“Wake up, Frank.”
“No.” Frankie rolled over on her cot, taking her damp sheet with her.
A sharp jab in her shoulder came next. “Wake up. It’s thirteen hundred hours.”
Frankie groaned and rolled over. Her eyes opened slowly, painfully. Last night’s mortar attack had gone on for hours; the explosions had rattled the hooches so hard that drops of red mud splatted down from the flat ceiling and landed in blotches on Frankie’s cheeks.
Frankie threw an arm over her eyes. “Go away, Ethel. We only went to bed an hour ago.”
“Two, actually,” Barb said. “Think for a moment about what day it is.”
Frankie pushed herself to a half sit, anchored up on her elbows. She saw the calendar tacked up on the wall above Ethel’s bed, with all the days Xed off. “Ethel’s DEROS.”
“That’s right, sports fans,” Ethel said, pulling the pink curlers out of her hair. “’Nam is losing the best nurse ever to serve in this man’s Army. I’m going back to the world. And I am not leaving this hellhole after two tours of duty with a pizza party at the O Club. Get your swimsuit on, Sleeping Beauty. I have a bird waiting for us.”
“Swimsuit?”
Frankie could hardly believe it. Yesterday, they’d worked for fourteen straight hours, on their feet for all of it; she’d spent most of those hours in surgery. Her back and knees hurt. And now … She glanced at her wristwatch. They were going to go swimming at some Officers’ Club … at 1300 hours on their only day off in two weeks?
Ethel yanked the covers back, revealing Frankie in her T-shirt and panties. She wore socks to bed, even in this heat, to save her toes from bugs and other creepy crawlers. Truth be told, it was why she wore panties, too.
Frankie climbed out of bed. （It took effort; her legs felt like jelly and her feet felt as if wild dogs had chewed on them while she slept.） She put on her two-piece belted red swimsuit, stepped into her sneakers, and headed to the latrines.
The smell hit her halfway there. Human shit and smoke. Some poor FNG was on shit duty. Literally. His job was to empty the latrines and burn the waste in fifty-five-gallon metal barrels.
She followed the plank walkway to the showers. This time of day, the water was almost warm, heated as it was by the sun. Still, she showered quickly and towel-dried her body. Not that she needed to in this heat.
“Finally,” Ethel said when Frankie strolled back into the hooch. “A damn debutante takes less time to get ready.”
“What do you know about debs?” Frankie said, buttoning her cutoffs and bending over to lace up her sneakers. Then she grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked at the hair around her face. There was no mirror in the hooch, which Frankie figured was just as well.
Barb covered her short Afro with a bandanna, tied it in the back, and then took the scissors from Frankie. Without a word, she took over cutting Frankie’s hair. Frankie let her do it, completely trusting. Such was the nature of the friendships Frankie had formed over here. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that she trusted Barb and Ethel with her life.
“Come on, country club deb,” Barb said to Frankie, tossing the scissors on the dresser. “The boys’ll be waiting.”
“Boys?” Frankie crammed some clothes into her pack and the trio left the hooch.
The Thirty-Sixth was surprisingly quiet today. Oh, there was mortaring going on—explosions in the jungle past the concertina wire—but no red alert siren yet. She could hear men shouting. They were playing football in the open space in front of the empty stage.
At the helipad, an armed helicopter waited—one of the Seawolves’ choppers. The nurses bent forward and ran toward it. The gunner reached out, helped them all aboard. At the last moment before takeoff, Jamie appeared, in gym shorts and a faded Warlocks T-shirt, and jumped into the chopper.
The pilot gave them a thumbs-up and up they went, the rotors picking up speed. The thwop-thwop became a blur of sound. The bird’s nose did a sharp dive, the tail lifted, and they sped forward, flying low. Gunners stood at fixed machine guns at the open doors.
Frankie sat in a canvas seat in the back of the chopper with Jamie beside her.
Through the open doors, she saw the world flash by: white beaches, turquoise water, red dirt roads that cut like veins through it all as they sped south, toward Saigon. As they neared the capital city, Frankie saw a verdant green landscape, shot through with silver strands; the Mekong Delta appeared like a lace overlay. Far away, flashes of orange flared in the jungle, explosions in the bush.