Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - The Healer's War

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THE HEALERS WAR [065 5.0]

BY ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

Synopsis:

Very realistic and chilling novel of an army nurse in Vietnam. Kitty

finds herself alone in enemy territory with a crippled Vietnamese child,

her only protection a mysterious amulet given to her by an ancient

Vietnamese wise man. The touch of fantasy keeps this book from being a

true nightmare. The author was a nurse in Vietnam herself and the

descriptions in this novel are not for the squeamish.

Dedication This book is specifically for Lou Aronica, who asked the

right questions.

It is also for my fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead, male and

female, military, civilian, and pacifist, American, South Vietnamese,

North Vietnamese, Australian, Dutch, Laotian, Cambodian, Montagnard,

Korean, and Chinese. And for our children, in hopes of arming them with

hard questions to ask leaders selling cheap glory.

The perspective, extrapolations, fantasy elements, and selection of

story material in this novel are entirely my own. This story is a work

of speculative fiction, not an autobiography, although some of the more

mundane aspects and background are based upon my own experience as a

nurse in Vietnam. This work does not, however, claim to be

representative of the viewpoint of any group or of any other person but

me. However, I have obtained nonjudgmental help, support, information,

and reference materials from the invaluable sources listed below.

I would most especially like to thank John Swan for generously sharing

his experience as a field medic, combat soldier, Vietnam Veterans

Outreach Center counselor, and human being, for helping me cope with the

initial stages of this book, and for introducing me to the Fairbanks

Combat Veterans Rap Group. Another debt is owed to a Vietnamese lady

whose perspective was of real help but who prefers to remain anonymous.

Thanks also to Mack Partain; Megan Lindholm; Dr. Sharan Newman; Dr.

Peter Cornwall; janna Silverstein; Karen and Charlie Parr, my parents;

Don and Betty Scarborough, my agent; Merrilee Heifetz, her assistant;

Kathilyn Solomon and others at Writers' House; and Walt Williams of the

Seattle Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center. In addition, I owe a great

debt to all of the veterans who have been courageous enough to tell

their stories, whether they thought what they had to say would be

acceptable or not. Without their example I would not have been able to

write my story. Particular thanks to Lynda Van Devanter, author (with

Christopher Morgan) of Home Before Morning; to Cheryl Nicol, a portion

of whose story is in 4 Piece of My Heart; to Patricia L. Walsh, author

of the novel So Sad the Hearts, based on her experiences as an American

civilian nurse who treated Vietnamese patients in Da Nang; and to Huynh

Quang Nhuong, author of The Land I Lost, a portrait of the author's

boyhood in rural Vietnam before the war. Also thanks to those who

collected the stories of other veterans: Keith Walker for the excellent

4 Piece of My Heart; Kathryn Marshall for In the Combat Zone; Stanley

Goff and Robert Sanders for Brothers: Black Soldiers in the Nam; Wallace

Terry for Bloods; and Mark Baker for Nam, among many others. I owe

special gratitude to Robert Stone for suggesting Dispatches by Michael

Herr, to Shelby L. Stanton for advice on technical aspects of the story

(all mistakes are purely mine, however), to Frances FitzGerald's Fire in

the Lake, and to Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann, editors of In the

Field of Fire, for suggesting that writers of fantasy could have

anything to say about Vietnam.

Glossary Author's Note Spellings are phonetic and meanings are

approximate, not literal, translations. Many terms are not actually

Vietnamese but pidgin. My apologies to any Vietnamese speakers for

inaccuracies. I wish I had had your assistance when compiling this.

Ba: Vietnamese term for a married woman.

Bac si: Vietnamese term for a doctor.

Beaucoup: French for "much" or "many," used in pidgin VietnameseEnglish.

Bic. Vietnamese term for "understand." (Bicced is author's

Americanizing of past tense.)

Cam ong: Vietnamese term for "thank you."

Cat ca dao: Vietnamese term meaning "cut off head."

Chung wi: Vietnamese term for a lieutenant.

Co: Vietnamese term for an unmarried woman or girl.

Com bic?: Vietnamese term for "Come again?" or "I don't understand."

Dao: Vietnamese term for "head."

Dau: Vietnamese term for "pain."

Dau quadi: Vietnamese term for "much pain." (Dau quadied is author's

Americanizing of past tense.)

DEROS date (military jargon): The day a person can leave an assignment;

in Vietnam, when one leaves country.

Didi or didi mau: Vietnamese or pidgin used often by GIs and Vietnamese;

approximate meaning "Go" or "Go quickly."

