The Healer's War Read Online Free PDF

stories, I was curious to find out what really was going on in Vietnam. And it wasn't as if I'd actually be risking my life, really, not the way the men were. Female nurses were stationed only in the more secured areas, well protected by several thousand of our finest fighting men. I'd be able to test my ability under emergency conditions, be in the thick of things.

    My skill had gotten tested, okay, and I'd flunked. Instead of getting sharper, I seemed to be losing what efficiency I'd had when I graduated second in my nursing school class. I had not, even at first, conned myself into thinking I was going to be another Nightingale, but neither had I anticipated becoming the Beetle Bailey of the Army Nurse Corps.

    Apparently the distress from that notion showed in my face sufficiently to satisfy Blaylock, for she was now ready to deliver her coup de grace.

    "After giving it some thought," she said, "I've decided to transfer you to another ward." She said "transfer," but her face said "banish."

    "Major Canon needs help on ward four. You'll start tomorrow, on days."

    Ward four? Glory hallelujah, I must have overprayed. God not only helped Tran but delivered me from from mine enemies as well. I felt like falling to my knees and begging Blaylock to please, please, Brer Colonel, please don't throw me in that brier-patch, just so she would be sure not to change her mind and spare me. Ward four was orthopedics.
    All the patients there were conscious. You could actually talk to them.
    You could actually watch some of them get better. You didn't run the risk of nearly killing them every time you gave them a cotton-pickin'
    pill.

    "Yes, ma'am," I said, trying to hide my smile and refrain from clicking my heels together until I was safely away from her office.

    "Dismissed," she said.

    I felt so giddy with relief that I was ashamed of myself, so I chastised myself by sneaking back onto neuro for another look at Tran. Chalmers and Cindy Lou were at the far end of the ward.

    Tran was making up for her lack of activity for the preceding twenty-four hours. She'd wriggled halfway to the foot of the bed, her feet pushing the sheet overboard to drag the floor. I slid my arms under her hot little back and boosted her up again. She was so light she felt hollow. She let out an irritating but relatively healthy wall.
    I smoothed her covers and wiped the sweat from her knotted forehead.
    "Give me hell, sweetie, but thanks for not croaking," I whispered to her.

    In the next bed, old Xe lay quietly with his hands over his chest. The deep frown lines I had noticed earlier were smooth now, his wrinkles gentle as the furrows made by wind through a wheat field. The dreams that had disturbed him earlier seemed to have quieted, and his sleep was peaceful.

    Chalmers and Cindy Lou trotted up the ward with bundles of charts tucked officiously under their arms, the two of them looking for all the world like Dr. Dan and Nancy Nurse. They exchanged a look that pointedly did not acknowledge my unclean presence.

    tramped up the wooden stairs of the barracks and down the landing to my own hooch too tired to spare a glance for Monkey Mountain or the South China Sea, and unsure whether I wanted to continue to beat my breast, lick my wounds, or gloat. What I really wanted to do was sleep, but as soon as I opened the door to my hooch I knew that was going to present a problem.

    The sun glinted blindingly off the tin roof of the building, giving my room the climate of a kiln. I had nailed a Vietnamese bedspread, an institution-green brocade of a phoenix, over my window in an attempt TO
    PROVIDE myself with shade and privacy. Otherwise the hooch's decor was a scant improvement on the miners' shacks outlaws use for hideouts in old Western movies.

    I flopped down on my cot and groaned for a while. The cot was covered with another Vietnamese spread, which was, like everything else at the 83rd, habitually sandy. I had no sooner lain down than I knew I was going to