The Healer's War
by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Summary
Lieutenant Kitty McCulley is an army nurse in a Vietnamese hospital ward on a rotation that alternates between American casualties and Vietnamese civilians, and she is losing her grip on the distinction between the people she is treating and the people her side is fighting.
One of her patients is a Vietnamese holy man close to death, who gives her an amulet before he goes. Afterwards she can see auras: the colours of health, sickness, fear and intention around every person in the room, including the ones who intend her harm, and she finds she can sometimes heal by touch.
Then a helicopter goes down and she is in the jungle with a wounded Vietnamese boy who has lost a leg, walking, hiding, and dealing in turn with Vietcong, with a village, and with an American soldier who is a far greater danger to her than the enemy.
The war material is not softened by the magic. Scarborough writes triage, amputation, the smell of a ward, racism inside the American unit, and the position of women in it, at a level of specificity that only comes from having been there.
Around three hundred and sixty pages, plain and direct, and the amulet is the least of it.
The boy, Ahn, is the centre of it. He is ten, has lost his family and a leg, is entirely dependent on Kitty, and is not sentimentalised for a page.
Best for readers who want a Vietnam novel from the nursing station rather than the patrol, and one of very few written by a woman who was there.
Historical Context & Significance
The Healer's War won the 1989 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough served as an army nurse in Vietnam, at the China Beach medical facilities near Da Nang, and wrote the novel more than fifteen years afterwards. She based it loosely on her own service, adding the fantastic element so the story could take in more than her own point of view.
Almost all of the American fiction of that war is written by and about combat soldiers. Roughly eleven thousand American women served in Vietnam, the overwhelming majority of them nurses, and their accounts arrived late and in small numbers, mostly as oral history rather than as novels, which is a large part of why this book matters beyond its award.
Scarborough went on to write comic fantasy and, with Anne McCaffrey, the Petaybee and Barque Cat series.