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which she lost a lot of blood. The first unit of blood had been hung as I came on duty. My assignment was to monitor the patient for a transfusion reaction. Although transfusion reactions are rare in the States, it's routine to keep track of the patient's vital signs and general well-being for the first hour or so, just to make sure everything is okay. Only this time everything wasn't okay. The woman spiked a temp even higher than the one she was already running from dehydration, and began chilling at the same time. It's eerie seeing goose bumps rise on somebody when their fever is 104-105 and the room temperature is the same or higher. It happened so fast that she was starting to convulse before I quite realized what was happening. As soon as I did, I yanked the unit of blood, tubing and all, and replaced it with a bottle of Ringer's lactate. I put in a call for the doctor, who was, I think, in downtown Da Nang that night (though that was supposed to be off limits), and called the lab to ask them to repeat the cross match.

    "Why?" asked the stoned young thing on the other end.

    "Because the unit you brought me was wrong-it almost killed my patient."

    "Then so would anything else I bring you. 0 poz is all we got for gooks, lady."

    "What do you mean by that remark, soldier?" I asked in my best John Wayne growl. "The woman almost bled to death already. We surely aren't going to bring her in and just finish her off with bad blood."

    I meant to be sarcastic, but the fellow was full of herbally induced patience.

    "It ain't bad blood, Lieutenant. It's good ol' American universaldonor blood. The gooks are lucky to get it. American donors donate for
    'Mericans, get it? There'd be hell to pay if they knew their blood was going to keep some gook alive. But bein' the Good Samarit-the kindhearted suckers we are-we let 'em have a little of the cheap-and-easy brew."

    "If 0 positive is the universal donor, why is she reacting to it?"

    "Oh, it ain't all that universal. Lots of AB types don't handle it real well, and uh-AB is a lot more common among the gooks than it is with us.
    oops, gotta date with a hot centrifuge. Have a nice night, Lieutenant."

    The doctor was even more offhand than the lab tech, who was indeed repeating hospital policy. Nobody said in so many words that they didn't care if the Vietnamese patients lived or died. But the lifers, the career Army sergeants and senior officers, were fond of reminding us new recruits that anyone who had served in the Pacific in WW II or Korea could tell you gooks didn't value human life the way Americans and Europeans did.

    It wasn't until the neurosurgeon left and a fill-in, a doctor who had been serving in the field, was reassigned to us on temporary duty that something was done about the problem. Dr. Riley was a very logical man. He decided that if gooks bled, gooks could give blood. He grabbed a handful of tourniquets, needles, and syringes and he and Major Crawley, our head nurse at the time, raided the visitors' tent and availed themselves of its walking Vietnamese blood bank. Most of the visitors didn't mind donating. Nobody had ever thought to ask them before.

    I had thought myself above the kind of bigotry that had willfully overlooked what was so obvious to Dr. Riley; the human body works pretty much the same no matter what kind of upholstery you put on it.
    Now I had to seriously question whether I hadn't at least inwardly begun to buy into all of that "anti-gook" stuff. Had I harmed Tran because I secretly didn't give as much of a damn about her as I did about my
    "professional image"?

    Was I really more concerned with stupid appearances than I was with hurting somebody who was so totally helpless and dependent on me?

    Oh well, so I'd screwed up. Nobody had been making it exactly easy for me. Let them transfer me to an easier assignment. What did I care?
    Except-except that I still hated like hell that I had failed, that I hadn't measured up. Because I wanted to do