Dinky dao: Vietnamese or pidgin for "crazy."

Dung lai: Vietnamese term for "Stop."

Em di: Vietnamese term for "Shut up."

La dai: Vietnamese term for "Come here." (La daied is author's

Americanizing of past tense.)

Mao: Vietnamese term for a cat.

Mao hey: Vietnamese term for a tiger.

MOS: Military Occupational Specialty.

Sin loi: Vietnamese term for apology.

Tete or titi: Pidgin for French word petit.

TPR: Temperature, pulse, and respiration.

Triage: As used in medical emergency situations, this term refers to the

process of sorting victims of a mass casualty situation or disaster into

categories,. e., those who can be treated and released, those who can

be saved by quick intervention, and those who will need more extensive

help if they are to recover. The last category are those so seriously

injured they will probably die without immediate, extensive care and may

die anyway. In triage situations, patients are treated in the order

listed, the worst injuries requiring the most care left until last so

the greatest number of people can be treated.

Prologue The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can

haul myself out of one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked

sheet under me is not wet jungle floor, that the pressure against my

back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle or a terribly wounded

Vietnamese but my sleeping cat. When someone in a suit or a uniform

frowns at me, it doesn't always make me feel as if the skin over my

spinal column were being chewed away by pointed teeth. Sometimes I can

*just shrug, and recognize the authority in question as an uptight

asshole with no legitimate power over me-none that counts, that is,

nothing life-threatening.

Still, most of the time, I retain the feeling that it's the nightmares

that are real and my life here and now that is a dream, the same dream I

dreamed in the hospital, in the jungle, in the Vietcong tunnels. I'm

always afraid that someday I'll be dragged out of this dream, back to

Nam, to a war that goes on and on for real in the same way it replays

itself in my memory.

"That is what stops your power, Mao," Nguyen Bhu tells me. "You cannot

provi 'de a clear path for the amulet's power until your own mind is

clear. When you turn your face from your fear, that fear bloats with

the power you give it. Look it in the eye, and it will diminish into

something that is part of your life, part of your memory, something that

belongs to you rather than controls you."

Nguyen Bhu sweeps the floor at his cousin's grocery store. Charlie says

he's a former Cao Dai priest, a mystic like old Xe, and the wisest man

to escape from Vietnam. He is sixty and looks ninety, has lost three

fingers from his right hand, has more sense and is far less expensive

than a psychiatrist whose lifelong concern has been to avoid obesity

rather than starvation.

And most important, Nguyen Bhu knows what I have to say, and insists

that it is not too much to ask people to believe and forgive. Charlie

knows part of it, but he has his own nightmares to chase. Of the others

who know, I keep hoping that at least one or two survived, and that

someday I might see and recognize them among the refugees. One hope I

have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and

find me, and we can heal together.

I didn't know old Xe was a magician the night I began to be iaware of

his powers. If anybody had told me there was anything magical going on

that night, I'd have told them they were full of crap, and assumed they

either had a sicko sense of humor or had been smoking too much Hanoi

Gold.

I was in the worst trouble of my life, to date, and had brought someone

with me. An eleven-year-old kid lay comatose, barely breathing, on the

bed by my chair.

Every fifteen minutes I repeated the same routine.

Right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, I pulled up a spare lump of

flesh from each of the little girl's limbs and pinched hard, silently

daring her to kick me or slug me. Then I ground my knuckles into her

chest, counted to ten, and prayed for a sign of pain.

A kick or a slap, a whimper or a wiggle, even a grimace would have

gladdened my heart. But the kid just lay there, her disproportionately

long limbs limp as wet rags, her breathing so shallow that it barely

stirred her skinny ribs a quarter of an inch up or down.

I peeled back her eyelids one at a time and dazzled them with the beam

of my flashlight, checking to see if the pupils contracted at the same

rate, to the same size, or if they expanded at all. If they stayed

fixed, or if one was the size of a dime while the other stayed the size

of a pencil lead, both of us were in truly deep shit. I had to try them

five or six times before I could be sure they were not contracting more

slowly than they had fifteen minutes before. I'd been performing this

same cruel routine continuously since she had been wheeled back from

O.R., already deeply unconscious. Thank God, they had not yet

anesthetized her for surgery.

