The Healer's War

Heron seemed to read me as readily as I'd read him. "Going on a medcap isn't anything like going to Province, you know. We take you nurses and the doctors and supplies to the villages and you treat people right there."

"Is that how you met Xe?" I asked. "On a medcap mission?"

"It's how I heard of him," he said, stirring his coffee with the butt end of a ballpoint pen. "Wherever Xe had been, we weren't needed."

"Why? What do you mean?"

"He's kind of a one-man AMA," Heron said ruefully. "Only not as political."

"Xe's a doctor?" I asked, feeling ridiculously dismayed that we hadn't extended the old man more professional courtesy.

"Kinda. He's sort of a combination of doctor and priest, but I guess you'd have to say he was practicing medicine without a license, by American standards. I've been studying with him since I met him after he'd saved one of my people from rabies."

"You were the one who called in the chopper when he got hit, weren't you?"

"Umm hmm."

"You say you study with him. Is he like your guru or something?"

He gulped the coffee and pitched the cup irl the wastebasket with a basketball twist of the wrist. "Yeah, something like that. Think about what I said about the medcap, Lieutenant. Every Thursday morning."

I didn't much like Charlie Heron. He was a little holler-thanthou. He made me feel like some stupid debutante who never did anything but polish her nails and have her hair fixed all day. What did he think I was doing in the hospital anyway?

What Heron hinted about Xe was intriguing, though, especially since the old man seemed to have amazing recuperative powers. The day after Ahn's surgery, the old man spotted someone using a wheelchair and nothing would do until Mai and Voorhees lifted him into it.

He wheeled himself around the ward as if he were indeed making rounds and afterward returned to bed exhausted.

Later, Ahn moaned in his sleep and I took him a pain shot. The kid rolled over without a peep and, after I'd given him the injection, rolled onto his back again. His sheets had worked loose, so I began to straighten them and hauled him up in bed, lifting him with an arm under his shoulder, another under his hips. As I pulled my arms out and started to straighten, his good arm tightened around my neck and he buried his face against my shoulder for a moment.

The next morning, Marge was still off. Voorhees got pulled to ICU and Sergeant Baker spent most of the morning in his ward masters' meeting.

Joe was in surgery with Dang Thi That. There was a new technique for skin grafts using cadaver skin to cover wounds like hers, and Joe was anxious to try it out.

I went through my morning routine and checked the charts for the orders Joe had been writing while we were in report. On Dickens's chart was a new order: the dressings on his crushed legs were to be changed daily.

Remembering the man's behavior when he first arrived on the ward, I knew it wasn't going to be easy.

Most of the new casualties had pretty well stabilized by then, and were relaxed, shouting obscenities back and forth across the ward, sometimes throwing stuff at one another. When I took them their meds or changed their dressings, most of them seemed anxious to talk now, to tell me about their wives or girlfriends or mothers or dogs, even, to talk about what a mess it was back in the unit, to gossip about things they'd heard in the bush. Some of them talked so much you couldn't get away from them-they had what is called in psych a "pressure of speech," so much stuff was waiting to come out, a way of releasing adrenaline, of coming down. A few still stayed silent and I worried about them a little bit more. But there was nobody else like good old Private Dickens, thank goodness.

He hadn't mellowed a bit since he first came on the ward, and I approached him for the dressing change in much the same spirit he might have approached a squad of Vietcong. I'd given him a pain shot first thing that morning and he'd fallen asleep soon afterward, but the rattle of the dressing cart woke him to all his snarling glory.

"Dr. Giangelo wants your dressings changed this morning, Private Dickens," I announced with false cheerfulness, and before he could say anything began scooting Chux, the blue paper-diaperlike absorbent pads, under his legs, eliciting a howl and several unflattering references to my sexual and scatalogical practices.

When I poured the peroxide over his old bandages, he squirmed and hissed as if it were boiling oil. Of course, it was cold, and it bubbled, but most patients didn't seem to feel that even on very raw wounds it really hurt-not like iodine, for instance. But when I pulled the first layer of gauze away he woke anyone who might possibly be dozing with a bloodcurdling yell. The scream went straight from his mouth into my eardrum and almost deafened me. My hands shook with the longing to backhand him, but I gritted my teeth, having already decided that I was going to be gentle and compassionate with this obnoxious jerk if it killed me.

"What are you anyhow, some lousy VC, what the hell do you think you're doing to me, what did I ever do to you, why the fuck did this happen to me, oh shit, be careful, oh God, you're killing me . . ."

and then, as I began removing the most encrusted layers of gauze, soaking them with peroxide as I went and being as careful as my shaking hands would allow, he began writhing and screaming piereingly in my ear.

With my eyes on the wound and my ears full of his screams, it's no wonder I didn't notice the wheelchair gliding up until it was almost too late.

Dickens bucked up on the bed like a frightened horse and tried to climb the wall backward, his screams intensifying.

At the foot of the bed, Xe sat in the wheelchair and regarded the patient with a mixture of calm and bewilderment. Then he lowered his eyes and mumbled to himself as he spread his hands over the spoiled meat of Dickens's legs.

"Get that gook away from me, oh God, he's going to kill me!"

Dickens screamed.

A patient named Miller, with one arm in a sling, jerked the wheelchair sideways and sent it flying with a kick. The chair careened down the hall, the old man trying to get control of it by grabbing for the wheels. He succeeded only in making it veer into one of the beds, where it crashed, sending its fragile old occupant sprawling.

Two more of the patients leaped from bed and started after Xe. I didn't think they were going to help him up.

I saw Meyers running, as if in slow motion, across the hall from the Vietnamese side of the ward. God, he'll never make it, I thought.

just then an ungodly clatter drew everyone's attention to the Navy corpsman, Ken Feyder. "oops," Ken said. "Dropped my bedpan," as if nothing else had been happening. He turned his trunk lazily toward the hyperventilating Dickens. "Hey, doggie, whatsa matter? The old guy just heard you bawlin' about your legs and wanted to trade ya. Me too, anytime, pal."

Meyers reached Xe and used his own bulk to shoulder himself in between the angry patients and the old man.

Dickens's mouth opened, then he stared at Feuder's stumps. His eye strayed to where Meyers easily hefted Xe's legless body and deposited it back in the wheelchair. He swallowed hard and clamped his lower jaw shut like a snapping turtle. I quickly finished his dressing change while Meyers returned Xe to the ward. I didn't say another word and, blessedly, neither did anyone else. If they had, I'd have exploded.

I rammed the dressing cart against the wall, stripping off my gloves so fast I broke the rubber and made the powder fly. I had to make sure Xe was all right, call Joe and tell him about the incident so he could check the old man over, and fill out an incident report.

"Ma'am?" Feuder's soft voice stopped me in my tracks as I stalked past his bed. "Ma'am, would you hand me my bedpan? I can't reach it."

I picked it up and held it out to him. It wobbled up and down in my shaking hand. His voice was low as he spoke to me. "Don't be too hard on them, Lieutenant. The unit I was with when this happened to me?

Their interpreter took off just before we got hit."

I grunted, still too furious to talk. My second day alone on the ward and I have a fucking race riot. Jesus.

"How is he?" I asked Meyers, who was standing by Xe's bedside. "Did you get his vital signs? Is there any bleeding?"

"His vital signs are okay, dressings okay too, but maybe there's somethin' wrong with his head. He's just starin' into space. Pretty shook up, I guess. I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I was down washin' bedpans like Sarge told me. I didn't see him go over there."

'It's not your fault," I said, though I wished I could blame it on him.

Xe lay there with his arms limply at his sides, staring into space. I checked his clipboard. His vital signs did look okay.

"Can you feel this?" I asked and touched his arm with the tip of my finger. He shook me off as if I were a fly, and kept staring. I wished Mai wre there. I wished Heron were there. What was wrong with Xe was very clear to me. His feelings were hurt. Heron said Xe was considered a doctor among his own people, and he'd heard Dickens screaming and come to help,'only to be attacked. "I know how you feel," I said. "Dickens is almost as bad to me too, but he's an asshole. Don't let him get you down. We're not all like that, honest. Feyder tried to help. And I kept this safe for you, didn't I?" I didn't even mean to touch the amulet, just to point at it. I knew how sensitive he was about it. But he moved and my finger made contact with the glass for an instant. Now I know it wasn't a sensation I felt, but then I thought it might have been something like static electricity. Because pain shot up my arm and into my chest, like angina in reverse. And that blade of pain cut a swath for the hot surge of shame and anger that swept over me, leaving the nauseatingly bitter aftertaste of failure in its wake.

Xe's eyes fastened on mine as I stepped back, his eyes brimming with a feeble old man's leaking tears.

My hand was on my chest, but as soon as I stepped away, the pain within me disappeared. It was as if I was feeling all over again what I'd felt that night by Tran's bed, only worse, much worse. And it was all there, in that old man's face.

I returned to my desk and filled out the incident report.

"What did you do when the incident occurred?"

"I attempted to calm and restrain Private Dickens while Spec-4 Meyers assisted Mr. Xe."

"What could you do to prevent such an incident from recurring?"

I chewed on my pencil for a long time over that. Maintain strict segregation of patients? Gag all overwrought patients during dressing changes? Never start a dressing change until the riot squad is handy for backup? I gave it an appropriately vague answer in bureaucratese:

"In the future ensure that all patients understand ahead of time that they are not to interfere when staff members are treating other patients."

That night I went straight to the club from work and systematically proceeded to get very, very drunk.

In spite of my hangover, the following day started out a little better.

Marge and Joe took care of Dickens's dressing change during Joe's morning rounds, and I learned that most of this particular batch of casualties would be transferred to Japan the next day.

Sergeant Baker kept Meyers and Voorhees scurrying all morning cleaning up the ward. Blaylock informed Marge that VIPs would be touring the hospital later on. And sure enough, sometime around noon a handful of colonels and a general or two arrived with little jewelry boxes full of medals, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, and so on.

We all stood at attention and they handed Marge a list of patients to be decorated. I was supposed to help prepare everybody to be honored.

Ken Feyder was up for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. He was basking his buns under the heat lamp when the VIPs started their rounds. "C'mon, Ken, time to turn over and get your just reward," I kidded him. I couldn't be more pleased for him. After yesterday, I didn't need anybody to tell me he was a hero. And I always liked my heroes to be nice people, too. But I was a lot more thrilled by his official recognition than he was. For the first time since he'd arrived on the ward, Feyder was less than cooperative.

"Just have 'em pin it on my butt, Lieutenant," he said, and withdrew and refused to discuss it, pretending to be asleep. They finally presented it to his pillowcase.

A surprise came when Heron appeared on the GI side that afternoon and had a long visit with Ken Feyder.

"Okay if I take Feyder for a little wheelchair ride, L.T.?" he asked me.

" I don't know. He's got those wounds on his hips and Joe hasn't authorized-"

"Do me a favor, will you? Call Joe, ask him. Ken's about to go nuts in here with the heat and the noise. He'd sure like to go out for a spell."

He was giving me his most helpful good-ol'-country-boy routine, his eyes trying hard to look round and sincere.

"Are you and Feyder old buddies or something?" I asked. "I thought you were only interested in Xe."

"I heard what happened yesterday. You know, surely? Meyers said you were standing right there." The way he said "standing right there" made it clear he thought I should have been doing more than that. And he was right, of course. But I had been so taken by surprise I hadn't known which way to move or how fast. "Meyers could come too, for that matter," he continued, hurrying past the reproachful jab at me, no doubt having been told by his Southern mama that he could get more flies with molasses than with vinegar.

"Oh, okay, just a minute," I said. Joe okayed it, providing the chair was amply padded with Chux and heavy dressing pads. I asked Ken if he wanted a pain shot and saw him look toward Heron, who shook his head, very slightly, which I thought was a little odd. Meyers and Heron loaded Ken in the chair and the three of them left by the back door.

I passed them on the way to pick up my mall. I'd have missed them except for the wheelchair. The three of them were huddled behind some canvas and scaffolding between two of the wards. I saw only their feet, but I caught a strong whiff of pot as I passed. I could have confronted them then, I suppose. As Meyers's superior officer, I should have. I didn't condone smoking pot on duty. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe it was just Heron, who wasn't on duty, and Ken Feyder. And I really didn't want to get Feyder in trouble after all he'd been through. I kept walking, and decided to send Sergeant Baker out to collect Feyder later on. Discipline was the ward master's province mostly, anyway. However, by the time I returned, Feyder was in bed sleeping and Meyers had resumed his duties, though he was wielding the mop in a very dreamy fashion. Heron had wisely made himself scarce.

When I made rounds with Joe that evening, the doctor tried to encourage Xe to try the wheelchair again, but the old man folded his arms stubbornly and refused to so much as look at the chair, which was about what I expected. But when we came to Ahn's bedside it was a different story. The boy said, "Mamasan, mamasan," and pointed at the chair, then, "Ahn, Ahn," patting himself on the chest. We got the point and Ahn got the chair.

As I passed my P.m. meds on the Vietnamese side that night, I felt something tug at my fatigue blouse. "Mamasan, la dai [come here].

Mamasan I turned and there was Ahn, enthroned in his chair, one hand tugging at my shirt, the other pointing at an I.V. about to go dry.

"Why, thanks, Ahn," I said, and hurried to replace the bottle.

Sergeant Baker looked up from the bedpan he was cleaning and shook his head. "My, my, looks to me like you done got yourself adopted, Lieutenant McCulley."

chattered to Tony about Ahn, Xe, Xinh, and Heron in the jeep ion the way to the PX Monday.

"Yeah, those little gook kids are cute okay," he said when I told him about Ahn. "Just as long as you watch your wallet."

"Well, I think it's pretty amazing how fast a little hooligan like that can start acting like a normal kid once he's treated like one," I said smugly.

His arm was around my shoulders and he rubbed his hand back and forth, his long fingers curling and uncurling. It felt good, exciting and comforting at the same time.

"And did I tell you about Xinhdy?"

"Who?"

"Her real name is Xinh. She's a Vietnamese girl on the ward, really sharp. Mai's been teaching her English. She's always talking and laughing and polishing her nails and stuff-she reminds me of this girl I was in training with, Cindy Schroeder. So I called her Xinhdy the other day, just sort of teasing. She got real offended and said, 'No Xinhdy, Xinh." I asked Mai to tell her she reminded me of my friend in America whose name was almost like hers, and that was why I called her that.

Yesterday one of her friends came to visit her and called her Xinh, and she was so funny, Tony. She stuck her nose in the air and said, 'No Xinh. Xinhdy."'

He turned his head toward me a little and I saw my face reflected in his sunglasses. "Yeah, well, babe, you want to watch getting too close to these people, y'know? Don't get me wrong, I know how you feel.

Our hooch mouse is a great gal, and it's hard not to feel sorry for some of those poor bastards we pick up in the villes. But we're going to be pullin' out of here one of these days, and these folks will be on their own. You better hope your friends are carrying rockets for the VC at night if you care about what happens to them later."

He wasn't telling me anything new, but I was trying to amuse him with human-interest stories and he was insisting on turning it into hard news. Nobody wanted to talk about that. I'd already asked him about his background and family and how it went in the field and he was vague about everything. What was left? Talking about helicopter chassis?

"Hey, cheer up," he said, giving my shoulder an extra-hard hug. "Have I got a surprise for you."

"What?"

"Wait till you see." He led me inside the PX, a hangar filled with counters and shelves holding junk food-nonmeltable candy like M&M's and Pay Days, potato chips and sticks, canned chocolate milk, sodas-paperback books, mostly either smutty or the action-adventure kind all about what fun war is, and magazines whose illustrations looked like a day in the gyn. clinic from the doctor's point of view. They also had cheaply priced expensive watches, which was good because the sand worked its way through watch cases, and I'd ruined two already, and perfume.

The only other items for women were beaded sweaters from Hong Kong that looked like costumes for midget leading ladies in forties movies. In the back of the building was a walled-off section set up as a snack bar, where a Vietnamese entrepreneur offered anemic hamburgers certified by the PX to be beef instead of dog, and a plate of cold chips. That was where Tony steered me. But at the last moment he blocked the door with his body and said playfully, "What's your favorite Italian food?"

"Spaghetti?"

He shook his head.

"Pizza," I moaned.

"How long since you had some?"

"What's this all about?" I thought he was teasing me. It was a favorite game when the ward was quiet to dream of American junk food: "I'd give twenty dollars for a taco."

"I'd give thirty dollars for a slice of pizza." Though we got spoiled rotten on steak and lobster regularly, we lusted for cuisine from McDonald's, Shakey's, and Taco Bell. One doctor, returning from R&R in Hawaii with his wife, had built a little shrine of a Big Mac Styrofoam container, foil wrapper from fries, and a fried-pie box.

He stepped aside and gestured. "Voild. An authentic Vietnamese pizza parlor."

They'd tried. Under a nylon parachute awning, two skinny men and one bewildered-looking girl, wearing white aprons and chefs' hats, industriously made dough and popped things into ovens. The product was nothing for the Italians to worry about. It consisted of a crust, floury enough to make you pucker, topped with a little ketchup and pieces of hot dog. They'd completely missed the point about cheese. But we ate it and laughed and pretended it was the real thing.

We went to the beach for a couple of hours and swam and played in the water and lay on the sand. I enjoyed it more than I ever had before, because nobody interrupted us or tried to hustle me with Tony there. He acted as if he owned me, which was just fine under the circumstances. I was delighted to be with such a good-looking, sexy guy. I knew that back in the States I wouldn't have such a knockout for a boyfriend. It was just that in Nam the competition was all among the men. I wondered if there was any way I'd be able to hang on to such a fellow when we returned home. Shared experience maybe? I was pretty sure my family would like him and Duncan would be absolutely mute with jealousy-if not on my account, then because Tony was everything Duncan just talked about being.

We drove back to the compound. My hooch maid bobbed at us as she emerged from my room. I turned on the fan. He put Joni Mitchell on the tape deck. And there was a lot more trying each other on for size in every conceivable erotic position. Instead of being all steaming flesh, as it said in the novels, it seemed to me that we were more all knees and elbows with no place on that narrow cot to go without being in the way. I started giggling and he growled, "What's so funny? Why don't you close your eyes?"

I thought he had to be kidding. I shrugged. "I don't know. Sometimes sex just strikes me as funny. Why?"

He didn't answer but finished soon after that and grabbed enough clothes to run over to the doctors' shower. I rinsed off too, but I returned to the room before he did. Well, hell. Sex was sometimes funny to me, but mostly because I was having a good time and having a good time always meant laughing, as far as I was concerned. Jesus, I couldn't summon up all that dead-serious panting passion you saw in the movies. Tony was serious enough for both of us. At some points I'd felt like a patient getting a particularly thorough examination. I had the sneaking suspicion the whole afternoon would go on my chart with detailed graphs of my anatomical assets and failings. But I didn't want it to end. I just wanted him to think I was flawless for a little while before he started criticizing. I picked up my guitar and started playing a song I'd learned from a Tom Paxton songbook. Sarah poked her head in my door. "Do you know 'BIowin' in the Wind,' Kitty? There's one chord I can't get."

