The War Within (7 page)

Robinson whispered something that sounded like, “But I would.”

Meredith lowered her voice, too. “I don’t blame you. Lois can be a handful. Most of her stories are variations on the same theme. If you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all.”

“She’s looking for a man with medals on his chest and won’t stop until she finds one.” Robinson waved her hand dismissively. “I’ve learned to tune her out. Most of the time, she’s nothing more than background noise. I’m just glad I don’t have to live with her.”

Meredith lowered her voice to a whisper. “I wish I could say the same.”

Robinson’s mouth twitched as if she were trying not to smile. Meredith wished she would allow herself the pleasure. Robinson never seemed to truly enjoy herself. Instead, she always acted as if she had been ordered to be on her best behavior, making it hard to get to know her.

“Are you sure you won’t join us tonight?” A thought occurred to her. A possible explanation for Robinson’s decided lack of enthusiasm for her plans for the evening. “You don’t have a thing for Moser, do you? If you do, just say the word and I’ll step aside. After all, you’ve known him a lot longer than I have. You saw him first.”

“Relax, Goldilocks. I don’t want to call dibs on George Moser. He’s a nice guy, but he isn’t my type.”

“Are you looking for a man with medals on his chest, too?”

Robinson not only smiled. She laughed out loud. “Not hardly.”

The finality of Robinson’s tone made it seem like she thought their conversation had ended, but Meredith wasn’t ready to drop the thread.

“I hate the idea of you spending the night alone when you spend so much of the day that way. When you aren’t checking on patients or consulting with doctors, you’re off in a corner by yourself nursing a cup of coffee or lying in your hooch reading a dime novel from the PX.”

Robinson’s gaze was steady and unblinking, her voice low and deliberate. “Have you been watching me?”

“No,” Meredith said too quickly. The way Robinson was looking at her made her unsure of herself. She felt the need to explain herself much more than was probably necessary. “Well, yes. I worry about you. You need to let your hair down for a while. You seem so…intense all the time.”

Robinson’s eyes bore into hers, emphasizing her point. “Not all the time.”

Meredith got a rare glimpse of the tenderness beneath Robinson’s tough exterior. Usually only her patients were so fortunate.

“Is there anything I could say to convince you to change your mind about coming out with me? You could keep me company at Charlie’s and help me entertain the boys while I wait for everyone to get ready. Lois is always the last one on the truck each morning. I’m sure tonight won’t be any different. The first round’s on me. What do you say?”

“I appreciate the offer, but I already have plans, thanks.” Robinson rubbed her palms on her thighs. She rose to her feet as soon as the truck lurched to a stop. “Have fun tonight. I’ll see you in Long Binh. Maybe I’ll save a seat for you at the theater on movie night.”

She grabbed her duffel and jumped out of the truck after the driver lowered the tailgate. Meredith tried to follow her, but Lois blocked her path.

“You didn’t invite her to come with us tonight, did you?”

“Yes, I did.”

Lois’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why did you go and do that?”

“Did I do something wrong?”

Meredith nearly lost her balance when someone bumped into her from behind. She cleared a path as her heart began to race. Lois reminded her of a student the teacher had tasked with taking names when she had to leave the room. The rest of the students catered to her every whim to keep their names off the list. Had Meredith done everything she needed to do to remain in Lois’s good graces or had Lois taken her name?

Lois patted the air with her hands in a placating gesture. “First tell me what she said. Is she coming with us or not?”

“No, she said she already had plans of her own.”

“Good.” Lois’s relieved sigh blasted Meredith in the face like hot air from a rapidly deflating balloon.

“Why don’t you want her to go to town with us?”

Lois looked around to see who might be listening, but they were the only ones left in the truck. Everyone else had cleared out.

“I served with women like her in San Francisco.”

“What kind of women?”

Lois looked around again. The driver was filling the truck’s gas tank, but he was too busy ogling a tight-skirted secretary from General Lewis’s office to spare a thought for them.

“The kind of women you don’t want to hang around with unless you’re looking for a dishonorable discharge. The kind that usually gets weeded out after the men in white coats play Twenty Questions during the recruiting process.”

Suddenly, the conversation Meredith had overheard on her first day in Saigon made sense.

