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After thirty-six hours in the OR, surrounded by the unholy roar of shelling outside, there was nothing Nurse Kealani Kellye wanted more than to close her eyes and return to her home. Hawaii was only half an ocean away, and on nights of loneliness and fear, Nurse Kellye would cross that half an ocean, in search of reassurance and warmth.
She would dream of her family and her childhood there, when everything had been so simple, until one day when all illusions were shattered, and it was to this day that she was terrified to find herself returning more and more often, and each time it was even more painful.
As the shelling continued, Kellye shivered and prayed that tonight would not be one of those nights. She had been covered in blood for a day and half and didn’t think she could take any more of it, but her prayers went unanswered as she lost consciousness.
She was a young girl again, a happy eighteen-year-old running along the ocean banks with her close friends of those days. They were all smiling on this beautiful Sunday morning, all enjoying the brilliant sunlight without a care in the world beyond their small world. Kellye laughed as her best friend Aliikai waved, beckoning her towards the water, offering to race her there. Gleefully she took up the challenge, which ended with both of them tripping over their feet and landing in the wet sand, giggling as they rolled around, clasping each other’s hands and grinning breathlessly at each other as the other girls pointed and good-naturedly shook their heads.
Contentedly they dived into the water, emerging with salt on their lips and their hair plastered to the sides of their heads. Before ducking under again, she grabbed Aliikai’s arm and pointed down the beach, where a handsome boy was standing alone, his perfectly toned body glistening in early morning glow. Her friend’s eyes sparkled as she turned to her and asked, “You like him, Kealani?”
Kellye blushed as she replied, “Well, everyone else does,” and Aliikai chuckled in acknowledgement that every girl on the island probably dreamed of that boy without so much as knowing his name, then dived under water again, pulling Kellye with her.
But instead of falling into the ocean and the sand, Kellye found herself passing through a maze of colours, and then she and Aliikai were walking along the streets. It was still Sunday morning, and very early. They were dressed in their Sunday best, talking animatedly on their way to church, when the sky overhead began to roar.
Distracted, they looked up. It had sounded like thunder, but it couldn’t be, because it was sunny out. Kellye stared at Aliikai, looking for affirmation and finding it: She had not imagined that noise, because her friend had heard it, too. And then it came again, a deafening roar, and the girls trembled, their eyes darting around, vaguely frightened and unsure of what to do. And then, suddenly, Kellye knew what had caused the noise.
“Look!” she shouted to Aliikai, pointing upwards. ‘Planes!’ As Aliikai followed her gaze, Kellye noticed the red symbol adorning the planes, the rising sun that she had been taught in school was the flag of Japan.
The roar in the sky grew intolerably louder as the Japanese planes circled overhead, sometimes out of sight but never too far away for Kellye to hear. And then another noise began, one that was far more terrible. Explosions sounded out of nowhere. Kellye couldn’t see the place being bombed, but she could hear the deadly sounds of the attack. She looked around in horror for Aliikai but found that she was alone, alone with the sound of the bombs raining through the sky, alone with the screams of the people that she shouldn’t have been able to hear but could, alone with the blood gathering on the landscape all around her.
Kellye screamed, whirling around with nowhere to run, and then soldiers were being wheeled towards her, and doctors in white coats were telling her to scrub and barking orders at her, demanding scalpels, forceps, suction. Kellye stood rooted to the spot, trying to tell them she was just a teenage girl and didn’t know what they were talking about, trying to run away as the doctors yelled that she could not turn her back on these people who had been injured in the Japanese attack, angrily asking what kind of American she was, to even think of not helping these people, shouting that she must be one of them, and that she should be sent off to a camp.
When Kellye managed to break free of the doctors, she began to run towards her home, sobbing freely as blood spattered over her, soiling her good clothes, and soon she found that she had run directly into the operating room of her M*A*S*H unit, that her Sunday dress had been exchanged for Army greens, and that she was not a little girl anymore, but a competent, trained Army nurse, adeptly handing Captains Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Hunnicutt the instruments they asked for as more bloodied men were wheeled into the room, more soldiers who all looked alike to her, all boys too young to be on her operating table, boys no older than she had been on the day that she first saw bombs, boys no older than she had been on the day that had spelled the end of her childhood, in whose blood her clothes were soaked.
Nurse Kellye shivered as her eyes opened. Rather than blood, her clothes were now soaked with sweat as she struggled to escape from the nightmare that had just recurred again, the only memory of home she never wanted to relive. As the shelling continued around the camp, she knew that she would soon be covered in blood again, and began to wonder when the line between dreams and reality had become so blurred, noting that the one thing she knew for sure was that the blur was of a blood red color, and sighing as she prepared to be covered in it again, waiting for an orderly to tell her she was needed right away in OR.