The Healer's War

"Damn!" Maryjane threw his helmet angrily to the ground. "Ya see? Ya see? Women! Jesus! You let them in on something and they spoil everything!"

"Not everything, sweetheart!"

"Aw, come off it, M.J. It's just 'cause they don't get taught how to play football and like that."

I handed Zits' gun back to him, returned to my rock, and sat there, staring at Dinh's body and the tree as if the whole thing were part of some abstract work of modern art I was trying to understand. Actually, I wasn't seeing anything. I was resting my eyes. Resting my mind.

Everybody stayed the hell away from me. The yelling died down to angry muttering. That was okay. I didn't feel like talking to anyone.

Sometime later the chunking of chopper blades drew my attention. A Huey descended to hover in the clearing, blowing the hell out of everything.

I just sat there and ate its wind, the rain, watching a fitlooking tanned guy with white hair jump out. Some other guy was there too, but I was watching the general as if I'd never seen one before. He wore a shiny gold buckle at his waist. I thought what a great target it would make. He was clean, pressed, authoritative, and handsome in a steely sort of way. Like the successful older man every secretary yearns to marry. I didn't much care for the mossy-green aura camouflaging his intentions, but at least it went nicely with his uniform.

In a couple of minutes the chopper lifted up again and swung away from us.

Maryjane and his sergeant, who looked perpetually stone-bored, walked up to the general. The general stalked up to the corpse still hanging from his bonds against the tree, and examined him, his expression growing angrier and tighter with every second, so that I thought pretty soon his skin would split open from the tension. Maryjane pointed at me.

The general strode over and stood above me like a wrathful God.

"You don't rise when a general officer addresses you, Lieutenant?" he asked.

I just stared at him. I thought about trying to straighten out my knees, stand up again. Nope. Too much effort.

"From what the men here tell me, I have to conclude that you're a VC

sympathizer," he said as if accusing me of something shocking. I thought it over. It was at least partially correct. I had certainly sympathized with Colonel Dinh in his last moments. But generals weren't much for such nice distinctions.

"I was performing according to my MOS, sir. One of my primary goals is to relieve suffering."

"As a member of the United States Army, Lieutenant, your primary goal is to help win this war. Do I make myself clear?" I didn't ask what war, when did we declare war. I didn't want to cause the man to have a stroke. "I understand you just executed a valuable enemy prisoner, of your own volition, costing us the opportunity to extract vital information. Do you realize the loss of that information will result in the deaths of thousands of Americans?"

I shrugged.

The moss green in his aura erupted into a study in angry, arrogant reds and oranges, mingled prettily with the mustard of a low order of intelligence, and a swamp of deep blue and teal for fanatical devotion to selfish causes. Like his own career. His face was rapidly growing purple. He grabbed my arm and yanked and I found that I did have a squeak left in me after all. It was my bayoneted arm. It was growing increasingly edematous and inflamed. Might have to amputate that sucker, I thought idly.

He released me and wiped his hand off on his fatigues, swearing.

"Where the hell did you say you found her?" he asked Maryjane.

"I got her off a dead VC, sir," Maryjane said.

"How do you know she's one of ours? I don't see any dog tags."

"Want us to search her, sir?" someone asked eagerly.

"Later. Young woman, I want to see your military ID."

"Okay," I said. Then I remembered that I'd taken it out of my pocket and put it in my ditty bad and my ditty bag was long goneback at Hue's village. "oops," I said. "It got lost."

"Very convenient. Men, I want you to hear this. Our enemies are very clever. There is a report that a Lieutenant Kathleen McCulley went AWOL

about two weeks ago. She went down in a Huey headed for Quang Ngai.

She, the pilot, and crew chief and all presumed dead. It's an open secret, been talked about over the phone, over the radio. Now here is this girl, claiming to be McCulley. How could a lone girl have made it this far? And didn't you say, private, that when you found this woman she was being shielded by one of her comrades? Doesn't that tell you something? You know, all Communists are not Vietnamese. There are even American women in the employ of the enemy. Now, I would hate to think that an American Army nurse might have been so foolish as to have succumbed to Communist propaganda, but these women aren't real troops, after all. They can be scared and intimidated. The giveaway with this one is that she killed her leader over there before he could tell you anything about his operation, himselfor her. Gentlemen, I think we're dealing with a traitor here. I have my doubts if this woman ever was Kathleen McCulley, but if she was, five 'II get you ten she lured that chopper Into an ambush and then rejoined her VC buddies."

Wait a minute, sir," Zits said. "Sounds like you're going to courtmartial her."

"Well, that would be one option, private."

"Sir?"

"If this gets into the press, it will cast a shadow over all of our loyal girls in the service, all of our brave nurses and other female personnel. You men wouldn't want to see that happen, would you?"

There was a lot of random mumbling basically to the effect that they didn't really give a shit.

"Well, there's an alternative. Nobody knows about this but you men and me. Supposing this woman was killed with the rest of her comrades?

Supposing for the classified files, Kathleen McCulley was killed by the enemy. For the official files, she died in a chopper crash. To spare her family, of course."

I stared at him, hearing the words but not believing them. He had to be kidding, didn't he? No, of course not. Generals didn't kid. But he was coming to take me home. That's why he was here. I was going to go back to the 83rd and have a last swim at China Beach and get my stuff together and go home and see my mom and Duncan. I had been drifting along with the shock and fatigue, thinking that I was so close to being out of all this, if not the beach, just a warm bed and a bath . . .

"I want to go home," I said, but everybody else was talking and nobody heard me. That was just as well. Whining about home wouldn't do me any good. Everybody-well, almost everybodywanted to go home. I was being a privileged character again. The people I'd been among for the last week or so were home already and a fat lot of good it did them. I felt a little strength start to course through me, a few tendrils of anger start to warm my cold-clotted blood.

Behind the crisply uniformed general, Dinh's body hung lifeless from the tree, like a modern version of the crucifix, his rain-diluted blood still flowing in pink rivulets down his chest, his mouth. What's wrong with this picture? I wondered, and when I looked down at my own legs I realized: the aura was missing. It wasn't clinging to the body as I had seen the auras do so often right after death. It was clinging to me, overlaying my wisp of muddied pink with that clear blue and yellow, and sparks of red.

No wonder the general thought I was a VC spy. I was wrapped in the late colonel's aura, and it was a little like being wrapped in one of those cloaks of invisibility from the fairy tales, only not quite as useful.

still, I was beginning to feel a little stronger. It could be worse.

