I glanced over at the head nurse who had just sunk down on a stool on the other side of the counter from me, his face weary.
“You say that every time, Percy,” I said.
He gave me an apologetic look.
“We got a fresh truckload in a couple hours ago and...” He trailed off. A fresh truckload meant wounds that hadn’t had much time to be tended to. And a high likelihood that not all of the men onboard would make it. But I’d be damned if they were lost on my watch.
“How many?” I asked.
“Twenty-one.”
“Well, twenty-one just happens to be my lucky number.”
“I thought sixteen was.”
“That was two days ago, Percy.”
He gave me a sad, tired grin. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said and hurried off, his shoes squelching on the bloodstained floor.
Each patient loaded onto the plane came with his own set of instructions, pinned to his shirt, his pants, or the sheet covering his body. Some were unconscious and would only require a periodic glance, others had lost limbs, their wounds wrapped but not necessarily cleaned yet as there had been no time.
Some would need help shifting in their cot to ease discomfort, others needed pain medication to be administered at different times and in different quantities, oxygen might be a necessity depending on elevation levels, and then there were the stomach wounds.
Doctor Fischer, the man in charge, pointed to a soldier with a thick bandage around his torso. “Keep an eye on this one as you climb.”
“Yessir.”
“You’re aware what could happen?”
“Well aware, sir.”
Stomachs had a penchant for expanding if the plane rose too fast, bursting stitches and causing a wound to become life-threatening—and messy. On a plane filled with men in excruciating pain with only one nurse to tend to them all, it was best not to have to perform a surgery onboard. To counteract such issues, the stitches had to be cut and then redone as soon as it was safe to do so.
I’d only heard of one incidence of that happening since arriving at Espiritu Santo, and thanks to the gory details, I swore to myself it would never happen on one of my shifts. Poor Carlotta had returned the following day looking as though she’d seen a ghost.
“There was blood everywhere...” she’d said, her voice trailing off as she stared through the rest of us.
In addition to the stomach wound I’d have onboard, I also had a soldier with a brain injury.
“Is he coherent?” I asked Percy, who’d returned to help load the patients.
“Not exactly. He’s mostly quiet but sometimes babbles nonsense. He’s been here for a couple of weeks. We thought he was getting better. He had some other minor injuries so we kept him here, but those healed. His head hasn’t.”
“Non-aggressive?”
“Benny? Nah. He’s harmless.”
“And he’ll stay in his bunk without a fight?”
“Definitely. He’s happy to just stare at the wall, maybe at you because you’re pretty, and jabber on about nothing, sing, or just be silent. He won’t give you a lick of trouble.”
“Anyone else I need to know about?”
He went down a small list and I made some notes for myself, and then the two of us, Doctor Fischer, and three other nurses helped load the troops carefully into the plane.
As I helped one young man across the tarmac, his uninjured arm around my shoulder, he cracked jokes about his missing arm, which had been blown off by gunfire, along with a chunk of his left thigh.
“I was just looking for a quick way home,” he said. “And some cute girls to flirt with.”
