Free The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

you grab a clipboard instead, Kitty, and make rounds with me. I'll tell you what I know about some of these folks and what we're going to try to do with them."

    The Vietnamese side of the ward was more vigorously noisy than neuro had been. A bedlam of trol ois, dau quadis, and less articulate moans and whimpers greeted us, along with a cheerful wave from the end of the ward from a girl who squealed, "Bac si Joe! Bac si Joe!"

    Bac si Joe drew himself up to his full five feet four inches and summoned Voorhees, who was counting vitals on one of the new patients.
    "Specialist Voorhees."

    "Sir?" Voorhees asked, his head snapping up as if he expected to be called to attention.

    "What's the matter with you, Voorhees? Why haven't you informed these patients that they, as Orientals, are stoic and inscrutable?

    LDok at them! Listen to them! Scrutable as hell!"

    Voorhees gave him a "Give me a break" sigh and started counting the pulse again.

    Joe's face turned serious as he bent over the middle-aged woman in the first bed,,however. She was curled on her side, biting her knuckIt's, her face and pillow wet with tears, and she cried a little harder for a moment when he stooped down to say something soothing to her. Her patient gown was rucked up over a saturated pressure dressing covering her from waist to knee.

    "This is one of our new admissions from last night, Kitty, Dang Thi That. Mrs. Dang's husband was murdered in the assault that brought us most of these people. He was the village chief. After they killed her husband, the VC shot her too."

    "At least they didn't kill her," I said.

    "No, but this way she makes a good example to anybody who wants to cooperate with us. And it will take time and money to take care of her.
    You'll see what I mean when we get to another patient, a couple of beds down. Now then, Mrs. Dang, let me show the nurse where you're hurt.
    That's right." Dang Thi That gasped a little as he pulled the dressing off her wound and showed me a smallish entry hole. She cried out once as he gently turned her to show the gaping crater of medicated bloody gauze where her left hip had been. "You see here the tumbling effect of the bullet. Little hole here"-he pointed to the front-"totally blasts away or pulverizes the entire structure back here. We did a preliminary debridement in O.R. to clean out the worst of the necrosed tissue and dirt and tie off the bleeders, but of course we'll have to delay closure until infection is no longer a problem, and we can maybe get some skin to graft onto the area. It's going to be a long haul for her, but there's nothing else to do except maybe sew a volleyball in there."

    "Dau quadi, co," the woman said and stretched her tear-slicked hand toward me, then dropped it again, as if the effort of holding it up was too much for her.

    "She's been medicated within the hour," Joe said. "I don't think we could give her much else right now." He adjusted the flow of one of her two I.V.s and moved to the next bed, where an ARVN soldier with bilateral below-the-knee amputations lay.

    The man ignored Joe's greeting and held out his hand for a cigarette.
    Joe shrugged. "No can do. They're in my other pants. You bic? Other pants?" The man just looked disgusted and turned away, ignoring us while Joe told me about his unsuccessful attempts to save at least one of the legs. "He's been here about three weeks. You know how to do the figure-eight wrap to mold a stump for prosthesis?" I said I did.

    I had to say it loudly because about half the noise on the ward was coming from the next bed, a small boy with a big mouth.

    The stump of one of his legs was tightly bandaged, but draining. His right arm was in a plastic splint.

    "This little devil is Nguyen Tran Ahn, a ten-year-old orphan, parents killed by the VC before this last raid. He keeps saying he wants to go home, but nobody's claimed him. He was apparently up in a tree when a shell took his right leg. He fractured his right radius and ulna