What if I were Vietnamese, with no right and no desire to leave this beautiful, blighted land? If this were my home, and I had nothing to do but stay and try to fend off wave after wave of invaders while my family, the culture I knew, the very landscape rotted around me like an old silk curtain in monsoon season? Nothing to look forward to but struggle and more struggle. The last few days had been horrible, but I still had options, another home, one of my own-but I needed to snap out of it if I wanted to live long enough to see stupid TV commercials and eat Sugar Pops for breakfast again. What Colonel Dinh had said echoed back to me from what seemed like years before, but was only that morning: "Life is not meant to return to a dead limb, and now that it does, it burns. . . ."

"Well, young woman, if you have any explanation I'd like to hear it.

What were you doing in the company of the enemy?"

"I was a prisoner, sir," I said. "That's why my hands were tied."

Obviously. jerk.

"Yeah, but what about that guy on top of you, sweetheart?"

Maryjane asked nastily. "Looked to me like he was takin' your share of the heat. Some enemy." Maryjane's tone had raised in pitch to the shrill and malicious end of the scale.

"And that guy." Zits jerked his thumb at the colonel's corpse. "Why'd you off him? Like the general says, we coulda got valuable information out of him."

"You didn't want valuable information," I spat back. "You'd already tried questioning him and you knew he wasn't going to say anything. You just wanted to hurt him."

"So? What was it to you? Hadn't he hurt you? Or maybe you liked it, huh, baby?"

"No, I just don't like to see people mistreated."

Somebody laughed harshly. "Well, lady, you are in the wrong war, then."

From being protective and solicitous, the men had become hostile, aggressive. Looking up at the general, who wore an expression of smug satisfaction that must have been much the same as that worn by an early witch-hunter, I saw what was happening with graphic clarity. The blackness in the general's aura cannibalized the other colors that had been present in it, and grew, webbing out to touch the blackness that was the primary component of Maryjane's aura, to sprout more blackness in Zits, to web with the hatred and anger that had become part of every man's aura, and where the blackness met blackness, it was amplified, until the clearing was filled with it. General Hennessey sure was a leader of men, okay. He just didn't have much use for women.

One of them looked at the other while the general thumbed his side arm.

Maryjane gave me a lopsided grin and pulled out his machete. "You know, General, if the Cong had done her, they'd have made it hurt." He grinned and winked at me. Big joke. Very funny.

"Oh, great, soldier," I said. "What did you do when you were a kid?.Rip the legs off of frogs? Did I take away your toy and-" I was stopped in mid-sentence by a commotion on the perimeter. The sentry was yelling something and somebody else was yelling back. Several of the men ran over to see what was going on. The general merely turned around, annoyed at the distraction.

"Goddamn, sir, will you look at that? They must be havin' a fuckin'

sale on 'em today," Maryjane said as two men wrestled a third between them into the clearing. The third man wore crossed bandoliers slung over his bony shoulders and prominent rib cage.

He was still fighting, and one after another flung the men who held him away from him and jumped Zits, trying to wrest his weapon from him.

Three more men pulled him off and held him down. Zits covered him.

The general came out from behind a tree he had just happened to step behind. "What seems to be the problem here, men?"

"We found this dude pokin' around the dead gooks, sir. We started, you know, rappin' with him, and he fuckin' attacked us."

"I was gonna off him, but Darby said since he was American we should, like, try to bring him in," the other man said.

"Okay, soldier, what have you got to say for yourself?" the general demanded.

What was left of William spit and a glob landed right in the middle of the shiny gold buckle. The red and black aura was strobing like crazy and so was the aura surrounding Zits.

"Goddamn it, cut it out," I said. "He's dinky dao. He thinks you're VC. Leave him the hell alone." I pushed past Maryjane's machete and knelt beside William. He spat at me, too, but I'd seen lots worse lately.

I didn't have much aura left to share and there was nobody I much wanted to touch, but the general solved that problem for me. He came and stood so that his leg brushed my back.

"Do you know this man, young woman?" He was trying to intimidate me, but his well-fed, rested energy was what I needed. Only nothing happened.

No change took place and William spat at me again.

So I slapped him, and glared at him.

He rolled his head back and forth, back and forth, trying to shake that aura. After what seemed like forever to me, it receded and he opened his eyes.

"Lieutenant Kitty, baby. Hey, girl, what's happening'? I thought you was takin' babysan down to the ville."

I sighed, sat back on my heels, and buried my head in my hands.

"You know this woman, soldier?" the general asked. "What are you doing in this sector? Where's your unit?"

William blinked several times, as if trying to focus on me. His entire aura extended only about a quarter of an inch from him and was as wavery and uneven as the EKG of a patient with a myocardial infarction. "What the fuck is going' down here? Man, I was trackin' you dudes, only I wasn't always certain if it be you or if it be VC, dig? So I sort of follow along. Then, I dunno when, I see some other dudes humpin'

through the bush and I'd have thought it was you only they was draggin'

the lieutenant like she be the doggie in the window, if you can dig that? And then, man, I don't know. I was layin' down fire at someone and then somebody else opened up, but I'll be damned if I know who the fuck I was shootin'. I got like hit, see?" He touched the back of his head, and when he held up his fingers, they were bloody. "When I come out of it, I go to look at the bodies and then these other dudes come at me and-oh shit, man, was that you? Lieutenant Kitty, you right on, girl. I must be dinky dao as shit to take these dudes for gooks. Ain't no gooks that ugly. That's a joke, man."

The black radioman guffawed and two other black guys snorted.

"He may be dinky dao but he ain't blind," one of them said.

But William was taking stock of his surroundings now, and the same instinct that had told him when to roll under the bed sent bluegray needles of alarm prickling from his aura. "Oh hey, man, hey, now, look, I didn't-I mean, no way did I off one of our guys, did I? I-"

The general cleared his throat and Zits and Maryjane glared at him, but the black soldier leaning against the tree said, "No, man, nothin' like that. just seem like the jungle full of lots of folks 'sides Charlie out for a walk today."

"I told you we were both lost-" I began wearily, but William cut me off with a nervous spate of chatter. It was a side of him I hadn't seen before, another defense, I suppose, besides an automatic weapon or a straryglehold.

"Man, I dig. This is really wild. 'Cause I can tell you for dead sure I never expected to see this woman alive again. How's babysan, Lieutenant?"

I shrugged and mumbled, "He's at the village."

William plunged right on over my words. He was sitting up now, while the medic, who was one of the other black men, cleaned and bandaged his wound. His arms flew around as he talked so that the man had trouble bandaging him as he told the story of his unit being overrun.

"Yeah, I heard about that. Numbah ten, man. We didn't know nobody got out."

"Why didn't you report to headquarters, soldier?" the general demanded.

