For All Their Lives (16 page)

“Please call me Casey. Yes, I'm half French and half American. I think, Lily, that you and I will be good friends.”

“It is my wish also,” Lily said shyly. “I visited many places while I was in the United States. Your country is wonderful. There are so many places to go. I made wonderful friends. I saw the honeymoon place where much water rushes down. It was a memorable sight. Of course I had no one to honeymoon with.” She giggled. “I also went to California one summer and saw orange blossoms and a film studio. One does not need to wear perfume. The air is scented. I loved it. I had many boyfriends,” she said with her hands on her hips to make her point. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Casey laughed. “I don't know. Maybe, sort of, but I'm not sure.” She told Lily about Mac Carlin. “I couldn't believe my ears when he called my name. Now, all I have to do is find him or pray he will find me.”

“How exciting that you found your love here in my country. My love is from your country. I feel, too, we are destined to become good friends. I feel it here,” she said, thumping her chest with her fist. “Tell me, do you like my country?”

“It stinks,” Casey said bluntly. “What
is
that smell?”

Lily laughed. “It is the earth. One gets used to it. I truly missed the smell when I went to the United States. When there is no napalm in the air it isn't too bad. You will adjust to it. How do your feet feel now?”

“Much better,” Casey sighed happily. “When do we go back on duty? I don't even know what time it is, I forgot to adjust my watch.”

“You'll hear the choppers long before they get here. You will have time to dress and report to the O.R. Major Hagen says you are to rest until that time arrives. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Just talk to me. Tell me about Dr. Farrell. He's an excellent surgeon.”

“The very best, that's why he's the Chief of Surgery. He talks strange sometimes and says . . . funny things. I think it's to hide his feelings. He doesn't want anyone to know the way he feels. I have seen him walking in the middle of the night. He thinks too much of all those young men who have passed on. He cannot free himself of his countrymen. I understand this. One evening when it was quite late and he . . . he wasn't himself, he said his shoulders were heavy with guilt because he wasn't a good enough surgeon. He believes this, but it is not true. He is by far the best surgeon we have.”

“Tell me about Major Hagen,” Casey said, wiggling her swollen toes in the water.

“She is, how do you say, tough—but fair. She never asks anything of us that she will not do herself. There are only two other nurses besides myself, and now you. It is not enough. We work twelve-hour shifts when there is incoming wounded. You will do your share of ward duty. I must warn you, your heart will never be the same.”

“I've never seen anything like yesterday,” Casey confided. “At first I didn't think I would make it. I did, though. I really did. Then, listen to this, I ate three hard-boiled eggs and drank three bottles of beer and puked my guts out. Why are these sheets so damp?” she demanded.

Lily chuckled. “It is the humidity. We have local women to do the laundry,” Lily explained. “Every day the sheets are laundered, but they always feel damp. You will get used to it.”

“It's so much to deal with all at once. I don't know what I expected, but I do know this isn't it. Is Saigon like this?”

“Heavens no. Saigon is a beautiful city. My parents live there. Both of them are doctors, educated in Thailand. I have three sisters and three brothers. I am the youngest. What about your family?”

Casey told her about her life in Paris, the grandmother and father she never knew. She spoke of Nicole and Danele and Sister Ann Elizabeth.

“I will take you to Saigon to meet my family if Major Hagen gives her permission. It won't be for a while. We can catch a ride with one of the chopper pilots. You will like Saigon. It is very civilized. We can try to locate your lover and go to parties while we wait for him to come to you. It is a wonderful idea, is it not?”

Casey flushed. “He's not my lover.”

“He will be.” Lily giggled. “It is meant to be, I feel it here,” she said, thumping her chest again. “I will bring more coffee.” She gathered up the tray with Casey's dishes. When she turned back, her dark eyes were confiding and full of mischief.

“Yes?”

“I . . . I have a lover in Saigon.” The words gushed out of her mouth as though held in too long. “He is an American, a doctor. My . . . my parents do not approve. He's much older than I am, almost as old as my brother. He's married,” she blurted, lowering her eyes.

