"Some medicine, McMurphy?"
"No, thanks. I'm not that crazy about the taste."
"Ha. She says that now."
— Jan Wyatt and Colleen McMurphy, "F.N.G."

Colleen had never been this bombed before.

Oh, who was she kidding? She'd never actually been bombed, blitzed, pickled, plastered, or otherwise drunk before.

She couldn't decide if she wanted to lay her head on the bar and sleep or dance to the music playing from the new jukebox. Dancing, she decided, would go better with the way the unnamed watering hole, which had slowly been turning from a surplus storage building into a bar over the last month, had begun to undulate slowly in front of her eyes.

"Richard," she said, putting her hand on her current drinking partner's arm. She'd had several over the course of the night. It helped that she had started right after finishing her shift at the hospital. "Come on," she said, angling her head toward the makeshift dance floor when he looked at her.

He gave her a skeptical look. "Try standing up unassisted first. Then we can talk about dancing."

"I'm fine," she protested, and slid off the bar stool to prove it. The bastard actually laughed when she nearly crashed headfirst into the bar. "Ow," she complained after a moment, rubbing her right wrist where she'd smacked it against the bar to stop her fall.

"How many have you had, anyway?"

She thought for a while. "Does it still count as one if you drink it straight from the bottle? Because that's going to affect my math." As Richard picked up the bottle sitting on the bar in front of her seat, flipping it over and marveling at the two drops that fell, she turned around and leaned against the bar, propping herself up with her elbows. "I feel odd."

"I suspect anyone who puts away half a liter of Vietnamese whiskey in an evening would feel odd." He gave her a closer look. She tried to focus on his eyes, but couldn't quite manage it. "You've never actually been drunk before, have you?"

There had been a few parties in nursing school where she'd had one or two beers, at least until she'd realized she could pour a bottle in the toilet and refill it with water and no one would be the wiser. And there'd been one terrible date where she'd had a little too much wine in an attempt to feel as grown-up as the man she was with, but..."Not like this." She'd never had a reason to before.

Richard shook his head. "Where did you come from? I didn't think they made people this innocent anymore."

She glared at him. "Kansas."

He rolled his eyes. "I might have known." He got down from his stool and touched her back. "I'll take you back to your tent. You can sleep it off."

"No!" she all but shouted. Maybe she had shouted; the few other people in the bar this late gave her curious looks.

"Why not?"

Because then she'd dream about them—the boys they'd lost today. A fire patrol had just spent five days' R&R at China Beach, and two of them had reminded her so much of her younger brothers, Conner and Daniel, that she couldn't help striking up a friendship with them. They'd been ambushed by a VC patrol two days after they left, and both had come in just alive enough to give her hope before dying on the table. She'd lost too many patients to count already, but never anyone she knew. Never anyone with Conner's quiet kindness, or Daniel's eagerness for all the rebellious pleasures life outside a small hometown had to offer.

"It has spiders."

"You were picking maggots out of a soldier's leg this morning," he pointed out.

"Maggots aren't spiders."

"Better not come to my tent. We have water bugs the size of cats."

"What makes you think I'd want to go to your tent, anyway?"

"So many possible answers to that question, but I think for you, it would have to be my charm."

"Ugh," she said, with feeling, and shrugged out from under his arm. "I'll just stay here." She picked up the whiskey bottle on the bar, as though it might have magically refilled itself in the last two minutes.

"I think you've had enough. I'm cutting you off."

"You're not the bartender."

"But I am a doctor."

She rolled her eyes. "God help us."

"Come on." He picked up her left arm and swung it over his shoulders, then wrapped his right arm around her waist. "You're not staying here."

He was stronger than he looked, and he dragged her to the door, stumbling as she went. She supposed that was all right. She didn't actually want to drink anymore, and talking with him, as trying an experience as it was, at least pushed the faces of those two dead boys out of the forefront of her mind.

"Where are we going?" she asked as they negotiated the three steps down to the ground.

"Well, you don't want to go to your tent, or to mine. I suppose you could crash on a gurney in the hospital." She shuddered with her whole body, and was about to tell him exactly where he could stuff that idea when he said, "But I don't think you'd be terribly interested in that." He paused and looked around the dark base. "I suppose that just leaves the beach."

They walked for what felt like hours. Well, calling it walking might be generous on her part; "shambling" was more accurate. Finally, she felt the dirt and squelching mud turn to sand under her boots. Richard stopped several dozen yards from the water, far enough that the tide wouldn't get to them. He helped her to the ground, and she immediately collapsed on her back.

He looked down at her with a resigned expression she could just barely see in the light from the far-away bar and the moon. "I guess I'm stuck with you."

She bristled immediately. "I don't need you here. Go back to your tent. Or the bar."

"You'll never make it to shelter if they start bombing. Not without help."

"If you're worried about bombing, why are you out in the open?"

He snorted. "Believe me, I ask myself that every day."

She stared up at him blurrily as he settled on the sand beside her, leaning back on his hands. He was, in an understated—one might even say underhanded—way, kind. She hadn't expected that after their first meeting.

Abruptly, he started pawing at the sand near her head. She squinted, trying to make sense of it. "What are you doing?"

"Digging a hole for you to be sick in."

Sick? She felt like she was floating half out of her body, and the stars were doing a vaguely uncomfortable twirl above her head, but she wasn't ill. "I'm not sick."

"You will be soon, after all that whiskey you drank."