We sat on lawn chairs on the porch trying to figure it out, and by the time Tony joined us I was feeling better. The South China Sea was gleaming beyond the beach, the palms were waving on Monkey Mountain.

Judy, who was also off for the day, and the corpsman she was illegally dating 'Joined us, chiming in on the choruses as they sat on the porch swinging their legs off the side to the rhythm as we sang.

"I'm just learning this one," I said. "We could do the chorus together." I sang a couple of verses of "The Last Thing on My Mind" and Judy and Sarah tried it with me, but Tony hissed in my ear, "Why do you have to grandstand? You could sing something we all know."

I didn't much feel like singing after that. Or talking to Tony either.

I retreated to my room while they sang outside. He was doing something nobody else knew either. Pretty soon Sarah and Judy and her friend drifted away. I sat against the wall in the corner, with my knees drawn up and a book I wasn't reading propped up on them. Tony lingered in the doorway. "I'd better get back over to the unit."

"Okay," I said, trying to sound indifferent instead of disappointed.

'Bye." This time he didn't kiss me.

But he called later that ilight and said he had to go in the field for a while but would miss me and wanted to see me when he got back. His voice was warm and tender and I decided I got my feelings hurt too easy.

One side benefit of my new relationship was that I could now fit right in when the other girls were bitching or bragging about not just men in general but a man, the man each of them was going with, in particular.

Carol told me she thought her boyfriend might be a little bit more married than he'd told her to begin with. Judy was mad that she and her corpsman had to sneak around because the brass had ruled against nurses seeing enlisted men. Sarah's long face was wistful when she talked about her doctor boyfriend going home to his wife.

We confided in one another, and on the ward, during quiet times, I confided in Marge. She was older, had an upbeat but sensible attitude, and played the field. Or so I thought until she came back from mail call with her boots floating a couple of inches above the linoleum, a letter on Army stationery clasped to her bosom, and a silly grin on her face.

"Good news?" I asked.

She sighed. "It's from Hal. I knew him in Japan. What a guy!

He's going to be reassigned here."

"Here? To the 83rd?"

"No, but in Vietnam. We can see each other sometimes. He's really a kick, Kitty. You'd like him."

"Is he a doctor or what?"

"An MSC officer. He'll probably be a hospital administrator somewhere.

But between my contacts and his contacts, we're bound to be able to get choppers back and forth once in a while."

"When's he coming?"

"In a couple of months. God, I hope he gets assigned somewhere close.

Too bad Colonel Martin just got here."

"Marge! You'd be the scandal of the post, making it with the boss -tsk tsk."

She grinned. "Yeah. I would, wouldn't I?"

Being rather young, I believed that if I was not the model-perfect specimen portrayed in the fashion magazines, no man would have me, so Marge's romance came as a revelation to me. She was probably in her late thirties to early forties and a long way from being a beauty, though her pleasant personality and warmth made you forget that. She was even tolerant of the Army, a difficult thing for a reasonable woman to be, I thought. She had the same attitude toward it that many nice women married to men who are jerks but good providers seem to have toward their husbands. It's a living, and he means well. She had lots of buddies and was friendly with both enlisted men and officers, married and single. But it was obvious that this was far from your casual kind of affair. You could almost see little hearts popping out of her head, the way they did in the cartoons.

And for a while there was ample time to daydream. We admitted casualties in twos and threes instead of bunches, and saw men with bad backs and twisted ankles. Most of them wanted rest or drugs or both.

Mal was teaching Xinhdy English in her spare time and Ahn hung out with them when he wasn't following me around. I decided to join them and see if I couldn't learn more Vietnamese in the process. I didn't, as it turned out, but provided everyone with a lot of amusement as I tried to pronounce Vietnamese words. Ahn and Xinhdy were both much better pupils. Sometimes we watched the Vietnamese TV station, which featured singers of wavery-tuned songs doing what seemed like a cross between the oriental version of grand opera and soap opera against backdrops that were strictly from Sunday school skits. It wasn't very interesting to me and sounded like fingernails on a blackboard after a while, but it was better than the bullshit you saw on Armed Forces TV. Mal, Marge, Sarah, and I sometimes had mock battles over who got the honor of changing Dang Thi That's dressing. That would watch us with her eyes dancing, and laugh through the painful procedure, encouraged by the healing she could see for herself if she twisted far enough. Soon she could be grafted, and once that took, we could start physical therapy in earnest and maybe get her back on her feet.

If Ahn had adopted me as his mother, he took to Xe as a grandfather.

He'd sit by the old man's bedside and chatter at him, bring things to show him, try to involve him in conversations. Xe wasn't interested for a long time, but finally Ahn and Mal convinced him to 'Join them at Xinhdy's bedside to chat.

This sort of thing went on intermittently for several weeks at a time, you understand. New patients were admitted and discharged, but our long-term patients were the core group and watched one another and us for entertainment the same way we watched them. But a lot of the time they slept or vegged out in front of the TV, and those times were pretty trying. Hectic as the pushes were, they were easier to deal with in some ways than the weeks and weeks of twelve-hour shifts that dragged by while you tried to find something to do.

When the patients were napping, the last roll of tape was neatly lined up with the next on the dressing cart, the bedpans were cleaned, and the empty beds gathered dust, the day shift sat around the nurses' station and talked to each other.

Sarah and I alternated on nights, so I rarely got to work with her, since the head nurse, Marge, had to be on days all the time. We were supposed to have another nurse, but she had yet to arrive. If she'd been there, she'd have been as bored as the rest of us.

So Marge and I sat around discussing such burning political issues as what we planned to order from the Pacex catalog before we went home. She also waxed lyrical recalling her tours in Japan and Okinawa, talking about the shopping in those places. If you wanted cameras or stereo equipment you went to Japan, everybody knew that. But Hong Kong was the best place for all-round shopping, tailor-made anything, fast and cheap, sequined evening clothes and sweaters, jewelry, pirate editions of the latest bestsellers.

I could almost see it in all its quarter-to-half-priced glory, and it cheered me in my hour of need, when the patients were surly, when Tony was gone or we'd had a fight. Nonmaterialism and spiritual values are all very laudable, but when you're in a situation where everything including your J'oh involves questionable ethics, things are the safest possible topic for conversation and food for thought, except maybe for bargains, which are even better. Talking politics, work, or morality was confusing and depressing. Talking about home was even more depressing. Armed Forces TV showed news reports of what was allegedly happening in Vietnam, but to me they always looked wrong. Exaggerated numbers of Vietnamese dead and understated numbers of American dead and wounded may have been good propaganda, but seemed disrespectful of the sacrifice made by those dead and wounded who had not been counted. And anyway, only the naive new recruits, the terminally gung ho, and lifers believed all that crap about assisting the South Vietnamese in repulsing the Red Peril.

The Vietnamese I saw seemed more worried about getting enough to eat, keeping their families together, and not getting killed than they were about political ideals. Coming back late from China Beach, when the moonlight glistened on the flattened Miller High Life and Schlitz cans covering the Vietnamese huts with tin-into-silver alchemy, and the candlelight shone through the strands of plastic beads (a phoenix, a peacock, a dragon) curtaining the doorways, I imagined what the family gathered around the candle talked about.

"How many watches did you nab today, Nguyen?"

"Thirty-four and four very fat wallet, honorable mamasan. See here, thirty-four dollars and a J. C. Penney credit card. Do you think you can get a catalog from one of the Americans whose houses you clean?"

"I'll work on it. Daughter, how many tricks did you turn today?"

"Fifteen, Mama. One soldier was mean and wouldn't pay me, but then another gave me this ring. How much do you think we can get for it?"

"we'll ask your papa when he gets home from carrying rockets for the VC.

He's had a hard day of guard duty at China Beach."

"I wish poor Papa didn't have to moonlight like that."

"War's hell, my son."

If I were in their shoes I'd probably have done the same thing. Tony had hit the nail on the head. The peace marchers were eventually going to pressure the President into getting American troops out of this mess, and when they did, the people who'd been loyal to us were going to be up shit creek. It probably didn't make much difference to them if they were growing rice for South Vietnam or for North Vietnam, as long as they were able to eat it themselves. Some of the senior officers I'd talked with said America should have supported Ho Chi Minh to begin with. And some of the guys with a couple of years of college claimed that the war was not about communism and freedom but about boosting the economy and making Southeast Asia safe for the oil companies and the international military-industrial complex, whatever that was. While that sounded pretty paranoid, it was less hokey than saying that the whole war was strictly for the sake of political ideals. The only people who said anything about political ideals recited their lines in the same way church ladies said "blood of the Lamb" and "fallen from grace," or the Communists reputedly talked of "imperialist running dogs."

Shallow, materialistic bitch that I was, I preferred talk about something real like stereo equipment and clothes.

We were sitting there gabbing one afternoon when Sergeant Baker wandered in with the mail, eavesdropped a moment, and while Marge opened hers gave us the lowdown on Hawaii and on Thailand, where he'd spent a tour and knew all the best bars and brothels. Meyers, returning from being pulled to ward eight, chimed in that he wanted to go to Australia because he'd heard the women were real friendly. Married men like Voorhees tried to go to Hawaii to meet their wives. I wanted to go to Australia as much as anything because nobody I knew had ever been there.

"Yeah, man, I really want to get out of here, go to that Australia, man," Meyers said. "But more'n that, I want to go home. Get outa this place forever and ever."

"Well, man, you ain't got it so bad," Baker said. "Think of them poor damn Vietnamese. They don't get to go nowhere ever. They're home already and this is as good as it gets."

Tony hadn't called in a couple of weeks and I was about to start night duty, but I wasn't sure if I cared if I heard from him or not. Most of our dates had been spent in bed, with very little socializing or any other kind of activity.

"Look"' I said, the last time he came over. "Could we do something else besides screw for a change?"

"What? You don't want to?"

"It's hot in here and it's been a long, boring week, okay? I'd like to get out and see something maybe, or at least go to the club and dance."

"Surel- we can go dance if you want to, but there's plenty of time before that-"

"Tony-', "Baby, I'm risking my life up there," he said, slipping his hands up under my shirt and bra and nuzzling my neck. "Who knows? I might not come back next time."

Eventually we did go dancing, but it was one of those nights when the band played line dances and the fast kind that I love. Tony danced one or two but then sat in the corner talking helicopters with one of the other men from his company. When I sat down, sweating and happy, he said, "Do you have to show off all the time? Why can't you just sit here with me and talk and have a drink?"

"Because I don't know anything about helicopters and, frankly, they're not that interesting to me," I said. "You're not the only one who needs to recharge when you're off duty, you know. I put in long days too."

"Don't I make you happy, baby?"

The argument was conducted in fierce whispers and nonetheless we were drawing a little attention. "Tony, you're a fantastic lover, but sometimes I think it's not me you love at all-I keep getting the feeling you wish I were somebody else entirely, someone who is quiet and demure and keeps her place. Probably somebody who doesn't work a twelve-hour day. Well, I'm not. I'm me. And"-I threw in a line from an old blues song, because it fit-"And if you don't like my peaches, don't shake my tree, okay?"

He slammed down his drink. "Okay. Excuse me, I think I'd better get back to the unit. I may be needed there.

I didn't know whether I was madder at him for treating me like a whore who wasn't due any consideration or for spoiling my off-duty time. He was just jealous of the attention I got, I thought. He was used to being in the middle of things himself and couldn't take it that in this situation any woman would be more interesting to the vast majority of the population than any man. And that emotional blackmail crap about how he might not come back. The creep! After a week, I calmed down and realized that maybe some of it could have been my fault. I had to admit I recognized that he wanted me to be somebody else because I couldn't help wishing he were somebody else too.

Wednesday evening he called. "Hi, babe. How's it going?"

"Fine," I said. "How've you been?"

I've missed you. You're off tomorrow, aren't you? How about if I come over?"

"It's my sleep day," I said. "If I don't sleep, I won't be any good at work tomorrow night."

"You can sleep some of the time," he said.

"I don't think so, Tony."

"We had a couple of close calls this week, baby.........

"I'm sorry. Please be a little more careful. Maybe you could use the rest, too. Tony, we need to have a talk sometime soon, but I have to have tomorrow to think, okay?"

"Yeah. Sure. See ya," he said, and hung up.

Then, of course, I couldn't sleep that night, so I padded over to ICU to see how busy Carole was. She was bored stiff, sitting at the desk reading while her corpsmen played cards.

"Jesus, McCulley, what's wrong with you?"

I told her. "I don't want to break up with him, Carole, but dammit, if we're going to spend every free moment together I occasionally want to talk about something besides which position we should assume next and whether I came or not."

"I see where that would get old. Tom and I talk about everything. I dunno, Kitty, there are other fish in the sea, of course, but not many as sexy as Tony."

"I know. That's the whole problem."

"If he calls tomorrow are you going to let him come over?"

"No. It'll just be the same old thing. I don't think I'll be able to sleep, but I sure don't want to spend another goddamn day on post.

Besides, if I'm here and he calls I'll give in. Want to go to the beach?"

"Can't. I'm having my own summit conference."

"If you hear of anyone going, let me know. I've got to get out of here.

The last time I did anything interesting was the flying crane ride."

"Poor baby," Carole said, then chewed on her pencil awhile. "Hey, what's tomorrow? Thursday? Why not go on the medcap mission? I know it sounds like a drag to work on your day off, but if you don't mind losing the sleep-"

"So who can sleep? You're a genius, Swenson. I'll tell you all about it."

"well, look who's here," Charlie Heron said affably. "Bac Jvst Joe, how's it going? Nice you could come, Lieutenant. Climb in, climb in.

Lieutenant, you want to sit up front?"

He motioned to the ovenlike cab of a deuce-and-a-half.

"No thanks," I said. "I'll ride back here with the rest of the troops."

"Suit yourself," he said, and climbed in beside Joe.

The doctor and I hadn't exactly planned to come as a team, but the slow ward work had gotten to both of us. I met him as we were walking toward the gate that morning. Joe walked briskly and happily, a large camera and lens case around his neck. Photography was his other pet hobby, besides carpentry and orthopedic surgery.

"Hi, Geppetto," I said. "You don't mean to say that Marge is letting you go for the day, too?"

"Ma ings rge knows more about those folks than I do, by now. Th' have been too slow. Got to go drum up business or I'll get rusty. Bob Blum can handle any emergencies that come in. I want to see a village," he said. "Do you think a wide angle and a telescopic will be enough lenses?"

"That'll feed two families after the kids steal them from you, and the camera will probably feed half the village, so-"

"You're as funny as a broken leg, Lieutenant McCulley, you know that?

Speaking of broken legs, what's that limp about?" He cast an expert eye on my size nines.

"I don't know. Feels like I might have a rock in my boot."

By then we were at the truck and being hailed by Heron. I wasn't that thrilled to see him. But even though his tone had been carefully indifferent, I could tell he was glad to see me there. Cathie Peterson, from ICU, came along too. She was already in the cab of the truck when Joe and I arrived.

A young Marine corporal helped me into the truck. "Glad you could make it, ma'am," he said. "The villagers are always glad to see you nupses.

You don't know how much they appreciate it."

I looked around at all the Marine camouflage fatigues in the truck. "I didn't know the Medical Civic Action Team was a Marinesponsored thing,"

I said. The truck bucked into action and rumbled through Dogpatch and out onto the highway.

A swarthy sergeant whose name tag said "Hernandez" and who had swung up into the truck behind me after making sure all personnel and gear were aboard, said, "Yes, ma'am. This one is. Though it started with Special Forces as a PSYOPS mission. Most of these men been out in the bush the best part of their tour. They're short-three or four months to go. They finish up the tour working in the villages."

"You mean they come off of combat duty and go right out on medical missions?" I asked, feeling a little uneasy about it. These men could as easily have been the numbed, miserable-looking wounded who cycled through the wards, enthusing about nothing but the joys of bayoneting gooks and how the difference between a VC and a friendly was how fast the individual in question could run. If the human target escaped, it was friendly. If it died, it had to be VC.

"Yes, ma'am. Sergeant Heron handpicked them."

I had to digest that. Although most of the men surrounding us were marines, and there were certainly a lot of decent guys among them, there'd been a couple of nasty incidents early in my tour at the 83rd that made me question the kind of training they had. Lindy Hopkins had come steaming off the ward one night, slammed into Carole's hooch, and sat there crying. "Those bastards. Those goddamn bastards."

"Take it easy, Lindy. What the hell's the matter?" Carole asked. She and I had been sitting around talking. Lindy worked on ICU with Carole.

"They brought her in-she was just a kid-eleven years old and they raped her-"

"Who?"

"The seven big strong marines who brought her in. They raped her till-till they broke her spine. She's going to be paralyzed, Carole. An eleven-year-old kid. And then the sons of bitches had the gall to ask when visiting hours were!"

Another time another marine tried to break into Judy's hooch at night to rape her. Fortunately, Judy's got great lungs.

So I was not crazy about marines. Maybe the only reason I associated marines with the vicious and cruel things that happened was because the Marine Corps dominated the area. Of course, I knew the enemy did horrible things to our people and to their own. But they were the enemy. They weren't supposed to be civilized. I'd grown up with men like these, and they were supposed to know better. I despised any kind of training that taught them to be less than human.

At least the men around me refrained from drooling or pawing the bed of the pickup truck. They looked perfectly normal-a little older and sadder than a lot of the GIs who passed through the hospital, but basically okay.

The man nearest me even offered me his truck tire to lean against and cushion my back. I accepted gratefully, reveling in the wind the truck made as it rolled down the highway to Freedom Hill. There it turned off onto a dirt road and bumped along through what could have been a rural area south of San Antonio, Texas. Golden fields were flanked by fences, and rows of fanning leafy trees shielded the houses from the hot, heavy sun. Water buffaloes with pa'amaed people in tropical topees and coolie hats prowled the lone prairie instead of cowboys and longhorns, of course, but it was still cattle and cattle tenders of a sort, so what the hell. It was almost like home, lolling in the back of the truck, just enjoying the ride. The only signs of war were the uniforms and the weapons. The men acted as if they were going on holiday, although their eyes shifted toward the trees now and then.

A small boy wearing a blue shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap and carrying two metal jerricans over his right shoulder offered us a drink of water as the vehicles stopped beside the village pump. His shins were dusty, his face expectant. The men poured out of the truck, one of them knocking the kid's cap off and ruffling his hair, before replacing the cap, backward.

Joe started taking pictures the minute he hit the ground. The village was cool and shaded, made darker than the surrounding fields by a canopy of treetops lashed together overhead. Beyond the fields the mountains rose, and depending on where you were standing, you could see sparkles of a river glinting through the trees. This was not a newsreel-type-village, bombed and half-burned. This was a collection of neat little unpainted homes, most of which bore trellises loaded with flowers and melons. The streets between the houses and trees were busy with bicycles loaded with baskets of pigs, Hondas with nets full of coconuts lashed to them. Grubby children with big brown eyes and bowl-cut black hair danced around them. Adults squatting on their heels in the shade looked up from their work or talk and waved.

