My next patient was a sickly little girl whose round brown face, black bangs, and huge dark eyes made her look more like a doll than a real child. She was hot, her mother said, and cried all the time. I took her temperature, which was 103, and listened to her chest. For an FUO, fever of unknown origin, you also always checked lymph nodes routinely, so I raised the little girl's arms. Lumps the size and color of plums swelled in the child's armpits.
I took one look at them and said, "Whoopee shit," and called out to Joe.
"What is it, Kitty?"
"I'm not sure. I never studied tropical medicine or anything, but a couple of weeks ago I was reading this novel? And in it the heroine ends up treating a whole bunch of people in the Appalachians for bubonic plague. Joe, the book said the victims had big purple lymph nodes in their axilla and groin areas, just like this kid has. Come and see what you think." I tugged down the little girl's shorts and checked her groin while I talked. More plums. It was a wonder the poor baby could walk.
"Bubonic plague? No shit? In this day and age? Wait, let me get my camera. Damn, not enough light."
"Mamasan, if this is what I think it is, we'd better check you out too,"
I told the mother. Li didn't need to translate. The mother pulled her paiama top off and raised her left arm, pointing to the purple "owie"
underneath.
Joe examined the nodules and whistled. "I dunno, Kitty. Your junk reading may have come in handy. Anyway, the kid's fever is enough to have her admitted and we may as well take the mother too."
While the patients gathered their belongings and arranged for their departures, Heron drove us to the marines' quarters, on the outskirts of the village. Wonderful cooking smells waited toward us. The mamasan who looked after the marines had prepared a lunch of stewed chicken, rice noodles, and mushrooms in broth. The marines and Heron were already experts with chopsticks, but Cathie, Joe, and I all needed lessons. I began to wonder whether the Army chose olive drab for the uniforms of its Asian-based troops because the color went so well with chicken broth.
Heron sat next to me, which made me even clumsier and more uncomfortable: exactly what he intended, I was sure. "I can see where Xe might be right about you," he said. "You don't go much by the book, do you?"
"Only bestselling novels," I admitted.
"I mean, you're more intuitive. I can see where he'd find you interesting."
He sounded so ridiculously, deliberately mysterious that I barely suppres sed a desire to tell him that the rumors about me and Xe were completely false, that we were just good friends.
But my opinion of him had risen a little bit. After the incident with the marijuana, it would have been hard for it to get much lower. Still, the way the men behaved toward Heron and the villagers, and the obvious affection, even adoration, that the villagers greeted him with, made me realize that maybe the man could be more than a lot of talk.
"I can't get over how much different these people seem from the ones you see in Dogpatch and Da Nang," Cathie said.
"Uh huh," Joe agreed, simultaneously holding up his camera and slurping a noodle. "Look, we've been here half the day and nobody's tried to snitch my camera."
"Most of the folks you meet in town and around the hospital are refugees. They steal to get by. These people are farmers, but take away their land and their livelihood and they'd do the same thing, or worse, to put food in their family's mouths," Heron said. "Our mission is to make sure they don't have to steal to get by. Some of that livestock you saw, some of the clothes, cooking utensils, the men here bought for the villagers out of their own paychecks."
"Hey, that's really nice of you guys," I said.
"Naw, not really, ma'am," Sergeant Hernandez said. "It's like, see, well, last night a rocket landed out there and we went running out with our Band-Aids and Merthiolate. When one landed too near us a couple of weeks ago, the people were there to help us in a minute and a half. We figure what happens to them happens to us and vice versa, which is how this whole fuckin' war-excuse me, ladies-how this whole war should have been fought to begin with."
"If at all," said a thin-faced man with granny glasses.
"No shit, man," another marine said with feeling.
I seemed to have stumbled into a bunch of leatherneck Lancelots, no less-men who actually believed that there were good Vietnamese who were not dead Vietnamese. I can be flip about it now, but I had to look at my noodles to keep from "gettin' a little misty," as Maynard G.
Krebs, the beatnik character from "Dobie Gillis," used to say. I also felt a little disoriented-why did some marines give their paychecks to better the lives of some South Vietnamese while others, and maybe even the same ones, earlier in their tour of duty, dedicated themselves to obliterating villagers who couldn't have been very different from these people?
guess you can mostly only do this because it's so close to Da Nang and protected and everything," I said. "I mean, out in the bush, people who need medical attention have to be medevaced, right?"
Heron abandoned his cool altogether. He waved his hands negatively and almost choked on his noodles, trying to gulp them down in his haste to set me straight. "No way. See, what you don't understand, L.T., is what a lot of people don't understand. This is my third tour. Last year, Da Nang was hotter than any little old village. Of course, some places we just don't have the supplies or men to do much-"
"That's where dudes like Sergeant Heroil here come in," Hernandez said.
"You know what this character's idea of a combat mission is, ma'am? He's the medic, right? He walks point into some hostile damn ville and starts patchin' people up before anybody can pop a shot off. Guy's got to have a charmed life."
"Hey. Sarge, I been wonderin' about that. Is it true you even sleep in the villages sometimes?"
"Mostly the Montagnard ones," he said, as if that was different.
"Holy shit."
"But you're not doing that anymore?" I asked. "You're involved with this now?"
"I do a lot of things," he said. "Helping the Marines matchmake these guys and this villaGe is what I do lately."
"You beaucoup dinky dao, Doc," one of the men said.
"Yeah, I bet there's bets going' down on the black market who's going'
to nail your ass first, Doc, the brass or Charlie," the guy with the granny glasses said approvingly.
"We've got a little something for Joe, haven't we?" Heron said, changing the subject. The mamasan was clearing the dishes, and as soon as she finished, Hernandez returned with a moldy bottle, which he handed to Joe.
"Homegrown penicillin?" Joe asked.
"It's one-hundred-day wine. They make it from sticky rice buried between banana leaves for a hundred days. Try it. I hear tell this is a very good year."
Joe did himself proud. His lips squirmed a little when he finished the wine, but he managed to pull them up into a smile and a thank you worthy of a ham actor taking a curtain call.
As we left the village, he photographed everything in sight. I shot a few pictures, too, of a young man in a straw hat who had infected sores on his legs but a beautiful face, a young girl holding her little brother, a water buffalo and its tender, a mamasan with her loads balanced at the ends of a pole.
But the good feeling I retained from that experience was eclipsed that night when I was pulled to help Carole in ICU. She had only a few patients, but one of them was an old woman, an ARVN general's wife, who had been sitting on her front porch when some sort of incendiary bomb was lobbed onto it, burning her over 100 percent of her body, mostly third-degree. Carole was devoting all of her time to that patient, while her corpsman covered the rest of the ward.