He was, infuriatingly, correct. What seemed like mere moments after he finished making the depression in the sand, she felt an urgent need to empty her stomach into the hole. Him mentioning it had probably put the idea into her subconscious, she thought darkly as she retched.

He, of course, had moved to her other side—and out of the way—just in time. She could feel his hand on her back, though, rubbing up and down in a way she was about ninety percent sure was meant to be comforting rather than lecherous.

When she was finally done, she flopped on her other side and coughed a few times. God, that whiskey didn't taste any better coming up than it did going down.

"I suppose you could rinse your mouth out with seawater," Richard said.

And catch God knew what. "I'm all right."

"Then might I suggest moving upwind?"

She opened her eyes and glared at him, but the smell was threatening to turn her stomach again. Making a point to be sulky about it, she got on her hands and knees and inched several feet away from the vomit.

"Why did you drink so much tonight, anyway?" he asked as she lay down again. He sat next to her once more.

She thought about not answering. Finally, she swallowed, and said, "I thought it might make me forget those boys today. The ones from the fire patrol."

"Why them?"

She told him how they'd reminded her of Conner and Daniel. About how it had just been too much, the metaphorical crack on the knuckles that broke her weakening hold on the hope that things, even if they never got better, would at least stop getting worse. How the last month had been day after unending day of hell, and they had eleven more to go, and she had no idea how she was going to make it.

"You did volunteer for this," he pointed out when she was through.

Of all the... "What, that's supposed to make it okay?" she snapped. "I can't complain? Say anything about how..." Her voice cracked. "How horrible it is?"

He looked at her for a moment. She glared back at him. "I suppose no one could get through this without a few complaints," he admitted. "Not and stay sane."

They were both silent for a while. The waves crashed like thunder in the distance. They seemed quieter than before. Maybe the tide was going out rather than coming in. She had yet to figure out the schedule. "What made you join up, anyway?" Richard eventually asked.

A tiny smile touched her lips. "'Ask not what your country can do for you...'"

His eyes widened. "Are you serious?"

"It was inspiring."

"Somehow I don't think President Kennedy expected good Irish Catholic girls from Kansas to dive headfirst into a warzone."

"You don't understand. I wanted to do something with my life. Something worthwhile." And for good Irish Catholic girls from Kansas, the choices were pretty limited. She shrugged, her shoulders pushing against the sand. "Being nine thousand miles away from home didn't hurt."

"Ah. Now we get to the heart of it."

"I love my family," she insisted. "But I..."

"Can't actually stand living with them?"

"I couldn't see myself moving down the block and having babies, either."

He gave her a critical glance. "Given the state of your tent when you held that card tournament last week, I suspect whoever you would've been having those babies with is grateful. We've been here a month; how did you manage to get dust over everything you own?"

"You who have a river of mud flowing through yours," she shot back.

"It's more of a trickle, really."

"Let me guess, your wife is an excellent housekeeper."

"When she's not grading or preparing lessons." At her surprised look, he said, "Beth Ann teaches third grade."

"Really?"

"What's so surprising about that?"

"I didn't think you would..." She paused, not sure if completing that sentence would offend him—not sure if that would be a bad thing.

"I try not to get between a woman and her passions," he said, responding to the unspoken observation. "Beth Ann loves teaching."

"Oh."

He set his jaw and stared out at the black ocean for a moment before drawing his knees up so he could rest his chin on them. "I miss her," he admitted. "I miss all of them." She saw him press his lips together briefly. "You'd think the US Army could run this war without sending fathers to this godforsaken country."

"You'd think they wouldn't send children," she said softly, the faces of the boys who'd died today clear in her mind's eye. Their cheeks still round with baby fat, they were barely old enough to shave.

"That too."

Breaking waves and the calls and cackles of seabirds filled the silence that spread between them. Richard eventually lay down next to her. Colleen's eyes started to close.

The next thing she knew, it was morning, and Richard was poking her roughly in the shoulder. "Get up," he said, much too loudly for her pounding head. "Our shift starts in half an hour."

She opened her eyes and immediately regretted it as the sun sliced like a knife straight through her brain. "Oh, God," she moaned.

"Welcome to your first hangover, McMurphy." He put his hands under her shoulders and pushed her upright.

She struggled half-heartedly. "'m goin' back to sleep," she mumbled. Because God knew she wasn't about to do something stupid like move and make the pain worse.

"Come on. The sooner you get up, the sooner you can get to the coffee and aspirin in the hospital."

Aspirin didn't sound so bad. With considerable grumbling, she let him pull her to her feet. Her head pounded in time with her pulse, and she noticed now that her mouth felt and tasted like a used gym sock had fermented in it all night. She tried to spit in the sand, but nothing came out.

No wonder her father got in such a black mood after a night at the Elbow Room. Whiskey was horrible stuff.

On the other hand, she hadn't dreamed about the two boys, like she'd been afraid she would. She hadn't dreamed at all.

As they began the walk back to the base, Richard glanced at her with raised eyebrows. "You know, people are going to talk, seeing us come back together all"—he ran his eyes over her rumpled, sandy fatigues—"disheveled."

Oh, hell. He was right.

She made a noise somewhere between a shriek and a growl and started walking faster to get away from him. Behind her, she heard him laughing.

Her initial impression of him had been correct. He was absolutely and without question a jerk.

But he didn't make a bad drinking buddy.