Susan Jennings didn’t know what to do when she regained her senses. She was now, she assumed, a prisoner of war. She was in a POW camp, but she didn’t see any of her medical detail there with her. Sue had no idea how long she had been there. The last thing she remembered was an explosion in the OR the hospital’s Operating Room and then everything collapsed around her head. She wandered around the compound inside the barbed wire trying to get oriented. Other women seemed to be bartering their clothing, but she couldn’t figure out what they were getting in return.
It was terribly hot. On the other hand it was always hot in Vietnam. Eavesdropping on a transaction she found that the girl was bartering for food. Susan had never paid a great deal of attention to the very occasional lectures on prisoners’ rights and obligations. After all, as a nurse she was a noncombatant. Of what earthly good could such information possibly do her? Now she was finding out.
Feeling a little dizzy, she touched her scalp and discovered why. There was a lot of dried blood and what felt like a nasty laceration on the back of her scalp. The girl she had been watching completed her transaction and Susan asked her about it. The girl had taken off her bra, then put her shirt back on. She explained that there was only a tiny amount of rice given to the prisoners each day. Since she had been imprisoned for nearly three months, her bra was hanging on her now-flattened chest so it didn’t make any difference to her anyway. And it more or less guaranteed a full rice ration for the next thirty days.
Then Susan asked about later after the thirty days. The girl pointed to a couple of girls on the other side of the compound. One was naked to the waist retaining only her skirt. Others were completely naked.
What do they do? Susan asked. The ones with no clothes, I mean.
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