Heron pointed out the school and the marketplace, and the hut that I later described to Mom as the "labor and delivery facility." It was windowless and dark and had the smell of old blood, rot, and other, pungent, vaginal odors very strong within this tropical bacteria breeding ground. My clinical description was a euphemism; the place was so ripe I had to suppress an itch to scratch my own crotch in sympathy.

Little nests had been made inside, holes dug out of the dirt and lined with grass and old rags. One mother and her newborn, under the supervision of an unhurried-looking midwife, occupied the space on one side of the inevitable Vietnamese bedspread partioning the makeshift postpartum section from the L&D. "I'm afraid there's no delivery tables, Lieutenant," Heron said. "Vietnamese mothers deliver from a squatting position." Damned know -it-all. I'd assumed as much. So did my Indian ancestresses. So did a lot of women practicing the new natural childbirth methods.

He showed us to the clinic with another glance at me, as if he expected me to be horrified. I resolutely was not. The clinic area was a hut-a long, low one, also dirt-floored and dark. "You'll do fine," he told me. "I've done amputations in worse places than this, Lieutenant."

My "Goody for you" was drowned out in another introduction as Heron presented a boy of about eleven. "This is Li. He'll interpret for you.

And this is Miss Xuan from Province Hospital"-he indicated a plain-faced girl in a white go dai, the graceful tunic-dress of Vietnam, and conical hat-"and my ARVN counterpart, Sergeant Huong."

Li was as officious as any sergeant major as he lined up the patients for treatment. He strutted up and down the line while the examinations took place, as if supervising instead of interpreting. Li claimed that Miss Xuan, who was at least twice his age, was his niece. The niece didn't do much work but mostly flirted with Heron's ARVN counterpart, Sergeant Huong. Huong swaggered a bit, James Dean style, and flirted back.

I was nervous, not because of the conditions but because this was my first whack at public health nursing. Li's main usefulness was in telling the patients what I said. They were able to make themselves pretty clear with gestures and facial expressions. Besides the usual

"owies" the children had, there were a lot of snotty noses and deep coughs and running rashes. Joe diagnosed a carpenter with sore knees as having tenosynovitis, an inflammation of the tendons caused mostly by being a carpenter.

"Oh boy, McCulley, come look at this," Cathie called me, peering at the side of a woman's head. The woman was youngish, with rather protruding teeth and a pained expression.

"She say she no hear too good," Li said.

"No wonder," Cathie said, and stood aside. The woman's right ear was completely blocked by a protruding tumor.

"Tell her she needs to come to the hospital with us to have this fixed,"

I told Li.

Li fired off twenty or thirty syllables that rose and fell like Vietnamese music. The woman shook her head and replied with fifty or sixty syllables of her own.

"She say no can do, co. Papasan work in field and she have these babysans." He indicated the two shorts-clad toddlers clinging to her pajama bottoms and the little girl, about seven, carrying a nude baby of about two on her hip.

"Well, tell her to talk it over with papasan, and if she wants us to help her, come to the hospital with the team next week."

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.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"The POW is the other critical one. He's a burn case, too, not as bad, but he's got a collapsed right lung and a fresh trach."

He also had a guard, who had a green heret and a gun and who shifted as nervously as if he were surrounded by armed VC instead of standing over a relatively helpless one. He glowered at me as I approached. He was no more like Charlie Heron than Heron was like Barry Sadler.

He watched my every move as I extracted the prisoner's trach tube to clean it in a basin of hydrogen peroxide. Halfway through the cleaning process, the prisoner began gurgling, bubbles of accumulated phlegm collecting at the hole in his throat. I took off the gloves I'd already contaminated, put on a fresh glove, and reached for the suction tubing.

The guard held his arm over the patient.

"Let him strangle," he said.

"What?"

"Let him strangle for a while. We're trying to get information out of him. We can't do it if you coddle him."

I glared at his arm and brushed past it. "I'm not coddling him, soldier. I'm suctioning his trach tube so he doesn't die. If you wanted to torture or kill him, you should have thrown him out of a helicopter when you had the chance. Once you bring him here, he's not just a prisoner. He's my patient and he is by God going to get the same care as any other patient in his condition, meaning the best I can give him."

The slurp of the suction machine drowned out the guard's protests for a moment. When I pulled the tip of the tubing out of the POW's throat, I glared at the guard. The muscles in his jaws bunched and relaxed, bunched and relaxed, as if he were chewing on a particularly tough nail.

Finally he said, "Your kinda attitude is going to cost Americans their lives. This guy has information-"

"Bullshit," I said. "He can't tell you a damn thing if he's dead. You let us get him stable enough to talk, and then if you want to ask him questions, you do so under our supervision until the man is well enough for you to murder him. You bic?"

The only reason he didn't call me a stupid cunt was because I outranked him and could have had his stripe, and women were rare enough in Nam that fragging them was severely frowned upon even by gung-ho comrades.

So the guard merely growled, but he got out of my way and didn't interfere again. The guard who relieved him was less zealous and sipped his coffee in peace.

The patient might not have been too with it, but he did seem to relax a little when the first guard left. Carole finished spreading a fresh coat of sulfonamide cream on her patient's burns. I thought I should warn her about the surly guard.

"Yeah," she said. "But you can understand how he feels. He may have seen buddies get blown away by that guy."

"I guess."

"God, I'm sick of burns," she said, tossing her dirty gloves in the trash bag. "We had another guy last week worse off than this woman. He was a villager doing some painting for a civilian contractor, and this CIDG guard decided he wanted some of the paint. Apparently the guy told the guard that he'd have to ask the boss and the guard tossed a lit cigarette into the paint. Of course, the worker was already covered with paint and stuff and went up like a torch. His friends rolled him in the dirt and finally put him out, but he was third-degree over 90

percent of his body. He only lasted a few hours."

The night finally ended, and none too soon to suit me. A patient who needs constant suctioning requires you to be on your feet a lot, and mine hurt. I checked my boot again, but there was no rock, just a red place on my toe where I thought one might have rubbed. In spite of having been up for twenty-four hours, I had trouble sleeping the next day. The heat was a problem as usual, and I couldn't seem to get my foot into a comfortable position. Besides which, my mind was squirreleaging with a turmoil of impressions and conflicting emotions from the events of the day and night. Also, I came fully awake every time the phone by the staircase rang. The few dreams I had were confusing, more troubled than restful.

I gave up finally and had time for a shower before work. My sore toe did not want to fit inside my boot, but I thought, all I have to do is make it through the night. I'll probably be able to sit at the nurses'

station and put it up most of the time. It should be better in the morning.

It wasn't, of course. I got so sick that night that my memories of ieven the ordinary events are fairly surreal. Then Xe decided to intervene on my behalf and things got even weirder.

Though I secretly believed that wishing, willing, and praying would sometimes help some patients get well, I had been trained in a scientific tradition. Any energy I put forth could be nothing more than a random supplement to real help, such as antibiotics, surgery, and intravenous fluids. My feeling was just that any little extra effort I could throw in at a critical time couldn't hurt, so why not? Xe's perspective was the exact opposite.

I think that Xe must have already been considering using meboth from what Heron said and from what happened later. Some of Heron's antagonism toward me was because he had been passed over by the old man.

We've talked about this, and he says he knows now that it wasn't a question of unworthiness. It was just that the old man could see clearly and graphically how much Heron's energy was depleted by the war.

By the time I met him, the medic was on his third tour. He needed every scrap of energy to keep himself whole, and didn't have enough of himself left over for Xe's work. By the time I got sick, Xe was beginning to realize the full cost of his own wounds. He already had his eye on me, I think, because, of all the healthy people he was in contact with, I was the one who was already on his path, even though I'd never thought of it that way. Facts, figures, and procedures have always been more difficult for me than for most of the people I work with, so I'd always tried to compensate with some of the less tangible skills I'd tried with Tran. Unaugmented, of course, they didn't always help. But they were developed enough for Xe to pick up, even through the physically induced fog of a coma. He needed me well and strong and I think, if he had been a little stronger himself and time had been less limited, would have started trying to teach me. When I got sick . . .

But I'm ahead of myself.

The shift started at 1900 hours. The night started out to be even more hectic than the one on ICU. I was glad, in a way, because I was so sleepy that I wouldn't have kept awake otherwise. Sarah was on days alone and had received four fresh GI casualties at six, and had no time to settle them in before the shift change. I had their orders to carry out, two I.V.s to start, and a slew of paperwork. Besides that, Dang Thi That had had her skin graft surgery earlier in the day. The graft had to be "rolled," or smoothed down with a sterile Q-tip, every fifteen minutes to help it adhere. So I was constantly running back and forth between the wards and my sore foot got sorer every time.

I disregarded it. What was a sore toe compared to what the patients, especially That, were enduring? When I ran the Q-tip around That's wound she'd flinch, clench her eyes shut and her betel-blackened teeth together, and hiss. Her left hand, with the I.V. taped to its back, would clutch toward the wound, and stop just short of my hand. It must have felt to her as if I were sticking hot icepicks straight into her and twisting. But as soon as I stopped, her hand dropped back to her waist and she lifted her sweat-soaked face a little and blinked at me.

Her mouth even tried to curve a little and she would duck her head in a sort of apologetic gesture and collapse against the pillow again. I noticed once that the case was wet where she laid her face, so I lifted her head and turned the pillow over for her, and from the look she gave me, you would have thought I'd healed her single-handedly and brought her husband back to life to boot.

Joe called around 2100 and said that, starting at midnight, That's graft could be rolled every half hour, which helped me a little.

Still, when I got up from charting my meds at one, I couldn't bear weight on my left foot and I hopped from bed to bed, and stood with my knee on a chair while I did That's treatment.

A new corpsman, Ron Ryan, was on the other side and there was no sound except the rush of the desktop fan, which didn't cool things off much but blew my charts apart unless I weighted the papers down with I.V.

bottles and coffee mugs.

I felt funny hopping along, because with each little hop my head seemed to float right up to the ceiling and take a long time coming down. I felt as if I were looking out from a long way inside my brain, as if most of me were somewhere deep inside my body, smaller, shrunken- inside myself, with the rest of me, this big ungainly shell, hopping around and sweating. Sometimes I- didn't quite keep track of where I was and I'd think I was at bed three and I was already at five. I was well lubricated by continual runnels of sweat, but they almost felt cool by now. And I was oddly, dopily happy and unconcerned. Ryan appeared at one end of the ward with a mop and I stood staring at him for a moment and, hey presto, he disappeared without moving, just as I caught myself on someone's bed rail, falling backward.

Old Xe was still awake when I hopped to his bedside. He startled me by grabbing my wrist above the flashlight. He hissed as he touched me and his fingers felt so cool I thought for a moment his hiss was a sizzle, like cold bacon on a hot pan. "Numbah ten, co," he said, giving me a penetrating look from eyes that gleamed like pools of oil in the beam of my flashlight. I realized he realized my foot was killing me.

"Damn straight, papasan," I said from inside a tunnel somewhere.

"Beaucoup dau," I agreed, but then felt a little ashamed to be telling him my troubles, telling this legless old man about my silly sore toe.

Ryan was on his break when the commotion broke out on the GI side. I limped over in time to see one of the new men standing in the middle of the aisle, swinging his pillow in a circle and shouting. Two of his buddies were wide awake, their eyes bright in my flashlight beam like the eyes of wild animals, watching him in the dark. I started toward him, and one of the others said, "Don't, ma'am. He's asleep, but he could still hurt you." But I did my best to sound motherly-"It's okay, sweetheart. You're just having a bad dream"-and talked him back to bed.

Walking back to the Vietnamese side, I felt as if I were on a single stable stilt. Suddenly Ryan popped up in front of me. He reminded me a little of an intelligent chicken: sharp nose, sharp but receding chin, shiny little eyes, and a bit of a forelock over his brow, like a coxcomb. He grabbed my arm as I tottered against him. "Steady, L.T."

"You keep popping in and out," I complained; "it's like, now I see you, now I don't."

"You better sit down, ma'am. You feel like you're running a fever.

Anything wrong?"

"Got a sore toe. Isn't that silly?"

"You better go sit down."

"Gotta finish rounds."

"I'll finish them."

I was dubious. "Okay, but make sure everybody's breathing."

"Affirmative, L.T."

I limped back to my metal folding chair and landed heavily. I propped my sore foot on another chair, feeling like a comic figure of an old man with gout.

I wanted to take my boot off, but I was going to wait until the night supervisor made rounds, because I didn't want to be caught out of uniform and I knew that if I got the boot off, I wouldn't be able to get it back on. Actually, I didn't care all that much one way or the other, but to take the boot off would require bending over and I thought it very likely the top of my head would fall off and rattle down the aisle like a loose cookie jar lid when the jar is tipped too far. So I would just rest a minute and then I would start a letter to Mom.

My eyes just closed for a moment, but they wanted to stay closed. I fought them open again. I couldn't be caught sleeping on duty. I finally pried them open and started writing the letter. I found that I couldn't remember my last word and my pen kept slipping off the page, my words leveling out like an EKG gone flat when a patient dies.

My lids kept drooping and I wished I could use toothpicks to prop them open-the dim lighting, the muted noises, the intense heat, and the feeling I had of trying to move through molasses with my body while my mind was in free-fall made me feel drunk. I kept dropping off and startling myself awake a split second later, so that my surroundings took on the semblance of a clumsy animation with too few frames -jerky and discontinuous. I thought things would seem more real if only I could turn on more lights.

And then the ward lurched again and I saw that there were more lights, floating just ahead of me and a little above my chair. They were very pretty multicolored ones, patterned ones, a veritable Fourth of July's worth of lights, except that they weren't exploding and sparking but swirling out and dissipating like heat waves.

At first I thought there were seven, but they all sort of blurred and expanded into one big radiant pattern, flowing like smoke out of a central body, drifting, seeming to form ghosts, like the ectoplasm mediums were-supposed to exhale, only in living color-rather faded color at first, but as I watched, growing more vivid. Clear blue and jade green and spiraling flames of amethyst flowed from what seemed a redorange fountain with curls of blue smoke and rays of pure yellow, with a white spark near the center.

I thought: Far out, complimenting myself on my Technicolor imagination.

I watched the colored thing's progress passively as if it were a weird movie. I could see perfectly well beyond the light and everyone was still sleeping.

Behind the light, at first dim but growing brighter all the time, was a man's figure. Initially it seemed legless, but as it grew brighter it lit him up like a Christmas tree. I could see that he had his legs tucked up under him, yoga style.

He was floating about five feet off the ground, just above the iron ends of the beds, and underneath his toes I saw the intake and output clipboard hanging from Xe's bed foot. Through the transparent white spark his hands clasped at his chest.

I don't know if I actually said it, but I thought: What a great trick, Xe. I didn't know you could do that. I also thought it was neat the way he'd grown his legs back, but I didn't want to say anything-it seemed crass to mention it.

As I watched, the light shifted with the same jerkiness as everything else, so when the pink tendrils started waiting toward me, it was again a case of presto chango, now I see them and now I don't know if I like this whole trip or not. I scooted back and my leg fell off the chair, which sent shafts of fire up it. The tendrils shriveled, and as they shrank back to the center, they deepened to bright red, then deep brick red, surrounding the whole pattern. Through the light I saw Xe's face, and that made me scramble even farther backward.

With another of those animated frame shifts, I blinked and saw only the little desk lamp. Xe was lying quietly, his eyes closed, looking maybe a little more tired and sadder than I remembered from before, but otherwise the same. I caught the glint of Ahn's eye as he rolled onto his stomach, looking around him as if he thought a cougar would pounce on him. I started up from my chair but blinked again and there was Ryan leaning across me over the desk. "L.T., you okay? You look real bad."

"I'm burning up," I told him and realized it was the truth. "And I gotta pee."

Inside the narrow toilet cubicle behind the nurses' station, I saw in the mirror that my face looked ghastly-if I had a patient who looked like that, I'd put them on the seriously ill list. My hair was matted with sweat that rolled off my pasty face and trickled down the back. of my neck, though there were still goose bumps on my arms and ice water running through my spinal column. When I pulled down my trousers and tried to sit on the seat, my leg didn't want to bend from the hip. The rock in my groin was harder, and a ribbon of blush ran all the way down my leg.

I thought: Oh shit, and pried off my boot, which seemed embedded in my leg. I was glad I was already on the stool when I finally pulled my toe free because it hurt so badly I would have messed myself otherwise.

Rolls of puffy calf and ankle flesh almost obscured my boot garter and I cut it off with my bandage scissors. The toe was red and twice as big as the other one, and the whole foot was bloated with edema. When I limped back outside, I shoved a thermometer in my mouth before doing That's treatment. I thought something was wrong with the thermometer.

The mercury hit 105. I took three aspirin and left the rounds to Ryan.

When the shift was over, I reported to sick call and spent the next three days in my hooch soaking my foot in purple solution and popping antibiotics.

"Dear Mom," I wrote during that time, "I now know how it feels to be delirious. You wouldn't believe the dreams! And I think they may put me in for a Purple Heart on account of I got this service-incurred disability . . . ...

My toe was already turning toe-colored again, except for a slight residual purple stain, when Father O'Rourke made his sicklied visitation. The two of us sat in the lawn chairs on the porch outside my hooch and listened to my new Irish tapes, which had arrived from home a day or two before. The priest guzzled beer and I guzzled lemonaje-alcohol interferes with antibiotics. I elevated my purple foot on the rail and tapped air in time with the music. It felt good to be alive and not in solitary and not baking with fever anymore.

And if there was any man I loved to hear talk almost as much as he loved to hear himself talk, it was Father O'Rourke. It was the brogue, mostly, of course, emerging deep and sonorous from that dark and burly man, who gave the impression of being large without physically taking up all that much space. He could have made supply memos sound like Shakespeare. Or Brendan Behan, more appropriately. But he was also a lover of music and books and knew more theology than what was in his breviary.

During the time I was recovering in my hooch, I'd had a couple of dreams about what I'd seen on the ward that night. While I could pass off Xe's light show as being due to my delirium, there had been too many other off-kilter occurrences between that old man and me for me to pass it off so lightly. The brilliant light had had a very spiritual feeling about it, and I thought it might be bound up with halos after all. Everyone kept telling me Xe was a holy man. Unlikely as it seemed, I wondered if maybe-mayhe, because my illness had altered or expanded my consciousness as LSD was supposed to, I had been enabled to see his halo-maybe he wasn't just holy, but a saint or even an angel. Okay, so it sounded farfetched. But I hadn't expected to find bubonic plague in Vietnam either, and I had.

"Father, can I ask you a question?"

"After the song's over, my child," he said. The song was about an execution of an Irish patriot three hundred years before, and if I'd been paying proper attention I'd have noticed before I asked that Father had tears rolling down his cheeks.

When he'd mopped his face with a Kleenex, I tried again. "What I want to know is, who has halos and who can see them? Do saints have halos, or is it just angels? And can somebody be a saint without some sort of papal decision about it? I mean, could there be maybe Buddhist or Hindu saints that God knows about but hasn't let the Church in on yet? Could just anybody see their halos, if they let you?"

The chaplain glowered at me from under his bristling black brows. With such brows, he always seemed to be glowering, whether he intended to or not. "My dear child, what is it you're tryin' to do?

Start another holy war? Is the one not enough for you, then?"