"General, man, that's what I be tryin' to tell you. I be tryin' to report back for weeks, man. But you know, I got me no radio and you the first bunch of dudes I see and I'm not sure most times whether you ours or theirs."

"But you managed to contact Lieutenant McCulley."

"Wasn't like she was in no headquarters, though. She was lost, just like me." He frustrated the medic by scooting away from him to put his arm around me. "But hey, girl, we made it, didn't we? Here we be, safe and sound in the bosom of whatever the fuck this unit be." He gave me a squeeze. "Now, I want you dudes to take notice of this woman here. She be one amazing chick. I see this chopper crash, see, and here comes mamasan, deely-boppin' through the jungle with a one-legged kid, tell.in' me her boyfriend got greased in the crash and do I know the way to the nearest Howard Johnson's. Then she decides my company is too rough for her and goes down to this village to park the boy and ask to use a phone. I thought she'd be dogmeat for sure by now, but here she is and she sure is somethin', ain't you, mamasan?"

"Soldier, I want your name, rank, and serial number and your unit,"

Hennessey said.

"Whoa, there, sir, lighten up," said the radioman, whose aura was veined with mauve that had been deepening as he listened to William.

"I want to know your connection with this woman, soldier," Hennessey persisted.

"Connection? Got no connection. Don't you listen, man? I done told you my connection. Her an' me is friends, ain't we, Kitty? My unit got overrun and her boyfriend's bird crash and here we be in the jungle together. Only she had this kid to look out for, see, so we decide to split up-she goes to the ville to dump the kid and I come lookin' for you dudes. Only she beats me here."

"She was found in the company of a party of Vietcong," the general said.

"No shit? Baby, you all right?"

"Fuckit, man, I'm callin' in medevac," the radioman said. "My brother here, he's hurt."

"You'll do no such thing," Hennessey barked. "I'm conducting an inquiry here."

"Man, look at him," the medic said. "He's manic as hell, runnin' on a scared-stiff high. He gonna burn himself out from that all by itself, you don't get him back home. It's not just this head, sir. This man got a bad case of exposure."

"Me too, Washington. Send me back too," Maryjane said, and shut up when the medic glared at him.

The radioman spoke up. "With respect and all that shit, sir, you do the rest of your inquirin' back at HQ. You gonna hang around here long enough, somebody's gonna come lookin' for us."

Maryjane stubbed out his smoke. "That's a-fuckin'-firmative."

Although the general tried to throw his weight around, the men were drifting away, marking notches on their helmets or openly taking on joints.

The radioman called for the medevac chopper to take us to the hospital at Quang Ngai. He gave a thumbs-up sign as we lifted off.

The general pulled his hat down over his eyes and affected sleep for the journey.

William and I leaned together on the bench seat of the chopper, but neither of us tried to speak above its noise. William had gone from wildly talkative to dead quiet. He was so weak he stayed seated only because he was strapped in. His aura was almost nonexistent. I laid my head on his arm and tried to share strength, but Dinh's aura had deserted me and I didn't have anything left to share. We were both carried into the hospital on stretchers, but William was taken to a different section. He gave me a tired wink as they took him inside. I know they asked him more questions about me, and that he was reas signed to another unit, but beyond that I've never been able to find out what happened to him.

Vietnamese vermin and parasites saved me more than once in the ensuing weeks. General Hennessey did not give up easily, and many times while I was in the hospital, people came in and asked me a lot of questions about what had happened in the jungle. Most of them seemed more intelligent than General Hennessey, and one or two of them even had the grace to look embarrassed. If it wasn't obvious to the general that I had not been having a grand adventure running and playing with the Vietcong, it was obvious to almost everybody else. My skin was a mess of infected bites, my scalp lousy, and my hair falling out. The wound on my arm had to be debrided to three times its width and depth; the superficial puncture wounds on my breasts gave me a bad case of mastitis that made breathing painful and coughing, from the pneumonia, excruciating. My feet were so covered with sores and crud I had to wonder how I'd been able to walk at all. I developed malaria from not taking my pills, and intestinal parasites. The interrogators knew that when I said they'd better clear a path, they'd better clear a path.

I had been transferred out of Quang Ngal, which was set up for emergency surgica I care only, as soon as my arm was debrided, and sent to the larger facility at Long Binh. I don't remember the switch. I was delirious with fever during that time, and stayed that way for a week.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to begin to get really sick. Perhaps the anesthetic lowered what little resistance I had. Perhaps the amulet had afforded me some protection while I was using it for healing so intensely, but when I was knocked out, with no generative power for it to feed on, it conked out. Or maybe it was just the usual pattern, that my body knew while the stress was the greatest that I would not survive if it caved in, so it kept me going until the pace slowed a little.

At any rate, I was too sick to answer questions, too sick to do anything but sweat, have dreams that I knew were hideous but I couldn't remember, and mumble.

The staff was as kind as they could be initially, as busy as they wer& My doctor was one of those bloodless men who sees medicine as a science and patients as specimens. His aura was almost pure yellow, with only bits of mauve and blue, like colored thumbtacks, binding him to his career. The nurses wore white uniform dresses, which I noted with pity.

Nylons in I 10-degree heat will try to fuse with your legs. But my bed was dry and had clean sheets and I had been bathed. The first day I was able to shower, I tottered back toward my bed feeling dizzy and light-headed, but I stopped at the desk and told the corpsman, "That felt so good. Maybe I could rest a little while, then help you with your next set of TPRs or something?" He was another of those kids who looked as if they were fresh out of junior high, with a blond butch and a sunburned face. The face got redder when I talked to him. He wet his lips and said, "No thanks, ma'am," then, "You have a visitor who's been waiting for you."

"Oh? Who?"

"Just one of them people that's been here every day since you got here.

Head nurse ran 'em off but said we had to call them as soon as you were strong enough."

I wasn't strong enough. Nobody is strong enough to put up with the kind of shit I took from those intelligence people day in and day out for weeks after that. They made Hennessey's accusations sound like "Tsk tsk." One guy in particular started getting really hostile. They were trying to break me down, and that was easy. I've never been able to bear mental battering. But it didn't do a lot of good. I was confused and whiny, and weepy, and even to me my story never sounded exactly the same each time I told it.

But Marge came to visit me once. I told her as much as I could about where Ahn was and said if she could find Heron, I was sure he could find Ahn. I just wanted to know he was okay. She listened to me carefully and nodded noncommittally. On her way out, she stopped and chatted with the head nurse, and after that when the interrogators came, one of the ward nurses made it her business to be nearby.

Otherwise, most of the staff steered clear of me, except for treatments.

