Frankie turned back to thank the sergeant, but he was already gone.
She followed Barb into the hooch.
They stood there, shoulder to shoulder. “My mother would pass out,” Frankie said at last.
“Spoiled white girl,” Barb said.
Frankie tossed her purse and travel bag on the empty cot nearest her. They landed with a squeak of metal that did not inspire her confidence for a good night’s rest. She felt insects feasting on her bare arms and legs. Slapping her own thigh, she unpacked a few belongings and carefully arranged her family photographs on the rickety dresser. Then she tacked up a picture of Jamie; in it, he was leaning against a post, holding a beer, giving her the kind of smile that lifted everyone’s mood. She stared at it longer than she should have, then felt the start of tears and turned away.
Barb unpacked her posters. Unfurling them, she tacked them up on the wall, a trio of her idols: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted, with the words I AIN’T GOT NO QUARREL WITH THEM VIET CONG stamped across his body.
Frankie opened the creaking, makeshift dresser drawer, saw that it was full of rat droppings. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that literally. Shit.” She started to laugh and then heard an incoming chopper.
Frankie slapped her thigh again. Her hand came back bloody.
“And here I was thinking we had time for a little gin rummy,” Barb said.
“Or to do our nails,” Frankie answered, stripping out of her shorts. She put on her fatigues and gathered her supplies: a lighter, a roll of bandages, scissors, a flashlight, chewing gum, and a felt-tipped pen. She looped a length of Penrose tubing through her belt loop, in case she needed to start an IV, and snapped a Kelly clamp on her bagging waistband. You never knew when supplies would be lacking, and being prepared could save a life.
Outside, the whump-whump of the helicopters was deafening.
Frankie and Barb ran past the helipad, where wounded were being offloaded from a Dust Off and coming in by ambulance. Men covered in mud and blood, working together, shouting at one another beneath the thwomping rotors. In the air, a row of helicopters hovered, waited their turn to touch down.
A grizzled-looking Black medic was running triage in the ER, determining who would be seen when. Sawhorses were being set up quickly, to hold the men on litters. A screen in the back corner shielded the expectants. “Lieutenants Johnson and McGrath,” Barb said. “From the Thirty-Sixth. Surgical nurses.”
He looked at their bloody, stained fatigues. It meant they’d been in the shit. “Thank Christ,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the din of yelling men and helicopters landing and taking off. He pointed to a Quonset hut. “OR 1. Report to Hap. If he doesn’t need you yet, try Pre-Op.”
Frankie and Barb were halfway there when the red alert siren sounded. Seconds later a shell exploded on the ground not far away from them. A sound like pelting gravel hit the Quonset hut. The air stank of smoke and something strangely acrid.
Something whistled over Frankie’s head and thudded behind her. At OR 1, Frankie wrenched the door open.
Inside: Bright lights. Men waiting for surgery, lying on tables.
She and Barb washed their hands, then grabbed scrubs and caps and masks and gloves and found Harry “Hap” Dickerson, a lieutenant colonel, operating without assistance on a deep belly wound.
“Lieutenants McGrath and Johnson, sir. Reporting for duty.”
“Thank God. Cart’s there,” Hap said to Frankie. “Johnson, that’s Captain Winstead over there. He’ll need you.”
“Yes, sir.” Barb ran toward the other doctor.
Another rocket blast, this one close enough to shake the Quonset hut. The lights dimmed and went out.
“Shit! Generators!” Hap yelled.
Frankie pulled out her flashlight and flicked it on, directing the narrow yellow beam on the wound.
Seconds later, the lights came back on, accompanied by the hum of the emergency generators.
The rounds kept falling, raining fire on the camp. Thud. Whump. The explosions were so close they rattled Frankie’s teeth.
The noise was excruciating and heightened Frankie’s sense that hell had broken loose here. Helicopters coming and going, the mortar attack that went on and on and on, the hum of suction machines, the drone of the generator, the snapping of lights on surging electricity, the hissing of respirators.
“Hap! It’s Reddick. He’s in trouble,” someone shouted above the melee.
“Can you close?” Hap said to Frankie, stepping back from the patient.