Vivi was all too happy to be relieved of her punishment and was Ae-Cha's side immediately. The girl had become very ill thanks to her hunger strike, but smiled when she saw Vivi.
"I thought you left me?" She asked.
Vivi sighed.
"I was in a little trouble is all." She said.
Ae-Cha frowned.
"Because of me?" She asked.
Vivi shook her head.
"No, not because of you, but you need to start eating." She said. "You need to get well."
Ae-Cha just looked at her, but her eyes began closing.
Vivi turned to Pierce and McIntyre.
"You said there was someone who can speak to her?" She asked.
"Staff psychiatrist." Hawk said. "Sydney Freedman."
"Joins us for our Wednesday poker nights." Trap said.
"Considering the fight she has put up with." Vivi said. "I don't think it would be a bad idea, if it was something you two recommended?"
"Thankfully." Trap said. "It's Wednesday today. He should be here in a few hours, but I'll see if he can come earlier."
"Thanks Dr. McIntyre." Vivi said.
"It's Trapper." He said with a smile and left to call the psychiatrist.
Hawkeye sat down next to Vivi.
"I am sure you are thinking I shouldn't take such interest in a child." She said. "Considering she will be in good hands soon at Sister Theresa's. I'm a nurse, I should act like one."
"I wasn't thinking that at all." He said.
Vivi turned to him.
"I was thinking how brave you were to stand up for her and risk your whole career because of Burns." He said. "You ARE a nurse, but your compassion goes further."
"I know it's not supposed to." She said. "I know I am not supposed to let them get under my skin. With the soldiers, they are older, but they don't know what they got themselves into. Sometimes giving them the bitter truth brings out the demons as I have seen you do. With Ae-Cha, it's different. Bitter truth stared her in the face when she saw her parents lying dead. Treating her like a soldier would probably destroy her. If defending her ruined my military career, I was willing to take the chance."
She sighed.
"It was stupid of me to go against Majors Burns." She said. "But the sheer fact he could not look past his own ego, it practically sickened me. If it was a soldier, I stay out of it. But a child, just, how could he?"
Hawkeye looked at Vivi's pleading eyes.
"Frank Burns, like you said, only sees accolades." Hawkeye said. "He can be a good guy and dare I say it doctor, but he doesn't see this war for what it is. He sees his nights with Houlihan, promotions, money, people kissing his feet. Somehow he can tune out the gore, but in doing that refuses to see anything else outside his own narcissism"
Vivi nodded.
"I am sure I lost Major Houlihan's respect." She said. "I could never live up to her expectations now."
"Why do you care anyway?" Hawkeye asked. "You're a good nurse, why do you feel as if you can't do anything without Margaret's say so? After what happened I would think she lost your respect."
"You don't understand." She said. "When I joined the military nearly ten years ago, it was like a wake up call. I enjoyed the discipline, the hard work. It was like I had been too carefree and the military readied me for what I would soon see. Major Houlihan just wants us to see the war for its seriousness. Take pride that we were chosen for such a task. Most of all she has to prove herself. She's the head nurse, but sometimes I think we forget that. I think she worked so hard to get to be where she is, that she fears it could be easily taken away.
She stood up.
"I don't blame her." Vivi said. "You and Trap make it easy, in a good way, to ease the burden of war. So much so I think she fears that the nurses will one day start up a coup and demand that you two take her place. Think about it Hawk, a woman can easily be replaced, especially a nurse, a male doctor, not so much."
Hawk watched as she left post-op. He hadn't thought of that before about Hot Lips fearing being usurped. It was quite a revelation.
Vivi found Dr. Sydney Freedman a very professional man and psychiatrist. A fellow New Yorker, his dry humor was great, but his advice and help was greater she would soon find out.
"I'm sorry you lost your parents Ae-Cha." He said. "And you are allowed to hurt, but you can't let that hurt take over you."
Ae-Cha just turned her head.
"He's a doctor?" She asked Vivi.
"Yes." She said. "He talks to people who are sad. He fixes pain, but in a different way."
"I talk to you."
Vivi smiled and relayed the message to Sydney.
"Yes, but he talks to people even better."
"Nurse McCullough talks to you yes." He said. "But I came here especially for you. I wanted to talk to you."