I was at the end of the ward, and a curtain was drawn between me and the other patients, so I could hear them but I couldn't see them. I even had a guard, usually a woman, so she could go right into the bathroom with me, if necessary. I was surprised they spared the handcuffs, but at least having a guard meant there was someone I could talk to. I suppose that's what they counted on, but since I didn't have anything incriminating to reveal, it didn't do much good. Some of my guards ignored me pretty much to flirt with the corpsmen or the patients, but one WAC in particular was someone I thought I'd have liked for a friend under other circumstances. She reminded me a little of Hue, short, tough, and very quick, deceptively young-looking, with an aura of bright yellow intellect, creative lavender, and idealistic blue slightly overlaid with deceptive gray-green. I almost told her about the amulet, once, but then I remembered what the inside of a mental hospital is like and knew that that was not where I wanted to spend my first few years back in the world. Also, in the back of my mind, I kept hearing what Colonel Dinh had said about the way the government would use the power to prolong the war. I thought, if Charlie Heron turned up before I left, maybe I would give it to him. But he never did.

Sergeant Janice Mitchell, the one who reminded me of Hue, never grilled me. She just sat inside the curtain and chatted with me, leaving only long enough to light up a smoke away from the oxygen I had flowing through a cannula into my nose, as therapy for the pneumonia. She listened to what I said sympathetically, not as if she was about to indict me for every word. Every time I had another session and she was there, I'd blow off what little steam I had left or whimper in her direction, so we went over the same story almost as often as I did with the interrogators. Maybe more. Besides, we got to talking about home.

She was a Midwesterner too, from Nebraska, and had joined to get out of Nebraska and to be near her brother, who had been up at Phu Bai until he was injured. She was dating several guys, but she didn't elaborate, except in general terms. I gathered maybe she wasn't supposed to talk about that. I told her about Duncan, repeating some of his stories, and about my family. But somehow the conversation would always drift back to what had happened after my fight with Krupman.

I wasn't trying to lie, but I didn't want to talk about the amulet, nor did I want to be obviously withholding anything. So I told her about the villagers, okay, but I down played the injuries and upgraded the available equipment slightly. We had been talking for two weeks before we ever got past the ambush. I started telling her about what happened afterward, what Hennessey had said.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," she said. "You trying to tell me that the general tried to talk these men into killing you? You have witnesses?" She looked a little like a pointer who found a scent just then.

"Well, yeah, like I told you, William Johnson was there, but he got there after the general said most of that stuff. And Zits and Maryjane but-no real names." I shrugged helplessly and stared down at my sheet.

"Wait a minute. There was the radioman. A black guy. His name tag said Brown. He'd tell you."

"I'll check on it," she said ruefully. "There's probably only a couple thousand men named Brown in the area."

She stood up abruptly, flipped back the curtain, and stood at the foot of my bed. I heard the click of her lighter, saw her shadow take three short steps one way, three short steps the other, back and forth.

She and Sergeant Llewellyn, the ward master, struck up quite a friendship while I was there. He had mentioned once when he was handing me an emesis basin that Janice had been with me most of the week I was out with my fever. They'd gotten well acquainted at that time, I supposed. I heard him ask her if she wanted a cup of coffee and she ducked her head in and said, "Kitty, I'm going to the nurses' station for coffee. Want a cup?"

I shook my head. later I heard whispers from the station and then voices raised in argument. I caught the words "your career" in a male voice and then "about as subversive as you are" in Janice's clarion tones, followed by "my career" and mumbles of grudging agreement.

Before day shift ended that day, Llewellyn, a lanky, rawboned 91Charlie who had Cherokee cheekbones and a Tennessee accent, lingered by my bed after picking up my supper tray. His aura was a rather muddied mauve, the healing rose overlaid with anxious gray violet just at the moment, belying his casual tone.

"Well, how are you this evening, ma'am?"

I sighed and tried to smile, but the smile drained away before it got to my mouth. "I'll do."

"Yeah, well, it sure is exciting having you around here, y'know that?

All these visitors and such. Why, it's the most excitement we've had in this place since the My Lai thing and all those newsmen and investigators all over the place. Sergeant Mitchell was on that one, too, but I didn't know her then. Noticed her, though. I don't know how you folks felt up there, but we thought ol' Calley sort of took a fall for somebody higher up. Gotta hand it to General Hennessey, though, he was right in there cryin' atrocity with everybody else, even though I met this fellow used to work in the general's mess?" His voice rose in the Southern interrogatory that means "you know?" but puts in the question mark and leaves out the words. "He said Hennessey was in favor of wipin' out the entire population. Not that that's an unusual idea.

But it's commonly held that if it takes wipin' out all of us to wipe out all of them, he's gonna be right in there wavin' the flag and talkin'

about the domino theory. Between you and me, the man ain't fishin' with a baited hook. He's been around a couple of times to pass out medals and he's downright rude to the female personnel. Why, I remember last spring one lieutenant got raped by a troop under Hennessey's command and she had to go to the I.G. and have her mama write her congressman to keep from being thrown out of the service for bein' a loose woman.

Useful thing, the I.G. I believe General Torelli, same officer that was in charge when Lieutenant LaVeau had her trouble, is still OIC. Between you and me, I think he might like to get somethin' on that bastard."

My brain was not working at rapid speed, but the man had practically drawn me a picture. I had been too harassed and too out of it to wonder, but suddenly I realized I had had no letters, no calls, no solicitousness of any kind from home since my return. Nothing forwarded. I wondered what my family had been told.

"Well, I'd write home," I said wearily, "but I suppose it would be intercepted."

"It might be-unless you found a way around it. I think you better try, ma'am."

I did, because I knew he was taking a risk, and Janice was taking a risk, to try to help me. I didn't care all that much by then. It didn't seem to matter what I told anyone, they put their own connotations on it. I had always been a "gook lover," back on the ward.

All my coworkers said so, the interrogators told me. I had no feelings for the GIs. And when had I learned good enough Vietnamese to see me through my alleged ordeal? I was sick of it, but no sicker than I was of everything else, and I was getting used to being sick of things.

Having an easy time of it, having people in power be reasonable, being allowed to get well and go back to my job began to seem like a naive dream of Disneyland proportions.

But from what Llewellyn said, Hennessey was even more of a crazy man than I thought, and could do a great deal more damage to a great many more people. So I wrote some more letters and filled out more papers and eventually answered more questions. An official inquiry was conducted, one that included other high-ranking people than General Hennessey. Janice told me they located Brown in Quang Ngai, just before he was medevaced to Japan for removal of half his radio from his back.