"Come on, baby, come on," I prodded her encouragingly, as if she were my

kid up to bat at a Little League game, and pumped up the blood-pressure

cuff that circled her skinny upper arm. I had to pump it and release it

three times before the faintest throb of pulse came through the membrane

of my stethoscope. Partly that was because her pulse pressure was so

weak. Partly it was because the papasan in bed five had started up

again.

"Dau quadi," he whined ("much pain"), twisting in the padded cuffs

binding him to the side rails. He sounded like a night in a haunted

house, with the rails rattling like hail on windows, his sheets

thrashing like those of a particularly agitated ghost, his bedsprings

squeaking like unoiled ancient portals.

"Dau quadi!" he shrieked this time, his voice shrill with the hostility

head injuries inevitably display when and if they start to heal.

All eleven of the patients then on ward six, the neurosurgery ward, were

Vietnamese with some kind of trauma to the head. Most of them were

civilians, war refugees. Before, we'd had two poor GIs on Stryker

frames. One was a gork-a vegetable, who didn't know that he wouldn't

ever move by himself again. The other guy wasn't so lucky. Both of them

had been medevaced to Japan that morning, so tonight there were just

Vietnamese on this side, them and George, the corpsman, and me. Ginger

Phillips, who was officially in charge of the graveyard shift that night

for ward six, was staying on the other half of the ward, across the

hall. The EENT patients were over there, injuries and ailments of the

eyes, ears, nose, and throat, a couple of GIs with sinus infections and

a couple more with superficial facial wounds, as well as elderly

Vietnamese suffering from cataracts and facial cancer. Men and women

were mixed together on both open wards, which was true throughout the

hospital. On most wards the division was between GIs and Vietnamese

instead.

Papasan dau quadied again and the old man in the next bed stirred

restlessly. I pulled my stethoscope out of my ears.

"Can you shut papasan up, George?" I asked. "I can't hear a damned

thing for the racket."

George nodded, rose from his semislumped comic-book-reading position,

and lumbered sleepily down the aisle between the beds. I waited while

he threatened in a gentle, soothing voice to do hideous things to the

old man, pulled the gnarled and squirmy body up in bed, and smoothed the

sheets. Then I tried again. I could hear the systolic140-but the

diastolic eluded me until the second reading-it was 60. Up 6 points from

the previous reading. A widening pulse pressure-the difference between

the first throb I heard and the last-was a sign of increased

intracranial pressure. But last time the spread had been 144/ 52, so it

had decreased slightly. I hoped I could take that as a good sign.

The girl's respirations were still so slow and shallow I had to Measure

the movement of her ribs against the sheet to be sure she was breathing.

Her right radial pulse, before slowed to 50, was now 56, but that was

not necessarily a good sign. As the pressure on her brain increased,

her pulse might start racing as her squashed brain sent wild signals to

her heart, panicking it into an essentially useless flurry of activity.

I took pulses in both wrists, at both ankles, and at her carotid pulse,

at the base of her jaw. They were within two points of one another.

Her Foley catheter was still draining urine from her bladder, her I.V.s

were still dripping on course. I wrote everything down on the chart at

the end of the bed, sat on the metal folding chair, and used a towel to

wipe the sweat off my face and neck.

The sweat wasn't just from the heat. It was from fear: fear that this

child was going to die and I was going to have to live with it, and with

myself. The fear soured in my throat and I leaned forward again and

took her hand. It was clammy with sweat. How could I measure intake

and output when she was sweating gallons like that, poor baby?

Her bald head was bandaged with a strip of white gauze, like an Indian

headband, and her face didn't look like a child's. It looked like

death, the high cheekbones jutting through the shiny flesh like carnival

apples bleeding through caramel.

Her original problem was a depressed skull fracture. She'd tumbled off

a water buffalo, something Vietnamese kids always seemed to be doing. I

only wished the water buffalo had sole responsibility for her current

condition. But unfortunately for us both, the poor kid had fallen right

off that water buffalo into the hands of a numskull nurse, namely, me.

Now I was waiting to see if my carelessness had turned her simple,

easily treatable injury into something that was going to kill her or

make a zombie out of her.

I forced myself not to brood about how unfair it was, not to worry about

what they would do to me if she died, or about what I could have done to

prevent it.

Instead I held on to her hand and, in my mind, held on to her spirit,

apologizing over and over and begging her to stay. "Tran, come on now,

baby, keep it together. You know Kitty didn't mean to hurt you, and

she's sorry, honey, she's really sorry. Just come on back. That shit

of a doctor will fix your head and your hair will grow back and you can

go back to mamasan and papasan and eat that bad old water buffalo, okay?

