“Yes,” Frankie said, but her hands were shaking. Stitching up an incision was one thing; doing it with too few doctors and nurses, unreliable electricity, and bombs landing nearby was a whole other world.
She closed her eyes, brought Jamie to her mind, then Ethel. She felt them beside her.
No fear, McGrath.
She heard Jamie’s voice in her head. It’s just like sewing, McGrath. Don’t all you nice sorority girls know how to sew?
Frankie closed out the chaos and the attack; when she felt calm, she closed the belly wound, then handed the patient off to a medic, washed her hands, put on new gloves, and followed Hap to another table.
“Hey, pretty,” the patient said to her, his voice slurring, his eyes lowering heavily. He was a Marine, undergoing anesthesia. “Are you here to watch my game?”
She looked at his dog tag. “Hey, Private Waite.” She kept her gaze on his face, careful not to glance down, where both of his legs had been severed mid-thigh. Thick yellow tubes were draining the blood from his chest wound, pumping it into a suction machine at Hap’s blood-splattered boots.
Another rocket hit. Close.
“They’re targeting us!” someone yelled. “Mandatory blackout in three … two … one.”
The lights clicked off.
“Get down!”
“Lower the table,” Hap said.
“Put me in, Coach,” Private Waite mumbled. “I can score.”
Frankie and Hap lowered the operating table as low as it would go. The nurse-anesthetist lay on the floor, monitoring the gauges with a flashlight.
Frankie knelt in the blood and turned on her flashlight, held it in her mouth.
For the next ten hours, she followed Hap from surgery to surgery in the blackout darkness; they peered at each other through flashlight beams.
The wounded kept coming, wave after wave of men brought in broken and in pieces after the fighting at Dak To.
There were South Vietnamese incoming, too: soldiers and civilians. Children. Filling the wards, the hallways, the morgue, overflowing outside.
Finally, Frankie noticed a lessening of the noise.
No Dust Offs landing or hovering, waiting to land. No bombing. No ambulances rumbling toward the OR.
The lights in the OR snapped back on, jarringly bright.
Hap pulled off his surgical cap and lowered his mask. He was older than she’d thought, fleshy, with large-pored skin and a dark shadow beard that had probably sprouted during the push. “Hey, McGrath, good job. First day at Pleiku and a mortar attack.”
“Is this what it’s always like here?”
Hap shrugged. It had been a stupid question: Frankie knew there was no always anything in ’Nam. Everything moved, changed, died; people and buildings came and went overnight, roads were built and abandoned. Hap tossed his surgical garb into an overflowing waste bin and left the OR.
Frankie stood there, unable for a moment to move; she felt people around her—nurses and medics, cleaning up, moving things around, rolling out gurneys.
Move, Frankie.
It took an act of will to simply lift her foot, to take a step. She felt dazed, overwhelmed.
She walked out of the Quonset hut. The squishing of her socks told her that—impossibly—there was blood inside her sneakers. Her feet hurt from standing for so long, and her knees ached from kneeling.
Outside of Post-Op, she saw dead men on litters, overflowing from the ER, out into the walkway. She’d never seen so many wounded in one MASCAL.
The morgue was worse. Black body bags stacked up like cordwood.
The darkness popped with noise and distant rocket fire. Here and there, beyond the glimmering silver of concertina wire, she saw blots of yellow light moving through the jungle. The enemy was just beyond the wire, barely out of machine gun range, watching them, planting bombs and trip wires.
Rounding the corner of the Quonset hut, she saw Barb sitting in the dirt, knees drawn up, back resting against the metal wall, her green canvas boonie hat drawn low on her forehead.
Frankie slid down the hut’s wall to sit in the dirt beside her.
For a long moment, neither said anything. The distant pop-thud of the war raging in the mountain underscored their breathing.
“This is not the vacation we signed up for,” Frankie finally said in an uneven voice. “I want my money back.”
Barb’s hands shook as she took a joint out of her pocket and lit it up. “We were promised champagne.”
“Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. I feel like Frodo in Mordor,” Frankie said.
“I have no idea what that means.”