The China Beach Officers' Club was a rambling French coloTnial building on a hill above the beach. It commanded a splendid view of the South China Sea and the adjacent mountains and jungle. It was a romantic-looking place if you overlooked the concertina wire and sandbags and disregarded the attire of the clientele. With its lazily rotating ceiling fans, latticework of white painted wood, wide veranda, and potted palms, the place always made me feel as if I should be wearing a white linen safari suit and a pith helmet and walk in on the arm of jungle Jim. I kept expecting somebody to come riding up on an elephant and call me "memsahib."
Right then, however, the Gunga Din illusions of the place were of less allure than its distance from the hospital.
I usually dressed up to go to the club and went in a group, or with an escort. This time I just pulled on my rumpled fatigues over my swimsuit, which was by then bone-dry, tried to brush the sand off, and stuck my hair up under my baseball cap. I looked like a grunt, which was fine with me. I didn't feel very glamorous..
The club was half-empty at five, which was a little early for dinner. I really wanted to be alone to mope, but that was a sure way to attract even more attention than usual. I looked around for someone I knew.
Just anybody harmless and familiar.
Even as messy as I looked then, I no sooner stepped inside than the clatter of stainless and restaurant pottery died to an occasional clink and the muted conversations stopped altogether. I felt like the Fastest Gun in the West entering a saloon just before High Noon, but I pretended not to notice. Since coming to Nam, I had gotten used to stopping traffic. Literally. I had always considered myself attractive in a sort of wholesome, moon-faced way. I had nice hazel eyes and brown hair carefully kept reddish, and a figure that ten pounds less made "stacked"
and ten pounds more made "fat." But none of it mattered, because the attention was nothing personal. It was not my sheer breathtaking gorgeousness or incredible charisma that was causing apnea among the male diners. The standard female reproductory equipment and round eyes were all that was required to be the Liz Taylor of China Beach.
I just stood there kind of dazed from the sun and sleepy and tried to decide what to do. The very idea of all those men just made me tired right now.
One reason I hadn't minded coming to Nam so much at first was that I had already talked to a lot of bewildered boys my age who didn't want to go but saw no other choice. It seemed unfair that they had to serve, just because they were men of the right age. Like discrimination. I thought, if this war was for the benefit of the U.S., why were men the only ones who had to go? The North Vietnamese, or at least the VC, had women troops, and so did the Israelis. Of course, two days after I was in country it was pretty clear that no American, male or female, should have had to be there. If I had to enlist again, nothing short of the invasion of Kansas City would have gotten me into uniform. Furthermore, I knew that many of the men who had been gung ho before they got to Nam agreed with me. Even the South Vietnamese stayed out of the military if they could, and it was their damned war.
Nevertheless, there I was, and my idealistic notions of brotherand-sisterhood failed to prevent me from being an exotic novelty item in the war zone, no matter how much I wanted, or was able, to contribute. Most of the guys most of the time were okay, even downright gallant. But there were those like Mitch who decided that we nurses were just working twelve-hour shifts, continually suffering from Iick of sleep and incipient heatstroke, as a sort of hobby. What we were really in Nam for, of course, was to get laid. By them.
Nurses, Red Cross workers, entertainers-we were all nymphos if not actually whores, according to the predominant mode of wistful thinking.
Even fairly nice men swore to us nurses that all doughnut dollies were making big money as prostitutes, and apparently the same men told the same story about us when they were talking to the Red Cross workers. I remember having a conversation with one of the Red Cross girls at Marble Mountain. "Funny, you don't seem as-ah-you know she said at one point, when we had been talking about what we were doing in Nam. "I know," I said. "You don't look like a hooker to me either."
Thewhole thing made me want to smack somebody, but unfortunately, most of the people I could smack here would outrank me.
But basically, as long as the guys kept their cruder notions to themselves, I could handle it, and even enjoy the attention. What really got to me was the ones who made Mitch look like Mr. Suave. On Carole's birthday, one of her boyfriends had brought four of us girls to the club to celebrate. Drunken marine officers had converged upon us to woo us with obscenities and innuendos delivered with typical Corps couth, which vies with that of convicted multiple rapist-murderers for gentility. "No, thank you,"
"I'm not interested...... Please go away or I'll tell my boyfriend, King Kong...... I'm engaged," and "I'm married" did not deter them.
Neither, at first, did "Get your goddamn hands off me," and "Fuck off and die," until voiced with sufficient volume to attract the interest of other officers, who wandered over to reinforce Carole's boyfriend. Our rescuers then stayed around for drinks and any possible demonstrations of eternal gratitude. Most of them were somewhat better behaved than the marines. One of them suggested that we had had no call to get so mad, since if we didn't want marines lusting after us, we wouldn't be there.
That was so unfair. I for one had been expecting a different Marine Corps altogether-the one with the lofty Latin motto, the one my dad had Joined in WW II. He had had such a good time with those other marines, and often told long, funny stories about the adventures of his group of lads on Ishi Shima. They never, in Dad's stories, killed anybody, they just camped out in the rain a lot and scrounged and gave candy to children and nylons to women and converted POWs through sheer kindness and wrote home to Mother. And they certainly didn't say "fuck" every other word. Of course, by now I did. Dad would be very shocked at all of us, I supposed.
Maybe from this you can gather that our lives were a bit on the schizophrenic side. While we were on duty, we were responsible for the lives and deaths of our patients, for calming their fears and administering treatments that could cure or kill them. Off duty, we were treated as a sort of cross between a high-ranking general who deserved to be scrounged for, taken around, and generally given special treatment, and a whore. It was a little like that old saying of water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. All those men and you could still be so lonely.
On a date, after you talked about where you were both from, your escort would brag about his aircraft or his unit or, God forbid, his body count. If he was feeling disgruntled, you were supposed to keep up his morale. But you were expected to do the same attentive little cupcake act the football players had expected in high school. Nobody wanted to hear about your day at work. Some of the girls dated doctors, who at least had some idea of what the rest of their life was like. I was awfully glad I didn't. All I'd have needed just then was to have to spend my offduty time, too, explaining what I'd done to Tran. Dating doctors, to me, was a good way to screw up both your social life and your work life. Besides, doctors were married.
A nurse captain I'd met at Fitzsimons who had been to Nam twice and Okinawa once told me her prescription for handling one's love life on overseas duty.
"Keep it light, honey. Keep it light. What happens is you have these real killer romances and then the love of your life leaves country, promising to write, and all that shit, then he goes back to his everlovin' wife or his real girlfriend, and forgets all about you. It's just not real, see, whatever it feels like. The partying is great, but you can't take it seriously. What you do is you find a nice guy who has about three months left in country, just long enough to have a little fun. You don't tend to get so involved when you know how soon the end is coming. You date him and meet his friends, and when he goes, you take up with the nicest of the friends who have only about three months left in country, and so on. It's the only way to keep from being burned."