Aw, hell, sweetheart, I'm so sorry.........

The old man in the next bed, another depressed-skull-fracture case, with

bilateral above-the-knee amputations, shifted slightly in bed so that

his head lolled toward us. His name was Cao Van Xe, according to the

strip of adhesive that had been taped to his wrist. His arrival had

caused something of a stir. Some idiot with Special Forces had called a

chopper out to a really hot landing zone just to load this one old man,

who was probably going to die pretty soon anyway. The pilot had given

the redheaded GI who loaded the old man a piece of his mind, but the man

had grinned and waved and walked back into the bush. The object of all

this dissension slackened his lower jaw so that it seemed to drop into a

grin.

"What's with you, papasan? You think I'm as dinky dao as you, huh?"

Maybe it did sound crazy to be carrying on a monologue with first one

comatose patient, then another, but in nursing school they taught us

that hearing is the last sense to go, the first to kick back in. So I

always chattered at my unconscious patients, telling them what I was

doing, commenting on what was happening, and musing on life in general,

as if talking to myself.

Papasan's breath emerged in a sort of groan, and I turned in the chair

and leaned toward his bed, touching his bony hand. "You okay, papasan?"

His other hand fluttered like a bird to his neck and touched what I

figured was a holy medal. To my surprise, the hand under mine twisted

and caught my fingers for a moment before sliding back to lie flaccid on

the sheet.

Well, good. At least somebody was responding. I patted his hand again

and turned back, a little more hopefully, to Tran.

No dice. She hadn't stirred. Her breath was inaudible. I held on to

her hand with both of mine and concentrated. I had done this before,

while trying to hang on to someone who was dying, collecting my

strength, and any other strength I could suck from the atmosphere, God,

or whatever, building it into a wave and flooding it through my hands

into that person, almost as if I could wash her back to me, back to

herself. She lay there quietly, and when I pulled my hands away, her

small pale ones had red marks from the pressure of my fingers.

George clomped up, large and olive-drab, his walrus mustache drooping

damply at the ends. "How's it going?" he asked.

"Not good," I told him. "BP's a little better, I think. It's about

time for an encore."

"I'll do it, Lieutenant. You get a cup of coffee, why don't you? I

just made some."

"Thanks, but I'll do it."

He shrugged and clomped back to the nurses' station.

As soon as his back was turned I leaned over Tran again, but when I

looked into that vacant little face I just lost it. My calm,

I'm-incharge professional mask, the one no nurse should be without when

on duty, dissolved. I had to pretend I was wiping sweat away again.

Then I repeated my routine: vital signs, neuro checks, and as many

prayers as I could fit in between.

The prayers were for Tran, because I didn't know anything else to do,

not because I'm this holy, religious person. Like all my family, I've

always been a lukewarm, nonchurchgoing, nonspecific Protestant. People

like us pray only on ritualized occasions, like funerals, and when

there's a really big crisis. It isn't nice to pray for something you

want for yourself, according to my upbringing, and God expects you to

help yourself most of the time. But this was for Tran, not for me-not

mostly. Well, not only me, anyway.

Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe God wasn't listening because my heart

was not pure. Every time I squeezed my eyes shut and started mumbling

humble apologies for my sin and error I ended up snarling that it wasn't

all my fault. Even though I knew damned good and well I was going to

have to take the whole rap. Despite the fact that pre-op orders were

supposed to be written, pre-op medications and all narcotic medications

double-checked and double-signed. But our high-andmighty new

neurosurgeon had handed down his commands to our high-and-mighty new

college-educated head nurse, the twit, who had demanded that I do it,

damn it, didn't I know enough to give a simple pre-op?

I should have. I'd done it often enough. But not pediatric doses, and

not on head injuries, not that often. I hadn't been giving meds long on

this ward. And I was so mad at their sheer goddamned pompous arrogance

that I kept jumbling it up in my head. I was mad a lot in Vietnam. My

best mood, in the heat, with the bugs, and the lack of sleep, and these

gorked-out patients, was cranky. But that day I had gotten so mad that

.25 ce of Phenergan turned itself into 2.5 ce of Phenergan. And I gave

it to Tran.

As soon they came to take Tran to surgery, I got to thinking that that

had looked like an awful lot of Phenergan. By then the doctor was on

his way off the ward and the head nurse was in a more human frame of

mind and I asked her. . . .

Had Tran been anesthetized already, she would have certainly died. The

overdose I had already given her, combined with her head injury, was

potentially lethal as it was. She was quiet as death when she returned

to the ward, and I had been at her bedside ever since, watching for some

sign of reprieve for both of us.