Ae-Cha looked at Vivi.
"Will he yell at me, like that doctor." She pointed and low and behold it was Major Burns writing something down on a patient's chart. "He yells a lot, makes the soldiers mad or even sad. I saw one cry."
"No, no." Vivi said soothingly. "Doctor Freedman is not at all like him."
"She thinks you will treat her like Major Burns does to some of the patients." Vivi told him.
"Not at all Ae-Cha." He said. "Nothing you say will make me mad. Believe me I get yelled at more."
He then turned to Vivi.
"The day I act like Major Burns will be the day I eat my diplomas." He asked.
Vivi giggled. Ae-Cha looked up at her with questioning eyes and Vivi relayed the joke. Ae-Cha smiled.
"See." Vivi said. "He's a good doctor."
The hour went by with Sydney helping Ae-Cha work out her grief. He told her it was okay to cry, to mourn, but not to keep it to herself. She was worn by the time the session ended and soon she was asleep.
Sydney and Vivi tip-toed out of post-op.
"Once she is at Sister Theresa's." He said. "I'll try to see her when I can. No doubt it will be awhile before she can be able to move ahead."
Vivi kicked a pebble.
"I can't imagine what is going through her." She said. "Seeing your parents like that then having no where to go."
"The way you are with her." Sydney said. "You don't avoid the subject. Like you know what it is like?"
Vivi shrugged.
"Sort of." She said.
"Care to tell?" He asked stopping. "I heard you had quite the blow out at Major Burns. You really put your tuckus on the line."
"Who told you?" She asked with a smirk.
"Just about everyone in the camp when I got here." He said. "You're quite the celebrity."
Vivi rubbed her neck.
"I guess a session for me is in order huh?" She said. "Under command?"
He shook his head.
"More like humoring a guy?" He said.
Vivi led him to her tent.
"Buchenwald huh?" He said as he sat across from her holding his cap in his hands. "God, you have seen it all."
Vivi looked at him.
"You're Jewish, correct?" She said.
"Isn't it obvious." He said with a smile.
"Was your family, there?" She asked.
He shook his head.
"We came over in the 1800s." He said. "I was early in residency though when the refugees started coming. Counseled a few, practically threw up afterwards from hearing the horror."
He looked at Vivi.
"But you saw it." He said. "First hand."
Vivi nodded.
"Still bothers you, doesn't it?" He asked.
Vivi couldn't lie as much as she wanted to.
"The nightmares stopped when I was back in the states." She said. "But now, they are more frequent."
"What do you dream about?"
"All of it." She said. "Except this time, it's more, macabre, like a horror movie. It's like the prisoners are walking around in the blue striped clothes that hang off them, black smoke coming out of their eyes and mouths that almost take up their entire face. That smoke, it envelopes me. Then I see the children. They just are lying there, dead, pointing."
Sydney stayed quiet as she continued.
"Then, there was the gas chamber." She said. "It was abandoned, but when I dream, people come out of it, naked, but their skin melting, they keep coming toward me. They speak but their words are inaudible."
She hung her head.
"Why didn't we do more?" She asked. "I think that's what they are trying to tell me. Where were you? Why couldn't you stop this?"
Tears began falling.
"And when you look at Ae-Cha." He asked gently. "Do you see those children?"
Vivi nodded.
"There was a little girl." She said. "No more than Ae-Cha's age, maybe younger. I guess she had been spared somehow. I was told that older girls were made to work instead of being sent to the gas with their mothers. Her name was Freya. She clung to me as we treated her. The poor girl was so sick with typhus and starvation. Nothing we gave would stay in her system. We were covered from head to toe in scrubs and masks as we cleaned the mess and her."
"Did she make it?" Sydney asked.
Vivi gasped and shook her head.
"She died." She said. "A week or so after we brought her in. She cried for her mother and father a lot, but sometimes would perk up when I would read to her or just sit with her as we cleaned her. I thought maybe she had a chance. But her organs were too far gone for recovery. Treating her, even as carefully and slowly as we did couldn't stop the shock of introducing medicine and nutrition into her failing body."
She wiped her eyes.
"We had a lot of children like that." Vivi said. "We buried them as best we could. I think what's worse is that they died alone. They are right though."
"Who is right?" Sydney asked.