“
Do you think she’s one of us?
” Lt. Col. Daniels had asked.

“
I’m not sure
,” Robinson had replied. “
I don’t think she knows yet.
”

Robinson and Lt. Col. Daniels were lesbians and they were wondering if she was, too. Meredith had met lesbians in the service before. Like Lois, she had always kept her distance from them out of fear someone would mistakenly point the finger at her and get her sent home to face a litany of questions for which she had no answer. This time, though, she wasn’t so sure she could stay away. Or if she wanted to.

“I hear her…tendencies are the reason she lost her sergeant’s stripes,” Lois said.

“That can’t be true. If the brass suspected she was that way, she would have been booted out, not bucked down.”

Psychiatrists said homosexuals didn’t make good soldiers, and the military had bought it hook, line, and sinker. Soldiers caught committing homosexual acts were charged with sodomy and purged from the ranks. Draftees were asked point-blank if they were homosexual. If they answered yes, they weren’t allowed to enlist. Unless, of course, the country was at war like it was now and the military machine needed as many recruits as it could get its hands on.

Meredith wondered what would happen to Robinson, Lt. Col. Daniels, and the hundreds if not thousands of men and women like them after the tide of the war began to turn, and the number of personnel committed to fighting it began to decrease. Would they become victims of witch-hunts like so many of their predecessors had, or would they be allowed to continue performing the jobs they did so well?

“Robinson’s the best nurse in our unit,” Meredith said. “I’ve learned a great deal from her. So have you.”

Lois pursed her pencil-thin lips. “How can you say that when she doesn’t even have a degree? I’m an officer. She isn’t. And won’t be again, thanks to her predilections.”

“Rank doesn’t matter.”

“I beg to differ. Rank is everything. You’d know that if you didn’t have those stripes on your shoulders.”

“Rank doesn’t matter,” Meredith said again, even though she had worked her ass off to earn her current position and hoped to rise even higher. “Knowledge does. Experience does. Robinson has both. I’ve learned more from her in a month than I did in years of nursing school. So have you. I think we both could learn a great deal more. I’m not going to stop being her friend simply because you think she might be different from you and me.”

Lois folded her arms across her chest like a petulant child who wasn’t getting her way. “Oh, she’s different from me, all right, but I’m not so sure about you. Not after your spirited defense on behalf of your friend. Or should I say
girl
friend?”

Meredith felt her cheeks redden at the comment, which felt more like an accusation than a question. “Careful, Lois. That’s how rumors get started. Don’t go around saying I’m something I’m not.”

“Prove me wrong and I won’t have to. George Moser’s getting blue balls waiting for you to show him the time of day. You should take pity on the poor man and offer him some relief. Otherwise, I might have to start sleeping with my eyes open so I can keep one of them on you and one on your
friend
Natalie Robinson.”

After Lois turned and left, Meredith took her time gathering her things. The conversation with Lois had left her shaken. Would Lois go to the brass with her suspicions about Robinson or the baseless ones about her? She thought it best to stay on Lois’s good side. But was keeping her good name reason enough to give in to Lois’s demands? Perhaps not, but saving her career was. She hadn’t come this far to be derailed by something that wasn’t true. If she wanted to move up in the ranks, she needed to play by the rules with no hint of impropriety or scandal. She needed to stick close to George Moser and stay away from Natalie Robinson.

The situation made her feel dirty. After she took a long shower in the barracks, she slipped on a pair of modest heels and a sleeveless sheath she had picked up in Tokyo, grabbed her overnight bag, and headed to Charlie’s.

The bar was run by a civilian contractor and was popular with enlisted men and officers alike, though most of the top brass preferred the exclusivity of the officers’ club. Meredith had tried the OC a time or two, but it was too stuffy for her taste. The atmosphere at Charlie’s was much more her speed. The food at Charlie’s was better than the fare served up in the mess hall, even though it cost four times as much as it did back home. But the beer was cold, cheap, and plentiful.

When she walked in, Meredith spotted Robinson nursing one of those cold brews at the end of the bar. She thought about joining her, but Robinson had made it clear she wanted to be alone so she left her that way.