I couldn't just blame the doctor and Cindy Lou for the orders. I had to

blame myself, too, admit that maybe I was getting rattled, after three

long months in what was vulgarly known among staff members as "the

vegetable patch." Maybe it was the Army's fault for sending a sweet

young thing like me to Nam. But one thing for sure: it wasn't Tran's

fault, and she was the one who was going to die. I tried to explain all

of that to God to account for the impure static in my prayers.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of distractions that kept me from

formulating a really good defense.

"Beaucoup dau!" This time it was bed seven, a fourteen-year-old boy

whose Honda motorbike had collided with a tractor-trailer unit. The boy

had a broken arm as well as a busted head. Once more George's jungle

boots slapped wearily down the concrete floor.

Somewhere in the distance, mortars crumped. Outgoing. I knew the

difference now: what was incoming, what was outgoing. After 124 days in

country, I was fairly blas'e about anything that wasn't aimed

specifically at me, despite the fact that another nurse had been killed

by a piece of a projectile just before I arrived in Nam. Mortars

bothered me no more than receding thunder, ordinarily.

But, God, it was hot! This had to be the only country in the world that

didn't cool off at night. I finished Tran's neuro checks and vital

signs again and tried to touch my toes with my fingertips. My uniform

was sticking to my skin and my hair stuck out at all angles, I had run

my hands through it so much.

Pain boomed through my skull louder than the mortars and probed at the

backs of my eyeballs. The odors of the ward were making me faintly

nauseous. The smell of disinfectant and an Army bug spray so strong

that when I accidentally used it on the telephone it melted the plastic

was bad enough.

But the reek of pot drifting in from the Vietnamese visitors' tent, a

shelter set up between the neuro side of ward six and the generalsurgery

side of ward five for the families of our critical patients, was potent

enough to give an elephant a contact high from half a mile away.

At least the disinfectant and the pot smoke covered up the aroma of the

scenic beach, which stretched beyond the hospital perimeter, between the

barbed wire and the South China Sea. It was off limits to us because it

was used as a latrine by the residents of the villages on either side of

the compound.

The smells were something everyone complained about a lot. When George

had gone on his R&R to Australia, he said he'd felt light-headed getting

off the plane and figured out it was because he wasn't used to clean air

anymore. He said he had to poke his nose into a urinal for a while

until he could adjust to the change in air quality.

My own headache made me wonder about how Tran's head felt, with all that

pressure in her brain. By now the bone fragment pressing into her head

could have been gently lifted, she could have been recovering.

Since they'd brought her back, I'd replayed the scene in my head

hundreds, thousands of times, hearing bits of their snippy put-downs.

Next time they could write down their goddamned orders as they were

supposed to, so a person could read them, or give the medicine

themselves, and the hell with Army wrist-slapping and nasty pieces of

paper with snotty words like "insubordination." Better to go head to

head with them than this. At the same time, in the back of my mind an

accusing voice wondered if I hadn't overdosed Tran while entertaining

some adolescent subconscious desire to "show them"-Chalmers and Cindy

Lou-what happened when they didn't listen to me. The idea scared the

hell out of me, and I shoved it away. I was a nurse, a helping person,

a healer. The whole thing was a mistake. I hadn't realized the

difference in dosages. I'd never harm a patient out of spite.

Gutlessness, maybe, being too chicken to challenge orders until I was

sure of what I was doing, but that was different, even if the results

were the same. Sure it was.

She had to live. She had to. What in the hell could I do to get some

response out of that floppy childish body? The hard thing about

somebody you've met only after they've nearly been brained is that you

don't have any idea what you can promise them to induce them to do what

you want. What did this kid like? What was her favorite color, her

favorite toy? Did she even have any toys? Was a water buffalo a

Vietnamese kid's teddy-bear substitute? How would she look in a pretty

dress? Would she get a kick out of wearing a funny hat while her hair

grew back? Would her hair have a chance to grow back?

And why in the hell would she listen to me anyway? I tried to

concentrate on my prayers, visualizing not some holy heavenly father in

a long white beard but other patients I had been close to, people I had

comforted as they died. Nice people. I saw their faces as if they were

watching over Tran with me. Mr. Lassiter, a kind man with a daughter a

year ahead of me in nurses' training. When the doctor told him he had

lung cancer, I'd held him in my arms while he cried and tried to get

used to the idea. Later, when the cancer bit into his brain and he

began doing weird, sometimes obscene things, I led him back to his room

and talked to him and soothed him while he talked nonsense, and I

remembered who he really was while he acted in ways that would have

mortified him if he'd known. Mr. Franklin, an incontinent old man who

was in a coma with a high fever all the time I cared for him, but who

made me wonder, until he died, where he really was, and was he feeling

the pain of the hideous bedsores that ate up skin and fat and muscle.

