I had thought myself above the kind of bigotry that had willfully overlooked what was so obvious to Dr. Riley; the human body works pretty much the same no matter what kind of upholstery you put on it.
Now I had to seriously question whether I hadn't at least inwardly begun to buy into all of that "anti-gook" stuff. Had I harmed Tran because I secretly didn't give as much of a damn about her as I did about my
"professional image"?
Was I really more concerned with stupid appearances than I was with hurting somebody who was so totally helpless and dependent on me?
Oh well, so I'd screwed up. Nobody had been making it exactly easy for me. Let them transfer me to an easier assignment. What did I care?
Except-except that I still hated like hell that I had failed, that I hadn't measured up. Because I wanted to do more, not less. I really wanted to be in a field hospital, as a surgical nurse, doing the rough stuff. But of course, after my screwing up like this, there was no chance of that. So I'd have to accept what they told me and watch myself and make sure that it never, ever . . .
I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. I was furious with myself now, not just with everybody else, and it was a cold kind of furious that made the center of my chest ache as if I had pleurisy. My throat was as gritty and parched as the beach. I trolled with my fingers until I found the refrigerator door, and popped it open long enough to extract the dregs of a flat Coke. I popped two Benadryls and chased them with the Coke.
It tasted metallic, and there were little solid pieces at the bottom, like worms. Probably from having been shipped and stored so long. But there were all those stories floating around about the Vietcong taking the tops off pop bottles and putting ground glass in the Coke, then recapping and resealing it. I couldn't help wondering if their evil little minds hadn't dreamed up a similar way of getting into cans. I generally tried to drink 7-Up or Shasta, but with the PX, you took what you could get.
Despite the Benadryl, I couldn't get comfortable. My elbows and knees were in the wrong places, and vast patches of my skin stuck to the cot.
Someone climbed the steps to the upper porch and walked toward my room, the footfalls sending tiny vibrations across the floor aild up the cot legs. A face and a pair of hands squashed against my screen door.
,, Kitty? You there?"
I grunted, and Carole Swenson opened the door and plopped herself on the edge of my cot. Her ditty bag and another of the Vietnamese bedspreads slid to the floor beside her boot. "Hi. How was your night?" she asked as if it wasn't already all over the compound how my night had been.
"Oh, you know. Long," I said.
Carole was maybe my best friend at the hospital, but I couldn't talk to her about this. She waited a moment for me to continue, then started pawing through her ditty bag, the little olive-drab cloth sack we all used as a purse. Triumphantly she extracted a stack of three-by-five cards. "I had a brainstorm. Lookit here."
"What are those for?" I asked.
"My schedule. I got tired of reciting it to guys who keep forgetting it and call me up while I'm on duty, so I decided to start copying it out on three-by-five cards. It'll save time."
"Uh huh," I said, mild amusement lapping at the edges of my bone-tiredness. Carole did tend to carry her talent for organization a little far sometimes. But that talent was part of what made her such a good nurse. She handled the ICU, which was a nightmare, as if it were routine ward work, and conducted eincrgency triage situations as coolly as if she were planning seating arrangements at a party. Her I.V.s always seemed to hit the veins on the first punch, she always found the bleeder, she always managed to hold someone where it didn't hurt, and she seemed to know before the patients did what would make them more comfortable, feel a little better. She was the kind of nurse who would be there with a glass of water half a second before a patient realized he was thirsty.
"If you have your schedule, you could do the same thing she suggested, which was supposed to give me an opening to tell her about my transfer.
The hospital compound was a small place. Rumors had probably spread far and wide about how I had nearly killed Tran and what Blaylock had done about it. Carole, who would never have made the same kind of an error, nevertheless had probably already put herself mentally in my place and was trying to help.
I grunted noncommittally, because I still didn't want to talk but I didn't want her to go away mad either. I needed all the friends I could get.
,,Be that way," she said, and tucked her cards back inside the bag, and abruptly changed the subject. "Judy's ward master is going to the PX
and said he'd drop us at the beach on the way. Wanna come?"
She'd done it again. Suddenly I knew that I needed to get off the compound and away from the hospital more than anything. I nodded, plucked my beach bag from the corner, and followed her out the door.
Carole, Judy Heifetz, and I crowded into the jeep driven by Sergeant Slattery, the ward master on Judy's ward. Getting a ride all the way to the beach was a rare treat. Usually we had to walk to the gate and hitch ' with a passing deuce-and-a-half or whatever other vehicle was willing to pick us up. Women weren't allowed to drive vehicles off post. Too dangerous.
The Jeep bumped its way through the gate and down the dirt road through Dogpatch, the Vietnamese village that separated the southern 'de of the compound from Amer'can-bu'it Highway I. The highway si I I ran down the coast of Vietnam, and led past Tien Sha, the naval base north of us, past Freedom Hill and the China Beach R&R Center, to the south.
Somewhere along the way was a turnoff for the bridge across the river to Da Nang and another road that led to Marble Mountain Air Force Base.
Vietnamese children stopped and watched our Jeep sputter past. A little boy, who was probably eight but looked five, ran toward us. "Hey, GI, you want buy boom-boom?"
"Get lost," Slattery yelled.
"Hey, man, numbah one boom-boom, no shit." The child continued with the hard sell. After all, family pride was no doubt involved, since he was probably pimping for his mother or sisters.
We laughed, and Judy leaned out and waved him away. "Hey, man," she said. "We mamasans. No need boom-boom."
The kid, undaunted, trotted along beside our dust cloud, calling, "Hey, mamasans, you want numbah one job?"
Later, out on the highway, Slattery had to stop the jeep for an overturned Honda while the three occupants reloaded two baskets of chickens, their laundry, two water jugs, and a pig onto the little vehicle. While stopped, we all assumed the sort of hunchbacked position required to cover your watch with your right hand while keeping your elbows tight over your pockets and, in our cases, our ditty bags tucked firmly into our armpits. Vietnamese street kids watched for just such incidents to dart out and strip the valuables off the passengers of stopped vehicles before the suckers knew what happened. It occurred to me more than once that it was a damned good thing jeeps didn't have hubcaps.
Carole and Judy had worn bathing suits under their fatigues, but I had to stop at the ladies' room of the officers' club to change. My mom had picked my suit, a gold velour modified bikini, out of the Sears catalog.
Needless to say, it was not particularly revealing, but it wouldn't have made any difference if it had been cut like a pair of long Johns.
Stepping from the ladies' locker room onto the glaringly sunlit beach, surrounded by a couple three hundred males, I squinted down the long stretch of beach between me and the blankets Carole and Judy had stretched by the edge of the water. I felt I was running the gauntlet, like the guy in that old movie Flight of the Arrow, although the scenario was more like Annette Funicello in Beach Blanket Bingo. Or maybe it was Sally Field in Gidget Goes to War.