Words were bandied, more papers filled out. William had been reassigned to I'll Corps, she said. They were still looking for him. The possibility of a court-martial hearing for me was discussed.

In the meantime I received a letter from home. My mother was so glad to hear from me. She'd sent an inquiry through the Red Cross when I stopped writing, but hadn't had an answer as yet.

Then gradually the interrogators, even Janice, stopped coming by, except to ask the odd, enigmatic question here and there. The silence made me more anxious than their presence had. I thought this was never going to end. I was never going to be allowed to go home.

One morning the head nurse, Major Hanson, personally took my vital signs and tenderly took me in a wheelchair to the shower, straightened my bed, and helped me into a clean patient gown. I had been walking to the shower and changing my own bed for about a week, so I knew something official was going on. I wondered if my last meal was going to show up on the breakfast cart, and I about knocked myself out in the shower trying to pick up the soap, which kept slipping out of my unreliable hands.

General Hennessey, a bird colonel, and a major proceeded down the aisle of the ward and stopped at my bed. The major ruffled a document and handed the general a box. The general opened the box and extracted something.

"Lieutenant McCulley, in honor of your . . .

I didn't hear the rest of what he said. I was too busy flinching backward when I saw the pin he was aiming at my infected breast.

Meanwhile, he was less saying the words than sputtering them, and started waving the pin around. The bird colonel, who wore insignia from the inspector general's office, took the object away from him and laid it on my pillow. My Purple Heart, I thought, without looking at it. Big fucking deal. Instead of court-martialing me, they were giving me a medal. An hour and a half later I boarded an orange Braniff freedom bird, back to the world.

The airplane ride back was like a big, long, raucous party, but I Teurled up in my seat and pretended to sleep. I didn't have any money on me when I got to Fort Lewis, and I was wandering around trying to think what to do when a warrant officer tapped me on the shoulder. A woman who looked about to explode was standing nearby, watching, trying to restrain two boys about eight and five.

"You lost, Lieutenant? The real world's that way." He pointed to the doors. I looked at him and saw Tony, who should be meeting his wife. It took me a moment to refocus.

"I forgot to get paid," I explained finally. "I need to get home and I forgot to get paid."

"Where's home?"

"Kansas City."

He looked as if he was going to say the hell with it and leave me standing for a moment, then he said, "There's a Western Union office at SeaTac airport. If we give you a lift that far, have you got somebody you can call to wire you the money?"

I nodded. They dropped me off and loaned me a quarter. I called my folks collect and talked to the woman in the Western Union office. She had teased hair and her uniform skirt was a mini.

I thought, it's good to be back in the world. A woman with Mary Travers hair and wire-rim glasses and a boyfriend toting a guitar passed me in the broad hall, and I smiled at them experimentally. The woman twitched the skirt of her granny dress carefully aside and looked pointedly at the fatigues and combat boots one of the nurses had loaned me for the trip home.

I wandered into one of the clothing shops in the airport. All kinds of batiks and cotton-gauze ethnic things were on sale there. And gorgeous long dangly earrings, the kind you could never wear on duty. I wished I had my back pay.

"Is there something I can show you?" the young woman behind the counter asked. She had on a nice silky dress of some sort.

"No, I'm sorry. I wish I could afford something, but I just got back from Vietnam and they didn't give me my pay before I left."

"You were over there? It must have been terrible." I felt like snapping that no, it had been a lot of fun, really, but restrained myself. She was just being pleasant. "What were you doing there?" she asked.

"I was a nurse," I said, and added, "I took care of GIs and also a lot of Vietnamese civilians." I didn't want her to think I was a baby burner.

"How interesting." The loudspeaker came on, announcing a flight, and she leaned forward over the counter. I leaned toward her to hear what she had to say. "You must have learned a lot about the people, then. Did you get your necklace there?" and she reached out and touched the amulet before I quite knew what she was doing.

She let go of it fast, the bright mustard and green of her aura darkening like snow after a slop bucket has been emptied on it. She backed off. "Well, if you don't want anything, excuse me. I have to finish this inventory."

I yearned to see Mom and Dad throughout the five-hour trip, but when they hugged me, I had to fake returning their hugs. I wasn't quite up to their smiles, so very soon those smiles faded. Kansas City looked as if nothing else were going on in the whole world. Trees grew unmolested, people dressed in suits and hats with veils and high-heeled shoes that would have made running impossible. It didn't look real to me.

When we reached our old driveway, I felt like a teenager again. The wind chimes sang cheerily in the breeze. The pine tree in the front yard looked a little taller. All of the pets were long dead. My brother was there, and my grandma and grandpa. I didn't know what to say to anybody. I went upstairs to my room, sat down on the bed, and stared at the pink Chinese print paper I'd picked out when I was fourteen. The last of my cat collection, a couple of Avon bottles, sat on the blond dresser Mom and Dad had bought secondhand for me. I walked over to the dresser and picked up one of the glass cats, to stroke it for comfort.

Its surface was cool and smooth, but it felt warmer than I did. I felt as if my insides had been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop, cold, numb, and empty. I couldn't see my aura anymore. I thought the muddiness I saw in the mirror probably was real dirt. It had been a long trip.

I took off the amulet and tucked it inside my old jewelry box. I wouldn't need it here in the world. I put on a pair of jeans that had been too small for me when I left and were now miles too big, and one of Daddy's shirts, a pair of Mama's shower shoes. At least I'd lost weight. Maybe I could make money introducing the Exotic South China Sea Dieting Miracle-amebiasis and tapeworms. Most of them had been flushed out of my system by various antibiotics, fungicides, and other medications, but some of them were not easily gotten rid of.

Mom made my favorite foods: steak and homemade trench fries, corn on the cob, and fresh green beans and tomatoes. My aunt made my favorite cake, buttermilk chocolate, and put on it the peppermint boiled white icing that only she seemed to know how to do. I couldn't eat much of it. I didn't say, "Pass the tucking salt," as I've heard some of the guys say they did, but I didn't say much of anything else either.

So when Mom found the medal, she thought it was a topic of conversation.

"Honey, this is a Silver Star, isn't it? You didn't tell me you'd won a medal. Can I call Mr. Mingel at the Kansan and tell him?

He's been wanting to interview you when you came home."

I should have unpacked it myself, before she got around to it. The fatigues I had been in when I was admitted were still in there, and that's not the kind of thing you want your mother to see. But my attitude was "burn the whole damned thing." My stuff from Da Nang was being sent later.

Mama's eyes were troubled when she opened the box someone had packed the medal in. I hadn't brought it along. I guess whoever threw my stuff in my bag had done it. I wished Janice had come back to say good-bye. Or Llewellyn.