"No, it's not that, it's just that . . . well, when I first got sick, I was delirious, you know? And another time, I thought I sawon't laugh at me, damn it, it isn't funny. I want you to regard this as being as confidential as if I were one of your patients."

"Flock."

"Okay, one of your flock. Even though I was delirious, I think this was sort of like a dream and it must mean something. I haven't experienced anything like it since I had the measles and heard this radio that wasn't really playing and smelled salted nuts when there weren't any in the house." I looked at him quickly but he had composed himself, his backwards baseball cap pulled down over his too assertive eyebrows, the words "God Power" machine-embroidered on the cap's hem. "The other night, when I first got sick, I thought I saw this giant halo that was all different colors and shapes around one of the patients, an old Vietnamese guy. And before, when the old man was in surgery, it looked like the major and our interpreter and Meyers and everybody had little halos too. Do you think, if the old man is a saint, well, could it be contagious somehow?"

O'Rourke tilted his cap back and stopped balancing his chair on the back legs, squarely setting it down. "Ah, life among the heathen isn't fittin' for ye of little faith, I see that now. Some of this Eastern stuff seems to be rubbin' off on you."

He was kidding me-the Irish always got a whole lot thicker when he was pulling your leg.

"What Eastern stuff? Halos?"

"Not halos, darling' girl. The Holy Father holds the patent on halos and on saints and angels, since you ask. Auras, now. Anyone can have an aura. Buddhists and Hindus and the lot are lousy with them.

They have quite a few over to Duke University back in the States as well."

"What did you call them?"

"Auras."

"Like the northern lights?"

"That's auroras, though I daresay it comes from the same root. Light, bands of light. Colored light, as a rule."

"Sounds like a halo to me."

"Only on your proper martyrs and such. Buddhists and them other Easterners are only authorized auras, martyrs or no. You mark my words, girl, and watch your step. They get you poor little lukewarm Methodists and all over here and pump you full of Asian germs and start showing you auras, next thing you know you'll be runnin' around shoutin' Harry Krishna and playin' with matches and gasoline."

The weather changed while I was on quarters. It started getting cooler in the evenings. At first I thought I just felt cooler because my fever had gone down, but long after I returned to work, the nights remained quite pleasant, balmy but no longer sweltering.

I'd walk home from the ward for midnight supper break and sit on the porch outside my hooch. At night everything was so much nicer. You couldn't see the barbed wire and the concrete and the raw plywood and sandbags and olive drab so clearly. The sky was black and velvety and star-studded, as glamorous as if there were no war on at all. Palms swayed on the horizon, and the South China Sea lapped gently at the beach. You could even forget the smell if there was a little breeze. I couldn't help thinking that if I were Vietnamese, I could hate the Americans on aesthetic grounds alone. Poor as the native houses and cities were, they blended with the countryside. Our compound reminded me of a strip mine I'd seen high in the Rockies. Everything else around it was breathtakingly beautiful and then there was this gutted mountain and a lake that looked like liquid cement.

On the way back to the ward, the compound was dark and muffled, with only the red glow of a cigarette tip from the guard tower to remind you it was manned by a bored soldier with a rifle. Inevitably there was a little muted rock music from some corner of the compound, a radio turned down low.

The ward was quiet, too, those first few nights except for a whisper of pages turning in Ryan's book. I still took the flashlight and rolled Dang Thi That's graft, but now she sometimes slept through the procedure. I was more curious than ever about Xe, but he slept all night. Sometimes Ahn would wake up when I did rounds and climb into his wheelchair and come sit with me by the desk, watching with serious dark eyes as I charted or read or wrote letters. I showed him how to write his name in English and he drew the letters like an artist, his small grubby hands oddly graceful, the hooded light of the lamp at the nurses'

desk gleaming on his bowl-cut black hair. He was very quick. The worst problem was keeping him quiet. Already his sessions with Xinhdy and Mai had him babbling away in fluent pidgin. Still, he would leave them to follow me if he thought I had a scrap of attention to spare him. I wrote my mother and asked her to comb the garage sales for children's clothes.

Evenings when I came on duty, Xe would be visiting with Dang Thi That or with Xinhdy. He nodded courteously to me if I happened to catch his eye, but otherwise paid me no observable attention, though sometimes I felt him watching me. I wondered about him more than ever. That always seemed to feel better after he left, but while her wound improved with each new procedure, the process was as long and gradual as Joe expected.

I wonder now if Xe's power was really so diminished at that point, or if he simply felt that the hospital was the safest place for all of them to be.

Anyway, casualties came and went, including a pair of VC. I had no idea they were VC. They just looked like your average injured villagers to me, although, looking back, I remember them as a little more demanding and aggressive than most, but that could be my imagination. Anyway, one day they were admitted, seriously wounded, and when I came on shift again they were gone. I asked what had happened.

Mai chimed in. "Patients say they VC. Xinhdy say to me if we not move VC patients, other patients kill them," and as she said the last she ran her finger across her throat.

"So where'd they go?" I asked.

"The POW ward," Marge said. "The MPs came and got them."

I tried not to wonder what became of them after that, and not to imagine what might have happened to us or our patients if Xinhdy and Mai weren't so close.

The last night I was on the ward was quiet and Xinhdy la daied me down to her bedside. She took my hand and looked at my ragged nails. "Numbah ten," she said and got out her file and polish and started giving me dragon-lady points. I let her. My work was caught up until midnight and I'd missed her cheerful, normal company. She more than anyone else let me imagine that at one time there must have been a happier kind of life in Vietnam, where people could be frivolous and worry about what was pretty.

"Kitty, when you fini Vietnam?" she asked.

"Oh, I still have months to go," I said.

"Good. I cry when you fini Vietnam."

"I'll miss you too," I said. "Do you think you might ever get to come to America?"

"I don't think so, but maybe. I like America. You know Hollywoo'?

Vietnamee movie stars, they poor. Mai have more money than movie star.

Not like Hollywoo'."

"I guess not. Why, do you want to be a movie star?"

"Hollywoo' movie star, yes. Vietnamee movie star not so good. My family say movie star not so good for Vietnamee lady."

When she gave me back my hands I resembled Madame Nhu from the wrists down, stiletto nails, blood-red polish, and all. But Xinhdy thought I looked glamorous.

When I got back to my quarters that morning, Julie Montgomery was waiting at my door. I didn't much like Julie, as I'd mentioned to Tony.

She had two topics of conversation: how irresistible she was and how many men agreed with her. Most of the other girls disliked her, too, and openly snubbed her, but I'd tried to be at least polite. Being new in country wasn't easy. Still, I didn't welcome her visit. I had no desire to be bosom buddies with someone who was her own biggest fan.

"Kitty, I have to talk to you," she said, her voice carrying a tragic wobble to it.

"Sure. Come on in."

She stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. Her gestures were short and jerky and she tried to make a tossing motion with her head, but hair as damaged by overtreating as hers doesn't move very well. In the sunlight streaming in the door, not one glint reflected off that pile of dead straw she had teased into a bouffant. "I couldn't bear the thought that you'd hear this from anyone else, so I decided, painful as it was, I had to come and tell you myself. You see, I don't want you to be hurt. You've always been nice to me. But he said-he said you wouldn't mind sharing. And since he's married, I figured it couldn't be really serious or anything and"-she giggled-"he's such a dish and he was so lonesome. . . ."

I had been getting her a Coke from the fridge, but I put it back and kicked the door shut. "Wait a minute. Are you talking about Tony?"

She nodded, giving me a soulful look through her cigarette smoke. "The way Carole Swenson acted, I thought maybe you might not know and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of her. Oh, Kitty, say you won't hate me forever. It was just a date and you were on quarters."

"Let me get this straight. Tony told you that he's married?"

"Well, yeah-"

"Thank you, Julie. I appreciate you telling me, but you'll have to excuse me now, I've got a murder to plan."

Well, at least I knew who the demure creature he wanted me to be like was. I supposed that was faithfulness, of a sort. I called Red Beach and told Tony what I thought of him and never to darken my doorway again. I surprised myself by not crying. Instead, I flopped onto my cot and read until I fell asleep, feeling strangely relieved for someone who'd been jilted, as if I'd just peeled out of a tight girdle.

At least now I wouldn't have anyone harping at me about being ladylike or nurselike or like anything else but myself, or as much of myself as I could still find after seven months in country. Tony's wife was probably having a ball at home. He ought to have sense enough to know that even Is perfect wife would probably be a lot different if she were in my shoes. Being a dust-off pilot wasn't the only job that had to be done after all.

I knew I'd miss him, but it was just physical, I told myself. just because his legs were longer and prettier than mine, and his hair was so tritely perfect to run my fingers through, was no reason to fall apart.

just because his strong, beautiful fingers felt better than salt water and sun on my skin. In my mind's eye I saw him stride jauntily toward the pad. If only the jerk hadn't lied to me, damn him.

The monsoon drizzle started at around three that afternoon, in keeping with my mood. I didn't bother with a poncho but let the rain soak my red alligator-bedecked polo shirt. My flip-flops smacked against the wet cement walkway leading to the hospital and mail call. I didn't get mail, of course, but Marge Canon clutched another letter to her bosom, this one unstamped, which meant it came from in country.

I'lutty, you got time to come back to the ward for a cup of coffee?

I want to ask you about something."

"Sure thing," I said, almost hoping she'd ask me to give up my afternoon off and work extra. I felt miserable and useless, and when I felt like that, the ward was the best place for me.

"Kitty, you ever been to Quang Ngai?"

"No," I said cautiously. Had I screwed up again or had it simply taken the powers that be this long to find somewhere to send me? "I never had any reason to. Why? Am I being transferred?"

"No, but I hope I am. Remember I told you about Hal? Well, he's in Quang Ngai now as hospital administrator at the 85th Evac. He wants me to try for a transfer."

Her eyes sparkled. I didn't know whether to be happy or bitter that at least somebody's love life was going well, but if anyone deserved to be happy it was Marge, so I said, "That's terrific, but when would you leave?"

"Oh, not till I'm processed. And after your promotion, of course. Which is tomorrow, by the way, in case you'd forgotten."

"Promotion?" I asked stupidly. Even though promotion to first lieutenant was supposed to be automatic, the brass could withhold or delay it, as Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock had pointed out to me on a couple of occasions.

"Don't look so shocked. You've grown tremendously since you came here.

You're one of the best-organized charge nurses in the hospital and your rapport with the Vietnamese is outstanding. As a matter of fact, I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm putting you in for a Bronze Star and Joe is writing a commendation for your file before he leaves. And I'm recommending you for head nurse if my request for transfer goes through.

So everything's going to work out great with you getting promoted right away. Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock wouldn't like leaving a second lieutenant as acting head nurse but plenty of first lieutenants are. So I won't have to wait until my replacement arrives in country."

When I arrived at work the next day, I walked about six inches taller and chirped my way around the ward with more energy than usual.

,Good morning, Melville," I greeted one of the GI patients, "How's the ankle doin'?" Melville had sprained it while stocking supply shelves. I suspected he had fallen off the ladder while stoned. He stayed stoned a lot, though nobody on the ward ever saw him smoke.

"Oh, sir," he said, "I think gangrene is setting in. Can I have a Darvon?"

Usually I would have snarled. Today the milk of human kindness filled my circulatory system.

"Of course you can, Melville. Just a sec." It was a wonder I didn't tell him to take two, they're small.

My promotion was held on the Vietnamese side, with Marge, Joe Giangelo, Sergeant Baker, Mai, and Voorhees in attendance. Meyers had been pulled to ICU.

I stood at attention while Marge read me the paper telling me in Armyese that I had met their requirements (though it sounded, in typically inflated bureaucrat language, as if I had won the Congressional Medal of Honor instead of merely an almost guaranteed promotion) and pinned a set of shiny silver bars over the embroidered ones on my fatigues that corresponded to a second lieutenant's butter bars. The shiny silver ones were for symbolism's sake. You didn't wear metal insignia on combat fatigues. I had learned this soon after coming in country, when the rationale of Army couture was explained to me by the supply sergeant. "No, ma'am. No shiny brass in the field. Sun catches on it and announces your arrival to the enemy, sure as shit."

But I looked at my new bars as if they were platinum and shook hands all around.

I felt a tug at my hip pocket and turned around to see Ahn wearing an officious expression. "Mamasan, mamasan, la dai. Chung Wi Long say you come."

Lieutenant Long, in the bed directly across from the nurses' station, was nodding a smiling endorsement of Ahn's summons. Long had been with us about two weeks. He was an educated man who spoke both French and Vietnamese and sometimes translated for us on nights. He'd lost a leg but seemed to have accepted his loss with equanimity. He was glad to be out of action, I think, but I wished we could medevac him too. After all, when the NVA took over as seemed inevitable, Long would still be in Vietnam. I didn't think a disabled vet from the losing side whuld stand much of a chance.

I followed Ahn to Long's bed. In the next bed, That shifted painfully and gave me a tired smile. On the far side from us, Xe woke muttering from an afternoon nap.

Lieutenant Long cleared his throat. "Miss McCulley, you have promotion.

You are now chung wi, same-same me, yes?"

"Yes. See my pretty new bars?" I flipped up my collar for him to admire them.

"Very nice." He reached under his pillow and held out a couple of small brass flower-shaped clusters, hooked together. "This is Vietnamese rank for chung wi. Please accept with my congratulations."

"Are these yours?" I asked.

"Yes. I have more. Please accept."

"Oh, I do. Thank you very much." And added formally, as I pinned them on my shirt pocket flap, where sometimes we wore extra little pins, unauthorized, of course, "I will wear this proudly. I feel very honored." And I did. Even though no extra pay came with it, I was almost more pleased at being promoted by Lieutenant lmng than I was at being promoted by Uncle Sam.

Then, of course, Xinhdy and That and Ahn all had to admire my new rank, both American and Vietnamese. That bobbed her head respectfully. Ahn wanted to know if he could have my old ones. Even old Xe la daied me imperiously, gravely surveyed my new ornamentation, and nodded his approval. I patted his hand, despite his lordly air, and I thought his eyes brightened.

Xinhdy took out her lipstick and a Kleenex and polished the bars for me.

It was the kind of totally off-the-wall thing she was always doing to try to please me, just because she was a generous and outgoing girl. I never got a chance to pay her back for her attempts to make me glamorous.

Sergeant Baker called me from the door. "Hey, Lieutenant, you got a visitor," he said.

I turned from Xe to see Ginger Phillips shuffle onto the ward, her hands on the shoulders of a gangly, crew-cut Vietnamese child in a faded pink dress.

They met me before I came around the bed and the child threw her arms around my neck. I returned her hug, though I was a little puzzled.

"Tran just wanted to say good-bye and thank you, Kitty," Ginger said.

"She's going home today so she can spend Christmas with her folks."

"Cam ong, co," Tran said softly. "Tank you." I had no idea what she was thanking me for, but I suspected Ginger had put her up to it. She had worked on ward six since a little before I had, and had continued to speak to me after my transfer.

"No sweat, Tran," I said, stroking her bristling head. The words had a hard time coming out. My throat had closed over and my eyes watered like an old woman's.

Ahn grabbed my hand as soon as I let go of Tran, and didn't release it until she left.

I was promoted on Wednesday, switched to days on Thursday.

mISunday morning I worked alone on day shift. I walked onto the Vietnamese ward to find Sarah still running around trying to get morning meds and charting done. Her face was set and tight with emotion and she would not look at me. There was something else, too, something awful about the ward that made me stop at the door and hesitate to look around. My eyes went first to Dang Thi That and Xe, but they both seemed to be sleeping. I was noticing that the old man looked even more drawn and drained than usual when Ahn sat up, saw me, and catapulted into his wheelchair like a cowboy in a movie, barely stopping himself from knocking me over by throwing his arms around my waist and sobbing.

I knelt down to pet him and that was when I noticed Xinhdy's empty bed.

"Sarah, where's Xinhdy?" I asked as casually as I could. She could have been in X-ray, or surgery. She was young and healthy and . . .

"Xinhdy died, Kitty."

"Died?" I asked stupidly. "What do you mean she died? C'mon, Sarah, get real. I'm talking about Xinh, in the last bed? She couldn't have died. All she had was a broken hip, for Christ's sake. She wasn't even on the seriously ill list. She wasn't authorized to die." I know that sounds like a bad joke to an outsider, but we had a seriously ill list and a very seriously ill list. If a patient was not on the very seriously ill list before he died, staff members were considered to be derelict in their duty.

Sarah didn't answer me, but Mai emerged from the bathroom. This time more than her hair was wet.

"Mai . . . ?" I began, still stroking Ahn's back and shoulders. Mai looked away, then covered her face with her hands, and I knew there was no mistake.

But there had to be. When I left the ward the night before, Xinhdy was perfectly okay. Well, she was restless and was sweating more than usual. She had a very slight temp, which I charted. I told Sarah in report I thought Xinh might be coming down with the flu. She'd been so cranky all evening Meyers had asked very carefully if she might be on her period. She kept thrashing around, shifting from one position to another, demanding that things be moved to accommodate each shift. This from the most self-sufficient bedfast patient on the ward. When the other Vietnamese visited, she complained to them in a loud voice until they left again, disgruntled. Still, I figured it was just a little upset. Hospitalized people can get colds and the flu too. My God, had I missed the beginnings of some horrible fast-killing Vietnamese strain of pneumonia? The empty bed stared blankly back at me. I expected a gurney to be wheeled in at any moment with Xinh in her hip spica cast leaning up on one elbow to smile and wave hello like a Rose Bowl princess as she passed the other beds on the ward.

"What was it, Sarah?" I asked. "Did she-was it some kind of flu? Were you able to get Joe?"

"Not till it was too late," she said. "He was over at that generals'

mess at I Corps and didn't get back till later. Captain Schlakowski came over at eight and checked her but thought she was okay. Then we got three new patients on the GI side, and when I came back to do

'dn'ght meds Xinh was having trouble breathing. I was taking her mi I pulse when she arrested. I started CPR while Ryan called a code and tossed me the ambu bag. The team got here right away but it was just too late."

"How could she arrest?" I asked. "She's twenty-two years old."

"I know, I know," she said, her voice getting softer and softer. "Joe came in to pronounce her. He said it was a fat embolism. Sometimes it happens with bad hip injuries who are bedridden for a long time. I never heard of that before, did you?"

"No-l-where's Joe?"

"In surgery with one of the GIs. I don't know how he can do it, Kitty.

He was more upset than anybody. Except maybe Xe. He woke up when the team brought the crash cart and I guess he was confused by all the commotion. He tried to get out of bed by himself and fell, then kept crawling toward us. It was awful," and now Sarah started to cry and I put my free arm around her. "I'm filling out an incident reportnow.

"Old guy's more trouble than he's worth, isn't he?" I said, but my voice cracked.

I didn't cry until toward the end of the day, though. You aren't supposed to cry in front of the patients, but that wasn't it. I just couldn't believe she was gone. Well, gone, yeah, but dead? I kept wandering back to her bed. The silence, without Vietnamese TV, was oppressive. Mai simply made herself scarce except when she had specifically assigned duties. The other patients slept, except for That, when I did her treatment, and Ahn, who clung to me and wanted me to carry him all day.

