He didn't have to tell me twice. I slipped the amulet back over my head and followed. Although the footing was easier, and the wind and rain felt fresh against my face and arms, my feet burned as if I were walking on hot coals and my legs ached to my waist. William dumped Ahn onto the ground and rolled his shoulders back to relieve the tension. Ahn looked at me expectantly, but I shook my head, and without whining, he picked up a long stout stick and used it for a crutch.
The sky darkened from pale silver to the color of a new cast-iron skillet. The raindrops grew larger and the ground boggier. Below the ridgeline, the jungle covered us again. We slid down a slick embankment on our rears and dropped onto a spongy dead tree trunk that supported two more trees sprouting from its corpse. William stepped down from this and scuffed the ground cover up with his feet. Several lizards and spiders scuttled away, including two or three pretty large spiders. I wanted to ask if those were tarantulas but felt stupid for not knowing already, so I tried to look nonchalant as if, oh sure, I knew they could be tarantulas but I wasn't scared of anything like that.
"We better post sentry tonight," William said. "Which watch you want, first or second?"
"I'll take first," I said. "I'm beat but I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep-I hurt too much. What do we do if they do come? Spit at them till they drown?"
"No, but if we see them first, we're warned, we can hide. We don't see them and they see us, nicest thing they could do is slit our throats while we're asleep, but I don't think they'd let us off that easy, specially with you along."
"Thanks, William," I said, shuddering. "Any inclination I had to sleep is definitely gone now."
He nodded as if he thought I really was grateful and curled up between the tree and the lip of the ridge to sleep. Ahn was dead to the world as soon as the spiders were gone. I sat with my back to the cliff, my arms curled around my knees, and watched the auras of my companions dim with sleep, like private sunsets damping to dusky rose and slate blue.
Every once in a while I'd uncurl enough to peek up over the ridge, alert for the teiltale glow of enemy auras. But I didn't think I'd see them in time if they overran us.
I rolled my head and shoulders and rotated my feet, feeling the deep pain in my shoulders and neck, my legs, arms, hips, my feet especially.
I wanted to take off my boots. I knew I should or I'd get jungle rot, but who cared about that kind of thing when you could be shot# worse-at any time? I understood how the grunts came in with some of the complaints they did. I didn't want to take off my boots. I wanted to be able to run if I needed to. I did not want to be captured.
Officers' basic at Fort Sam was pretty much a lark for my class of nurses-they needed us too badly to harass us. Unlike the men, many of us could have quit. Those of us who had contractual obligations could get pregnant and get out if need be. They did not want to bug us too badly. So when they took a group of us into a small classroom and closed the door behind the instructor and a Special Forces-type sergeant, I thought they were just being melodramatic.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the instructor said, "what we are going to tell you here is not to go outside this room. If you repeat it, we will deny it." Oh boy, I thought. "Mission: Impossible." The others showed varying degrees of concern-with most of the women it was polite. The male nurses responded a little differently. I saw jamison, a fellow I'd chatted up at the 0 club, lean forward and look suddenly very intense.
There were several male nurses in our group, but two or three, including jamison, were already veterans before they got their R.N.s.
As soon as they got their diplomas, they were eligible to be redrafted.
jamison told me he'd enjoyed Nam as a corpsman, had felt he'd really done some good on the medcap missions, but wanted the expertise he thought nurses' training would give him. He hadn't been redrafted, but from the expression on his face, I wondered if he wasn't having second thoughts.
The sergeant introduced himself first as a two-tour Vietnam veteran. We didn't really need to be told. And it was looking at his face, with its tired eyes, at his stance that was at the same time very casual and very tense, that made me realize that this part was not just more Army melodramatic bullshit. "Now I'm going to tell you something and I know you're going to think this is a cruel and inhuman thing to say and all that, but I got my reasons. You women, if it ever appears as if you are in a situation where capture appears inevitable, the best thing you can do is to kill yourself. You men, if you are in a situation with one of these women and it looks as if she may be captured, do her a favor and kill her. Because the tortures are atrocious." Then he showed us pictures.
I was a little shaken, but still thought to myself: Oh, what a load
-there they go playing John Wayne again, the old saving the last round for the schoolmarm bit. The horribly hurt people in the pictures were shoved to the back of my mind with icky pictures out of medical books after a while.
At Fitzsimons, I met the nurse who told me her system for handling overseas romance. She had served in Nam during Tet too, which made her crazy enough to like me, I suppose, and try to help me out when the brass and all the other head nurses were so down on me. The day I got orders for Nam, she gave me the big-sister talk about men and we split first one, then two bottles of wine.
Toward the bottom of the second bottle, she started talking about the part of Nam she hadn't told me about: not the beach parties and the inconveniences, but her work. She had been triage nurse at Cu Chi during Tet and was talking about the way the Vietcong overran the place at one point and of some of the awful things that came through her E.R., the mutilations, the deaths. I asked, carefully, because we'd been warned not to mention it outside the room, "Did you get that talk about enemy torture before you went over there?"
She nodded. "Yep. I wish someone had told the civilians the same thing, because they were right on. We had a couple of American nuns come in; the VC had tortured those women till-well, one of them died, and I was praying to God the other one would too."
I thought about that while I huddled under the lip of that ridge. I could still see my friend's face. This wasn't something she had heard.
She had seen it. American women like us. Only they were civilians.
Surely it would be even worse, if there was worse, for military. And then there were all the officers trying to scare us, saying, "They know your names. They know who you are. The VC have you on a hit list." I thought about all the hideous things I had heard first- and secondhand, the Vietnam folk myths and the stories from other nurses, about torture victims, mutilations, Vietnamese and Vietcong women who had been sickeningly abused by either us or them, and I felt my own body, achy and sore because it was soft, easily pierced, of how I screeched if I stubbed my toe. Jesus Christ, what was I doing here?
The bugs were torture enough-my arms were sore from swatting at them, and big lumps itched and burned all over my face and arms and ur?derneath my clothing. Even though I sat on my poncho, I was saturated to the bone with rain and plant sap and mud. How did the grunts take it out here in this shit? No wonder people got vicious-the discomfort alone was enough to drive you nuts.
There had to be better things to think about, but I'd never stood guard duty before. What would Duncan do if he were with me? Probably say that if he had his old .30-06 he would pick off the entire NVA, but since he didn't, he'd probably leave me alone "just for a minute, kitten, while I check something out," and go off with some Vietnamese floozy. Ahn whimpered in his sleep and crunched himself into a tight ball. I wanted to whimper too. I wanted my mother. I could just hear her saying, "Now, Kathleen Marie, it's not that I don't love you, honey, but you got yourself into this. Neither your daddy nor I, nor even the Army, forced you to go over there, so now you're just going to have to handle it the best you can." Thanks a lot, Mom.