Healer’s War

320 Pages·1988·1.29 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

The Healer’s War
A Fantasy Novel of Vietnam
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
This book is specifically for Lou Aronica, who asked the right questions.
It is also for my fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead, male and female,
military, civilian, and pacifist, American, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese,
Australian, Dutch, Laotian, Cambodian, Montagnard, Korean, and Chinese. And
for our children, in hopes of arming them with hard questions to ask leaders
selling cheap glory.
Contents
Glossary
Prologue
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART TWO
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
PART THREE
23
Why I Don’t Tell It Like It Is, Exactly
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Glossary
Spellings are phonetic and meanings are approximate, not literal, translations.
Many terms are not actually Vietnamese but pidgin. My apologies to any
Vietnamese speakers for inaccuracies. I wish I had had your assistance when
compiling this.

Ba: Vietnamese term for a married woman.
Bac si: Vietnamese term for a doctor.
Beaucoup: French for “much” or “many,” used in pidgin Vietnamese-English.
Bic: Vietnamese term for “understand.” (Bicced is author’s Americanizing of
past tense.) Cam ong: Vietnamese term for “thank you.”
Cat ca dao: Vietnamese term meaning “cut off head.”
Chung wi: Vietnamese term for a lieutenant.
Co: Vietnamese term for an unmarried woman or girl.
Com bic?: Vietnamese term for “Come again?” or “I don’t understand.”
Dao: Vietnamese term for “head.”
Dau: Vietnamese term for “pain.”
Dau quadi: Vietnamese term for “much pain.” (Dau quadied is author’s
Americanizing of past tense.) DEROS date (military jargon): The day a person
can leave an assignment; in Vietnam, when one leaves country.
Didi or didi mau: Vietnamese or pidgin used often by GIs and Vietnamese;
approximate meaning “Go” or “Go quickly.”
Dinky dao: Vietnamese or pidgin for “crazy.”
Dung lai: Vietnamese term for “Stop.”
Em di: Vietnamese term for “Shut up.”

La dai: Vietnamese term for “Come here.” (La daied is author’s Americanizing
of past tense.) Mao: Vietnamese term for a cat.
Mao bey: Vietnamese term for a tiger.
MOS: Military Occupational Specialty.
Sin loi: Vietnamese term for apology.
Tete or titi: Pidgin for French word petit.
TPR: Temperature, pulse, and respiration.
Triage: As used in medical emergency situations, this term refers to the process
of sorting victims of a mass casualty situation or disaster into categories, i.e.,
those who can be treated and released, those who can be saved by quick
intervention, and those who will need more extensive help if they are to
recover. The last category are those so seriously injured they will probably die
without immediate, extensive care and may die anyway. In triage situations,
patients are treated in the order listed, the worst injuries requiring the most
care left until last so the greatest number of people can be treated.
Prologue
The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can haul myself out of
one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked sheet under me is not wet
jungle floor, that the pressure against my back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle
or a terribly wounded Vietnamese but my sleeping cat. When someone in a suit
or a uniform frowns at me, it doesn’t always make me feel as if the skin over my
spinal column were being chewed away by pointed teeth. Sometimes I can just
shrug, and recognize the authority in question as an uptight asshole with no
legitimate power over me—none that counts, that is, nothing life-threatening.
Still, most of the time, I retain the feeling that it’s the nightmares that are real
and my life here and now that is a dream, the same dream I dreamed in the
hospital, in the jungle, in the Vietcong tunnels. I’m always afraid that someday
I’ll be dragged out of this dream, back to Nam, to a war that goes on and on for
real in the same way it replays itself in my memory.
“That is what stops your power, Mao,” Nguyen Bhu tells me. “You cannot
provide a clear path for the amulet’s power until your own mind is clear. When
you turn your face from your fear, that fear bloats with the power you give it.
Look it in the eye, and it will diminish into something that is part of your life,
part of your memory, something that belongs to you rather than controls you.”
Nguyen Bhu sweeps the floor at his cousin’s grocery store. Charlie says he’s a
former Cao Dai priest, a mystic like old Xe, and the wisest man to escape from
Vietnam. He is sixty and looks ninety, has lost three fingers from his right hand,
has more sense and is far less expensive than a psychiatrist whose lifelong
concern has been to avoid obesity rather than starvation.
And most important, Nguyen Bhu knows what I have to say, and insists that it
is not too much to ask people to believe and forgive. Charlie knows part of it, but
he has his own nightmares to chase. Of the others who know, I keep hoping that
at least one or two survived, and that someday I might see and recognize them
among the refugees. One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read
it or hear of it and find me, and we can heal together.
Part One
The Hospital
1
I didn’t know old Xe was a magician the night I began to be aware of his
powers. If anybody had told me there was anything magical going on that night,
I’d have told them they were full of crap, and assumed they either had a sicko
sense of humor or had been smoking too much Hanoi Gold.
I was in the worst trouble of my life, to date, and had brought someone with
me. An eleven-year-old kid lay comatose, barely breathing, on the bed by my
chair.
Every fifteen minutes I repeated the same routine.
Right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, I pulled up a spare lump of flesh from
each of the little girl’s limbs and pinched hard, silently daring her to kick me or
slug me. Then I ground my knuckles into her chest, counted to ten, and prayed
for a sign of pain.
A kick or a slap, a whimper or a wiggle, even a grimace would have
gladdened my heart. But the kid just lay there, her disproportionately long limbs
limp as wet rags, her breathing so shallow that it barely stirred her skinny ribs a
quarter of an inch up or down.
I peeled back her eyelids one at a time and dazzled them with the beam of my
flashlight, checking to see if the pupils contracted at the same rate, to the same
size, or if they expanded at all. If they stayed fixed, or if one was the size of a
dime while the other stayed the size of a pencil lead, both of us were in truly
deep shit. I had to try them five or six times before I could be sure they were not
contracting more slowly than they had fifteen minutes before. I’d been
performing this same cruel routine continuously since she had been wheeled
back from O.R., already deeply unconscious. Thank God, they had not yet
anesthetized her for surgery.
“Come on, baby, come on,” I prodded her encouragingly, as if she were my
kid up to bat at a Little League game, and pumped up the blood-pressure cuff
that circled her skinny upper arm. I had to pump it and release it three times