The day passed in a haze until mail call. I opened a care package from home when I got back to the ward. A nest of fat, bright yarn hair ties lay in the bottom and I pulled them out. My first thought was Xinhdy will love these; and then I looked at her stripped bed and aping bedside table. My throat clamped down. I dumped Ahn in his wheelchair and bolted for the nurses' bathroom on the GI side. I don't know how long it took me to stop crying, but when I did, the fog had lifted and the pain had definitely set in. I wish I could say that I nobly comforted everybody else, but we all handled it as we handled most things in Vietnam, isolating ourselves from one another until we could convince ourselves that the anguish was nonsense, that war was a tough situation and you just had to do the best you could. The patients slept. Mai went home early. The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker furiously cleaned the ward as if the President were visiting the next day. Joe was a pain in the ass when he made rounds, ordering all kinds of useless things for patients he hadn't done more than cursory exams on for months.

On Monday, Sergeant Baker plopped a wad of R&R pamphlets on the desk in front of me. "Forms are right there, Lieutenant. Pick your spot, fill

'em out, and get the hell away from here while you still got the chance."

I leafed through them. The waters of the Great Barrier Reef looked abnormally blue, the mountains of Japan steep, and I already had a camera and a stereo coming from the Pacex catalog. As for the shopping of Singapore and Hong Kong, who needed sleazy silk clothes or outdated beaded sweaters? I couldn't work up any enthusiasm, yet I knew that Sarge was right, I needed to leave, and soon.

Heron was leaning against Xe's side rails when I returned from passing meds to the new GI casualties that day. He looked tired and ungainly, his body angling off in several directions to bring his face close to the still one of the shrunken old man. Xe's left hand fluttered like a moth until it lit in the medic's palm. As I approached them, the old man's eyes opened. His face was agonized as he looked up at Heron, like a dog asking to be put to sleep.

Without turning around, Heron asked, "How long has he been like this?"

"Since last night. He fell out of bed. He was trying to-urn, he was-"

I broke off and bit my lip, swallowed, and continued, "One of our long-term patients died last night. She was-a friend of Xe's. I think he was probably so scared for her he forgot he couldn't walk-"

"Who was it?"

"Xinhdy-Xinh. The girl in the last bed. It was-a sort of freaky thing.

My voice died away as my throat closed off again. "I think -I think he's grieving-"

"That's putting it mildly," Heron said bitterly. Then he turned to face me. "Sorry, McCulley. But you have no idea how special this man is."

"I'm starting to. You've spoken of it before. And-some things have happened."

"Like the deal with the men on the other side of the ward?"

"Heron, I want you to know it wasn't that I didn't mean to help Xe. But I saw Meyers coming and I still had to dress Dickens's legs and I don't think the men would have really-"

He gave me a disgusted look. "Of course they would have. But I understand when you've got two patients who both need you, your inclination would be to stay with the white guy."

"That's a goddamn lie," I said.

"Okay, okay, cool it. Can you get someone to relieve you? Good. Theri.

let's go for a nice walk. If you really want to know about Xe, I'll tell you. But I don't want to talk anymore in front of him and I don't much like spending time in rooms full of people. It makes me jumpy."

He stopped, said something in soft Vietnamese to Xe, and bowed slightly.

The old man wearily inclined his head and closed his eyes, his hands crossed on the amulet in the gesture I'd seen so often. Only this time it reminded me of the classic pose of a corpse holding a lily.

I let Sergeant Baker know I was going to be off duty for a few minutes and led Heron through the screen door at the back of the ward, through the curtain of rain draining off the roof of the building and onto the streaming sidewalk between the perimeter fence and the back row of Quonset hut wards. It wasn't raining hard then, but we were both wet in patches before either of us spoke again. A cool green smell waited in from the perimeter, of ozone and fresh growth.

Outside I saw that Heron was in worse shape than I was, though not as bad as Xe. His eyes were infrared maps, and in the blue circles lining the sockets a large vein jumped. His mustache, waxed to ferocious points like the toes of Turkish slippers, twitched.

"Heron, I do care about Xe and I wouldn't have let anything more happen to him, you've got to believe that. I guess I just don't think on my feet that quickly and Meyers and Feyder were quicker. But I'm getting ready to go on R&R. Can Marge or someone on the ward contact you if anything happens to Xe?"

He shook his head dismally. "Nope. That's why I came over today. To say good-bye. I'm being reassigned to the field next week. I got in a little trouble I couldn't talk my way out of."

"Was it with drugs? Because I know you use pot-I saw you with Meyers and Feyder. . . ."

"Did you?" He looked mildly amused. "Is this a bust?"

"Come off it. What I mean is, you use drugs, well, pot anyway, you have access. I just need to know. The drugs aren't part of this power of Xe's you're talking about, are they? I mean, you don't have to be on something to see it? He doesn't, like, give people something . . ."

He stared me down. "What do you think?"

"I don't know what to think. You tell me Xe is some kind of native doctor and I've seen him get hurt twice trying to help other people, but the experiences I've had with him were like how I've heard LSD trips described. So when I saw you pushing pot to my corpsman and one of my patients, it made me wonder, you know?"

He looked down at his foot and nodded, his lips compressed. "Yeah, well.

The smoking's got nothing to do with Xe, but I'll tell you how that is for me. I think we need a little light anesthetic sometimes to get through this war. A man who's good and stoned isn't so uptight he's going to go shooting up whole villages, you bic? But that's my thing.

Xe doesn't need drugs for the kind of high he generates." He turned his back on me as if he had had the last word, and started walking back toward the ward.

I walked backward until I caught up with him, passed him, faced him. The sun came out behind him and I had to squint up. His lantern jaw shuttled back and forth beneath the pointy mustache. "Fine. I won't argue with you. Listen to me a minute, okay? Let me tell you why I even asked about drugs."

I told him about the ball of multicolored light around Xe and about the day I'd worn the amulet. "But was it really just that I was sick, or did I see something? Father O'Rourke said it could have been auras. Is that right? And if it is, why did I see them on everybody that one day when I wore the thingy he has around his neck, but then the other time I just saw his aura, but brighter, without wearing the necklace?"

"He allowed you to wear the amulet?"

"He insisted. He was going to surgery, and Xinh-l-he told her he wanted me to wear it if he was going to take it off."

"And you saw colors?"

I nodded.

"Shit. I wore it once, too, and I didn't see a damned thing. He's talked about you before, but he never let on that you'd worn the amulet.

The way he explained it to me, the amulet is a sort of magnifying glass.

It makes the auras of other people clearer to him, although he can see them, of course, without its help. But with it, he perceives physical and spiritual information about people that helps him heal them."

"I don't get it," I said. "It's usually pretty clear what's wrong with my patients, but I can't do anything about it just because I know what's wrong

"Maybe not, but he can. The way I understand it, the amulet also amplifies his aura so he can use his energy to help someone else's.

Before he got hurt he traveled all over the north part of the countrynobody ever gave him shit, not VC, not NVA, not ARVNS. Because he knew how to read them, how to heal the folks around, so that they always protected him from the hard-core badasses. Too fuckin' bad mortar shells don't have all that much of an aura." His voice was bitter again.

"How about the night I saw the ball of light, then?" I asked. "I wasn't wearing the amulet."

But he'd had enough of my questions and looked at me as if I were a sister who'd gotten more than her share of cake at his birthday party.

He shrugged. "You said you were sick. You figure it out." And he returned to the ward to say a good-bye to Xe that I suppose both of them must have known was final.

When I dreamed that night it wasn't about R&R or about Xinhdy or Tony. I dreamed about Xe. I couldn't remember much except that he was floating around in a big balloon and seemed to be looking for something. I had the feeling he was looking for Heron, but I also knew, the way you do in dreams, that that wasn't quite right. And ihen I thought it might be me he was looking for and I wanted to tell him where I was, but Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock was hiding in the jungle somewhere with a rifle and if she found out I was watching that balloon instead of being back on the ward, she'd shoot me and make sure I wouldn't get my Bronze Star either.

I went to Taiwan for R&R. After Xinh's death and my cheerful chat with Heron, I couldn't bear to stay in Vietnam one extra minute.

As soon as my papers were processed and Marge had rearranged the schedule, Sarge drove me out to the airport. Ahn rolled over on his stomach and wouldn't say good-bye to me, but That squeezed my hand and Mai handed me a folded paper fan. "Airplane too hot," she explained, fanning herself with her hand.

At the airport, the NCO in charge of the R&R flights said no way could he get me out. I started feeling panicky. It was one day of my leave just sitting there. I told him to send me anyplace, anyplace at all, just get me out of country. He found one seat on a plane to Taipei. I didn't have the faintest idea what I'd do in Taiwan. The corpsmen told me proudly of their exploits and showed me photos of their bedroombound dates, but I was damned if I was going to spend my little taste of freedom from the 83rd in one lousy room.

Sick of the Army, tired of the military milieu in general, alone in a foreign country I had never explored before, I headed straight for the naval base. I don't remember why. Maybe I needed time to become acclimatized to a week playing tourist. But I found I'd been missing things I'd taken for granted, even despised, before. I met a Navy wife at the PX coffee shop and sat for hours drinking coffee and listening to gossip and routine marital problems that would have normally bored me stiff. It felt good to hear another woman a normurse, nonmilitary woman, talk about ordinary, everyday housewifing business that had nothing to do with sickness or war or dying. I found her child-rearing traumas fascinating, her struggles with the base schools gripping. I cannot for the life of me remember if I even got her name.

After I left her I wandered around the commissary in a daze, and at one point stood between the rows of sugar pops and frosted flakes and remembered all my junk food breakfasts and Saturday morning cartoons and prizes and box tops and good old American come-on advertising, and I stood there and wept like a fool. I never thought I'd miss crass commercialism so much, and realized that I was capitalist to the core. I missed the damned radio and TV commercials. I wished Xinhdy could have seen, oh, a Maybelline ad, or a Clairol one. She'd have thought them very glamorous. On Armed Forces Radio, the only commercials were "Do preventive maintenance on your vehicle," and "Clean your weapon," and

"Don't use captured enemy weapons and, if you happen to be an enemy listening, we wouldn't advise you to use your own weapons either."

Later I shopped and bought jewelry and presents for friends at the 83rd and the family and went to a Taiwan aboriginal dance where they dressed us visitors up in native costume and had us dance with them, something a lot like the squaw dances the Indians hold at powows at home. I had dresses made and I smelled flowers and traveled inland to the gorgeous Taroko Gorge and saw a turquoise river flowing through the mountains and the marble factory. The funniest thing was getting on a FAT airlines plane and hearing only oriental voices and seeing only oriental faces all around me. I began to feel panicky when all the speeches by the stewardesses were in Chinese. To my relief, a man's voice with a heavy Australian accent announced that "this is your captain speaking." Of course, there are undoubtedly lots of marvelous oriental pilots, but I knew only of the mess the ARVNs made of our technical equipment, and the association was automatic.

I felt like a large barbarian, a feeling that was reinforced when I went shopping. I kept forgetting, surrounded by small oriental people, that I was no longer in Vietnam. I was looking at one ring in a jeweler's stall and said, "Oh, that one. I like. Numbah one." And the man in the stall said, "Yes, madame, that is an emerald of the finest quality.

Would you care to try it on? Could I offer you tea, perhaps, while you are considering your choice?" I felt like a condescending fool.

And once my cab passed a construction site and somebody dropped a board or a hammer or something. I was on the floor of the cab before I knew what I was doing.

The driver was alarmed. "Miss, miss, you okay?" he asked.

"Oh, sure, thanks. just-uhropped my contact lens. There you are, you little devil."

But the country was more beautiful than I had ever imagined, and I almost forgot about Vietnam in the fun of going shopping, dressing up and eating in nice restaurants. People were unexpectedly kind. I ran out of money before I could collect my developed snapshots and the man at the photo store told me not to worry, to send the money to him when I got back to Nam, no sweat, he had a brother who was a dentist in the States and so that made me okay too. And the girls in the hotel gift shop, where I had bought a couple of rings, called me over on my last day to give me a sack of dried pineapple as a going-away present.

I returned to the 83rd, if not eager to get back to work, at least eager to share my adventures with my friends and play lady Bountiful with the presents: a book for Marge and jade earrings for Voorhees's wife, a pirated rock tape for Meyers and an ivory back scratcher for Sergeant Baker, strings of beads for Carole and Judy, a woven Chinese handcuff for Ahn, and a delicately carved wooden hair ornament that struck me as something that would be beautiful in Mai's hair if she kept her locks dry long enough to wear it. It cost maybe thirty-five cents in American money and I intended to get her something nicer but ran out of money. I felt guilty about being so chintzy when I had been so little comfort to her over Xinh's death.

So I was surprised at her reaction when I intercepted her and gave it to her.

"Very pretty," she said admiringly and handed it back to me.

"No-it's for you," I told her. "I don't know if you wear this kind of thing or not, but I thought it would look nice in your pretty hair."

"For me? You buy present for me?" Her eyes started filling as she handled it. "Thank you, thank you very much. Is so beautifoo. Wait. I have present for you too. It not here today. I bring it tomorrow-,,

"Oh no, Mai, you already gave me a present. You were right. The plane was very hot and I used your fan all the time. I just wanted to bring you the comb because I think a lot of you. It's so little really."

But the next day she was there with a bolt of purple silk. She held it up against me, measuring. "It maybe too long for Western dress."

"But that's good," I said. "I've really been wanting a Vietnamese dress. I'll have mamasan at the gift shack make me one. You always look so pretty in yours."

She took the cloth back. "No way you have her make Vietnamese dress for you. I make you go dal." The next day she measured me for it and within a couple of days brought it over to the ward, along with an invitation from her family to come to the village and have dinner with them. So far as I knew, none of the other girls had been invited to a Vietnamese home. I had to get special permission, but Mai was well known and liked at the 83rd and had doctors, nurses, and corpsmen she had worked with in the past writing to her from all over the world.

Permission was granted. The day we were to go, we both dressed in our go dais, my purple one so much larger than her little pink flowered one, and Joe took our picture. We walked down the road unmolested though not exactly unnoticed through Dogpatch and to Mai's house. Her mother had fixed a chicken dinner and left the beak and the claws on top of the cooked meat so I would know that it wasn't dog or cat. Their house was large and spacious, with covered decks for eating and cooking.and big fan-cooled rooms full of books. After dinner, Mai's brothers and I played guitars and I chatted with her mother while Mai translated. By then it was well after dark, and Sergeant Baker came for me in the jeep.

I think Mai and I were trying to start a friendship that would expand to fill some of the gap left by Xinh's death, though we never spoke of her.

But though the friendship was cut short, I remember that peaceful, relaxed evening with gratitude.

I had been looking forward to monsoon season as a break from ithe bleak simmer of the heat. The first weeks of rain were welcome, but soon everything stayed clammy with damp. The sheets were damp, the towels were damp, even my sweater didn't offer much warmth because it was damp, too. I worked an unexpected run of nights when Sarah caught amebiasis and had to lie on a stretcher and take I.V. fluids every morning before work because anything she ate or drank was lost to diarrhea and vomiting. The wards were cold in the daytime, and high winds brought storms in off the sea. Dressed in ponchos and wet jungle boots, we waded to work across half-submerged islands of sidewalk. About an inch of water covered the floor of the central corridor. The roof leaked and bedpans and urinals sat around everywhere to catch the drips while poncho-clad Vietnamese workmen crawled around on the roof, laboring slowly to plug the holes. Little lizards darted through the halls, and Ahn, now equipped with a crutch and a makeshift wooden leg Joe had fashioned from a crutch, limped after them with more agility than I would have thought possible.

Marge's transfer to Quang Ngai was reluctantly approved with the help of her boyfriend's connections. Joe's DEROS date was fast approaching, and between the two of them, you'd have thought the place was a photography studio instead of a hospital ward. We took turns snapping pictures of Marge and Joe, Marge with Mai, Joe with Mai, Marge and Joe together and separately with Ahn, me, Sergeant Baker, Voorhees, Meyers, Ryan, That, and any other patient or staff member who would stand still long enough to be snapped. Then we had to do more of the same because Marge's camera was a Polaroid and Ahn and Mai wanted duplicates of every picture with them in it.

Then Sarah suddenly got a drop because of her amebiasis, which meant they sent her home two months early to recuperate. I was pleased for her, but it made a lot more work for me, since her position and my old one were filled with two new nurses. I spent a lot of time being teacher. One of the new girls got amebiasis her second week in country and, like Sarah, had to report early for I.V.s every morning. She and Sarah left on the same plane.

Marge hugged me when it was time for her to leave. "You'll do fine, Kitty. Write and let me know how everybody is, okay?"

"Okay. just take care of yourself and kick Hal in the shins for me for taking you away from us."

Soon to be ex-Major Joe Giangelo and another major made it to the door in time to block her exit. Joe grabbed Marge for a hug. "You be a good girl, Margie, and oh, I almost forgot, I have something for you here."

His brown eyes twinkled as he handed her a couple of pieces of paper.

"They're exercises to correct bowless-after you've been with old Hal for a while you're probably going to need them."

"Don't let me take the copies you were going to mail to your wife, Joe.

How long have you got left now?"

"Six days four hours three minutes and"-he checked his watch

-"twenty-one seconds. By the way, I'd like you all to meet my replacement. Major Krupman, Major Marge Canon, the best ortho nurse in Vietnam and possibly the entire military and an incredible fink who is splitting our fabled beaches. And this is Lieutenant McCulley, her second-in-command."

Marge said hi and then had to run for her ride. I said hi, but Krupman ignored it. "I'd like to make rounds now, Joe, if you don't mind," he said briskly.

"Sure thing. We'll start here."

"Here? But these aren't American servicemen, they're gooks."

Joe looked around him at all of the familiar faces and the few new arrivals. "No kidding? How about that? You mean you guys aren't from 1st Cay?"

Mai giggled. I decided it was a good time to get That up for her afternoon walk. Her grafts had taken and her hip was healed except for a single small area, from which a drain protruded. She had already walked twice. This time when I raised her, she only hissed between her teeth, but did not cry when I got her to her feet, slung her arm around my shoulders-which was a reach for her-and put my arm around her waist.

She hissed again and groaned once.

"Sorry, That," I said. "Sin loi." I hated to hurt her.

She turned her face to me and on it was the biggest smile I had ever seen. She was walking. It hurt, but she was walking and she hadn't ever thought she'd do that again, the smile said. We made the route twice. In a couple of weeks the drain could come out and with a little help she could go home, wherever that was.

"Hey, Joe, look at That!" I said. Joe looked up and waved.

"Numbah one, mamasan!" he called to That from Xe's bed. "You gonna run footraces pretty soon."

Krupman straightened and glared.

Joe made rounds for three more days. Krupman usually made it just in time for the rounds on the GI side, but was unavoidably detained elsewhere when it came time to examine the Vietnamese. Even when Joe was not technically on duty, during the three out-processing days, Krupman didn't make rounds on the Vietnamese ward, despite our having a flock of new casualties, though he spent a lot of time patiently explaining back exercises to the incapacitated clerk-typist from Marine headquarters.

