She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Damn it, McGrath. We don’t have time for fear. You’re good enough. Do it.”
Frankie nodded, swallowed hard, moving in closer to the patient’s draped, sliced-open abdomen.
“It’s just like sewing, McGrath. Don’t all you nice sorority girls know how to sew? You can stitch.”
Frankie took a deep breath and released it. You can do this.
She took another moment to focus, to tune out the noise and mayhem, the sound of the rain hitting the roof; when she’d calmed, she gently began to close the kid’s fascia, one stitch at a time. She counted each knot, kept careful track of them.
“Good,” Jamie said, glancing over at her. “I knew you could do it.”
Frankie had never focused on anything so intently in her life. The din in the OR faded away. She felt her own heartbeat, the flicker of her pulse, the air moving through her lungs. The whole world compressed into the bloody space in this kid’s belly. By the time she’d closed the fascia, she was sweating profusely, but she kept working. Finally, she let out a long breath and closed the wound and stared down at her work: the sutures were perfect. She had never felt so proud.
This, she thought. This is who I came here to be.
“I’m done here,” Jamie said to Frankie.
“Me, too,” she said.
They both looked up at the same time. Even though he was masked, she could tell that he was smiling.
“Told you, McGrath.”
She could only nod.
“Now move,” he said. “I just heard another Dust Off land.”
* * *
In late June, monsoon season hit with a vengeance; the weather was like nothing Frankie had ever seen.
Howling winds ripped off roofs, tore away signs. Rain fell in sheets, blown sideways by the wind. The red dirt turned to a viscous, clinging mud that oozed into the OR from outside, mingling with blood on the concrete floor. It was a constant job to shovel it away. Frankie and the other nurses and the medics, and anyone else they could wrangle into picking up a shovel, spent time trying to push the mud outside.
And it was cold.
Frankie stared down at the patient in front of her, his guts split wide open, his chest covered in frag wounds. Tonight’s storm battered the Quonset like a kid continuously hitting a toy barn with a hammer.
“He’s gone,” Jamie said, then cursed under his breath.
She looked at the clock for time of death, reported it in a quiet voice.
She had been on her feet for twelve hours. Monsoon season made every part of life more difficult. Or maybe it wasn’t the weather that was bad; maybe it was the increased number of wounded that came through these doors. Last week had been mostly quiet, with lots of downtime for the nurses; not so this week. LBJ kept sending more and more troops into the fray, hoping manpower would turn the tide, while the Stars and Stripes published rah-rah-America-is-winning-the-war articles every week.
She shivered hard, her stained, faded fatigues damp beneath her surgical gown. Her pockets bulged with cigarettes and lighters. （She always kept them on hand to give to her boys. That was how she thought of the casualties now: as her boys.） In her breast pocket she had a small flashlight and bandage scissors. A length of stretchy rubber tubing hung limply from one epaulet, just in case she needed to draw blood on the fly. A Kelly clamp hung from one belt loop. A blue surgical cap covered her shaggy hair and a mask covered her nose and mouth. All anyone could see of her was her tired eyes.
Jamie looked at her over the dead body of a kid who had probably been playing high school football six months ago. “You okay, McGrath?”
“Fine. You?”
He nodded, but she saw the truth in his eyes. He was as exhausted and dispirited as she was.
They knew each other so well now. In the past month, they’d spent more hours together than some married couples spent together in a year. All of this hardship—the rain, the damp, the cold, the mud, the wounds, the hours spent trying to save men’s lives—had bound them together, made them into more than friends. Sometimes, over here, the only way to handle the emotional pain was to laugh—or cry. Frankie rarely cried anymore, but when she did, she was probably in Jamie’s arms. He was always there for her and she was there for him. He could make her laugh in the harshest of moments.
They stood together for hours, she and Jamie, working in tandem. She knew every nuance of emotion on his face: the way he gritted his teeth in anger when he saw a child burned beyond recognition by napalm or a soldier who worried about his friends even as he was bleeding out. She knew he missed his beloved Wyoming ranch, with its cool nights and hot days, and its horses in the barn, and a field full of flowers just beyond his front porch. He missed fly-fishing and horseback riding and floating down the Snake River on an inner tube, a six-pack of beer floating with him. She knew that Sarah was a kindergarten teacher who sent him baked goods every week and worried that he didn’t write back often enough, and repeatedly asked if he was okay, and that he couldn’t write anything in answer to that question except Yes.