Chapter 1

STANDING IN THEIR BLOOD

I had been an army operating room nurse at the 12th Evacuation Hospital Cu Chi, Vietnam for about six months when Johnny was brought in. Three of our surgeons were alerted and showed up for him. Johnny was nineteen years old with red hair, bright blue eyes and a strong healthy body — but all of that was obscured by the severity of his injuries. Johnny had been hit by American artillery, a 105 mm Howitzer to be exact. He was brought to us by dust-off helicopter within minutes of being blasted. His legs were barely hanging on by skin and muscle; the bones of his legs were shattered; his penis testicles and buttocks were full of shrapnel; and his thighs, lower legs, and buttocks were black, ugly, blasted open, mutilated and bloody. He was losing a lot of blood and he had clamps on his major arteries in the groin to keep him from bleeding out before we could do surgery.

Because our team had been at the 12th Evac for between 4-6 months, we were well trained and honed by our experiences up until that moment. We all looked at Johnny and no one was sure what we could do for him. I was scrubbed in and ready professionally, but emotionally horrified by what I was seeing. An all-too-common experience. Would he want to live with only half a body? How would his body function after this? Could we just let him die? What if he didn’t die? What can we fix? I could feel something like lead in my stomach, my own body tense and I was holding my breath. I looked at Dr. Henry, our urologist, and saw his eyes full of water while pleading not to have to do this, his jaw tightly clenched as he said, “How do we decide what to do? When will this fucking destruction of human life end!?” He was making fists with his gloved hands as he said it. I felt a welling up of the fiery energy of anger, rage and passion that I had come to live with for the past six months. I could see Dr. Travis’ face contort with his well-held feelings. He was our orthopedic surgeon, and Dr. Dynan, our general surgeon, was shaking his head.

It seemed like those long surreal moments, of seeing the underside of Johnny’s bloodied and blasted legs, penis, scrotum and buttocks, were held together in suspended animation. We could hear the anesthesia machine with its loud simulated rhythmic respiratory sounds keeping Johnny’s lungs working, yet we were barely breathing. None of the three doctors wanted to make the decision.

Dr. Henry and I were with Johnny for four hours standing in his blood as it ran down the sheets onto the floor, onto us, and our shoes. Dr. Travis and Dynan were able to leave earlier after their part was done. Dr. Travis and I took off Johnny’s useless legs, while Dr. Henry had to repair his testicles, his penis, and urethra. Johnny ended up with big skin flaps loosely covering over the inside of his pelvis and hips when we sent him to post-op. He went from having a whole healthy body to having only half of a badly blasted and mangled body. Now, his body went from his head to his pelvis and there was nothing beyond that, so there was nowhere to attach artificial legs. It was a devastating loss that I could feel in my own body with a heaviness in my chest, a lead like lump in my stomach and an overwhelming sense of despair.

I started that day wondering: How does any human being do this to another? How can I keep doing this? How can I see any more young men with their bodies and lives

destroyed— and for what? Why are we here? Why are we doing this?

I heard their screams in my head. I saw their faces in my mind’s eye and what I couldn’t forget were their pleading eyes and the smell of their blood. I had been feeling exhausted when Johnny showed me the worst of the horrors in war, and if I had not already been emotionally numb to it, I don’t know if I could have gone on. I wondered if Johnny would survive or if he would even want to live the way he would end up.

That night when I was off duty and finally able to take a shower, I could not get the smell of Johnny’s blood out of my head and nose. No matter how many cold showers I took or how much soap I used, the smell of his blood would not go away. One of the worst things for me about working in surgery was that I always had a lot of blood all over me and would be standing in it for hours. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t get it off my skin or the metallic smell out of my head: fresh and old blood, in my nose and in my head— their blood, my brothers’ blood, Johnny’s blood. Even when it was washed off and I knew it was gone, I could still smell it. After taking that cold shower (because we did not have hot water), I was wide-awake and needed to talk. That night my whole body felt like it was made of the heaviest metal and my legs could only drag rather than walk. I wanted to cry forever, yet could not shed even one tear because all my emotions were locked up tight. The other nurses in the hooch (long wooden structure with individual personal spaces divided by bamboo netting) were laughing and listening to music, but I could not join in this time. I could not make the shift. I managed to drag my now clean body, filled with the smell of my brother’s blood, over to the olive drab army phone. I turned the crank several times and waited for the familiar sound of the Aussie operator voice after I asked, “Are you working?”

I had been reaching out to the Aussies for months when I needed human contact apart from the war. There were a bunch of Aussie soldiers who ran the communications system in Vietnam, which included the phones. Finally, I heard the voice I was waiting for “working,” said the familiar sounding Aussie voice. Many of the Aussies were from Sydney so I often called them by that name.

“Hi, Sydney, this is Sarah. Can you take a few minutes to talk with me?”

“Yes, I can do that. Did you have a bad experience?”

“More than my emotions can handle right now.” I told him about Johnny’s wounds and that I couldn’t get the smell of his blood or the memory of his wounds out of my head. “Can you talk to me for a while and tell me about Australia, where you live and what it’s like there?” My conversations lasted only about ten to fifteen minutes but were comforting to me. They took my mind off of the horrors I dealt with and pain I felt from that war.