The day Joe got on the plane, however, I returned from lunch and saw that the new doctor had finally deigned to visit the Vietnamese ward long enough to stack a pile of charts where I could take off the orders.

The first chart was that of an old man with a fractured collarbone and possible pneumonia. He had had his arm in a sling and had had I.V.

antibiotics for the last day or so. The new order said "Discharge," as did the orders on the charts of a girl with multiple shrapnel wounds to her lower body and a fractured humerus. The third discharge order was for Lieutenant Long, and already his bed was neatly made up and his bedside table cleared.

"Mai, did you see somebody take this order off already?" I asked, puzzled, since as the only nurse on the shift I was the only one who could pass along the orders to be carried out.

"No, Kitty. Chung Wi Long, he hear Dr. Krupman say, 'Send that man away, is no more we can do for him." Chung Wi Long go."

"Go? Where can he go?"

Mai just looked unhappy.

"Does he have family here, Mai?"

Mai looked even more miserable and finally she mumbled that she supposed he must, and left.

"Sarge, Lieutenant Long just took off and Mai doesn't know where he's gone."

"Oh, yes, ma'am. Major Krupman said he could go. Only he didn't exactly put it like that."

"Go where? He's got one leg and no family around here anymore. He said they were all wiped out at Tet last year. Where could he have gone?"

Baker gave me a long look. It said I'd had a sheltered life and didn't understand much about people with no choices. It said what did I think happened to former Vietnamese officers with no family and wounds that left them helpless and dependent.

"Beats the hell out of me, ma'am," was all Baker said.

My hand went to my brass rosettes and my eyes swam as I opened the fourth chart, Dang Thi That's. "Transfer to Province Vietnamese Hospital," the order said.

I cleaned and dressed That's wound, helped her use her trapeze to swing herself free of the bed, and walked her, deliberately waiting until Krupman arrived the next day to talk to him about his preposterous orders.

He beat me to it. "What are these people still doing here, nurse? I have written orders that they were to be discharged."

"Xuan and Dinh are waiting for someone from their village to collect them, sir," I said. They might be waiting, but their village was near Tam Ky and their relatives had no idea how to locate them.

"How about the old woman?"

"I wanted to talk to you about her, sir. That's been making great progress-I'm sure Dr. Giangelo told you how hard we've worked with her, how hard she's worked, but she's not quite healed yet and-"

"Lieutenant, I am the physician here. I make that determination," he said, despite the fact that he had yet to examine her. "She's on her feet. She's well enough to go to her own facility and give up her much needed space to a deserving Gi."

"Sir, we haven't had to admit GIs to this side since I've been here and the census isn't especially high right now. We don't need the bed.

There are four empty beds-"

"I've given you an order, lieutenant. I expect it to be carried out. Do I make myself clear?"

"But, sir, when you've been in country awhile and seen what Province Hospital is like-"

"See here, young woman, I'm not listening to any more of these crappy war stories by you so-called old-timers. I want that woman out of here and I want her out of here now. Sergeant!"

He was talking to Baker. "Yes, sir," Baker said. "Voorhees!"

Voorhees dropped the thermometer he was about to put in Dinh's mouth.

"Sergeant?"

"You heard the doctor. Get an ambulance and transfer the patient in bed four to Province Hospital ASAP."

"Yes, sir."

I glared at Sergeant Baker, but he didn't meet my gaze.

Voorhees moved slowly, rebelliously, but he was up for promotion, so he got the ambulance and he got the stretcher and he started loading Dang Thi That onto it. I went over to help, to try to reassure her. I don't remember where Mai was, but she wasn't there to translate or I would have tried to find someone else, a friend, a relative, to let them know about That's departure. I took her hand and said, "New doctor say you well, mamasan. Send you Province Hospital."

I hadn't gotten the words out of my mouth before she grasped my arm with both hands, digging in frantically with her fingernails. Her face, which had reflected slow and agonizing suffering for so long, was suddenly suffused with terror. "No, co! No!" She started climbing my arms, crying and begging. "Kitty, no-" Her eyes pleaded with me to change things, not to betray the hope and trust I had-we all hadencouraged her to have in us.

I held on to the stretcher, but Voorhees was pulling it away. That's nails grazed my arms as her hands lost their grip. Sergeant Baker tugged gently at my shoulders. "Come on, Lieutenant. No need to get hysterical over this," he said. "How many ladies like her you think are out there ain't had nobody to look after them?"

"No, Kitty! No!" That cried, but now Voorhees, who looked about to cry himself, was patting her and trying to calm her. He pulled the cart away from me and rolled her down the hall. I looked after them.

Voorhees was still comforting, but That was silent now, her arms folded across her chest, her streaming eyes turned toward the ceiling.

I whirled around to glare at Krupman, but the bastard hadn't had the guts to stick around and hear her cry, so I glared at Baker instead.

"Thanks for the backup, Sarge," I said sarcastically.

"Don't go gettin' hurry on me, L.T. I just saved your butt. That doctor outranks both of us, and he said she goes, she goes. I didn't like it neither, but this is a war we got going' on here. Lkts of folks got less chance than Mrs. Dang out there on their own. At least he sent her to the hospital."

"You heard what Voorhees said about that place! She'll die there and she knows it." I was still shaking, so I concentrated on licking my finger and smudging the bloody tracks That's nails had left on my arms.

"You don't know no such thing, ma'am. It's the place these people would go to if we weren't here. They got their own ways, you know."

"I guess so," I said, and turned away because I didn't want him to see me crying. I was sitting at the desk watering the charts when I felt something warm close by. I turned slightly and Ahn leaned against me, nodding his head wisely, his eyes filled, not with fear, but with a mixture of cynicism and the sort of pity an adult gives a child the first time the child has a toy his father can't fix.

We got in a push of GIs later that week, and Krupman was too busy enjoying being a combat physician to banish any more of the native patients. I did my job and was barely polite, but as I worked with him that week and the next I couldn't help realizing that with the GIs he was a good doctor, caring, skillful, and thorough. I had to close my eyes and see That's face to remind myself what an ass he was. But I was beginning to be almost able to stand the man when Voorhees returned from the orphanage.

"We stopped by Province Hospital on the way back, Lieutenant," he said.

I was afraid to ask but I did anyway. "Did you see That? How is she?"

,,She died a few days after she was admitted. Wound infection."

"Shit," I said, but that was all.

Mai returned from her daily shampoo in time to hear me. "What the mattah?" she asked, looking from me to Voorhees.

He told her.

I just sat there, and when I started to move, I felt as if I'd had a great big novocaine shot that affected my entire body.

Behind me, I heard the Vietnamese talking, but I didn't pay any attention. When it was time for dressings, I missed doing That's as I had every day since she'd left. Forty patients on the census, and I missed dressing one hollow hip.

When it was Xe's turn, I bent over to dress his stumps and felt his hands come up at the sides of my head. The numbness there began sliding away, and a deep ache replaced it.

"What are you doing?" I snapped, but then I looked at him to find in his face a perfect counterpart of my own pain and sense of failure. And I knew what had been slowly killing him. We were in the same boat, but his was sinking faster. We were both there to help, and he, who according to Heron had once been so much more powerful than I, was now even more powerless.

His hands, transparent as paper, hovered on either side of my head and he ignored my question but kept watching me. Something silken and balmlike touched the burning edges of the ache, then fell away. The sorrow in his eyes deepened even as he lowered his hands.

But the ache in my head receded and the numbness returned.

I walked away from the hospital, the cold afternoon drizzle soaking through my uniform. I didn't even bother with my poncho. I went straight to the club and knocked back three straight tequilas. The tequilas weren't so much to bolster my courage as to tranquilize me so I didn't attack Krupman with my bare hands. Usually booze just makes me sleepy, but that night I had to quit drinking before I calmed down.

The anger swelled up inside me till there was no longer room to swallow.

I wanted Krupman to come into the club. I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to ream him out in front of everybody. But he didn't come, the bastard, so I staggered over to his hooch and stood there pounding on the screen while rivulets of water poured off my boonie hat and down my arms. The doctor was inside, headphones enveloping his ears while his reel-to-reel deck rolled shiny tape from one cylinder to another. He looked up, and no one could accuse him of undue sensitivity or second sight.

"What is it, lieutenant?" he asked, almost amiably. "An emergency?"

"Not exactly," I said. "I just wanted to give you something to celebrate. I thought you'd like to know that poor woman you sent to Province Hospital accommodated you by dying. That seems to be what you wanted-"

He had lifted the headphones when I started to talk; now he tore them off his head and flung them on his bunk. "I didn't want anything one way or the other, lieutenant. I just didn't give up my practice to treat slants." He picked up a photo of a group of people, and I admit I didn't register what they looked like because I thought he might be planning on using it as a weapon. "You see this boy in uniform here?

That's my baby brother. He volunteered to be an American adviser and help these goddamn people and they let him walk into an ambush.

"I came over here to help boys like him and keep them from dying in this idiotic war. How people like that Giangelo guy and you can make pets out of the locals when you see what they do to your own people is a mystery to me, but as long as I'm in charge of orthopedics we are treating Americans, and the gooks can take care of their own. I'll tell you something else, lieutenant"-his face was perfectly calm through all this and his voice was as even as a numbed-out marine's, though not as loud-"as soon as I have a little free time from the men who need me, I'm going to clean that place out, starting with those panhandlers who've been using up American medical supplies for the past few months. So you might as well start getting used to it."

He slammed the screen, then the inner door, in my face. As the door slammed, I saw him slip his headphones back on.

I could have pounded all night and been hauled off by the MPs, I suppose, but instead I sloshed back through the rain to the club to continue getting drunk. It wasn't my day. Tony was there. I hadn't seen him in weeks, except coming and going a couple of times from Julie's hooch. Carole had mentioned that they'd broken up and that Tony had cornered her and Tom to cry on their shoulders.

"Kitty, I have to talk to you-"

"Not now," I snapped. "Not ever. Let me alone, Tony. Take whatever you've got to say and put it in a letter to your wife."

"Don't be that way, babe. I didn't know it mattered to you. You were seeing jake when I met you."

"I was not 'seeing' jake," I began and then was just too tired to finish. "Look, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk to you."

"Baby, I miss you. We're getting fired on all the time now. I almost got creamed last time." From his tone and the slight tremble of his perfect fingers around his drink, I thought he meant it this time.

Usually, despite his fondness for military melodrama, Tony had as much faith in his own immortality as most of my patients had before they qualified as patients. But I, for one, did not give a shit what he believed.

"Tony, I'm sorry about that, but I have a few other things on my mind, all right? I'm cold and wet and I just finished talking to a so called physician who cheerfully accepted that he murdered one of my patients and intends to go on murdering them, all perfectly legally and with the Army's blessings, because he blames my patients and maybe me for the death of his brother."

"He killed your patient?"

"Yes. It was Dang Thi That."

"The old lady with the hip?"

"I'm surprised you remembered. You never liked me to talk about my patients, if I recall. They weren't as interesting as your goddamn helicopters."

"Okay, okay, I deserve that, I guess. Carole tried to tell me a little how you felt, and believe me, I never thought you were cheap or anything. It's just, we were so good together I couldn't see why you couldn't just be happy with that. Why dwell on the war all the time?"

"I wasn't talking about the goddamn war. I was talking about my patients. The same way you talk about your fuckin' helicopters. It's my work and-and that bastard is destroying everything......... I started bawling again, and could have shot myself for it.

But Tony had made up his mind to be charming, and I had forgotten how good at it he could be. He ran his hand up the back of my neck and kneaded, comfortingly, warmingly. "God, babe, I'm sorry. Tell me about it, come on. Let's go back to your place, or you won't be in any shape to do anyone any good."

I stopped crying before I told him because I didn't want to give him an excuse to hold me, much as I wanted to be held. He was unexpectedly concerned, however, and I remembered that a lot of my patients had been his patients first, in a way. He had delivered them. And Tony was a lot of things I didn't like, but for Vietnam, he wasn't much of a racist.

"Now he says he's going to do the same thing to the others-"

"Can't you head him off?"

"How?"

"I don't know. Where are they from?"

Somewhere near Tam Ky."

"Okay, I'll check it out. If we can get some relatives up here, your patients will have someone to look after them at Province anyway."

He was talking about an awfully long shot and we both knew it. Uninjured Vietnamese were even lower priority than injured ones.

"Christ," I said. "It's like triage. It's bad enough for the new people, but old Xe and Ahn . . ." He reached over and stroked my cheek with that beautiful hand and gave me a melting look from those beautiful eyes and I almost fell into his arms. But I wasn't about to. Maybe he wasn't a complete rat, but That's death was the issue here, not my sex life or his.

"Don't they have anyone?"

"Nobody. Ahn's an orphan and Xe-Tony, do you know a Special Forces type named Heron?"

"Heron, Heron . . . no, babe. Sorry. I don't-sounds familiar, but .

. ." He let his arms raise and drop and the pungency of his sweat rose up between us from the darkened green patches under the arms of his fatigue shirt.

"Will you ask around for me? Please? He's a friend of the old man's.

He got sent back to the field, but he might be able to pull some strings and get Xe sent home. But I don't know what to do about Ahn. If Marge were here she'd know what to do."

"Where is she?"

"In Quang Ngai, with her buddy Hal, who runs the hospital. If she hadn't left, that bastard Krupman would never have gotten away with this."

"She knows the kid, Ahn, huh?"

"Sure. She knew all the long-term patients. Ahn's not so sick, but his stump isn't all that healed over yet, even though he has that prosthesis Joe cobbled out of an old crutch. We've been waiting for a real prosthesis."

"He'd just sell it on the black market," Tony said.

I started to swing on him.

"Okay, okay."

"I'm sorry. You're right. But he doesn't have any place to go or any chance."

"You could say that about half of Vietnam."

"Yeah, well, half of Vietnam doesn't call me mamasan. Tony, I can't let him die like That, I just can't. Shit. If only Marge were around."

"Well, hell, if she's the answer to everything, why not take the kid down to her?"

"I can't. I-"

"I could. I go down there every once in a while. We could go down and visit your friend and you could drop the kid off."

"Is that-I mean, is it okay to carry a Vietnamese civilian?"

"I do it all the time." He grinned. "Part of my job description, babe, remember? And why do you care about okay? You're the one who needs to get around regs now. just tell me when to pick you up."

"Well, I couldn't go-I mean, I'm on duty."

"You could go after, couldn't you? You're head nurse now. Rewrite the schedule. Give yourself a day off. Nobody will know. I'll have you back day after tomorrow night, and if not, hell, what can they do, send you to Vietnam?"

"But couldn't you just find Marge once you get there and get her to admit Ahn?"

"Baby, I don't give a shit about Ahn, or Marge. I'm in this for ulterior motives, remember? I want my best girl back."

"Tony, you're married," I said wearily. "And you lied to me about it."

"Well, so what? She's not here and you are. Is it a deal or not?"

That's face flashed in front of me again and Ahn's sad, knowing eyes as Tony's scent smoked up my nostrils and his hand brushed my cheek again.

"What you say, babe? Deal? Huh?"

"Okay."

"Seal it with a kiss?" His mouth came close to mine and his arms slid up mine.

"Tony, believe it or not, I'm just not in the mood right now."

He grinned. "I bic, baby. That's okay. I know a guy in Quang Ngai I can kick out of his hooch for the night. See you tomorrow."

'Tony?"

"Yeah?"

"You think this will work?"

"Sho 'nuer, baby. No sweat."

The atmosphere on the ward the next morning was as dismal as the weather. Navy-gray clouds rolled in from the South China Sea like tons of concrete, dropping rain in thick splats. The din of rain on a tin roof can be rather pleasant if you're inside. But combine the din with the discordant notes of those same drops plonking into basins and bedpans inside your shelter and the cursing of personnel tripping over the basins, and it's too noisy to think.

Sergeant Baker glowered at me when I came in and Voorhees declined to meet my eyes. I made old Xe's bed with him in it that morning. He was still asleep when I brought his medication, but his respirations were loud enough to be heard from several feet away over the rain. His chest sounded like a rattle. Ahn sat in bed and watched, his eyes as round as if he'd never seen anyone sick or hurt before. I thought again how quickly he had begun to act like a normal child. I wondered if I had done him any favors by convincing him that he could afford the luxury of a childhood, however brief.

The sheets I bunched under the old man were damp. Ahn slid out of bed, grabbed his crutches, and helped me. Watching Mai and the corpsmen, he'd learned to make hospital corners as sharp as any probationer's, and while he tucked, I rolled Xe toward me. When I rolled him onto his back again, his eyes were open-one of them, anyway. The other lid drooped heavily over the eye and the side of his mouth tugged at the corner. I grabbed a blood pressure cuff, but there was no particular change. At some point, while he slept, Xe had had a stroke.

It could have happened to anybody his age, but combined with his amputations and the rattle in his lungs, it was ominous.

"Aw, shit," I muttered, half to myself, half to Ahn, who had moved to my side and was watching the old man as if he might explode. "Now I have to call Krupman in early." I couldn't help but take a hard look at Ahn.

"No, mamasan, no call bac si. He cat ca dao papasan, same-same Ba That, Mamasan, you make papasan numbah one."

"No can do, Ahn. Sin loi," I said, and started for the phone as Ahn continued his protests in ever-shriller Vietnamese. Xe's right hand curled over his chest like a claw, but his left one whipped out and grabbed my arm in a viselike grip.

He moved his mouth, but nothing save a dribble of spittle emerged.

"What did he say, Ahn?" I asked. "Does he need anything?"

"Papasan say he fini pretty quick."

"Give me a break, kid. You sound like Krupman now."

The right hand stayed hovering over the chest, but the left one steered my hand to the old man's neck and the theng, and my fingers found the amulet. Together we steered it back to its place over his sternum, and his good hand clamped mine over his bad one and the amulet. A violet-gray light oozed from him like a slowly spreading hematoma. I started to check his pupils, but suddenly life-real, knowing, painful life-leaped back into his good eye like a revived candle flame and focused on me. I felt as though we had clasped hands across a deep crevasse. I had seen, felt, such a thing from patients before, when they prepared to die, especially those who couldn't talk-this is who I am, remember me, it said. But never before with the bruising strength of will that flowed from Xe. In those eyes were my grandfather, great-grandmother, my favorite teachers at their wisest, my mother and father, Charlie Heron as I had last seen him, and another, stronger presence, a man who had been young and whom the war had made old, a man who had been even more than he was now-much more-and who was finally losing what was left. Those eyes held me fast, and then the power and the personality drained from them until only a stagnant pool was left in the good eye, which wearily closed for a moment.

I hugged Ahn close to me with my free hand. Papasan breathed a deep sigh and opened his eye to fix it on us. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then the side of his mouth that was not drooping downward twitched up. His good hand nudged mine toward his chin.

"Xe want you take his joolry, mamasan. Same-same last time."

