He turned into the familiar glade and, as before, the brilliant green of the trees exploded around us. The jeep stopped and I looked up towards the sky.
"Is this where you take all the girls," BJ?" I asked, ribbing him.
"Nah, just the special ones," he replied. His words seemed to tie a knot in my stomach and I reveled in the tension. It was a nice change from the utter lack of emotion I had been feeling prior to the trip. "I just wanted to wake you up a little," he continued. "It's easy to slip into the darkness of this place and, without a little light, it will consume you." He stopped talking for a moment and listened to the whistling of the wind through the leaves. The birds, the wind, and the sound of my heart, beating like a tympani drum, all seemed to come together in a symphony as he turned his head to look into my eyes.
"What is it about you?" I found myself asking.
"What do you mean?"
"How can you see through me and know exactly how to make me feel so much better without even batting an eyelash?" I wasn't even thinking about what I was saying. My mind had completely shut off and words were spilling out of my mouth, seemingly coming from a well much deeper in my body. "Somehow, you can just look at me and know what I'm thinking. Can you read my thoughts? Can you open up my mind and peek inside?"
He shrugged. "I'm just a normal guy trying to help out a friend."
I shuddered. Right then, in that moment, I hated the way he had said "friend." It was stressed unnecessarily, unnaturally and he spit it out in an almost spiteful way. I found myself disgusted at him. I wanted to ask him, "Is that all I am, just a friend?" But my mind was back in control and I was able to put a lid on that well deep inside.
"Thanks," was all I was able to squeak out. We sat for a while in silence, him staring into the distance and me stewing in anger. I wanted to tell him why I was so upset, but I couldn't really place it myself. I knew we were friends. I had told many people who whispered about me and BJ that he was a friend and nothing more but that word was tearing me up inside.
"I think we should go," BJ said, finally breaking the silence.
I nodded, not able to answer him. He started the jeep and we rode back to the camp in silence. However, it wasn't the same anticipatory silence like it had been on the way there but a palpable block between us, keeping us from communicating. I knew I was being unreasonable but I couldn't help it.
We stopped on the road into camp and he turned to me. "Did I say something wrong?" I looked at him and realized how awful I was being. He went out of his way to help me, to help his friend feel like a person again. I put my hand on his knee. "No. Thank you for being a good friend, BJ."
We looked out over the hustle and bustle of the camp and I noticed how small it seemed to be from this angle. The tents seemed to be bursting with people and they filled onto the compound in a mass exodus.
I looked again and noticed the abnormal amount of people running about. A sense of dread settled in the pit of my stomach and I looked at BJ, pleadingly.
"Tell me it isn't so," I begged. He shook his head.
"I wish I could." Without another word, we sped towards the camp, the sound of the tires on the gravel followed suit by the even, staccato sound of helicopter blades punching the air. "I'll drive up to the helicopter pad and we'll get the kids on the choppers," BJ yelled over the commotion. He veered away from the compound and fled up the dirt ramp to the helipad. The dust flew from the sky like rain and I had to shield my eyes from the torrent as the helicopters touched down, filled with wounded soldiers.
BJ got out of the car and to the helicopters first. He threw off the clear shield, barely noticing as it crashed to the ground. I raced over to him and waited for instructions.
"It's a bad chest wound," he yelled over the cacophony. "The one on the other side can wait but this one can't. Let's take him down and give him to Hawkeye."
BJ and I lifted the soldier up and put him on the back of the jeep. I climbed in after the wounded man and threw my body over him to shield his wounds from the dust. BJ jumped in and floored it to the compound, pausing only long enough to yell his plans to the ambulance on its way up the ramp. I held on to the poor kid with all my might, smearing his blood all over my uniform, although at the time that hardly mattered. I just kept whispering, "It will be ok," to him, hoping that he could hear me.
When we reached the compound, I jumped out of the jeep and yelled for a stretcher. BJ ran up to the wounded soldier and examined him more closely. "Give him whole blood. Pump it into him as fast as you can and get him prepped."
"Stretcher!" I screamed again. Finally two men and a stretcher rounded the corner and picked up the soldier. I repeated BJ's orders and ran to Colonel Potter, who was calling for a nurse.
"What is it, Colonel?" I asked, kneeling beside him.
"These bandages are completely soaked through," he said. "Someone has to dress these wounds and get some blood into him or he's gone." He pulled the bandage off the soldier's neck and blood squirted out over the both of us.
Without hesitation, I plugged up the hole in his artery with my fingers, barely registering that my un-sterilized hands could cause an infection later on.
Colonel Potter was already calling for men to pick up the soldier when the man began to move. He isn't unconscious! I thought. He began to thrash back and forth, making my hands slip and causing his life's blood to be poured over the unyielding dirt of the compound. He began to whimper, "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die."
