She needed to use the restroom. Should she waken one of her roommates to go with her?
No. Not after the night they’d had.
She threw the covers off and got out of bed, stood there in the dark. She heard something scurry across the floor and already she didn’t care. What were rats to her after tonight?
She dressed in her fatigues and slipped her stockinged feet into her boots, immediately feeling the raw blisters that had formed.
Outside, the compound was relatively quiet. Some distant gunfire, an engine humming—a generator, maybe—a faraway beat of music. Someone somewhere was listening to a transistor radio.
She shouldn’t go out. She knew that. It could be dangerous. Not all soldiers are gentlemen, Ethel had said, reminding Frankie that the Army at war wasn’t so different from the world.
Still. She couldn’t breathe in here, couldn’t sleep, and her bladder ached with the need to be emptied. The horrible images she’d seen wouldn’t let her go and the heat was giving her a headache.
She stepped down onto the hard-packed dirt and walked toward the latrines. Off to the left, a shadowy figure stood at a burn barrel, throwing things into the fire. The stench wafted this way.
A narrow walkway spread over a ditch, with coils of spiked wire on either side. She walked cautiously over the makeshift bridge and ducked into the women’s latrines.
When she exited the building, she smelled cigarette smoke and stopped.
A lone orange-gold light shone down from a post overhead, revealing a man standing not far away, smoking.
She turned away quickly, stepped on something that cracked.
He turned.
The chest cutter. Jamie.
In the ghoulish light, his handsome face looked drawn, even as he tried to smile at her.
“I’m sorry. You want to be alone,” she said. “I’ll go—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”
Frankie bit her lip, remembered Ethel’s warning about men. This was a lonely place, hidden. She glanced back toward the relative safety of her hooch.
“You’re safe with me, McGrath.” He held out a hand. She saw that it was shaking. “Hell of a thing, for a surgeon’s hand to shake,” he said.
Frankie moved toward him but remained out of reach.
“You caught me on a bad night,” he said.
Frankie didn’t know how to respond.
“A friend from high school came through today. We played football together. He said, Save me, JC.” His voice broke. “I haven’t been JC in a long time. And I couldn’t save him.”
Frankie could have said the kind of thing she’d heard at Finley’s funeral, the empty, shiny words of a stranger. Instead, she said, “You were with him when he died. You can tell his family that he wasn’t alone. That will mean a lot to them. I know, believe me. My brother died over here and all we got back was another man’s boots.”
Jamie looked at her for a long time, as if her words had surprised him. Then he tossed down his cigarette, ground it out with his heel. “Come on, McGrath. It’s late. I’ll walk you back to your hooch.”
He moved toward her. She fell into step beside him. On the makeshift bridge, he let her go first, and at the closed door of her hooch, he stopped.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“Just being here, I guess. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to save a man in ’Nam.”
On that, he gave her a false, fleeting smile, and walked away.
Seven
The next morning, when Frankie woke up, she was alone in the hooch. She dressed quickly and presented herself at admin at precisely 0800.
She saluted. “Lieutenant McGrath, Major.”
“I heard you were as much help in the ER as a tiara,” the major said, and opened a manila folder. “A nursing degree from some small Catholic women’s college and almost no clinical experience. And you’re young.” She peered at Frankie through black horn-rimmed glasses. “What on earth brought you here, Lieutenant?”
“My brother—”
“Never mind. I don’t care. But I hope to God you aren’t here to say hi to a brother.” Major Goldstein pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “The Navy and Air Force won’t even let a girl like you in ’Nam. They require training.” She closed the folder, sighed. “Anyway. You’re here. Unready, unprepared, but here. I’m assigning you to Neuro. Night shift. How much damage can you do there?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Uh-huh. Welcome to the Thirty-Sixth Evac Hospital, McGrath. Be the best version of yourself.”