Elizabeth Anne Scarborough
1988
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
The Healer’s War is a moving real-life account of one woman’s service in the Vietnam war in the guise of a good science fiction story.
The main character, Lieutenant Kitty McCulley, is a nurse at a U.S. Army
hospital near China Beach. Her hospital treats wounded American GIs as
well as South Vietnamese civilians. McCulley isn’t always great about
keeping her cool or doing things exactly by the book but she genuinely
cares about her patients and tries her best for all of them, whatever
color they are.
The American soldiers usually stay for only a short time and then are
shipped to better-equipped hospitals back home. The Vietnamese
civilians, having nowhere else to go, tend to stay longer, and McCulley
develops something of a bond with several of them.
One of her Vietnamese patients is a holy man, a healer, who had both
legs blown off by a bomb. She cannot save him but before he dies, he
gives her his magical amulet. The amulet reveals auras – clouds of color
around people and animals that show how they are really feeling and
where their pain is – and it also focuses her energy to give her
tremendous powers of healing.
Both of these powers come in very handy when she is transporting one of
her patients to another hospital and their helicopter is shot down,
leaving her and her one-legged, ten-year-old patient to slog their way
through miles of Vietnamese jungle until they are eventually captured by
the Viet Cong.
While the jungle section contains most of the adventure in the book, my
favorite parts were the first section, in the hospital, and the last
little section, after McCulley gets back home to the States, because
they are both so clearly based on the author’s own experiences as an
Army nurse in Vietnam and as a returning vet.
In the first section, Scarborough paints vivid pictures with details.
Everyday life at the hospital is largely miserable for McCulley, with
the smells (disinfectant, pot, latrines), the heat, the rain, and the
bugs. Her nylons fuse to her legs with sweat and the plastic earpiece on
the telephone has been melted by the bug spray everyone wears. She
deals with so many angry, aggressive, and/or flirtatious soldiers that
the nice ones can actually be the most unsettling. But, at the same
time, Vietnam can be beautiful to her, with misty mountains covered in
hundreds of shades of green.
The last section of the book is equally powerful. It doesn’t give away
anything about the book’s central plot to say that when McCulley comes
home from Vietnam, she is suffering from shock and trauma and is
isolated from those around her. She has real trouble adjusting to life
with relatives and friends who have no concept of what the war was like.
It is very hard to watch her go sluggishly through the motions of
trying to repair herself until she finally realizes she can’t do it all
on her own.
I also very much liked McCulley’s personality. She’s a realist and she
makes it easy to put yourself in her shoes. She’s exhausted and
depressed by the war but she doesn’t make too many excuses for herself.
She thinks of herself as an inept, incompetent nurse who isn’t doing a
terrific job, and sometimes she does screw up, but her compassion and
care for her patients come through loud and clear.
The only major knock I have on this book is that the power of the amulet
goes a little too far; in particular, it eventually allows her to
understand Vietnamese perfectly. This makes communication with her VC
captors conveniently easy but it seems inconsistent with the amulet’s
other attributes, which are more vague and impressionistic.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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