"Shh," I said. "It's going to be ok. You'll be fine."
His voice became weaker and he began to speak in fragments. "I got shot..." A gurgling sound came out of his mouth. "So much blood..." He gasped and looked me straight in the eyes. "I don't want to die."
I knelt beside him and stroked his hair, hoping that would calm him. I plugged up his neck once more and, with my other hand, looked at his dog-tags. His name was Dennis Martin.
"It's going to be ok, Dennis. I won't let you die, I promise."
I began humming a lullaby that my mother used to sing to me when I was a child. The pandemonium around me went on as I waited for someone to help that poor kid who was bleeding all over the ground.
Finally, two corpsmen ran to my aid. They lifted him up and ran into pre-op as I walked along side him, one hand on his neck and the other hand clutching his cold fingers.
The doors to pre-op banged shut and the corpsmen dropped Dennis onto a table and ran back out of the room. The other nurses scuttled around, preparing him for surgery as if I wasn't there.
He began to moan, long, painful wails that broke my heart.
"Someone give this guy some morphine!" I screamed over the chaos of pre-op.
The nurses rolled their eyes at me, chalking it up to my dramatic nature, my need to be in the spotlight that I was carrying on so. I yelled again and Nurse Kellye, the only nurse that could stand to be seen in the same room as me, seemed to believe that I wasn't practicing for the school play and ran up with a syringe and shot some morphine into his arm. He whimpered pitifully, his mouth moving as if he was trying to speak. Whether it was too noisy or whether he wasn't speaking at all, I couldn't make out what he was trying to say.
I felt a hot sting beginning burning my eyes. I shook my head to try and clear them, but my tears trailed down my face despite my efforts to wipe them away.
"Will someone help me, for God's sake?" I cried.
"He's going into the O.R. right now," Major Houlihan said. "You can let go now."
"No I can't," I said. "He's got a neck wound and if I move my hands he's dead."
"But you're not sterile."
"To hell with being sterile!" I screamed, causing some of the corpsmen and nurses to turn and look at me. I took a deep breath and said more calmly, "Just get me a mask and once he's stitched up we'll deal with my being sterile or not."
I followed him into the O.R and he was set in front of BJ.
"Linda?"
"He's got a laceration in his jugular, BJ," I said. "If I move we're going to be mopping him up for a week." Nurse Bigelow came up behind me and threw a mask over my face. "Thanks."
"I find this highly irregular, Lieutenant," Major Burns said, pushing BJ away from the private's neck.
"Then take a laxative and get away from here," I said, shoving him out of BJ's way with my other arm.
"It's against regulations to push a superior officer!" he screamed, but I didn't give him an answer.
"I've got this covered, Linda," BJ said in his cool, calm voice. "Let me get some gloves over here," he yelled to another nurse in the corner of the room. She scurried to the shelves and grabbed some gloves, taking her time to come back with the gloves and an instrument tray. "It'll all be ok, Linda," BJ said. "Just keep your finger on that artery and we'll have him stitched up in no time." He said it in such a manner that his voice irritated the hell out of me. His smooth, silky tone sent shivers down my spine. I was having the same reaction to his tone now that I had in the jeep before when he had spit out "friend" at me. It wasn't his words but his attitude that made hate him again.
"How can you be so calm when this man's life is pouring out of him?" I asked.
"It comes from seeing this everyday when I go to work," he said, slowly and evenly.
"That doesn't matter," I said, my voice rising in pitch. "That doesn't make him any less of a person just because he bleeds the same color as everyone else. He still bleeds."
"It's ok, Linda, he'll be fine," BJ replied, worry creeping into his voice.
"But why are you taking your sweet time to save his life?" I shrieked. Heads began to turn and look at me. "You're treating him like he was just a car on an assembly line." My voice climbed to a shrill yell. Everyone in the room had their attention on me and I knew I should have stopped, but it was too late. "Add the wheel, tighten a screw, is that all you do? This is a person who is hurt and you can't shake a damn leg?" My whole body trembled with rage. I wanted someone to say something, but everyone just stared at me. "Someone say something!" I screamed.
"Kellye, can you help me here?" BJ asked quietly. Kellye gently pushed me aside with one hand and replaced my fingers with hers on the soldier's neck.
I felt hands on my shoulders and, before I knew it, I was being guided out of the O.R. It was only until I sat down on the bench outside of the O.R door that I realized it was Hawkeye that had taken me out of the room. I took one look at his face and all the weeks of loneliness and abandonment I had felt combined with the horror I had just seen burst out of my body. I buried my head in his chest, and cried like I had never cried before.
