The Healer's War

Lieutenant Kitty McCulley is an army nurse in a military hospital in Vietnam, working a ward that holds American soldiers, Vietnamese civilians and prisoners in adjacent beds, and treating all of them with whatever the supply chain has left her. Among her patients is an old Vietnamese holy man, dying of a cancer nobody can do anything about, who gives her an amulet before the end. Afterwards she begins to see the light around people, the colour of their state and their intent, which is not a comfortable gift in a place where she must talk to men she cannot trust and cannot afford to accuse. When a helicopter goes down she is left in the jungle with a one-legged Vietnamese boy named Ahn, moving through country where every possible rescuer is somebody's enemy. Scarborough served as a nurse in Vietnam, and the hospital chapters have the specific, unheroic texture of remembered work: the shortages, the black humour, the exhaustion. The fantastic element is used sparingly and to a purpose, as a way of insisting that everyone in the war remained a person, which the war itself was arranged to obscure.