Casey dried her feet, wondering what it was she was supposed to say. “Has he made any promises to you?”

Casey felt inept when Lily winced.

“The same promises all the GI's make to Vietnamese girls. They want to marry us, they say, when the war is over. We cook for them, wash their clothes, and go to bed with them. They give us babies and leave to return to their homes, and they do not come back. But Eric isn't . . . Eric is different.” Her voice, Casey thought, was too defensive. She knew the girl doubted her lover.

“I'm sure he's all the things you say he is,” Casey said kindly.

“I . . . I had to tell someone,” Lily said shyly. “You will keep my secret?” At Casey's nod, Lily left with the tray held high over her head.

Casey slid her feet into soft felt slippers, hitched up her fatigues, and ventured outside. She wanted to see, in broad daylight, what her new home was like. On her trip to the shower, she had not glanced right or left. She did both now, drawing in her breath at the lush, dark greenery surrounding the compound. She saw the concertina wire rolled in what looked like hoops along the eight-foot-high fence. To keep her in or keep the VC out? Both, she decided. She hated the sight. The smell, the humidity, was so overpowering, she felt dizzy. She started to breathe through her mouth again. Would she ever get used to this country?

“A bit awesome, eh?” Someone behind her chuckled. Casey whirled.

Luke was still wet from his shower. His rusty curls were slicked back from his head, but he was freshly shaved, and his robe flapped around his bare ankles. He linked his arm through hers.

“Yes,” she said. “Where are the flowers? I thought there would be flowers.”

“Jesus, I don't know. I never thought much about it, but you're right. I think we should find out right away, before the next push comes in. Heavy casualities are predicted for today. Predicted,” he said, “is the same thing as confirmed. It beats the shit out of me how these brass monkeys know almost to the goddamn minute when wounded are due to arrive. They stick pins in some asshole map, and the next thing you know we have two hundred kids coming through here. Those flowers now,” he said, slapping at his head, “are going to bother me. Flowers are important. Don't know how that got past me.”

The row of Quonset huts came into Casey's line of vision. They were barren-looking, hot and ugly. She wanted to say something about how ugly they were, but she realized Luke already knew. Instead she said, “Do you know a doctor, an American one, in Saigon, named Eric?”

“Jesus, are you going to tell me you already got a thing going with one of our doctors? You just got in-country yesterday. Or are you going to tell me you're asking for Lily?” He didn't wait for her answer. “Want some advice, Casey? Mind your own business and let Lily handle her own affairs.”

“I guess that means the Eric in question is married and is stringing Lily along,” Casey said. Her face flushed with the reprimand. “When his tour is up he'll go back to the wife and children. She'll probably be pregnant, and he'll never think about her or the child again.” Casey searched her mind for an apt description of the situation. “It stinks!” she said succinctly.

Luke laughed. “You know, it sounds worse when you say it with a French accent. Married men have dalliances with young women all the time, here, in the United States, in France. It's what it is, nothing more. And,” Luke wagged a finger under her nose, “Lily has been educated in the United States and lived there for a good number of years. She looks young, but she's thirty years old, so that hardly makes her a young girl who doesn't know the score. Take my advice and stay out of it. She won't thank you later on.”

Casey watched the doctor when he stopped in his tracks, his ears and eyes cocked toward the horizon. “Here it comes.”

He meant Chinooks full of wounded, but she couldn't hear a thing, couldn't see a cloud on the horizon. She was aware of movement as corpsmen with their insignia on their arms rushed outside the Quonset huts. She saw Lily Gia and the chief nurse head for the hospital. She walked as fast as she could, back to her quarters, where she pulled on the shoes Lily had left earlier. When she was outside again, she still couldn't see anything or hear the rotor blades of the incoming choppers.

Five minutes later she was masked, scrubbed, gloved, and gowned and standing alongside Luke Farrell. He was discussing the flower shortage with two other doctors. One of them promised to have some flown in.

