Edward looked at his chart. “Seven minutes.”

“I’m going to get you that hot lunch.” Robert was nursing the plane along with all the skill at his command, using the throttle and rudder to try to keep it on a straight course. The altitude was still dropping alarmingly. Finally, ahead of him, Robert saw the sparkling blue waters of the Tonkin Gulf.

“We’re home free, buddy,” Robert said. “Just a few more miles.”

“Terrific. I never doubted …”

And out of nowhere, two MiGs descended on the plane with a thunderous roar. Bullets began thudding against the fuselage.

“Eddie! Bail out!” He turned to look. Edward was slumped against his seat belt, his right side torn open, blood spattering the cockpit.

“No!” It was a scream.

A second later, Robert felt a sudden, agonizing blow to his chest. His flight suit was instantly soaked in blood. The plane started to spiral downward. He felt himself losing consciousness. With his last ounce of strength, he unfastened his seat belt. He turned to take a final look at Edward. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He blacked out and later had no recollection of how he ejected out of the plane and parachuted into the water below. A May Day call had been sent out, and a Sikorsky SH-3A Sea King helicopter from the USS Yorktown was circling, waiting to pick him up. In the distance, the crew could see Chinese junks rapidly closing in for the kill, but they were too late.

When they loaded Robert into the helicopter, a medical corpsman took one look at his torn body and said, “Jesus Christ, he’ll never even make it to the hospital.”

They gave Robert a shot of morphine, wrapped pressure bandages tightly around his chest, and flew him to the 12th Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi Base.

The “12th Evac” that served Cu Chi, Tay Ninh, and Dau Tieng bases had four hundred beds in a dozen wards, housed in Quonset huts arranged around a U-shaped compound connected by covered walkways. The hospital had two intensive care units, one for surgery cases, the other for burns, and each unit was seriously overcrowded. When Robert was brought in, he left a bright red trail of blood across the hospital floor.

A harried surgeon cut the bandages from Robert’s chest, took one look and said wearily, “He’s not going to make it. Take him in back to cold storage.”

And the doctor moved on.

Robert, fading in and out of consciousness, heard the doctor’s voice from a far distance. So, this is it, he thought. What a lousy way to die.

“You don’t want to die, do you, sailor? Open your eyes. Come on.”

He opened his eyes and saw a blurred image of a white uniform and a woman’s face. She was saying something more, but he could not make out the words. The ward was too noisy, filled with a cacophony of screams and moans of patients, and doctors yelling out orders, and nurses frantically running around ministering to the savaged bodies that lay there.

Robert’s memory of the next forty-eight hours was a haze of pain and delirium. It was only later that he learned that the nurse, Susan Ward, had persuaded a doctor to operate on him and had donated her own blood for a transfusion. They had put three IVs into Robert’s ravaged body, and pumped blood through them simultaneously, fighting to keep him alive.

When the operation was over, the surgeon in charge sighed. “We’ve wasted our time. He’s got no more than a ten per cent chance of pulling through.”

But the doctor did not know Robert Bellamy. And he did not know Susan Ward. It seemed to Robert that whenever he opened his eyes, Susan was there, holding his hand, stroking his forehead, ministering to him, willing him to live. He was delirious most of the time. Susan sat quietly next to him in the dark ward in the middle of the lonely nights, and listened to his ravings.

“… the DOD is wrong, you can’t head in perpendicular to the target or you’ll hit the river … tell them to angle the dives a few degrees off target-heading … tell them …” he mumbled.

Susan said soothingly, “I will.”

Robert’s body was soaked in perspiration. She sponged him off. “… you have to remove all five of the safety pins or the seat won’t eject. Check them …”

“All right. Go back to sleep now.”

“… the shackles on the multiple ejector racks malfunctioned. God only knows where the bombs landed …”

Half the time Susan could not understand what her patient was talking about.

Susan Ward was the head emergency operating-room nurse and the best. She had come from a small town in Idaho, and had grown up with the boy next door, Frank Frescott, the son of the Mayor. Everyone in town assumed they would be married one day.

Susan had a younger brother, Michael, whom she adored. On his eighteenth birthday he was sent to Vietnam, and Susan wrote to him every day. Three months after he had enlisted, Susan’s family received a telegram, and she knew what it contained before they opened it.

When Frank Prescott heard the news, he rushed over. “I’m really sorry, Susan. I liked Michael a lot.” And then he made the mistake of saying, “Let’s get married right away.”

And Susan had looked at him and made a decision. “No. I have to do something important with my life.”

“For God’s sake! What’s more important than marrying me?”

The answer was Vietnam.

Susan Ward went to nursing school.

She had been in Vietnam for eleven months, working tirelessly, when Commander Robert Bellamy was wheeled in and sentenced to die. Triage was a common practice in emergency evacuation hospitals. The doctors would examine two or three patients and make summary judgements as to which one they would try to save. For reasons which were never truly clear to her, Susan had taken one look at the torn body of Robert Bellamy and had known that she could not let him die. Was it her brother she was trying to save? Or was it something else? She was exhausted and overworked, but instead of taking her time off, she spent every spare moment tending to him.

Susan had looked up her patient’s record. An ace Navy pilot and instructor, he had earned the Naval Cross. His birthplace was Harvey, Illinois, a small industrial city south of Chicago. He had enlisted in the Navy from college, and had trained at Pensacola. He was unmarried.

Each day, as Robert Bellamy was recuperating, walking the thin line between death and life, Susan whispered to him, “Come on, sailor. I’m waiting for you.”

One night, six days after he had been brought into the hospital, Robert was rambling on in his delirium, when suddenly he sat straight up in bed, looked at Susan, and said clearly, “It’s not a dream. You’re real.”

Susan felt her heart give a little jump. “Yes,” she said softly, “I’m real.”

“I thought I was dreaming. I thought I had gone to heaven and God assigned you to me.”

She looked into Robert’s eyes and said seriously, “I would have killed you if you had died.”

His eyes swept the crowded ward. “Where … where am I?”

“The 12th Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Six days.”

“Eddie … he …”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have to tell the Admiral.”

She took Robert’s hand and said, gently, “He knows. He’s been here to visit you.”

Robert’s eyes filled with tears. “I hate this goddamn war. I can’t tell you how much I hate it.”

From that moment on, Robert’s progress astonished the doctors. All his vital signs stabilized.

“We’ll be shipping him out of here soon,” they told Susan. And she felt a sharp pang.

Robert was not sure exactly when he fell in love with Susan Ward. Perhaps it was the moment when she was dressing his wounds, and nearby they heard the sounds of bombs dropping and she murmured, “They’re playing our song.”

Or perhaps it was when they told Robert he was well enough to be transferred to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to finish his convalescence, and Susan said, “Do you think I’m going to stay here and let some other nurse have that great body? Oh, no. I’m going to pull every string I can to go with you.”