The Healer's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

have to sit up again and pry off my boots. My socks were wringing wet, my feet swollen and sore. I twisted on the bed and opened my door and dumped the sand from the boots. Mine were standard issue leather because I have big wide feet and the quartermaster couldn't find the lighter, canvas-and-steel-reinforced jungle boots in my size. The plywood floor of the room did not cool my burning soles, so I lay back down on the bed and let the room spin around for a while.

    The whole hooch was about the size of my clothes closet at home in Kansas City, and it didn't have a closet. It did have, courtesy of my mother's care packages, contact-paper flowers stuck around on the bare plywood walls and a mobile of paper cats, a pop bottle with Mexican crepe-paper flowers stuck in it, also gifts from home. My hot plate, assorted food, a midget refrigerator, and a reel-to-reel tape deck, along with my folded clothing, even my underwear, freshly rice-starched and ironed by my hooch maid, were arranged on a wonderful wall of shelves constructed by the orthopedic surgeon I would soon be working with. Joe Giangelo, a doctor who had somehow managed to escape ascending to deity when he gained his M.D., was better known as Geppetto by the nurses, because of the kindness with which he deployed his carpentry skills. With Geppetto for our local architect and interior designer, the hooches of several of the nurses were pretty plush by Vietnam standards.

    Correction. This whole assignment was very plush by Vietnam standards.
    So what the hell was wrong with me? I wasn't being asked to build the Bridge on the River Kwai, just to do my job, for very good pay, under much better circumstances than most of the people in Vietnam. I wasn't in any foxholes, or in danger of being shot at, and even the concertina wire and sandbag bunkers were more for joshing the folks at home than taken seriously, at least by me. Of course, the work hours here were a little longer, the heat and bugs were atrocious, and I was unable to get enough sleep because of all of the above, but compared to what the average grunt went through I was living in fat city. So why was I screwing up so badly I almost killed people?

    Well, actually, I wasn't almost killing just anybody, but specifically a little Vietnamese girl with a head inJury. There was a double dehumanizing factor there. She wasn't one of "us," of course. Didn't speak English. Was automatically suspect of being a grenade-tossing junior terrorist just because she had the gall to be Vietnamese in Vietnam.

    And the head injury made it worse, because even though I knew theoretically that some of the neuro patients would get well, I could remember only a handful of encounters with patients alert enough to display whole personalities. I really wanted to blame someone else so that I didn't have to admit that I had gotten not only careless but callous.

    Looking closely at why I was so mad at the doctor and the head nurse and the others who were justifiably alarmed over what had happened with Tran, I think I took the whole thing personally because I felt they didn't really care about her as much as I did. They were just tsk-tsking me to get me. Because only a couple of months earlier, it had been standard operating procedure to give the Vietnamese patients lifethreateningly dangerous care on a routine basis, when we transfused them with 0-positive blood.

    Before I came to Nam I had only read about transfusion reactions in textbooks, because a routine laboratory procedure, typing and crossmatching a patient to ensure compatibility with the donated blood, eliminated most of the danger.

    I began to realize the difference between wartime and peacetime nursing the night one of my Vietnamese patients went into a transfusion reaction and nobody but me was even upset about it.

    The patient was a middle-aged woman who had been too near when a bomb went off, drilling a hole in her skull as well as peppering her body with frag wounds, from