“I just want to know who the fuck is going to plant them,” Luke grumbled.

“I'll do it if no one else will,” Casey said from behind her mask.

“Do you have a color preference?” the doctor closest to Luke's table asked sourly.

“Red. Purple. Yellow,” Casey shot back.

“They'll be here by 0800 two days from now.”

When the wounded came in, there was no time to think, no time to do anything but concentrate on the surgeon's hands.

She was looking down at Luke's patient. He had a lacerated liver and was going to lose his spleen. He had multiple shrapnel wounds all over his body. He'd lose one of his legs, maybe the other. His stomach steamed upward. “Wipe!” Luke ordered. “Clancy!” he roared. “This guy has a head wound. When I finish, take over!”

Jack Clancy was the neurosurgeon.

“I think we can stabilize this guy,” Luke said from behind his mask. “What do you think, Nurse?”

Casey slapped a clamp into Luke's waiting palm. “I say you're right,” she replied softly.

They talked then of inane things, about where she was going to plant the flowers and how many would arrive. When they exhausted the subject of flowers, they talked about hot dogs and hamburgers and ice-cold beer. Picnics, Luke said, were his favorite pastime, ants and all.

They were on their fifth patient; the talk moved on to hula hoops and stuffed animals and two-wheeled bicycles. When a deep belly wound arrived, Lily spelled Casey for her ten-minute break.

Outside in the stifling air, Casey lit a cigarette as she let her eyes travel the length and width of the compound. Now was as good a time as any to decide where the flowers would go. Planting flowers was normal. Planting something beautiful in a place so ugly was civilized. She did a mental count of how many plants she would need. Maybe she should just make a big circle and plant everything in the center instead of trying to decorate the mean-looking Quonset huts. She knew in her gut that the plants and the garden would become an obsession. She felt like crying, but of course she wouldn't. That would mean she was weak, and this awful country wasn't for the weak of heart. She said a prayer then, asking for strength and stamina to do what she came here to do. “Don't let me fail,” she pleaded silently.

The day wore on. When the shift crawled toward the fourteen-hour mark, Casey felt as if she would drop in her tracks. All she wanted was to lie down on the wet sheets and sleep forever. She no longer cared about her feet. They were as numb as her brain. When she left the O.R. at the end of fifteen hours, she refused to look at the chart by the door. When she peeled off her hospital clothes, she saw dried blood on her arms. She wondered whose blood it was.

Casey headed straight for the shower. She stood under the spray, fully clothed. She rubbed at her fatigues, trying to squeeze the water toward her swollen ankles. In a daze she walked back to her room and fell on her cot.

Six hours later she heard the Chinooks directly overhead. She bolted upright, knowing she had five minutes at best to get to the O.R.

She pulled the hospital gown on over the same clothes she'd showered and slept in the night before. Until she pulled on her booties, she hadn't realized she was barefoot.

“I had a dream last night,” Luke volunteered.

“I thought you said you never sleep,” Casey said in an accusing voice.

“Actually, it was a daydream, okay?” Luke looked down at his first patient. “Jesus Christ!”

Casey glanced at the faceless boy, faceless because there was virtually no face left. She reeled and felt one of the corpsmen's backs push against her own. She recovered immediately.

“Who's doing triage!” Luke barked. “I can't help this kid. I don't fix faces. Ah, shit! Corpsman! On the double, move him out! Next!”

Five hours later Luke said, “As I was saying, I had this dr—this daydream. I was sleigh riding with this kid Jimmy Oliver. I didn't have a sled, so I was using an old rubber tire. Man, did that baby go. I was at the top of this huge hill, back in Pennsylvania, and when we got to the bottom, we sailed right into the South China Sea, tire and all. Is that a dream or what? There we were freezing our butts off, and then at the bottom we slid into ninety-degree water. Neat, eh? Close this guy, Adams. Looks like it's going to be an early shift today. Ten and a half hours. Can't beat that. I'll buy dinner at the club.
After
I fight you for the shower. Remember now, neat stitches.”