Book Review : The Nurse, the Holy Man and Experience of Vietnam

The Healer’s War by Elizabeth A. Scarborough (Foundation Books/Doubleday: $17.95; 303 pages)

When things begin to turn up repeatedly in novels, it’s a fairly sure bet they are turning up--somewhere--in what we think of, absently, as “real life.” Here is yet another story with a so-called realistic base that zooms into what we think of as fantastical material, then zooms right back to make a three-point landing in ordinary existence.

Kitty McCulley is an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. She tells us her story as if she’s writing a letter to an old friend, hoping she’ll finally be understood. (In fact, all through this novel, Kitty composes long, thoughtful letters to a gentleman friend living back in the United States, only to find, when she returns, that he’s never even opened these letters.)

Why Go to Vietnam?

Kitty enlisted in the Army, she tells us, because she’s terrified of nuclear war and is ironically grateful to the military industrial complex simply for engaging in a modest “conventional” conflict. Also, she wants to do good in the world by being a nurse. Also, although she’s pretty, Kitty is no knockout, and so she longs to change the ratio a little--finding great-looking men who will love her a lot.

Kitty does find Tony, a picture-perfect pilot who is as cute as Steve McQueen in his aviation glasses: “The man had to have pored over the Kama Sutra as thoroughly as he’d studied his helicopter manuals, and he handled me with the same sort of competence. The trouble was, I wasn’t a helicopter.” Underneath his mechanical technique, Tony is an insecure dolt, always telling Kitty not to “show off,” not to tell her stories, which is too bad, because in the hospital, Kitty is racking up some pretty amazing experiences.

The Army hospital is divided into separate wings for American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. Since, allegedly, America and South Vietnam were fighting on the same side, the United States owed medical attention to civilians who had been injured. . . .

And here is where the novel tends to explode from within, much like the bullets, so popular in those days, which made a small hole when they entered the body, and then pushed everything every which way, scrambling folks into red Jell-O. The American administration runs everything in the hospital with tight, mathematical attention to detail. They get fair results. But out on public health patrol, a grumpy serviceman named Heron has brought back an injured Vietnamese holy man named Xe who wears an amulet around his neck on a grubby thong, and gets pretty fair results himself. The trouble is, Xe is not in the best shape himself. He’s a healer, but he too needs to be healed.

What you’ve got here so far is a straight-forward, utterly grounded-in-reality story about nursing in Vietnam. It’s fascinating in its unpleasant accuracies. There are yards and yards of embroidered detail about wounds and treatments and good doctors and bad doctors and the covert (careless?) murder of Vietnamese civilians by transfusing them with bad blood. But the real story here is about the two kinds of healing; the scientific and the spiritual--when the one works and the other doesn’t--when the spiritual stuff ceases to work, and so on.

Fantasy Interlude

In a fairly implausible Part II, Kitty and a Vietnamese orphan get lost in the jungle and confront enemies both allegorical and real. I found this section hard to take, whether because of a prejudice against standard fantasy or because the material was weaker, is hard to say. But Part III, in which the disillusioned nurse, exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually, comes home to an America where everything seems meaningless is beautifully rendered.

At some level, this is an old-fashioned “nurse” book, a sophisticated and raunchy variation on a Sue Barton book. By the end, Kitty has found a meaning in her life, gotten her healing powers back, and may even have dug up a boyfriend. But the structure here has very little to do with the thoughtful, even fascinating content, which, again, is a treatise on dual modes of healing--how, when and why they work.