I rallied from the impact of that compelling stare, which had made me feel almost that I was Xe instead of me. I couldn't stop to think about it until after I'd taken his pulse, called the doctor, done what I could to preserve his life. I tried to untangle my hand from his so I could take his pulse. Refusing to release my hand, however, Xe carried it with him as he nudged at his amulet again. I had to take a set of vital signs before Krupman arrived, so I did as Xe insisted and removed the amulet. If Xe died, my logical side insisted I'd save it for Heron. I was just kidding myself-I knew there was more to it than that-but for Xe it was enough that I took it. He didn't insist I wear it this time, and as soon as I stuck it in my pocket, he relaxed.

Krupman had barely begun his examination when Xe expired.

"Well, Miss McCulley," Krupman said, "looks like your hangover from your little toot last night prevented you from giving decent care even to your pet gooks. He's dead. Perhaps if I'd been called sooner-"

"If you'd been called sooner you could have sent him to Province to die, right?" I demanded.

"That's it!" he said. "I've put up with you about long enough, young lady. You're earning yourself an Article 14."

I bit back what I would have said if I could have afforded to spend my afternoon at attention in Blaylock's office.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," I said more meekly than I would have thought possible. "But I called you as soon as I could. I didn't want to leave the patient alone." Yeah, Doctor. Unlike you, I care about my patients.

"I want those other people out of here by tomorrow morning. And I'm discharging the amputee kid."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't agree with him or he'd be alarmed, and since I already knew what I was going to do, I had no reason to disagree with him. So I shut up.

"Lieutenant?"

'Sir?"

"I mean it. I expect these patients to be gone when I return in the morning."

"Yes, sir," I said, and did busy work on the other side until he left the ward to go to surgery and heal the patients who deserved treatment.

Tricking Voorhees wasn't necessary. Fortunately, Sergeant Baker had a long ward masters' meeting and a farewell party for the command sergeant major of the hospital. So I refrained from telling the corpsmen about the transfer until the end of the shift. Then I gave the fastest report in nursing history and announced that I was going to ride along in the Jeep. But as Voorhees and I rolled Ahn's wheelchair out the door of the E.R. toward the motor pool, Tony landed. He cut it a little close to suit me, but he was there.

"Oh, wait a minute, Gus, will you?" I said. "Tony will want to say good-bye to Ahn."

I had to shout over the ripple of the blades. The spin and wind of them blew rainwater everywhere and lifted my poncho up over my face.

"What's going on, L.T.?" Voorhees shouted, trailing me to the pad. I helped Ahn out of the wheelchair and handed him his crutch. I didn't want to get Voorhees in trouble, but then, it wouldn't be so great if he reported me as AWOL the minute we left the pad.

I leaned over and cupped my hands to the corpsman's ear and shouted,

"We're taking Ahn to Major Canon in Quang Ngai."

He shouted into my ear, "Krupman will have your ass."

I shouted back, "No way. He just wants the kid gone, bic?"

Voorhees seemed to think this over for a split second, then pulled back and gave me a wide grin and a thumbs-up sign. "All right."

I climbed aboard the chopper, pulling Ahn in after me. Lightfoot, Tony's crew chief, handed me a pair of earphones, and the avalanche of noise around me dulled to a vibrating thunder. A splatter of CB-style radio talk passed between Tony and the ground and then we lifted off the pad like a pregnant hummingbird.

"Welcome aboard, babe." Tony's distorted voice crackled into the mike.

"Want to sit up front? It's more comfortable."

"Nah, I'd better stay back here with the kid in case he gets scared."

"A gook kid? Scared of a little chopper ride? You gotta be shittin'

me." But he didn't repeat the offer. Lightfoot knelt by the open door, watching the country go by. Gusts of rain swept in and I tugged my poncho tight around both Ahn and me for warmth.

Tony kept to the coastline at first, the sky drab pewter, the beach pale, the rain and sea shiny, and the jungle a brilliant ribbon of variegated green. Perfect squares of fishnets were suspended above the water all along the coast, isolated from the shoreline. I wondered how they caught fish in them. Ahn kept shouting curious questions at Lightfoot, who grinned and pointed at things.

I settled down amid the olive-drab-painted metal and webbing. Whew. So far so good. We were getting away with it. A little rush of excitement and anxiety zipped through my nervous system, only to be replaced by depression. Out of all those people I'd cared for all those months, I could save just one. Maybe. Xinh gone, That gone, and now Xe. When that guy said war was hell, he wasn't just whistling Dixie. I was racking up a body count a marine would envy. Ahn flipped water from a fold in my poncho and smoothed it across my lap, before laying his head in it and falling asleep.

Seeing little but sea, most of my hearing blunted by the roar in my earphones and the occasional staticity chatter, I soon grew sleepy, too.

Some time later, Tony's voice crackled in my ear. "Hey, babe?"

"Yeah?" I mumbled into the mouthpiece.

"You know that guy you told me to ask about-Heron?"

"Yes," I said, a little more alert. Heron would want to know about Xe.

He'd be glad I saved the amulet. Even if he didn't want to use it himself, he'd know who should have it.

"I kinda found out and I kinda didn't. He's off in the field somewhere, but the mission is classified, no contact. Sorry 'bout that."

And after another minute, "Babe? You okay?"

"Yeah, sure, I'm fine, Tony. The old man died earlier today, did I tell you that? I just wish Heron could have been around." I fingered the cloth of my pants pocket where the amulet lay. The headphones went staticity-silent for a moment, and then Tony was humming "The 59th Street Bridge Song."

I was sleeping again when we got hit. I felt the chopper lurch and snapped awake, thinking for a moment we'd landed. It was too noisy to hear the round striking the bird. But when my eyes flew open, I saw Ahn's head raise up for a split second. His eyes glittered like a trapped animal's then his skinny little arms covered his burr crew cut and he curled into a protective ball.

The round hadn't wakened Lightfoot and I thought it should have. Surely when Tony started dodging bullets the crew chief would have duties. And sure enough, Tony's voice called, "Tonto? Hey there, kemo pabe-Ben?"

and he started to turn around. But I realized it was too dark for him to see anything and too dangerous for him to let go of the controls, so I unbuckled myself and crawled over to the crew chief, shaking his foot to wake him, as I had learned to do with the combat troops.

The foot flopped and I noticed that one of Lightfoot's arms was dangling out the door. I thought we ought to close that sucker anyway. I started to tug on him, and then I noticed the blood on his chest. I dragged him in and felt for a pulse, found none. I didn't expect to.

"Lightfoot's hit," I told Tony. "I think he's had it."

"Well, do CPR, for Chrissakes, while I try to find Quang Ngai.........

I was way ahead of him, working on Lightfoot even as I tried to remember what I'd been drilled on with a plastic doll but had never had to do to a human being-clear the airway, tilt the head back, pinch his nose, take a deep breath, and cover his mouth with mine. His mouth smelled sour, and when my finger came away from feeling for the airway, it was smeared with blood. I breathed in anyway, and pumped on his chest, but all that did was force more blood out the mouth and the wound. God, Lightfoot, you could give a girl a little help here, I thought, but I knew I was working on a dead man.

"Get away from the goddamn door," Tony barked over the roar. I started to haul Lightfoot with me, but he was a big man, awfully heavy, and his foot caught on some webbing. Then the chopper lurched again and outside I saw a red tracer round streak past us. I couldn't help but remember what they'd said in basic about the red cross on medevac choppers making such a great target.

I was trying to dislodge Lightfoot's boot from a piece of webbed strap when another round hit, and Lightfoot's body jerked again. The chopper lurched and I fell backward as another round exploded through the metal floor of the chopper's belly, right behind me, and another. I abandoned Lightfoot and grabbed for Ahn, huddling against the metal pole that held the rotor.

The rounds kept coming and Tony was trying to fly us out of range, but something was wrong with the rhythm of the blades. Even I could tell that. Instead of a steady "thucka-thucka-thucka" there was a jarring grind every few beats. I lifted my earphones. I could feel the chopper's damaged heartbeat through the floor, through the walls, through my skin, and deep inside my guts-my hips and the backs of my thighs tightened every time that beat missed, every time a round hit.

Ahn grabbed for my neck like a drowning boy just as the chopper wallowed onto its side, the open door yawning beneath my boots. Lightfoot's body was lodged between me and the opening or I would have fallen out then.

Somehow we had left the ocean and were now heading over tall elephant grass toward an endless tangle of trees.

The taste of Lightfoot's blood in my mouth made me want to vomit, but Ahn had hold of me and I had grabbed on to one of those webbed straps and was pulling myself up as Tony righted the chopper.

"You okay, babe?" Tony's voice, crackly and almost unrecognizable, came through the earphones.

"Yeah-I think so," I said. Okay considering the circumstances. I fumbled as I talked. The wire to the headphones had wound around my neck and the mouthpiece, and I had to untangle it and pry Ahn loose before I could move freely.

"Kid too?"

"Him too. How about you? You okay?"

"That's affirmative."

I drew a deep breath. Good. Tony would get us out of this. He had been in plenty of scrapes before. This was only going to be a tragic delay. Everything was under control.

"Babe?"

"Yeah?"

"Listen, there's a field of elephant grass up ahead. I want you to push the kid out and jump, got it?"

"Jump?"

"Do it, dammit."

"Yeah, but What about him? He must have some idea how to maneuver the bird to safety but couldn't do it with us aboard. He wouldn't ask us to leave unless he had a plan. He'd get us out of this somehow. He wanted to get laid, didn't he?

The chopper jerked and shuddered over the elephant grass, and blades licked the sides of the open door. Ahn clutched me convulsively. I crawled over Lightfoot's body, trying not to step on him, wishing I didn't have a corpse to stumble over.

The broad grassy valley swept beneath us, the elephant grass rippling from the wind of our blades, spewing rainwater everywhere. The patients had shown me pictures of themselves in the elephant grass. The grass, which looked so soft, stood a good three feet above the heads of the tallest men.

The chopper convulsed and Ahn twisted away from me and dove through the door, the end of his crutch peg leg disappearing last. I grabbed for him-he couldn't jump with just one leg like that, surely -but the headphones tugged on my ears. I ripped them off and turned to set them behind me and saw Tony turn and rise in his seat, his mouth forming a scream: "Jump!,, From overhead came a horrible grinding and the floor fell out from under me as a blade sheered through the front windshield, metal, controls, and all, and through Tony, vertically, spraying me with his blood and burning me with its speed as it brushed past me and cut into the floor.

I didn't have to jump. The floor was somewhere to my right and down a foot or so and the chopper in a roll. I tumbled through the open door, scraping against the raw edges of the new holes in the red cross on the chopper's belly and dropping past the remaining prop, still swinging like some berserker's sword blade as it sliced the air and grass where my body had been just before.

The ground smacked up with a bone-jarring thud, and for a moment I was caught between the hard ground and a flattening wind as the chopper crashed past me, mowing a path through the elephant grass before exploding with a roar of flame and shrapnel that made the ground buck up under me again. The stench of hot grease, hot metal, and gasoline and the stomach-churning stink of burning flesh boiled into my eyes and nostrils, so I started choking and crying at the same time. One of the chopper blades poked out of the flames like the handle of a saucepan from a campfire.

I don't know how long I gasped and coughed and watched the billowing black smoke from watering eyes before the full impact of what was happening hit me in a shock wave harder than the blast of the crash.

All at once I took it in, along with the smoke, along with the heat of the flames, along with the rain: this was not me overdramatizing, this was not a movie, a joke, a stunt, or a nightmare. Tony was not going to come walking from the flames. What I had seen before I fell meant that he had died before the chopper caught fire. It's hard to scream when you're gasping for breath and gagging on the air, but a scream swelled up inside me and started to force its way out my open mouth. Maybe it was because that's what women always do in the movies, but I had to cry Tony's name, had to keen for him A bony arm slammed between my teeth.

"Em dil co," Ahn pleaded, his voice a low hiss. His all too familiar tears were coursing down his cheeks again, and the sight of his frightened face jerked me back to my own responsibilities, which were to the living, Ahn and me. Tony would be really pissed if he knew I blew the chance he gave us by screeching our position to whoever had fired on us, or got roasted in the Vietnamese equivalent of a prairie fire while paying noisy homage to his memory.

Ahn already had his arms around my neck and I hoisted him up, piggyback, and ran for the trees. Every time my foot hit the ground I thought about land mines and unexploded bombs and trip wires. Every yard closer to the trees I wondered who was in them, if we were already in the cross hairs of a sniper's rifle or were running into a Vietcong ambush.

Part Two: The jungle

I tried to think what to do, where to go. In the States I would lwalt calmly by the wreck to be rescued. Here I might not want to meet the fire department, if it did come. Quang Ngai had to be around here somewhere-maybe a few miles, maybe more-but I didn't even know my directions here. And I couldn't remember what the hell it was the sun did, except that at noon it was in the middle of the sky and at night it disappeared, if it bothered to appear during the day at all, during monsoon season. VC would be all over the jungle, probably, but they'd see us even quicker in the high grass, if they hadn't already. I was glad Ahn had kept me from screaming. No need to announce that all of the occupants of our chopper hadn't perished.

Thinking about that put me in a funk again and I stopped, a little inside the forest, and stared off into space, my mind floating for a while. I wished I could float my body right after it and float away.

When I looked down, Ahn was looking up at me anxiously, and also somewhat speculatively. I frowned down at him. He was probably calculating how much an Army nurse captive would bring him from the VC.

The Army had warned all of us girls that we absolutely mustn't allow ourselves to be captured-in case any of us had been considering doing so for kicks, I guess. The propaganda value would be too great, they said.

They would waste too many lives trying to get us back, they said. And, oh yes, the enemy would do terrible things to us. No doubt. I shivered and backed off a pace from Ahn, whose face suddenly broke into one of his monkeyish mugs as he began to cry in earnest.

I pulled him to me and smothered his sobs against my fatigue shirt, as much for both our safety as his comfort. Poor kid. He'd already learned that his own parents weren't omnipotent enough to prevent their deaths and his injuries. just when I'd made him feel safe and cared for, my grand plan to protect "my" patient had landed us both in this godawful mess, had cost Tony and Lightfoot their lives. I wanted to comfort Ahn but I started crying too.

We couldn't stumble through the jungle crying. We'd get blown up or caught for sure. Besides, I didn't want to get too far from the chopper wreck. Maybe it would draw some of our guys to see what happened. And I had the vague idea that maybe, after the smoke had cleared and things had cooled down, I'd find something in the wreckage that would help us.

All I had with me besides Ahn was my poncho and my ditty bag, still tied around my belt loop, where I hung it when I didn't want to risk leaving it behind but wanted to keep my hands free.

I dug into it and pulled out a bag of M&M's, tilted Ahn's head back, and popped one in his mouth. "There, babysan, numbah one, eh?"

He wouldn't be comforted but chewed and cried at the same time.

"Look, honey, I couldn't agree with you more, but we have to do something."

The obvious answer was directly overhead, in the branches of the trees, which I figured, despite my conviction that everything in this jungle was out to kill me, would be the best possible cover. After all, hundreds of VC snipers couldn't be wrong, could they?

I pointed up to Ahn and gave him a boost. He shook his head and pointed to his makeshift prosthesis. I cut the bandage away with my scissors, and immediately realized I should have unwound the gauze and tape instead and saved what I could. God alone knew what we were going to need before we were-before whatever was going to happen to us happened.

With the bandage gone, I gave him a boost and he grabbed on to the lower limb and swung up on it like the monkey he resembled when he cried.

There was plenty of vegetation to use for foot and handholds and I was not many years removed from my treeclimbing days on the elm in my parents' yard, so I scrambled up after him and urged him to a higher branch.

We settled in like a pair of geese trying to roost where the hawks would least expect to see us. I fed Ahn another couple of M&M's and started to put them back without having any myself, since I was going to go on a diet. Then I remembered where I was and popped two, hewing them mechanically, looking out toward the red and black of the monsoon-drenched blaze. Though the area right around the chopper was still burning pretty hot, the elephant grass had charred out a fair distance from the wreck and died out, so at least we wouldn't be fried in our sleep.

Ahn had snuggled into a crook of a branch and fallen asleep. My bulk wasn't so'easily accommodated. At least we were out of the rain, though we were both soaked from the grass. I thought of Tony, and of what we should have been doing right now-and I thought about all the things I would have done for him before, all those little things he liked so much, if only I had known. But who would have thought such a chickenshit would turn hero on me like that? My mind was racing too much to sleep, I was too scared, too relieved to be alive, too worried, too bewildered, too aggrieved. My nerves were jumping along the back of my neck, down my spine. Or was that bugs? There were certainly enough of those in the tree, though by and large the rain kept them from being too fierce as long as it lasted.

My ditty bag contained a change of dressing for Ahn; three bags of M&M's, one plain, two peanut; a can of shoestring potatoes; six packets of fizzles; a comb; lipstick; change of underpants; and wallet. My fatigue pants held adhesive tape, scissors, scraps of notes I'd written to myself, a discarded medicine card, a small flashlight, pens, a pencil, several I.V. needles and a couple of syringes I'd neglected to discard, and Xe's amulet.

A spasm of bitterness swept over me as I fingered it. My mother hadn't warned me about days like this. She'd never dreamed there could he days this bad: starting with Xe's death, ending with Tony's and Lightfoot's, and me, an unathletic, very conspicuous uniformed woman, stranded with a one-legged child she could barely talk to in terrain she hadn't the foggiest idea how to handle. Where were all those goddamn marines when you really needed them?

I fell asleep wondering how I was going to explain Tony's death to his wife-I would have to do that, I figured, if I got out of this all right.

I owed him that-or maybe that was exactly what I didn't owe him. No, no, I could lie and say I was medical escort for a critically injured child Tony was flying to emergency care and-oh, what the hell. How was the Army going to explain my death to my family? At least Ahn didn't have that kind of problem.

I'd been turning the amulet over in my hand like one of those jade egg-shaped worry stones I got in Taiwan. The worn old glass reminded me of Xe and the hospital and safety and of Charlie Heron, burned out and idealistic at the same time. I slipped it around my neck. It hadn't been such hot luck for either one of them, but Xe had died an old man at least. Anyway, it couldn't hurt. I fell asleep with it around my neck, my thumb tracing its smooth contours.

I slept very poorly. The foliage had shielded us from the worst of the rain initially, but soon the wind changed direction and we were taking the full force of it. The poncho kept blowing up over our heads. And I had fitful half-dreams full of fear that I would make noise and reveal our position, and self-reproach that I really didn't seem to feel all that much about Tony and Lightfoot dying. Why wasn't I grieving?

Tony and I had been lovers for three months. He given his life to save ours-well, for the time being at least.

And instead of thinking nice thoughts to send him to heaven with, an ungrateful bitch inside me kept muttering, Women and children first, huh? Thanks a lot, Tony. Now what do I do? You're the one with the survival training, the combat conditioning, all that good shit. What am I supposed to do when people try to kill me? Punch 'em with my bandage scissors? My recruiter told me this would never happen to me. The Army wouldn't let it-guess we outsmarted the Army, buh?

They probably told you you'd never get knocked off those gorgeous pins of yours by a helicopter prop either. And I would try to make myself cry, forcing up memories of those long legs storking about my hooch as he sipped a beer or smoked a joint, the smell of his skin, the feel of his curls, the way he felt inside me. Funnily, all I could remember of his eyes right then was those damned mirrored shades.

