I first met Annie in a wooden building full of broken boys.

It was 1969, on a cold February night in a place half a world away -- Camp Drake, on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan. The small Army base dated back to the days of the Korean War, and served two functions: Far East headquarters of the 500th MI Group and the Army Security Agency; and as a hospital where the wounded from Vietnam were brought to either heal up and be shipped back to the war zone, or made stable enough to be transported to VA hospitals in the United States.

I was assigned to the MI outfit, barely two months fresh from Vietnam myself. I'd emerged unscathed from that place, with no external scars except a mild case of what I think was prickly heat that plagued me for months afterward. I wore civilian clothes in my new job, a coat and tie, a far cry from the sweaty fatigues I'd worn a short time before. I was very lucky.

On that particular night, however, I was faced with an unpleasant task. I'd recently received a message from my folks that the son of some Seattle friends of theirs had been wounded and was now in the Camp Drake hospital. They didn't know how badly he'd been shot up, and asked if I would look in on him and call his folks, collect, to let them know how he was. I didn't know him, and I forgot his name long ago, but I already knew how he was, and that was bad. I'd made a couple of calls right after I got the message and was told he was in a ward of the hospital that was for the most severely injured.

I'd been putting off looking in on him for a couple of days, but that night I stiffened myself with a couple of belts at the base club and trudged to the long wooden building that served as a hospital ward. It was quiet and the lights were down. Rows of beds were lined four abreast the building's length, each containing a silent and wounded soldier, covered and shrouded in bandages. At the far end, the nurses' station, a solitary figure sat at a desk making notes, her head bowed under a pool of lamplight, a wisp of dark hair trailing over her forehead.

She was startled to see me as I approached to ask which bed the man I was looking for was in. Healthy soldiers did not come into hospital wards very often, for very primal and superstitious reasons. She pointed back the way I'd come, and whispered that he was in the sixth bed down on the right. The overhead lamp cast shadows under her eyes and she appeared very tired and very stern.

I walked back to the bed he was in and looked down at him. His head was covered in bandages, leaving but one eye and part of his face uncovered. In the dim light I could see his eye was open, staring up at the ceiling.

"Hi, buddy. I'm Tim. Your folks asked me to look in on you to see how you're doing."

He continued to stare unblinking at the ceiling, and then I knew just how bad off he was. I didn't know what to say, so I mumbled something about him beating me home from the war and how he'd be up and rolling in no time, and other lies and inanities. I saw that his hand was outside of the covers, so I took it, patted it, and said, "Good luck, pal. Ill see you back in The World." Another lie.

As I left I turned to wave thanks at the dark-haired Army nurse and saw she'd been watching me. She smiled slightly, rather sardonically, and returned my wave in dismissing fashion, then I plodded out of the building with the weight of an impending phone call pressing down on my 20-year-old shoulders. How was I going to tell two loving parents that their son had half his head blown away and he'd never be the same again.

The next morning I stopped at the camp snack bar for a cup of coffee on my way to work. As I sat alone pondering the unpleasant task awaiting me that day, a tall, slim woman wearing captain's bars on her cap sat down across from me. It was the nurse. She gave me that tough, wry smile I remembered from the night before.

"I'm Annie," she said. "I just wanted you to know that your buddy is being transferred to Madigan in two days. He's in bad shape, massive head trauma, but he'll live. He's one of my special ones."

The weight was lifted from me. Madigan was a VA hospital in the Seattle area, and in two days the soldier would be home. I didn't have to make the call.

Annie and I became friends. She told me she was from upstate New York, of Italian lineage, and had been an Army nurse for five years in Vietnam and Japan. She'd only been home twice during that time. She was 27 years old and was a notch shy of being outright pretty, but had what used to be called a "handsome" face. Anjelica Huston comes to mind now.

It became our routine to meet at the snack bar in the mornings, me on my way to work and she just getting off her night shift. I called her Captain Annie and she referred to me as Wagontire, after the small Oregon desert town I'd made the mistake of telling her about.

I discovered that the cynical look Annie usually wore on her dark Mediterranean face belied a deep compassion for the injured young men she cared for. She took pride in tending the worst cases, and said the toughest part of her job was trying to be upbeat with the boys that were dying, especially the ones she considered special for one reason or another. She also told me it was hard for her to buck up the younger nurses under her tutelage and keep them smiling through the misery around them. During the occasional parties I was invited to in the nurses' quarters, shed invariably end up in a corner, her comforting arms around a weeping young nurse.

Sometimes when I got to the snack bar I'd see her sitting alone at a table, her face in her hands, and I knew she'd lost another "special one." They were the only times I'd see her cry, just a couple of wet patches on her cheeks, and she never talked about those boys. And I never asked.

When I left Japan in 1971 and got out of the service, Annie was still there and I'm sure she stayed until the war was over. When we met at the snack bar for the final time, and as I rose to go, she smiled that crooked smile and said, "Take care of yourself, Wagontire. You were a special one."

I knew it was Annie who was the special one. I hope with all my heart that she came home to have a happy life, that she is perhaps retired by now and is showered with attention by lots of sons and grandsons -- a loving family of unbroken boys.