory, she grabbed her travel bag and jumped off the helicopter and stood on the helipad, looking up. “Be safe, Riot!”
Rye took a seat in the open door by the gunner, smiling at her as the helicopter lifted into the air.
He yelled something she couldn’t hear. Waved goodbye.
The helicopter veered sharply sideways, headed north, and swooped down close to the jungle canopy.
Pop-pop-pop.
She saw sparks of light hit the Huey’s broadside. The gunner shot back as the bird veered sharply away.
Another shot. Sparks. The ra-ta-ta-tat of the gunner shooting back. The Huey maneuvered swiftly. Orange bits streaked through the sky.
The shooting stopped, leaving silence in the jungle and the softening sound of the helicopter’s rotors as it flew away.
Safe.
This time.
From now on, until she and Rye both landed safely back in the U.S., she knew there would always be a piece of her that was afraid.
April 10, 1968
Dear Frankie,
I don’t know how to write this. My brother, Will, was killed by the Oakland police this week. A shoot-out with the Black Panthers. He was shot ten times, even though he’d surrendered.
I’m devastated.
Heartbroken.
Pissed off.
I need my best friend here with me to keep me steady.
Love you,
B
April 24, 1968
Dear Barb,
I know your grief. Losing a brother is losing a piece of yourself, your history.
I’m sorry is a shitty, useless, not-enough thing to say, but what else is there?
If I still believed in a benevolent God, I’d send you prayers.
Stay strong for your mom.
Find a way to honor and remember him.
Love,
F
June 16, 1968
Dear Mom and Dad,
I can’t believe that another Kennedy has been assassinated.
What is wrong with the world? Things are getting worse over here, too.
Morale among the troops is the worst I’ve ever seen it.
Between the assassination of MLK and Robert Kennedy and the protests back home, everyone is mad as hell.
If you wonder how we can lose a war, imagine how the guys fighting it feel.
And LBJ just sends more and more untrained kids to fight.
The ORs here are always full. The sound of Dust Offs landing is becoming constant.
We used to have days off, times the OR was quiet.
Not so many anymore. Don’t believe everything you read—our boys are dying every day.
I see more and more soldiers stumbling in from the boonies, their minds broken, their nerves shot to hell.
They walk through the bush, snipers everywhere, and step on hidden mines and blow up five feet away from their buddies.
It’s awful. And yeah, a few of them are high.
Heroin is its own horror. So is the way they look when they find their way to the hospital.
I can’t fix them all. No one can. But I’m doing my best, I want you to know that.
I am making a difference and helping to save lives.
Thanks for all the letters and for the care packages. I really needed more film. And who knew you’d miss Twinkies and Pop-Tarts in a war?
Love you,
F
On a still, sweltering evening on the Fourth of July of 1968, Frankie stood beneath the bright lights in the OR, stitching up a minor abdominal wound.
Sweat dampened her mask and cap, slid down her back.
The temperature today had gone past 102 degrees.
When she finished, she peeled off her bloody gloves and dropped them into a garbage can.
Two soldiers stumbled into the OR on bare, bloody feet, carrying a man on a litter between them.
The men looked sucked dry, hollowed-out.
Sunken eyes, sunken cheeks, the thousand-mile death stare that Frankie had begun to recognize as the look of men who’d been out in the boonies too long, trekking, trying to avoid land mines, looking for Charlie in every shadow and bush. Constant fear turned a man inside out.
Frankie grabbed some masks and handed them to the men.
“We carried him thirty miles,” one of the men said. “We broke out… too late.”
So. Prisoners of war. No wonder they looked so beaten, both physically and mentally. Word was that the NVA kept American POWs in cages too small for them to stand up in. And that they tortured them. “How long were you prisoners?”
“Three months,” the other one said. He was wearing a necklace made of amputated fingers and ears strung on a leather cord.
Trophies, probably, taken from their North Vietnamese captors when they escaped.
It was the kind of thing she’d seen more of in the past few months, as the fighting had heated up.
