Prologue
1969, Vietnam
The choppers appeared just after the sun. The staff at theNinety-first Evac Hospital at Chu Lai had been expectingthe one, hadn’t hoped to see the other. After all, it wasmonsoon season, and the rains simply didn’t stop. Theypoured in the windows and shorted out the power supply.They turned the Vietnamese dirt to a river of mud thatseeped through sandbags and slid in under doors and cakedonto everything they touched. They pummeled the trees andswamped the roads and overwhelmed the senses.
It was the monsoons, and by rights things should havebeen slow. The NVA never quite saw it that way. And so thechoppers still came.
This dawn brought them in flocks, stuttering their way infrom the north, from the west and from the south. The sun,breaking through the clouds over the China Sea, glinted goldand crimson on their shivering blades.
On the ground, triage teams waited inside the doors labeled Emergency as long as they could, huddled against thethreat of a new downpour, bent with the weight of morecasualties. The Quonset huts that lined up behind them onthe barren base on the cliffs at the edge of the ocean werealready full. Pre-op was full, and the OR was full. The ICUswere standing-room only, and the choppers to take thetransfers out that would make room were late.
It was the monsoons, and nothing went right in the monsoons.
At the same moment the first dust-off chopper landed, ateam ran from the protection of the doors, crouched beneath the blades, their clothing and hair flattened in the rotor wash. Medics and nurses and doctors helped pull littersoff the Hueys and settled them onto gurneys for their ride through the maze of evac medicine.
Some of the men were conscious, their faces pinched andsmall with pain. Some, blood-soaked dressings cocooningheads, lay silent and ominous. None cried out or whimpered as they were moved. One, however, talked. Hegrabbed the nurse who was checking him and begged for herhelp.
“My radioman,” he pleaded in a voice that was huskyfrom the wounds to his chest and abdomen and leg. “Getmy radioman. I can wait. Get him... he was next tome...please. He’s hurt bad. You get Smitty.”
The nurse gently pried the man’s fingers from her arm and held them in her hand as she assessed his wounds. Hewas a Marine, she thought, although it made no difference.“It’s okay, Sergeant. Somebody’s taking care of him.”
“No,” he demanded, his voice rising even as the bloodsoaked the gurney beneath him. “You can save him.”
As she helped roll the gurney into the receiving area, shelifted the soaked, dirty dressing on the soldier’s chest and winced. “How long were you swimming in that rice paddy, Sergeant?” she asked, her voice as gentle as her blue eyes. The soldier never saw the brief flash of horror in her expression at the extent of his injuries. His eyes were bandaged, as well.
“All night,” he answered, his voice dying a little. “We got caught, but I held on to him. Don’t worry about me. CheckSmitty. Please... check Smitty for me. I’m not gonna... I’mnot gonna make it. You get him.”
The nurse looked up to catch the eye of a medic across theroom. He was wheeling another gurney behind the yellow partition. On the gurney lay the sergeant’s friend. The onehe’d spent the night protecting in the rice paddy. The friendwho was being isolated because he was going to die andthere was nothing they could do to help him.
“Is he okay?” the sergeant asked.
The nurse noticed that the sergeant was a big man. Wellbuilt, probably an athlete. He had a clean, strong jaw beneath that field bandage, a voice that would probably command men well. A young voice. A voice too young to die.
But then, she imagined, so did the radioman namedSmitty who had just disappeared behind the screen that hidthose labeled Expectant.
“I can’t see him,” she lied, and turned to her medic, whowas in the process of cutting the sergeant’s uniform away.“Hey, Humbug, toss me the blood-drawing equipment. Ineed another IV in him. And tell Doc Schaeffer he’s gonnaneed a couple of chest tubes and big antibiotics before wecan risk OR.”
The sergeant would lose some of his intestines. He wouldprobably lose his spleen, maybe part of his liver. If he waslucky, he’d end up with both lungs intact after they drainedall the blood and air and pus off them from the pseudo-monas infection he’d been breeding in his injuries during thenight he’d lain in the paddy water with his friend. If he waslucky, he’d keep his leg, which was already swollen anddark.
That was if he lived. The nurse hadn’t even had a chance to assess his head yet. For some reason, she couldn’t bear tolift that dressing and see what had happened to the rest of that handsome face.
He was wearing a religious medal of some kind on his dogtag chain. Maybe that would help him. She wasn’t sure shecould.
“Sergeant?”
His grip was loosening from hers. She let go and grabbeda stethoscope to get his pressure.
“Damn it, Sergeant, don’t do this to me!”
He was a strong man. But then, they’d all been strongmen when they’d come to this war.
“I’m not…gonna... make it….”
“Oh yes, you are,” she disagreed even when she got areading of fifty over thirty. “Humbug, get me that IV!” sheyelled, snapping a tourniquet around his arm. “Pump in thefluids and get me a couple of units of O neg. And getSchaeffer down here with those chest tubes!”
“It’s... okay, Lieutenant....”
His voice was fading, just like his blood pressure.
