It was 5:03 a.m. on the graveyard — midnight-to-dawn— shift in La Jolla’s Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, where two nurses on the burn ward were trying to decide whether the information phoned in from New York by Capt. Ray Brentwood’s father should be communicated to his son, who was on their ward. The older nurse, in her mid forties, busy checking the medication trays, was for withholding the news until later in the day, after the daily assessments, including that of Ray Brentwood, had been made by the doctors on their rounds. The young nurse, on the other hand, not long out of college, argued that bad news should be communicated as soon as possible to a patient. “Quicker they know, the sooner they’ll have to confront it. And overcome it,” she said confidently, but the older woman, who had worked as a nurse’s aide long before she’d become qualified as a fully trained nurse, regarded the younger woman’s approach as typical of the college-trained nurses. They were all full of confrontation, “tell it like it is,” encounter groups-mistaking forthrightness for professionalism. After many years on the job, the older nurse had come to believe that sometimes you had to keep the truth at bay, for a while anyhow — a lie if necessary. With all the daunting confidence of youth, the younger nurse stood her ground. “Sorry, I still think we should tell him. Be up-front about everything.”
“Oh?” said the older nurse. “Then why’d you tell him he looked ‘just great’ the other day?”
The younger nurse thought for a moment. “I didn’t.”
“You did, honey. I heard you say it. You told him that the last plastic surgery was a ‘terrific improvement.’ I can’t see any improvement at all.”
“Well — that’s — that’s a subjective thing, I guess.”
“Exactly.”
“I still don’t think you should keep something about his family from him. He’ll probably get official notification from the Pentagon that his kid brother’s missing anyway.”
“Not for a week or so. Believe me. Washington doesn’t move that fast.”
“All right, you tell me — what’s he going to think when he finds out we knew all along?”
“We don’t have to tell him we knew.”
“C’mon, Sue, by then he’ll have read about it in the papers.”
“About what?”
“You know — hand me that temperature chart, will you? — about how bad things are in Europe. About this Dortmund pocket or whatever they call it.”
“Honey — there’s nearly a million of our boys fighting over there. Ray Brentwood won’t know where his kid brother was — until the War Department tells him. Even then, they’re pretty vague about the area. They usually give the country, that’s all.”
The young nurse was flicking over the temperature charts, entering the readings into the computer, and wondered aloud what Brentwood’s sister would do in the circumstances.
“Honey, she’s back of beyond up there in the Aleutians. We’re here and we’re the ones making the decision.”
“Regulations say you should tell them,” said the young nurse.
“Regulations tell you you should use your discretion. Best judgment. That’s what I’m doing.”
The young nurse paused at the computer for a second. “Did I really say that? That he looked better?”
“God’s my witness.”
“Well, I don’t believe in God. I’ll have to take your word for it.” She paused. “I guess we can hold off for a while.”
“I’ll tell him,” the other one volunteered.
The younger one returned to tapping the temperatures into the computer files. “Sue — is that true about his sister? About when she was in Canada? Did she really—?”
“Gossip.”
“No — I’m not judging her. I think she was right — if that’s what she did it for.”
“Doesn’t matter what she did it for. And if you don’t want to end up back of beyond like her — don’t you ever do it. It’s easy, I know. You feel sorry for them. Nothing wrong with that, but we’re professionals.”
“I thought professionals were supposed to care.”
The other nurse said nothing.
The younger one pressed, “You do believe it, then?”
The older woman pulled over three medication trays, took a tongue depressor, and began counting off painkillers to put in the array of paper portion cups. “All I know is Lana Brentwood was Little Miss Shy Shoes. Pretty brunette, the original Miss America figure, not too tall, not too short— ‘just right,’ like they say in the nursery rhymes. Then, who knows? She married some bigwig, went to China, came back, and left her husband — or he kicked her out. Tried to hide away from the front pages, then decided to be Florence Nightingale. Next thing there’s this rumpus over the young Brit, Spencer.”
“Spence.”
“Whatever. Anyway, she was lucky she wasn’t court-martialed.”
The young nurse saw one of the call lights go on. For a moment she thought it was Ray Brentwood and was much relieved when she realized it was the patient in the next bed over. “You sure know a lot about her. Wheredo you pick up all that juicy stuff? Sounds to me like you’ve got her file.”
“Gossip — well, she was in all the papers — over the marriage breakup.”
“What papers? I never read anything in the papers about it.”
The older nurse was blushing. “I don’t know. Maybe the National Enquirer or something. Look — you’d better hop on down and see what Jensen—” They heard a torrent of abuse erupting from five rooms down on the west wing.
When she entered the room, the young nurse saw Ray Brentwood was awake, reading. He looked hideous — the night-light reflecting off the tight skin, stretched like pink plastic, blotchy here and there with dead spots. The eyes, having escaped the burn, appeared strange, fixed and protruding like those of a fish, but she realized it wasn’t that anything was wrong with the eyes so much as the rest of his face, especially the nose — so horribly disfigured, off center, and pushed to one side — so that the eyes looked grotesque in their normalcy. She avoided their stare as she checked the frame that had been built over Jensen’s bed, Jensen’s burns being on the lower part of his body and, like Brentwood’s, caused by the extraordinarily high temperatures from a ship’s aluminum superstructure. While the light weight gave the modern ships more speed, the aluminum alloys were unable to sustain high temperatures. In the case of Brentwood’s ship, the guided missile frigate USS Blaine, the white-hot superstructure, collapsing under the stress, tumbled into the fire of other explosions below, taking men down with it into the inferno of the ship’s twisted entrails.
Brentwood was making a terrible piglike snorting noise as he breathed in. The young nurse pitied his wife and wondered how a woman, even with the best will in the world, could ever make love to a man after something like that.
“For Christ’s sake!” Jensen cried. “Gimme a shot!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jensen. It isn’t time.”
Jensen was sobbing, and she wanted to tell him to stop it. It couldn’t be that bad, she told herself.
“You’ll be fine,” she told him, and knew she was lying. He would be lucky to survive, and if he did, it would be a torture. He no longer had any genitals, and had to be constantly catheterized.
Brentwood’s breathing was getting heavier. She hated it, asking herself why on earth she’d become a nurse in the first place. It had been a terrible mistake. But then, when she had been writing her finals only months before, the world had been at peace, and nursing a guarantee of a job. Now everything had changed. It was another world, one in which death and suffering on such a scale had been unimaginable to the young. The types of wounds she was seeing in this hospital simply hadn’t been covered. Even automobile accidents paled by comparison. She remembered some professor in college assuring them that nuclear weapons had made world war “obsolete.” She wished the fool could have been on the ward with her now, hearing, smelling, the death that hung about the night wards, giving her the creeps, like some obscene voyeur whose presence, though invisible, was palpable in the dark corners of the room.