The Healer's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

messages to my folks, my lisp made me sound like a third grader.

    Obviously, I wasn't the kind of officer men or anybody else followed to hell and back. If Blaylock had been chewing out John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, they'd not only convince her to exonerate them and court-martial Chalmers, but would come up with some new strategy that would win the war. Those kinds of guys never have to question how much of the blame is theirs. They're never wrong.

    But right then it was rapidly dawning on me that I was wrong about rnpre than Tran's Phenergan dosage.

    Why, oh why, had I ever gone into nursing and joined the Army?

    When I was a kid, I'd dreamed of being either a world-famous mystery novelist or a Hollywood costume designer. I wrote stories and doodled elongated models in glamorous getups during idle time in school. But what I wanted to be when I grew up was eclipsed by wondering if I'd get the chance.

    Almost every week we'd have civil defense drills at school. The fire bell would ring and our teachers would herd us into the corridors, assumed to be the safest during bombings, or direct us to huddle under our desks. We listened to the mock alerts on the radio and memorized the conelrad call letters. At home, my mom and dad wondered if the cellar, which made a good tornado shelter, would also be effective against atomic bombs. On TV, Russia threatened us, then we threatened Russia, Khrushchey pounded his shoe on the table, and nobody seemed to be able to get along. War with the Reds was inevitable. I'd be walking home from school, enjoying brilliant autumn leaves or a fresh snow, and all of a sudden hear a thunderous explosion that rattled nearby windows.
    I'd check the sky, see the telltale jet stream, and relax.

    just a jet breaking the sound barrier again. But I was afraid that one day I'd hear a sound like that and there'd be no more leaves, no more houses, no more cellar, no more school, no more Mom and Dad, and no more me or anything else. No matter what paltry precautions the adults tried to take, from what we kids had seen of the films of Hiroshima and read about the new, improved destruction perfected by atomic tests, nothing was going to do any good. If they dropped the Big One, the only thing to do was bend down, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass good-bye.

    Later, I read On the Beach and began thinking about what I would do if I wasn't vaporized. I'd have to be useful, that was for sure.

    Know how to do something the other survivors couldn't get along without.
    If I was designing costumes or writing stories, I'd be one more mouth to feed. But if I went into nursing, like my mother, and knew how to take care of people, I'd be valuable.

    Vietnam had been a pimple of conflict when I entered training, but by the time I was a senior, it was obviously another of those undeclared wars like Korea. The military actively recruited student nurses. I was short on money to finish my senior year, and tired of being broke. I was restless, too, and wanted out of Kansas City. I didn't approve of war, God no. But Vietnam seemed to be a comparatively piddly conventional war with men and guns and tanks and stuff, like most of World War II, instead of nuclear warheads. I was so grateful that the world was restraining itself that I felt a rush of patriotism unmatched since the last time I'd watched the old movie about George M. Cohan.
    Surely, if I joined up and took care of casualties, I wouldn't be helping the war, I'd be repairing the damage as it occurred and doing my bit to keep the war contained until we could win it, without recourse to monster bombs. I never thought I'd actually end up in Vietnam. I'd have to volunteer for that, I was told. But on my first assignment, I ran afoul of one of those colonels I mentioned before, and discovered that I had been volunteered whether I liked it or not.

    My mom had a fit, but after six months at Fitzsimons taking care of casualties and hearing my patients' war