"Silver Star, huh?" I asked, and glanced at it. Sure enough. I guess the general felt I needed a little higher bribe than a simple Purple Heart to keep my mouth shut. Those things take months to review and award normally. It made me a little sick to think that they were trying to buy me off with something most people earned with the loss of one or more limbs, or maybe their lives. "Don't mean nothin', Mama. Please don't call the newspaper man. I don't have anything I want to tell him."

"Well, if you're sure," she said uncertainly, then patted me on the cheek. "You know your daddy and I love you and we're very proud of you, honey."

I felt as if she'd hit me. Tears stung the backs of my eyes. Proud of what?

I'd killed a man, had been the cause of death for two others, and had abandoned the little boy I'd been trying to save in a Vietcong village.

Nothing had turned out right. The medal was a mockery. A Hollywood happy ending. Fuck. I'd give it to Duncan. He liked that kind of shit. I'd make up a funny story about it, and give it to him. And then later, maybe he'd hold me and I could tell him how it really was. If I could just tell everything to him, I could really start to feel at home again. That was a good idea. If I could talk to him, he'd make me feel better and then I could be a little more normal around the folks. He was living in Independence, Missouri, now, according to the third and final letter I'd received from him. I sat down on my folks' bed and tried to call, but nobody answered.

I drove out to Independence the next day. Mom and Dad disapproved. They thought I should sit around and regale the relatives with more war stories. But I needed to see Duncan badly. If he was gone, maybe I could wait. I stopped and called again from a 7-Eleven store.

"Kitten! You're home!" He said. "God, that's about the most wonderful thing I've heard. Hell, yes, come on out. I've got so much to tell you."

Maybe it would be all right. Maybe he cared more than I thought. Maybe he had realized how much he missed me. I drove into the parking lot at his apartment complex and felt my stomach knot as I came to the front stoop of his apartment, rang the doorbell. The door opened.

A mane of wild red hair held back by a blue bandanna over whelmed a girl who wore rubber gloves, cutoffs, and an overtaxed halter top and who had legs up to her armpits. Maybe I-'d gotten the wrong apartment after all. Maybe he'd moved and had kept the same phone and had forgotten to tell me.

"I'm looking for Duncan-" I began.

She grabbed my hand in her rubber gloves and chirped, "You must be Kitty McCulley! Oh, that rat didn't tell me you'd be here so soon I've been cleaning this place all morning trying to make it look nice for when you got here. Duncan has told me so much about you I've just been dying to meet you." She dragged me into the hall and peeled off her rubber gloves. "I'm Swoozie," she concluded, as if that was supposed to mean something. Duncan had definitely not told me all about her.

"Uh-hi," I said, looking beyond her to see if he was there. Across the living room was a stairway. Upstairs, a faucet shut off, there were a couple of footsteps, and then Duncan came bouncing down the steps, attired in fresh jeans and a starched, button-down shirt. I'd forgotten men could look that clean.

He grabbed me in a bear hug and, to my surprise, I didn't feel any more like hugging him than I had Mom and Dad. I just looked at him. If he really meant that hug, who the hell was she?

"I see you met Swoozie. Great, isn't she?"

"Umm," I said noncommittally.

"She's made us chicken for lunch. You like chicken, don't you, Kitten?"

He didn't wait for an answer. The chicken amply showed off her domestic skills, and the way she hung on Duncan showed off others.

When she had detached herself for a second I said, "Duncan, I've got so much I need to tell you."

"Oh, yeah, and I really want to talk to you too, hon. But it's going to have to be later. Swoozie and I have to run out to her folks' farm for an hour or so. You can entertain yourself, right? The TV's in the bedroom."

I didn't say anything and he didn't ask anything. The two of them piled into his Camaro and drove away. I wandered around the house, thinking I should just leave. He was behaving as if I came over every Sunday for dinner. As if I'd never been away. And to me, his apartment didn't even look real. I drifted upstairs. I'd have to look at the TV. I think I was still hoping he'd get halfway to whatsername's farm, slap himself on the head, say, "Oh, what a fool I've been! I need to get back and talk to Kitty. We can take care of these trivial errands later." But though I strained my ears listening, I heard nothing. I opened the closet door and the smell of his cologne and fresh-pressed clothes drifted out. I lifted a shirt sleeve and sniffed. Before I left, I'd asked him to keep my letters, and I wondered if he had. I didn't expect to find them so easily. But there they were, in a pile, with a rubber band. I picked up the pile, all written on stationery with helicopters and Big Chief tablet-style lines. When I removed the rubber band, I understood why his letters never made reference to mine.

He hadn't opened them. Incredulously, I pawed through the pile. Not one was opened.

I picked them up, tucked them into my purse, and got back into Mom s car. I drove into the countryside, hoping by some coincidence I'd run into them and he could explain. It had been a rainy day, and as I drove down a small dirt road with trees on either side, it rapidly grew darker. I didn't care. I took the curves very fast and ended up plowing through the woods. I was still focused on the letters, and on Duncan, and it took me a while to realize that I wasn't on the road and was heading down a steep embankment. I forgot about braking until the shock of impact hit me, and the fender was crumpled against a tree, the radiator spewing water.

I got out of the car and walked until I found a farmhouse. I called Duncan, and he and Swoozie came to get me, and called a garage.

I didn't ask him about the letters then. But the next day I called a VA hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, and was accepted as a staff nurse almost at once.

I thought what I needed was to get back to work, to get back into the swing of things, to stop dwelling on my problems and help other people.

I was assigned to a drug/alcoholism rehabilitation ward. The alcoholics were mostly suffering from DTs, the drug addicts had hepatitis. The alcoholics told the staff where the druggies were getting their fixes, the druggies told us where the alcoholics were hiding their hottles. I was not popular with my coworkers. I was used to getting myself organized and getting everything done at the start of the shift and waiting for casualties. I found myself getting irritable and brusque with the staff, and I resented it when they asked me to help them with their work. It was boring. I felt no empathy for the patients, and even wearing the amulet didn't help. Their auras were uniformly depressingly gray-green, deep with self-deception and shit-brown with selfloathing. My own was thin and brown. Once I worked on ortho, and was caring for a very nice man with terrible pain in his back. I tried to help him, tried to focus, using the amulet. Nothing happened. I gave him a pain shot, which did nothing either.

The day I got the letter from Charlie Heron, I walked on air. He left a phone number and I called him. He was living on the Coast, he said, in a great place in San Francisco, and he wanted me to come and see him. He sounded different than he had in country, aimless and unemphatic, but I figured he probably couldn't talk to anyone either. Maybe we could talk to each other. I could give him the amulet. He'd trained with old Xe.