"The ghosts or demons or whatever I see in these dreams." She said. "Where were we, how could anyone be so blind? In those days, the soldiers started bringing around civilian Germans to show what happened. Showed the dead bodies, the destruction. They would cry, scream, try to run, faint, vomit. They kept pleading that they did not know, but how is that true?"
She narrowed her eyes.
"Then I heard our guys weren't being so civil." She said. "They were plundering around, talks of rape. I knew they were checking for Nazis in the cities, but I didn't know they were also taking advantage. Supposed to be this great, admirable country, yet even our soldiers can't show common decency."
"Is that why you yelled at Burns?" Sydney asked. "Because he wasn't being civil to Ae-Cha, like one of our soldiers when they were on foreign land?"
Vivi nodded.
"He accused her people of starting this war." She said. "That she was born Korean that it was automatically a black mark against her. That her screaming for her dead parents was a nuisance. The children at Buchenwald screamed because like Ae-Cha they were now orphans. No one knew where their parents were and some were like Ae-Cha, lying there alongside their dead mothers and fathers. What gives him the right to treat people the way he does and not expect reprimand or hell, disagreement!"
"Did any of the soldiers at the concentration camp act like Burns did Vivi?" He asked.
Vivi sighed.
"Not like Burns sees her." She said. "I think what they saw angered them more than anything. It was the civilians outside the camp they went after. If they weren't going after Nazis hiding in the city they made sure to take advantage of the women and girls. I think maybe that is what I fear for Ae-Cha and wish to protect her. Burns may see her as dirt, but soldiers could see her as a commodity, so I have heard."
Sydney nodded.
"You can't blame yourself, though, for not being able to save the prisoners in the concentration camp. You may be feeling some sort of guilt and the dreams are a unconscious manifestation of that. Coming to Korea, seeing what happens to these boys and then Ae-Cha, it brings it all back to the surface. You wish you could have saved her parents, you wish you stop the soldiers and people like Burns from abusing the people, but your hands are tied."
"My father was there too." She said. "He was a surgeon, a captain like Pierce and McIntyre. His division came in just after mine did."
"How did he take it all?"
"Like anyone normal person would." She said. "Took care of the patients then drank whatever hooch he could get and pass out. Get up and do it all again the next day even with a bad hangover. I smoked. I can be a social drinker, but hangovers tend to incapacitate me."
"Do you two talk about what happened in Germany?" Sydney asked.
Vivi shook her head.
"My mother was already frightened for her family in Italy with Mussolini. " She said. "We didn't want to scare her further, but thankfully her family was spared. Our letters home were pretty scripted, just taking care of the soldiers and the German landscape. It was only when reporters and newspapers starting coming in that my mother saw we were lying through our teeth. When we came home though, she too didn't bring it up."
She looked out her bunk window.
"Vivi, you are an extremely strong woman." Sydney said. "You have the compassion of a mother with the military persona of a seasoned, fatherly general. As admirable as that it, it can also be your downfall. You hide a lot of yourself because you fear retribution, but by hiding yourself you also become a ticking time bomb when the likes of Frank Burns enters your peripheral vision."
"I can't be like everyone else and go against my superior officers on a regular basis, especially Major Houlihan." She said.
"No one says you have to." He said. "But you respect them so much that you don't respect yourself enough. You yelling at Frank Burns was you yelling at the Nazis for the Holocaust. At America for not intervening when you should have. You couldn't speak up in Germany, so you did here in Korea for Ae-Cha.
He took a breath
"You dream those victims are blaming you for their deaths. You carry a burden of guilt that you shouldn't be. You didn't create Buchenwald, you didn't hurt those people. You being unable to save them was not your fault. You not being able to save Ae-Cha's parents was not your fault either."
"I know that." She said. "But what Burns said..."
"Is what Burns believes." He interrupted. "But you can't let him bother you either. You can't change him. He's going to spout his rhetoric and bigotry whether anyone is listening or not. But you can't risk yourself for the likes of him. I mean, he looks at me and my profession as a quack. Even has said so to my face. But I know who I am and you need to know who you are."
Vivi looked at him.
"Who am I?" She asked.
"That my dear." He said standing up and putting his cap on. "You need to figure out for yourself. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a poker game to attend."
Then he left.