She couldn’t imagine what they’d been through or what they’d done to escape, or how hard it had been to carry this wounded man for thirty miles through the booby-trapped jungle on bare feet.
The man on the litter had an infected bullet wound in his chest that oozed pus. Frankie didn’t need to touch his forehead to diagnose a raging fever. She could see it in his eyes, smell it on him. Frag wounds had torn up his arms and neck. He could barely breathe, kept gasping. Something must be swollen or lodged in his airway.
He was going to die, and soon.
Frankie called out to Dr. Morse, who came over, took one look at the kid on the litter, and said, “Expectant, McGrath.”
“Put a trach in, Doc,” she said. “Let him breathe easy, at least.”
“Waste of time, McGrath. Go find someone you can save.”
One of the soldiers said, “Wait. We just humped through the boonies for a week with Fred—”
Frankie knew that the doc was right. This kid wasn’t going to make it, and the OR was crowded with casualties they could save, but she couldn’t turn her back on these men and what they’d suffered.
She pointed to an empty table. “Set him there, boys.”
“What are you doing, McGrath?” Dr. Morse asked.
“Letting him say goodbye to his friends and die in peace.”
“Be quick. I’ve got a sucking chest wound that needed you ten minutes ago.”
The men set the wounded soldier on the table. Frankie cut off what was left of his fatigues. Yanking her cart close, she changed into clean gloves and wiped his neck with antiseptic solution. Holding her scalpel, she took a breath to steady herself, then made a small cut between the thyroid and cricoid cartilages and inserted a breathing tube.
The dying man took a deep, wheezing breath; Frankie saw relief come into his eyes. How long had he been fighting just to breathe?
“We got out, Fred,” one of his buddies said. “Took five of those fuckers with us.”
Frankie took hold of Fred’s hand, held it in hers, and leaned close, whispering, “You must be a good man. Your friends are here.”
His buddies kept talking—about his girl, the baby waiting for him back home, how he had saved their lives in that hellhole.
Frankie saw Fred take his last breath; felt the way he went still.
“He’s gone,” she said tiredly, looking at the two bloodied, dirtied men in front of her. “You gave him a chance, though.”
She wouldn’t be surprised if those death stares would be a part of them forever now. Men staring into a world they no longer were a part of, no longer comprehended, a world where the ground beneath your feet exploded. Another kind of casualty. She thought of other men who had grabbed her hand over the past few months, begged her to answer the question, Who will want me like this?, and it struck her that it wasn’t just physical wounds that soldiers would take home from Vietnam. From now on, all of them would have a deep understanding of both man’s cruelty and his heroism.
A medic shoved through the OR doors and yelled, “Forty-five Vietnamese villagers coming in. Napalm,” and left again.
Napalm.
“Go to the mess,” she said to the two soldiers as she stripped out of her gloves. “Get some chow. Take a shower. And get rid of that damned necklace.”
She yelled for someone to take the dead man away. Then she found Margie and together they pushed the few OR patients to one side and gathered empty beds to turn the OR into an overflow burn unit.
Two minutes later, a flood of villagers hit the OR, most of whom had been burned beyond recognition. Frankie knew it was the same scene in the ICU and Pre-Op and on the wards.
Napalm—a jellied firebomb used in flamethrowers by the U.S. to clear out foxholes and trenches, and dropped in bombs by U.S. planes—had become common in these first few months of her second tour. More and more of its victims were coming into the OR; most of them were villagers.
Tomorrow they’d be flown to the Third Field—a real burn unit—but few would survive until then. The few who did would wish they’d died. These burns were like nothing else on earth. The gel-fueled firebomb mixture stuck to its target and didn’t stop burning until nothing was left.
Frankie moved from bed to bed, applying topical ointments and debriding dead tissue, but there was so little she could do here to help them heal, and nothing to ease their tremendous pain.
By 1000 hours, she was exhausted, and the burn victims were still arriving. She could hear Margie and Dr. Morse and some medics talking to each other, rolling carts, yelling for ointment.