He'd know what to do with it.

One of his friends met me at the airport and took me to the house he shared with Charlie. Charlie was wadded up in front of the television with a joint in his hand. The house reeked so badly of pot you could get stoned just breathing normally. I smoked with the two of them, but didn't get two coherent words out of Charlie all weekend. I didn't even consider giving him the amulet then. His aura was only a slight variation on the ones worn by my patients in Colorado.

I worked at the hospital for another month, but finally quit. I couldn't stand it. As the patients sobered up, the yellow in their auras, a tendril of blue, sometimes some other healthier color, would bud along with sprigs of personality, only to be smothered again as soon as they were released. I found myself going home at night and drinking to relax from the misery of it. I crashed my car another time, and was nervous about driving for a long time after that.

I drifted from job to job, trying to work as a night float whenever possible, working first on one ward, then another. I liked the variety and the adrenaline rush of occasionally having dire emergencies to deal with. That made me feel at home, as if I were back in Nam. But what I liked the best was that I didn't really have to get to know anybody. I wouldn't risk contaminating anyone else.

When Nixon ended the war, I was fiercely glad. Our men could come home and the Vietnamese could begin adjusting to having one boss instead of many. I expected the news of the Communist takeover, but the day it came out, I didn't go to work. I stayed in bed and tried to remember what Mai looked like, wondered if having been a patient in an American hospital would affect Ahn's status, and hoped Hue was reinstated in the good graces of the winners. I sat in bed and stared at the TV and ate junk food and held my knees in my arms and watched, and rocked, and wondered. Pretty soon I started to cry, just a trickle at first, and then great gulping sobs, such as I hadn't cried since before Tony crashed us in the jungle. Thinking about Tony and Lightfoot made me cry all over again, until I couldn't get my breath. I didn't go to work the next day either. I didn't have the energy to go anywhere, or to do anything. I couldn't bear to brush my teeth and it was a struggle to drag myself to the bathroom.

When I realized I was out of anything to blow my nose on, pulled myself together enough to return to work. Everybody was talking about this new restaurant or that new movie. If you hadn't been there, you had nothing to talk about. I was home, but I wasn't. Everything here seemed trivial, superficial. Life was not sweet. It wasn't even bearable.

One night I was working the emergency room, in Gallup, New Mexico. There was a long lull between the night's stab wound victim and the drunk who'd been hit and run from. The receptionist and the nurses' aide were chatting about inconsequentialities. A new boyfriend, a new soap opera, the grandparents taking the receptionist's kids to Disneyland, a new crochet pattern. I wanted to scream. I had consoled myself by trying to jump back into everything, into jobs, into love affairs that were little more than one-night stands (I was still trying to find someone to touch me), into the whole pop-culture commercial scene. I spent most of my days in shopping malls charging stuff I didn't need on my charge cards and worrying over paying them off, eating out so I wouldn't have to eat alone. I lived in a singles complex with no old people, children, or pets but lots of predators of both sexes circling the pool like so many sharks, looking to score with the best body with the best tan. And I didn't give a shit about any of it.

I walked out to my car that morning after work and found I'd left the lights on and the battery was dead. I spent a sleepy morning learning about jump starting, and hitched a ride home with the service station attendant. I walked into my cute little studio apartment, around the breakfast bar, and gave the steak knives a serious once-over. I selected a sharp one and took it into the bathroom.

Why not? Duncan didn't love me, my parents would be better off without me, I was no good at my job anymore. Nobody wanted or needed me anymore. From being someone with special power, I had become someone who was another body, in the way, who had spent a yeat of her life doing something that was not to be mentioned in polite conversation. I would kill myself and then they wouldn't have to worry about me. Nobody had ever taken me to Disneyland. And I had always wanted to go, too. Tears ran down my cheeks and over my hands and onto the knife blade as I thought how unfair it was that here I'd fought for my country and nobody had even offered me a lousy trip to Disneyland.

Well, goddamit, I would kill myself, no mistake about that, but I'd do it after I took myself to Disneyland. Duncan hadn't kept his promise to be the man of my dreams, my parents hadn't kept their promise to always make everything all right, no matter what, and the Army sure as hell had never kept any of its promises, but I could keep my own promise to myself. I didn't expect the place to be wonderful. I didn't expect it to thrill me. I knew it would be silly and childish and commercial, but it was something the little girl I'd been before I went to Nam wanted to do, so whatever I thought now, I'd go for her. Like going to the funeral of Hue's mother. To honor her memory. Nobody else was going to.

I called in sick, and packed a bag. I drove to the airport in Albuquerque, and handed over my plastic for a ticket to L.A. Flying over it made me think of Nam: the mountains, the palms, the ocean. It also made me think of the line in the joni Mitchell song about paving paradise and putting up parking lots. I had heard the city put down pretty often, but it looked okay to me. I'd heard one of the patients joke about returning there from Vietnam. "When you've spent time in hell, L.A. ain't so bad," he said.

Baggage claim seemed miles from where we deboarded. People were in a terrific hurry and the auras surrounding them looked like a psychedelic nightmare. I decided that before I went to Disneyland I would remove the amulet and stick it in my jeans pocket. I wasn't ready for Mickey Mouse with a black and red aura.

I've become pretty familiar with the baggage claim area by now, but that day I had only an impression of a large room with several entrances, one of which had an almost tunnel-like hall, like the endless corridors in VA hospitals.

I turned to scan the baggage racks, looking for my new tweed case, when I heard a noise as if the streets of downtown Da Nang had been crowded into the room. What was this, a flashback? I wondered, as I turned toward the stomach-wrenchingly familiar singsong cacophony of Vietnamese language being spoken in frightened, angry, defensive, awed voices, and saw what looked like half of Vietnam come pouring out of the tunnel The familiar gray-violet fearful aura wrapped these people in a fog, but there were sparks of yellow around many, and clear, hopeful turquoise.

Their bodies, normally small and slim, were emaciated now, some bearing sores. Children looked up at their parents with frightened eyes and the parents looked dazed, shell-shocked. Some carried small bundles, others had nothing. No one went to the baggage claim. I had long ago stopped listening to the news or reading the paper, and I couldn't imagine what they were doing there. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I noticed several American people and a couple of fairly well-dressed Vietnamese infiltrating the main crowd, detaching clumps of people who must surely be family groups. Waiting behind the barrier separating the luggage area from the rest of the room stood people with signs. "Welcome," they said, in English and in Vietnamese, with names below them. I wanted to cry again. Nobody had been there with signs for us. But at least most of us were familiar with airports, and heavy auto traffic, and how to catch a cab, and had someplace to go, eventually when we got here.

