Ethel Flint Character Analysis

Mass casualty. That was what they called tonight, or actually MASCAL. Apparently, since the recent influx of troops, it was beginning to happen so often that they didn’t have time to call it by its full name.

Frankie stood in the back corner of the Quonset hut that housed the ER. After nine hours on duty, she was beyond exhausted and her feet burned with blisters, but it wasn’t the ache in her bones and muscles and feet that mattered. It was shame.

How on earth had she thought she belonged here? That she had something to offer men who were grievously wounded? She’d been as much help as a candy striper.

Tonight she’d held scissors in hands that never quite stopped shaking and cut off T-shirts and flak jackets and pants, revealing wounds that she couldn’t have imagined before today. She still heard patients’ screams inside her head, even though the ward had emptied a while ago.

Frankie couldn’t stop thinking about Mai, lying in a ditch, burned, still held in her dead mother’s arms. “Her village had been bombed.”

War was one thing; bombing villages of women and children was something else. God knew there were no stories about it in the Stars and Stripes. Why weren’t they reporting that truth?

A silence fell between them; in it lay the ugly truth that none of them wanted to face. The village was in South Vietnam.

And only the Americans had bombs.

But you know what I’m going to say. It’s ‘Nam.

You meet people, you form these bonds that tighten around you, and some of the people you love die. All of them go away, one way or another. You don’t carry them around with you over there, you can’t. There isn’t time, and the memories are too heavy. You’ll always have a piece of him that was yours and your time together.

The pills her mother had given her helped to take the edge off of her pain. She learned that two sleeping pills softened the nightmares and helped her fall asleep, but when she woke, she felt lethargic, unrested. One of the Mother’s Little Helpers perked her right up, maybe even gave her too much energy. Enough so that she needed the pills again to calm down enough to sleep. It became a cycle, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

She stopped visiting her parents, stopped answering the phone, stopped writing letters to her friends. She didn’t want to hear their pep talks, and no one wanted to listen to her despair.

Mass casualty. That was what they called tonight, or actually MASCAL. Apparently, since the recent influx of troops, it was beginning to happen so often that they didn’t have time to call it by its full name.

Frankie stood in the back corner of the Quonset hut that housed the ER. After nine hours on duty, she was beyond exhausted and her feet burned with blisters, but it wasn’t the ache in her bones and muscles and feet that mattered. It was shame.

How on earth had she thought she belonged here? That she had something to offer men who were grievously wounded? She’d been as much help as a candy striper.

Tonight she’d held scissors in hands that never quite stopped shaking and cut off T-shirts and flak jackets and pants, revealing wounds that she couldn’t have imagined before today. She still heard patients’ screams inside her head, even though the ward had emptied a while ago.

Frankie couldn’t stop thinking about Mai, lying in a ditch, burned, still held in her dead mother’s arms. “Her village had been bombed.”

War was one thing; bombing villages of women and children was something else. God knew there were no stories about it in the Stars and Stripes. Why weren’t they reporting that truth?

A silence fell between them; in it lay the ugly truth that none of them wanted to face. The village was in South Vietnam.

And only the Americans had bombs.

But you know what I’m going to say. It’s ‘Nam.

You meet people, you form these bonds that tighten around you, and some of the people you love die. All of them go away, one way or another. You don’t carry them around with you over there, you can’t. There isn’t time, and the memories are too heavy. You’ll always have a piece of him that was yours and your time together.

The pills her mother had given her helped to take the edge off of her pain. She learned that two sleeping pills softened the nightmares and helped her fall asleep, but when she woke, she felt lethargic, unrested. One of the Mother’s Little Helpers perked her right up, maybe even gave her too much energy. Enough so that she needed the pills again to calm down enough to sleep. It became a cycle, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

She stopped visiting her parents, stopped answering the phone, stopped writing letters to her friends. She didn’t want to hear their pep talks, and no one wanted to listen to her despair.