It was profoundly disturbing. Sickening.
A terrible sign that the soldiers’ minds were being as broken by war as their bodies.
She couldn’t imagine what they’d been through or what they’d done to escape, or how hard it had been to carry this wounded man for thirty miles through the booby-trapped jungle on bare feet.
The man on the litter had an infected bullet wound in his chest that oozed pus.
Frankie didn’t need to touch his forehead to diagnose a raging fever.
She could see it in his eyes, smell it on him.
Frag wounds had torn up his arms and neck.
He could barely breathe, kept gasping. Something must be swollen or lodged in his airway.
He was going to die, and soon.
Frankie called out to Dr. Morse, who came over, took one look at the kid on the litter, and said, “Expectant, McGrath.”
“Put a trach in, Doc,” she said. “Let him breathe easy, at least.”
“Waste of time, McGrath. Go find someone you can save.”
One of the soldiers said, “Wait. We just humped through the boonies for a week with Fred—”
Frankie knew that the doc was right. This kid wasn’t going to make it, and the OR was crowded with casualties they could save, but she couldn’t turn her back on these men and what they’d suffered.
She pointed to an empty table. “Set him there, boys.”
“What are you doing, McGrath?” Dr. Morse asked.
“Letting him say goodbye to his friends and die in peace.”
“Be quick. I’ve got a sucking chest wound that needed you ten minutes ago.”
The men set the wounded soldier on the table.
Frankie cut off what was left of his fatigues.
Yanking her cart close, she changed into clean gloves and wiped his neck with antiseptic solution.
Holding her scalpel, she took a breath to steady herself, then made a small cut between the thyroid and cricoid cartilages and inserted a breathing tube.
The dying man took a deep, wheezing breath; Frankie saw relief come into his eyes. How long had he been fighting just to breathe?
“We got out, Fred,” one of his buddies said. “Took five of those fuckers with us.”
Frankie took hold of Fred’s hand, held it in hers, and leaned close, whispering, “You must be a good man. Your friends are here.”
His buddies kept talking—about his girl, the baby waiting for him back home, how he had saved their lives in that hellhole.
Frankie saw Fred take his last breath; felt the way he went still.
“He’s gone,” she said tiredly, looking at the two bloodied, dirtied men in front of her. “You gave him a chance, though.”
She wouldn’t be surprised if those death stares would be a part of them forever now.
Men staring into a world they no longer were a part of, no longer comprehended, a world where the ground beneath your feet exploded.
Another kind of casualty. She thought of other men who had grabbed her hand over the past few months, begged her to answer the question, Who will want me like this?
, and it struck her that it wasn’t just physical wounds that soldiers would take home from Vietnam.
From now on, all of them would have a deep understanding of both man’s cruelty and his heroism.
A medic shoved through the OR doors and yelled, “Forty-five Vietnamese villagers coming in. Napalm,” and left again.
Napalm.
“Go to the mess,” she said to the two soldiers as she stripped out of her gloves. “Get some chow. Take a shower. And get rid of that damned necklace.”
She yelled for someone to take the dead man away. Then she found Margie and together they pushed the few OR patients to one side and gathered empty beds to turn the OR into an overflow burn unit.
Two minutes later, a flood of villagers hit the OR, most of whom had been burned beyond recognition. Frankie knew it was the same scene in the ICU and Pre-Op and on the wards.
Napalm—a jellied firebomb used in flamethrowers by the U.S. to clear out foxholes and trenches, and dropped in bombs by U.S. planes—had become common in these first few months of her second tour. More and more of its victims were coming into the OR; most of them were villagers.
Tomorrow they’d be flown to the Third Field—a real burn unit—but few would survive until then. The few who did would wish they’d died. These burns were like nothing else on earth. The gel-fueled firebomb mixture stuck to its target and didn’t stop burning until nothing was left.
Frankie moved from bed to bed, applying topical ointments and debriding dead tissue, but there was so little she could do here to help them heal, and nothing to ease their tremendous pain.