I knew it was healthy to cry, and this might be my only chance, but I just kept wondering hopelessly how we were going to get out of there.

How I didn't even have the pioneer woman's traditional last round to use on myself if capture became inevitable. And even if we never saw a VC, what would we eat? Where would we sleep? How would we keep from being blown to pieces by all of the things that were all the time blowing my patients to pieces? And we would get nowhere fast-Ahn's prosthesis, which worked well enough on the level concrete floors of the hospital, was going to be a problem in mud and rough terrain.

I opened my eyes in the middle of this rambling anxiety attack passing itself off as a dream and realized that I must have been sleeping in spite of everything. It was now fully night, with a steady hard pour.

Across the elephant grass the chopper sat in a blackened circle, glowing with heat and little interior fires. And around it other things glowed, like huge fireflies. I could see the lights clearly through the rain, the elephant grass, and the darkness, but the funny thing was that many of the colors were not bright or light ones but dulled down-a brown glow, a taupe one, wine-colored, teal, brown with red spots, olive, rust, and even, I swear it, a black glowing deeper and hotter than the blackness around it. These mixed and wavered and changed often, but they danced around the chopper like so many Tinker Bells. And as my eyes adjusted, I saw within the glow people in military hats a little different from ours, with rifles in their hands. They were digging around the helicopter, looking for the bodies, I supposed, or usable debris.

I jumped as something touched me on the shoulder, and looked up to see Ahn, encased in a pale green glow sparked with grayed violet, putting his finger to his lips. I nodded.

The fireflies poked around for some time, then fanned out, looking up and down, side to side, rifles ready. I always knew where they were, however, thanks to old Xe's handy-dandy cosmic gizmo. Everybody was lit up like a Christmas tree.

A teal-blue glow stalked through the elephant grass, toward us, then below us, and at first I wanted to shut my eyes so the woman with the rifle couldn't see me. Because light was pouring from me, too, just as it was from Ahn, who was wrapped tightly around his tree limb, gray-violet rays of radiant fear leaking from him.

But the closer the woman got, and somehow I knew it was a woman, a girl really, even through the blinding rain and her personal light show, the more I felt I knew about her: Poor kid, she's so heartbroken she doesn't even know how scared she is. And the closer she got, the more the light grew distinct, into separate colors, brown overpowering the teal, gray-violet overpowering both, all three colors blending into one another before bleeding from her into the darkness, not in beams, the way you'd think light should, but in droplets, like tears. And the whole time her rifle was at the ready, waiting for us to make a false move.

We didn't, though. We lay there barely breathing for what seemed like hours, until, when I looked around cautiously, I could no longer see any of the nine glows I had counted-two mostly teal, three mostly brown, an amber, a rust, a black, and a dull red.

I patted Ahn on the arm and the little brat yawned at me. He'd gone to sleep, rain and all. "Come on, babysan, I think we better didi mau."

His purplish gray had been superseded by a brighter red and green which I knew, don't ask me how, were much healthier colors for a growing boy.

The green was a shade that spoke of growing things, similar to the faint phosphorescence that was the aura of the tree that hid us, the plants all around us; the red, vital and strong, qualities in Ahn that were obvious watching that one-legged boy shinny back down the tree.

The sky lightened a little in one direction and the sun peeped out beyond the rain, splashing a rainbow across the sky. It seemed inappropriate, under the circumstances, but it had its uses. I didn't know if Vietnamese kids were ever boy scouts, but I thought they might have survival skills little girls who were bookworms in Kansas City might not have mastered. "Ahn, can you tell from the sun which way is the sea?"

,, Sure. Sea that way," he said, and pointed toward the wrecked chopper.

I wondered how he knew, but even if he was wrong, it was someplace to start. I had about abandoned hope that another helicopter would arrive to find out what happened to the first one. If it did come, I hoped the will-o'-the-wisps from the previous night would be far away.

I found a stout stick and handed it to Ahn. "Babysan, you use this for crutch."

"No want stupid stick!" he said, his face screwing up for a good cry as he poked through the underbrush below the tree until he found the piece of crutch that had been his prosthesis. "Want leg Bac si Joe make for me."

Kids. I humored him. Let him determine for himself what was going to work for him. I rewrapped his stump and bandaged it into the cup of the makeshift prosthesis.

The elephant grass gave off a faint greenish radiance, punctuated now and then by varicolored sparks as insects and lizards darted past us. I was glad for the cooler, damper weather and the wind. The bugs weren't so bad now as they had been earlier in the year. I took the lead, with Ahn just behind me. I watched the ground carefully for the sort of traps patients had told me about: punji sticks, trip wires, any trace of recently disturbed earth where mines could be buried. The VC might hope as I did for a second helicopter to investigate the loss of the first one. If I'd been them, I would have laid a tra for it.

I was not reassured when I didn't spot anything. After all, most of my patients had had far better training than I had before they became patients, and obviously they hadn't spotted anything either. I stopped short of the charred remains of the chopper. Fortunately, it didn't look as if anything remained that would have been of any earthly use to us, because I sure wasn't going to wade through that mess of smoldering wire and metal to find out if the wreck had been mined.

Ahn tried to take my hand, but it was shaking so hard he had trouble catching hold of it. His was small and hot in mine but reassuring nevertheless. My knees kept trying to fold and I had a queer, dizzy sensation. The color around me was mostly gray, though Ahn's aura by now showed a little less gray, a little more red, and he patted my hand with his free one and looked gravely into the wreckage, not because he cared, I thought, but because I did.

The red cross was not burned all the way off the bottom and I kept seeing it, feeling it against my shoulder as I scraped by, seeing the blade drop, seeing Tony fly apart, seeing the chopper scream by me and feeling the impact of the explosion, then all over again, from the time I first turned Lightfoot over to the lightning bug people last night, and again, and again.

A faint orange glow still shimmered near the bottom of the wreckage-the last embers of the fire? I scarcely noticed it at first, as my mind replayed the last few hours, but then I couldn't help but notice that the glow drifted against the wind, toward us. My own aura bristled around me, a fearful gray shadow, growing wider the longer I stood there, but the orange crept into it, warming it, interpenetrating it until my aura and a portion of Ahn's mingled with the brightness. My knees rebraced and my head settled down. My trembling fell several points on the Richter scale. And the instant replay stopped while inside my head a more sensible voice said: Could be worse. You're alive, the kid's alive. Now try to stay that way. 01' Tony didn't get greased helping some dumb broad who folds up when it gets a little tough. These woods are thick with VC, but they're thick with our troops too. Stay loose.

And I suddenly realized what a great target I made and shook myself free of what was no doubt a major hallucination induced by fear and the weird psychogenic power of the amulet. I had no choice now but to accept what the amulet showed me, and be glad of it. Heron was right. Old Xe had known a thing or two and, bless his heart, had somehow in that last long look managed to pass some of it on, maybe knowing how much we would need it. If he could read me the way I read Ahn, read the VC woman last night, then he could have known. And however much his amulet confused me with the feelings and reactions it stirred in me, it had the quite practical ability to light up any human being in the vicinity as if that person were a shop window, and I couldn't think of a more useful tool to have when marooned in a jungle war, not even an M-16.

Ahn had wandered off. The rain was somehow colder and harder, but even though the orange light had bled away, that around me was no longer the pure gray it had been, but was flushed a somewhat healthier mauve.

I skirted the wreck to the forest beyond, watching silently for Ahn. A faint glint in the underbrush caught my eye and I stooped toward it.

Tony's mirrored shades winked up at me, one earpiece broken. I picked them up and tucked them in my pocket.

I caught Ahn's glow in the brush ahead of me and quickened my step just a fraction to catch up with him, though I still moved as quietly as I could and kept my eyes moving.

Then the glow dipped and he fell with a rustle of brush and a sharp Vietnamese swearword.

He was no sooner down than another glow, one I hadn't noticed in my scrutiny of my surroundings, my pursual of Ahn, stepped into MY line of vision and dove toward Ahn.

The hell with trip wires. I plowed through the brush toward them.

khn cried, "No, Joe! No. Me good boy. Me no VC."

"Hold still while I'm killin' you, you little muthahfucker," someone demanded unreasonably.

But he was demanding in black American English.

"Wait!" I called. I didn't mind being loud now. If one GI was here, his unit couldn't be far behind. No doubt they'd seen the crash and come to investigate and we were rescued already. "Wait! Don't hurt him. He's okay. He's with me."

A tall black man with his shirt tied around his waist unbent until he was standing, staring bug-eyed at me. Ahn scuttled out from under him and half crawled back to me. His prosthesis was dangling at an angle from his stump and he was crying again. I picked Ahn up, pulled the prosthesis off, and threw it in the brush.

"Shame on you for picking on a little sick boy," I said to the GI, wiping Ahn's tears away. "He's a patient of mine. I was medevacing him to Quang Ngai when the chopper went down." The man kept staring at me and I began to feel uneasy. "Wow, are we glad to see you," I said.

"Where's the rest of your guys?"

He looked blank, and wary.

"The rest of your unit, where is it?"

He took a step toward me and I noticed his aura then. It was peatbrown and ash-gray-he was deathly afraid, even of me. I took a step forward to meet him. "I'm Lieutenant McCulley-Kitty McCulleyfrom the 83rd Evac at Da Nang," I said, trying to radiate all the warmth and gratitude I could. The mauve shadow around me deepened and was tinged with darker streaks of magenta. The first gray tendrils mixed with it, and the man stopped, and stared some more. "Two of the guys from Red Beach were taking me to Quang Ngai with little Ahn, my patient, here. But we got shot down. I'm so glad to see you."

He took one more step and the mixture continued. He swallowed.

I swallowed and slowly lifted a wrinkled brown package out of my ditty bag. "We wouldn't have had enough M&M's to last much longer, but now that we're rescued, we can use them to celebrate. Want one?"

He took it slowly, a red one, and popped it into his mouth, and looked mildly surprised when his tongue met the candy. Then he backed up a pace, still surrounded with gray, and started marching back into the forest.

"Hey, just a minute!" I said. "You can't leave us here. This little boy is crippled and I-I don't know where I am, and-" and I knew all of a sudden that something was badly wrong with this man-I wasn't sure we weren't safer without him, but he was an American. He must know where there were more. He must have come for us The soldier stopped, turned around, and picked Ahn up as easily as if he were a rifle and hoisted him onto one bare shoulder. "Lady, that just about make it unanimous,"

the man said.

We walked into the forest together and the GI remained silent, his aura still mostly gray, though it seemed the green of the plants showed through now and then.

We could hear the rain pouring harder, but under the forest canopy it took its time reaching us. Sometimes it was a fine mist, sometimes a steady drip, and now and then a downpour. The noise of the rain on the leaves was quiet compared to what it had been while Ahn and I were in the tree. The soldier's head rotated constantly, back and forth, side to side, up and down, and changing so he never got into a pattern, watching the ground, the trees, and air in front of him, the spaces on either side of him. I found myself doing the same thing.

He moved with thorough, automatic caution but very quickly. Too quickly for me. I lagged behind, panting to keep up. Ahn looked back over his shoulder, worried.

The man stopped abruptly and turned around. "Could I have another piece of candy, ma'am?"

"Sure," I said.

"They're all dead," he said when he had bitten into the M&M. He kicked a log and, when it didn't kick back, lowered Ahn to the ground and sat down himself. "My unit. I thought you was comin' to find me when I saw that bird."

"Dead?" I asked. "Who's dead? You mean the chopper crew?"

"No'm. I mean my unit," he said. Now that he'd started talking, his tone was conversational, ordinary. "We got overrun, I guess you'd call it. See, I was asleep in my bunk one night back at base and we was all in this, like Quonset hut, kinda, with a screen door? And somethin'

wake me up. I always been like that, since I was a little boy. I sorta know when somethin' ain't right, like. Anyhow, I wake up and I see this shadow with a gook hat go by the screen door. And at first that don't mean nothin' 'cause the gooks, you know, they all over the place in the daytime. But then it come to me-they ain't s'posed to be no gooks there at night. And I'm just thinkin' that and I just start, halfasleep, you know, rollin' down under my bed when all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. Somebody starts afirin' in the screen door and killin'

everybody. Everybody in there, all my buddies, all my friends, they get sprayed all over there, and when I crawl out, they all dead. Everyone dead and I ain't even had a chance to warn 'em. And outside the door I see fire and I hear guns and I see gooks runnin' this way and that and I crawl on my belly to the door and they're all over the place, all them gooks. Ain't s'posed to be there at night. Not at all. But they all over the place."

He was shaking his head like an old man with palsy. I patted his arm, the gray and mauve mingling again, spreading into each other. I felt his fear suddenly, as I had felt my own the day before, sharp and acid and helpless.

"How'd you get away?"

"Crawled. I crawled down off that hill, through the fence, and tried to find somebody. But I just got lost. Then I saw your chopper and I thought, William, they have come lookin' for you. Say, you really in the Army?"

"Army Nurse Corps," I said.

"I ain't never seen no Army nurse in Nam. They come for us with you here. We just got to keep out of Charlie's way. Army won't let you stay out here."

"They don't know I'm here," I said, realizing miserably that it was true. "I guess, officially, by now I'm AWOL."

"AWOL? And you a lieutenant? Whoo! That some kinda rich!

Shake," and he held out his hand. I tried to take it, but he did that complicated black handshake instead and I couldn't follow.

"How long you been out here?" I asked him.

"dunno. Two, three days maybe. You?"

"We spent the night in a tree."

"Yeah, me too, till a snake chased me out. I hate them things."

time too. But at least the VC didn't spot us."

"VC? Around here? Where?"

"All over the place last night. They're gone now."

"Fine with me." His aura flooded with beams of yellow, blue, and a hint of purple that went with the sudden wide, self-deprecating grin. "I hate them things too."

Seeing people as rainbows was a dizzying experience. Still, annoying as the side effects were, the edge the amulet gave me was too great to dismiss because it was a little disorienting. And the longer I wore the amulet and the more I listened to William and Ahn and had a chance to compare the feelings the colors gave me about them with their actions and words, the more eloquent the auras became. It was as if people had an extra feature to gesture with, one that expressed a whole side of them that mouths, eyes, and hands were unable to communicate. William's grin, by itself, was somewhat enigmatic, but while the basic gray-brown of his aura told me that he hated and feared the VC deeply and was in a state of shock explained by what he had just told me, the yellow, blue, and purple said, in the same way a grimace or a twinkle in an eye might, that his hate was not a customary thing for him, that he was a very bright guy, and more used to caring about the people around him than hating them.

That was part of the problem with acquiring an object of power without having studied its ramifications. I thought then that the amulet was giving me guarantees, that I could trust what it told me as absolute.

From being a nonbeliever I was rapidly coming to rely on that one talisman as my salvation-rings of power and singing swords, as in

'folkien and King Arthur stories, aren't supposed to lie any more than just and wise rulers. The amulet abolished any reservations I would normally have had about William. But that was partly my fault, I guess.

I desperately needed something to believe in right then.

In basic, the sergeant had given a little speech I thought was amusing at the time. "Those of you who are going to Vietnam will need a god. We do not care which god you pick. Your god can be Buddha, Jesus, Allah, or Pele the volcano goddess. Your god can be sex or money if you so desire. But you will need a god. If you do not have a god, go to the quartermaster and he will issue you one." I began to see what that was all about.

"So," I said. "Have you got any idea where we are now?"

William scooped Ahn up with another smooth motion and started loping through the jungle again, which at that point was easy. The jungle door was flat and the ground cover was mostly more elephant grass, though shorter than that in the field because the trees hogged the light. "Umm hmm."

"You do? Where?"

"In deep shit, woman. We in deep shit. Thass where."

'"Tohn Wayne would have probably just shot me, but William stopped when I said I couldn't go any farther.

"Thass cool. 01' babysan here ain't no lightweight. They feed you too much Da Nang hospital, babysan."

"No way, Gi," Ahn protested. "Feed me tete. Ahn beaucoup hungry."

"Yeah, William beaucoup hungry too." William shrugged Ahn from his back and shrugged his shoulders together to take the stiffness from them.

"You hungry too, mamasan?"

"I sure am. But I don't want to make my meal out of sweets. You haven't seen any rats around, have you?"

"Nah, why?"

"Didn't you guys get that speech in basic about what you do if 're stang and you only have a raw rat and a Hershey bar?"

you ryi

"Oh yeah. You mean where you eat the rat and chase it with a piece of Hershey bar 'cause you ain't even gonna barf up the Hershey bar? It don't work, lady. I know a guy tried it. Says it just make you hate Hershey bars from then on."

fully. "Well, maybe it's better with peanut M&M's," I suggested hope

"Mmm," he said, lowering his voice a decibel or two. "Well, we ain't even gonna have to worry about it 'less we carefuler than this."

I took a quick look around and spotted no particular glows besides the amulet-enhanced phosphorescence of the greenery. "There's no one close," I said. "I think we're safe."

"Then you musta bumped your head in that chopper crash, woman. We not safe by a long shot."

"No, but there's no one close."

"You can't see 'em, lady. Thass the point."

"I think I could," I said, and then wondered how I would explain it to him without sounding like a superheroine refugee from Teen Titans comics.

"Yeah? An' how's that? Some special info only officers get?"

'."Well, maybe you could say I have unusually good vision," I said. I decided I wasn't up to explaining about the amulet right then and William didn't look as if he was in the mood for listening to such explanations if I was willing to make them.

"Umm hmm. Well, find us some food, then, if you that good."

'V didn't have that much survival training," I said. "What have you been eating? If I were home right now I'd be having steak at the mess hall."

"Steak? Jesus, lady, you been on the gravy train for sure. What make you get your dainty steak-fed little ass into somethin' like this, taggin' along after some one-leggity child?"

"Someone has to look out for these people," I said.

William gave me a look that said it was too bad I was braindamaged. "I been lookin' out for 'em okay. I lookin' real hard, and if any one of

'em come 'cross me, they ain't gonna need no more lookin' out for, and that, girl, is puttin' it polite 'cause you're a female and all."

Recalling what he'd just been through, I didn't argue with him but changed the subject. I didn't want to stop the conversation. As long as we talked, I felt less afraid.

"Where are you from, William?" I asked, only a little breathless from trying to keep up with him.

"Cleveland," he sad, still mad at me, his aura bristling dull red.

"I'm from Kansas City. That's where my folks and my brother live. You have brothers or sisters?"

"Yeah. And a wife and two babies. An' I'd like to stay alive to see

,em again. Look, lady, it real nice talkin' to you and all, but I don't want no VC catchin' us shootin' the breeze."

I shut up, at first a little resentfully-after all, if we were all stranded out there, it seemed pretty lousy not to be able even to talk to each other. Before long, we were climbing the side of a ridge, pushing through vines and shrubs that tore at my poncho and stands of elephant grass that made a ripping sound as we brushed through it, so it sounded as if our clothing were being shredded. Any VC in the area should be able to hear us for miles before we ever saw them. I remember Duncan, who was a hunter, telling a story in which he said something similar to klutzy hunting companions when they complained of not seeing deer. "Nope, you haven't seen them, but they've sure as hell heard you,"