Free The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

when he fell out of the tree. I-Jesus-" He looked down into the screwed-up little face, which reminded me of a monkey face carved out of a coconut, only smoother, of course.

    The volume of the kid's howling and sobbing increased as Joe started to unwrap his stump dressing. I tried to shush him, but that made him howl even more loudly. joc cut his examination short and sprinted two beds down. "I would have debrided him this morning, but the little devil got ahold of a candy bar somewhere and I couldn't operate."

    Sergeant Baker, a towel draped over one shoulder, paused to catch what the doctor was saying. "Yeah, well, bac si, you can do somethin' for me when you take him in to surgery. Sew his mouth shut, will you?

    Whoo, that child sure can holler." He tugged his ear, shook his head, and ambled toward the back door.

    The next patient sat stone-still in bed, disregarding the slings around her shoulders and arms, staring at the far side of the ward.

    "What's the matter with her?" I asked, dropping my voice.

    "Bilateral fractured clavicles and shock. Remember what I told you about the VC?"

    I nodded.

    The question was rhetorical. He used the pause to swallow. He'd been doing a fairly good job of putting on the jolly Joe Giangelo Show for my benefit and that of the patients, but the jolliness vanished suddenly and it was easy to see that the man had been working all night.

    "They, uh-the VC-shot-she was walking down the street, see, coming back from taking dinner to her husband, who's one of the CIDG civilian guards. She had her one-and-a-half-year-old on one hip and her three-month-old on the other. The sniper shot both babies out of her arms. They were small. The impact fractured her clavicles." He continued talking in a flat, chart-dictating voice about what he was going to do for her. He had two daughters, a toddler and an infant, back home.

    The next two beds were empty, but in the last a pretty young Vietnamese girl ostentatiously pouted until we turned toward her, then bounced up and down like a puppy while she waited for us to reach her bedside.
    Bouncing up and down when your leg is in traction is not all that easy to do, so we hurried, while she beckoned urgently with her hand and called, "Bac si Joe, Bac si Joe, I no see you long time.

    "This is Tran Thi Xinh," Joe told me. "Xinh, this is-"

    "This your girlfrien', huh?" she asked.

    "Nah. You know you're my best girl. This is Kitty. Lieutenant McCulley. She's going to be working with us now, so I want to show her your leg, okay?"

    "Okay, Joe. Kitty, how old you? You marry? Have children?"

    We straightened the sheets under her while she pulled herself up in bed with the help of the metal trapeze suspended from her overhead bed frame. I told her I was twenty-one, not married, no children, and she said, "Ah, same-same me," though she looked no more than seventeen.

    Xinh here is going to put me in the textbooks, Kitty. She has an unusual spiral fracture of the distal femur. We don't really have the equipment here to work with. I'd send her back to the States except that her family doesn't want her to go. So I ordered the equipment through channels. Needless to say, Xinh is going to be one of our longterm patients."

    Xinh flashed a cover-girl smile, followed by a torrent of Vietnamese.
    Mai, also speaking rapidly in Vietnamese, rushed over, half hugging Xinh every time she winced as Joe examined her. The two of them were almost as noisy as the little boy, Ahn, who was still alternately caterwauling and whining.

    Both were drowned out by the sudden boom of Sergeant Baker's bass voice.
    "Wait just a goddamn minute, soldier. What you think you're doin'?"

    "Bringin' you a new patient, Sarge. Ain't that nice of me?" The response was from an equally forceful voice with a thick overlay of Southern drawl-which didn't necessarily mean the guy came from the South, not in Vietnam. For some reason, even guys from Boston started talking like Georgia crackers by the time