Surely these people couldn't all be visiting relatives in Pasadena?

I watched until the throng disappeared. I found myself searching every child's face for Ahn's or even Hoe's, every young girl's for Mai's or Hue's, every old man's for Huang's, or even Xe's, though I knew he was dead. I knew now I wasn't hallucinating, that these people were not ghosts that had collectively come to haunt us, but I grew fascinated by them. When they stopped pouring in and had been picked up by the welcoming committees, I wandered off to a newsstand to see if there was anything about it. On the third page of the Los Angeles Times, I found a story I almost ignored: "Hundreds of Boat People Arfive Daily." But there was a picture with Vietnamese people in it. I scanned those faces too, but didn't see anybody familiar. I didn't understand how the people I had seen could be boat people if they arrived on an airplane, but I took the paper with me back to the baggage claim and watched several more planeloads of people file through the tunnel, people from many countries, but among them some Vietnamese.

I didn't go to Disneyland. Though I knew it was a long shot, I kept thinking, Maybe Ahn will be on the next plane and I'll take him with me.

Wouldn't Disneyland knock babysan's eyes out of their sockets? Finally I got too tired to watch anymore and I checked into a hotel near the airport. But the next day I was back. And I went back every day for the week I had planned to stay, watching the planes, watching people being collected, -searching the faces.

At last, among one of those big crowds, I thought I saw him, a one-legged boy with a crew cut and a thin, frightened face screwed up like a monkey's, ready to irritate everybody by crying. I'd been leaning on the railing near the luggage carousel, and I snapped to my feet and walked forward as if someone were pulling me on a string, toward that boy. Penetrating the crowd wasn't easy, but I did reach him, only to have a woman snatch him into her arms and glare at me.

"Excuse me, what are you doing?" an American voice said behind me.

"That boy I said and then braved his mother's glare and looked at him again. It wasn't Ahn. Too young. He looked like Ahn when he had first come to the hospital, but Ahn would be almost fifteen now. "I'm sorry,"

I said to the American woman and made a steeple with my hands and bowed to the mother. "Sin loi, ba." And to the American woman I said, "I thought he was a boy I knew in Nam. A friend of mine, a patient actually. I-"

I felt as dazed as they looked as the people poured around me like a stream around a rock. "I'm sorry," I said finally.

"No need to be sorry. Wait a sec," the woman said and signaled to one of her friends with the signs, then took me by the arm, out of the traffic. "You were in Vietnam?" I nodded. "What as, a missionary?"

"Army Nurse Corps," I said.

"No kidding. And you're waiting for your adopted son, is that it?

I shook my head. "I just thought I recognized him. He-I don't know where he is. I left him in a village."

"Probably not here, then. We don't get that many peasants with this bunch. Mostly history professors and government people, intellectuals who'd be killed by the new regime if they hadn't escaped. But you never know. They keep sneaking in all kinds of shirttail cousins and old family retainers and what have you that they feel an obligation to. He might make it in with some family."

"Oh," I said, disappointed not to find something I didn't even know I was looking for. But I waited with the woman, who told me her name was Shirley Nussbaum, for the next planeload, and she told me about some of the problems the people were having resettling: no apartments, no job skills, worst of all no English. The government gave some hell , but church groups and clubs did most of the sponsoring.

p And of course there was a lot of resistance to the presence of the refugees in some places.

I nodded, only half listening, and took Shirley's address as she shepherded her last group away. I lingered for a while as the crowd drifted away, then headed for the women's room. It looked empty, but then I heard a toilet flush and somebody shrieked. My adrenaline leaped up. A mugging? Heart attack? Somebody just freaking out? I searched every stall, flapping open the doors, until I came to the latched one.

Sobbing issued from within.

"You okay in there?" I asked, knocking on the door. More sobbing.

"Look, can I help you? Are you ill? I'm a nurse. Please, just answer me." But the sobbing grew louder.

Oh hell, I wouldn't catch anything on the floor of the L.A. airport I hadn't already caught in Nam. I lay down and peered up under the door.

A skinny Vietnamese girl squatted with her feet on the toilet seat. As I watched she leaned back against the flush button and shrieked again. To go through a war, and refugee camps, and a brave new world, only to be freaked out by plumbing. I wriggled under the door, unlatched it, and helped her down from the seat. She couldn't have been more than seven.

She tugged at my hand and I squatted down beside her so I wouldn't look so tall, and scooped her up, t4en showed her how the toilet flushed.

"Where's mamasan, huh, kiddo?" I asked her, and carried her to the sink and showed her how to wash her hands, then carried her out into the lobby. I had Shirley's number, but I didn't need it. Shirley, carrying a toddler, came barreling back through the door, followed by a frightened-looking young woman with a child on each hip and another toddler clinging to her skirts. When Shirley saw us she stopped and put her free hand over her heart, panting exaggeratedly. "You found her."

"Yeah," I said, looking for someone with a free hand to hold her. There wasn't anyone and it would have needed a crowbar to dislodge her fingers.

"Mrs. Huong has too many kids to keep track of, I think. Would you mind walking with us out to the van?"

"Sure," I said. It didn't look as if I had much choice. When everyone else was seated, Mrs. Huong reached for the little girl. The child clung to the theng around my neck until she was sure her mother had her, and as I released her, her fingers touched the amulet. A warm rush went through me as we formed a triangle, and the energy formed a circuit; a tentative mauve-pink light, a little grayed down, but definitely growing brighter, sprang up among us. Mrs. Huong did not smile, but her expression lightened with relief at another hurdle overcome. Life after war. It happened. I had seen hundreds of people in the last few days who had lived through it, who were still trying to live. And there was nothing I had seen that most of them hadn't seen, nothing I had had to do that many of them hadn't had to do, and maybe worse. I couldn't contaminate them, I couldn't shock them, and yet a kid who had been born and raised amid all that ugly, numbing horror had more awe and wonder at push-button flush toilets than I had at the idea of Disneyland. I watched the van depart and then headed back to the hotel. Shirley would pick me up tomorrow morning, to see some of the temporary facilities her group had arranged for the refugees, and to take me to the airport to meet more. They needed a lot of help, she said. Meanwhile, I had things to do, preparations to make. I wondered if Charlie Heron was still stoned all the time, if he was alive, if he was interested in making a trip to L.A., and if I still had his number.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a former nurse and a Vietnam veteran, is the authorof seven other Bantam novels, all humorous fantasy. She has recently moved )lrom Fairbanks, 41aska, to the Washington coast.