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Summary
Chapters Eight-Eleven
Chapter Eight
Frankie’s mother sends her a worried letter about protests against the war at home in the US. Although she is exhausted from her shift, Frankie still gets on the helicopter that takes her, Ethel, and Barb to another base at Long Binh for Captain Smith’s farewell party. At the party, Jamie Callahan invites her to dance. As they dance, Jamie suggests that Frankie submit a transfer request from Neuro to surgical nursing. He’s heard good things about Frankie and thinks she’s ready for the change. Because Jamie has a reputation, Frankie is initially dubious, but she agrees to put in the request. Being a surgical nurse is far more intense and fast-paced, which Frankie learns immediately when she and Jamie repair a bullet wound to the chest on her first day. They head to the Officer’s club and Jamie confesses he’s married. He only married Sara, his wife, because she was pregnant with their son, Davy. Frankie is hurt and betrayed. Frankie writes home about how beautiful Vietnam is and how much she wants to excel. Bette writes back and grudgingly admits it must feel good to have purposeful work to do.
Chapter Nine
Frankie is left alone to close her first major surgical procedure when Jamie gets pulled away to fix a sucking chest wound. She sews up a man’s abdomen after a splenectomy, saving his life. She and Jamie are spending more and more time in surgery together, and Frankie is struggling to squash her feelings for him. She notices that he’s always touching her, and one evening the attraction almost gets the better of them. Frankie manages to resist letting herself kiss Jamie and runs back to her hooch. She reads mail from her mother, which talks about how the protests at home are escalating and people burning draft cards and bras in the street. Barb organizes a MEDCAP trip to a local orphanage staffed by nuns, where the nurses give the children candy and administer vaccines and malaria treatment. Frankie helps treat a girl who’s been badly burned. When she gets back to base and tells Ethel and Barb about the girl, they collectively wonder why the US media isn’t reporting that the Army is bombing villages in South Vietnam
Chapter Ten
Ethel and Barb take a very sleep-deprived Frankie to a going-away party for Ethel. It’s on a beach near Saigon, and the nurses catch a ride on a Naval helicopter. The pilot of the helicopter is Slim, a tall, mustached man with a pretty face. He and his co-pilot Coyote entertain the nurses with cold beer and waterskiing. Feeling sad to be leaving, Ethel invites Frankie and Barb to visit her in Virginia after the war. She promises that if they do, they can eat barbecue and ride horses together. Jamie, whose time in Vietnam is also less than three months away from ending, tells Frankie he knows she wants him. He asks if she could have loved him, but she sadly walks away. The next day Ethel leaves, and Barb and Frankie work an eight-hour surgical shift. Jamie tells Frankie he loves her, and she admits she’ll miss him. A week after, a helicopter delivers an injured Jamie back to the surgeons. He’s dying, but Frankie begs the attending surgeon Dr. Rob Aldean to try and save him.
Chapter Eleven
Medics rush Jamie to Neuro, where he is unresponsive and barely alive after his maiming. Frankie tries to comfort him. As a helicopter arrives to transfer him to another hospital, she writes “You fight” and her name on the stone the little boy gave her for saving his sister, and places it in his duffel bag. She blurts out that she loves him as the medics remove him. She sees a medic stopping CPR on Jamie and shaking his head as the helicopter leaves. She’s miserable, which is made worse when Barb tells her she is going home in December. Major Goldstein tells Frankie that she is transferring to join the Seventy-First Evac in Pleiku, a very dangerous mountain region near the Cambodian border. Barb decides to join her there. Sgt. Alvarez tells them to report to their new supervisor Lieutenant Colonel “Hap” Dickerson in the bare-bones Pleiku OR. There’s a huge flood of injured solders coming in via helicopter, but the base loses power after a mortar explodes. Frankie, Barb, and the surgeons have to operate for a full shift with only flashlights.
Analysis
This section of the novel starts to show the toll that months of loss and violence are taking on Frankie. Even at this early stage, the narrator highlights that the hangover from wartime traumas isn’t quick to fade. This pain is mixed in with several other incidents of Frankie struggling to let go of things she knows she must not keep. The reader is brought face-to-face with Frankie’s difficulty in confronting loss as she must navigate her attachment to the (married) Jamie Callahan. There’s a sense in these chapters that Frankie is starting to feel a strong sense of injustice on two fronts; about how the Americans in Vietnam treat the Vietnamese, and how her own service is dismissed or criticized by people who have no idea what field medicine in wartime is like.
Before Frankie was a surgical nurse, her time in the Neuro ward allowed her a relatively gentle introduction to the horrors of Vietnam field ops. However, her transition to surgery exposes her to the full force of wartime carnage and the breakneck speed with which nurses and doctors must act to save lives. On her first day assisting Jamie in the surgical ward, she sees the worst physical damage to human bodies she’s ever come across. Instead of sitting with coma patients, she’s removing shrapnel fragments and sponging away spinal fluid.
The relentless pace and severity of the work force her to adapt quickly, and Jamie is one of her only sources of support during this time. Their emotional relationship grows alongside their professional one, but they’re able to hide the intensity of their feelings in the chaos of the surgical ward. In letters home, Frankie writes about wanting to excel as a surgical nurse but doesn’t discuss her feelings for Jamie. Her mother Bette’s responses don’t comfort her, however. Instead, Bette’s concerned descriptions of anti-war protests and the growing discomfort with US military presence in Vietnam make Frankie feel guilty. She feels even closer to Jamie because he understands how necessary their work is. By contrast, Bette’s letters make it seem as though everyone in America feels like Frankie’s parents did when she left; uncomfortable with the idea of Americans being in Vietnam. The disconnect between Frankie’s attempts to save lives in Vietnam and the response to the war effort her mother describes leaves her feeling angry and isolated.
Frankie feels that her time in surgery is slowly anesthetizing her to the horrors of physical injury. However, she’s snapped back to feeling horrified and shocked when she and the other medics visit the orphanage on their MEDCAP mission. The devastation American artillery has wreaked on Vietnamese lives is clear, both from the large group of parentless children who need the nurses’ help, and from the clear psychological damage done to some of those children. It’s a whole new realm of devastation beyond the battlefield. When Frankie treats the young girl covered with burn scars, she’s shaken by the story the nun tells her about finding the child alive in a ditch in the arms of her dead mother. This moment revolts and saddens Frankie deeply, which also makes her resolve not to turn to Jamie for either comfort or pleasure. When she weeps into his chest it’s half out of frustration and half out of disbelief that such a thing could be allowed to happen to a child. Her frustration with the lack of media coverage of the injuries and deaths in Vietnam only intensifies this growing feeling of disillusionment. Again, she turns to Jamie to discuss it and again begins to attach herself to him emotionally.
Frankie’s growing feelings for Jamie point to her utter lack of control in an environment where nothing feels stable. Ethel warns her about Jamie’s romantic and sexual intentions toward her, but Frankie chooses to ignore her doubts because focusing on Jamie is the only thing that seems familiar and appealing to her. Frankie can’t reconcile her feelings for Jamie with the realities of their situation. However, when she believes he’s dying she’s forced to confront her feelings more directly. These wounds also bring the war home emotionally from the reader and for Frankie in a way that previously wounded soldiers had not. Jamie’s wounds—amputation, head trauma, and a dangerous chest injury—all seem more real because they’re happening to a character the reader “knows.” Frankie’s decision to keep working through the chaos shows her resilience, but it also shows how war’s demands leave no space to process its effects.