She waved to the owner, Charlie Miller, and took a seat at the other end of the bar. Charlie’s wife, U’ilani, who worked as a waitress, ambled up to take her drink order. Charlie weighed probably a buck fifty soaking wet. U’ilani was easily twice his size. No wonder she acted as bouncer and he cowered behind the bar whenever one of the enlisted men had had one too many.

Charlie was from Texas and U’ilani was from Hawaii. Meredith didn’t know where they’d met or how they had ended up in Vietnam. Both said it was a long story, but neither had offered to unspool the yarn.

“You look pretty tonight.” U’ilani placed a mug of whatever was on tap in front of her. “You got a hot date?”

Meredith took a sip of her beer to swallow the bile that rose to her throat each time she thought about her conversation with Lois. “Something like that.”

She glanced at the other end of the bar, where Robinson was chowing down on a burger and some Texas-sized fries. She was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a short-sleeved red silk blouse. She looked a lot more comfortable than Meredith did. She probably felt that way, too. Meredith’s dress was shorter and more formfitting than she was accustomed to. She had too much skin and too many curves on display. She felt like she was playing dress-up, but she didn’t know who she was dressing up for, George or Lois. She wished she could just be herself. She wished she could be with Robinson.

Where was she going tonight? What was she planning to do? Who did she intend to spend time with? Meredith wanted answers to all those questions and more.

She took another sip of her drink. She had been looking forward to going on leave for weeks. The thought of having a few laughs with George and the others had sounded like fun when he first proposed the trip in the mess hall two weeks ago. Now it was beginning to feel more like a chore. One she wasn’t certain she wanted to perform.

George was probably harmless, but she didn’t want to spend any more time with Lois than she had to. On the transport truck, Lois had exposed herself as a bigot. Meredith didn’t want her to think she espoused her beliefs, but she couldn’t afford to have her think she didn’t.

Talk about a Catch-22.

“Would you like some food?” U’ilani asked.

Meredith tried not to eat more than a few bites during a date in case the guy she was with found her hearty appetite unappealing, but she was too hungry to go without. She pointed at Robinson’s plate. “That looks good. I’ll have what she’s having. Except make mine well done.” Robinson’s burger was so rare it looked like it was still moving.

“You two keep eating like this and you’ll look like me in a few years,” U’ilani said with a loud belly laugh. The hem of her colorful muumuu swayed back and forth as she walked the length of the bar.

“You’re beautiful just the way you are, U’ilani,” Robinson said with a grin.

“Yeah, I bet you say that to all the girls.” U’ilani pinned a hibiscus blossom behind Robinson’s ear and chucked her under her chin before she handed the slip of paper containing Meredith’s order to the cook, a young local in a pair of brown pants and a stained white T-shirt. “I need another Number Three, Tran. Burn this one.”

“Yes, Mrs. Miller,” Tran said in heavily-accented English. He grabbed a thick hamburger patty out of the refrigerator and tossed it on the grill. The resulting sizzle reminded Meredith of home. Of her father’s famous backyard barbecues.

She didn’t know where U’ilani and Charlie had found Tran, but he was fast and good. Her food was brought out in what felt like record time and it was prepared just the way she liked it.

“My compliments to the chef,” she said when U’ilani came to check on her midway through her meal.

“I can’t do that. Compliments would go to his head and he’d start asking for more money. Charlie and I would have to raise the prices to compensate, then you and all your friends would start complaining.”

“Okay. Forget I said anything.” Meredith swallowed another bite of her two-dollar meal. Back home, she could get a burger at McDonald’s for thirty-nine cents, fries for fifteen. But that was in the real world, and the real world was thousands of miles away. Besides, this was her last weekend in Saigon. Who knew what awaited her in Long Binh? “I hope I get food like this where I’m going.”

“You should. Tran has a cousin who works in one of the restaurants on post. He’ll take care of you until you come back home where you belong.”

Saigon was nothing like home, but Meredith would rather be here than anywhere else. She looked around Charlie’s. It was close to 1900 hours and the place was starting to fill. George and the others would probably turn up soon. Robinson deserved to know Lois had it in for her so she could take the necessary precautions. If she wanted to drop a word in Robinson’s ear about the situation, she needed to do it now. She finished her meal, tossed her napkin in her empty plate, and grabbed her mug as she prepared to head to the other end of the bar.