And the baby born with its insides so scrambled we couldn't tell if it

was a boy or a girl, but whom I rocked and eventually persuaded its

mother to rock before it died. Those people were who I was really

asking to help Tran-them and the handful of my own friends and relatives

who had died before I came to Nam. I thought about all of those people,

visualizing them as a cross between ghosts and angels, relieved to be

free of suffering and looking down at us with a sort of benign apterest.

They wouldn't be overly anxious to have anyone, especially a child, join

them prematurely. "Do me a favor, folks," I urged them. "Nudge her

back this way."

Old Xe stirred, and I realized I'd been babbling aloud. I stood and

stretched, my bones creaking louder than the mortars, and leaned over

him. He didn't seem comatose now so much as dreaming. The fingers of

his right hand still gripped the medal thing to his hairless chest. He

mumbled a word and groped toward me with his left hand. I thought again

of Mr. Lassiter, who mistook me for his daughter in vaguer moments, and

gave papasan my hand to hold. He grasped it with a power that was

surprising in someone whose bones looked like a bird's.

Whatever he was dreaming, it must have been intense, because he held on

to me as tightly as if it were a matter of life and death that we remain

connected. I stayed there as long as I could. It made me feel a little

stronger, a little more confident, to provide even such a small measure

of comfort. I thought that was what I was doing, at the time.

When I tried to pull away, his hand clenched over mine so tightly his

ragged nails bit into my wrist. Well, the beds were on wheels. I

tugged them a little closer together and counted Tran's respirations,

then checked her pulses and pain reflexes with one hand. The old man

refused to relinquish either my hand or his holy medal. The wrinkles of

his forehead and between his eyes deepened, as if he was concentrating.

As I knuckled Tran, I thought I felt her stir slightly.

I was reaching for the blood-pressure cuff when the other patients

started up again.

"Troi oi! Trol oi! Trol oi!" (Omigod, omigod, omigod!) The old lady

from bed fourteen padded toward the desk, holding her head. "Beaucoup

dau," she complained to George, who headed her off halfway down the

aisle.

"Mamasan, you just have numbah one pill. No more now."

"Beaucoup dau," she insisted, showing her betel-blackened teeth. She was

not used to taking no for an answer. The interpreter said she was the

scourge of the marketplace in downtown Da Nang. She'd been clobbered

with a rifle by an ARVN guard who wanted some trinket from her shop. She

was lucky he'd hit her in the head, where she was well armored by a

thick skull. If he'd hit her in the abdomen, he might have killed her.

Leaving George to handle her, I pulled away from the old man to take

Tran's blood pressure. When I pried my hand loose, old Xe's hand, as if

worn out from the exertion of holding on to mine, flopped between the

rails and brushed my back.

I dreaded starting the neuro checks again, and my hands fumbled as I

lifted Tran's lids to check her unseeing pupils. If she died, nothing

would ever be all right for me again. I wished I could trade places

with her. My own skin crawled when I pinched hers, my own lids twitched

when I lifted hers, and I felt a knot in my chest when I knuckled her.

I apparently felt more than she did. "For Christ's sakes, Tran, that

must hurt like hell. Snap out of it. Come on, kiddo, wake up." The

breath eked out from between her lips with little sighs. I wanted to

smack her awake, anything, just so she'd move. That would be

compassionate and helpful, now, wouldn't it, nurse? Shit. I just

wasn't cut out for this. I was okay with the gallbladders, cancer

cases, and geriatric patients I'd cared for while I trained in Kansas

City, but we just hadn't had a lot of skull fractures, traumatic

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THEHEALERSWAR[0655.0]BYELIZABETHANNSCARBOROUGHSynopsis:VeryrealisticandchillingnovelofanarmynurseinVietnam.KittyfindsherselfaloneinenemyterritorywithacrippledVietnamesechild,\heronlyprotectionamysteriousamuletgiventoherbyanancientVietnamesewiseman.Thetouchoffantasykeepsthisbookfrombeinga\truenightma...

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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - The Healer's War.pdf

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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - The Healer's War

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