by Tatjana Soli
Helen glared. Without a word, she turned and stalked away toward the communications bunker. The rest of the morning she took pictures at the field hospital. Her nerves were badly jangled by the tension of the camp, the sight of the wounded, the thought of what she had avoided. Although they worked side by side, she didn't speak to Linh once. Her intuition told her she had missed something important, and far from helping her, he had talked her out of it. She planned on ending the arrangement when they returned to Saigon.
But the outgoing flights were loaded with wounded, and they would be forced to spend the night. At sundown, as she was lounging in the communications bunker reading a magazine, the radioman waved Sergeant Medlock in.
"The lead jeep set off a mine. Everyone inside got it."
Medlock shook his head, his long face even longer, and punched his fist on the table.
The radioman listened again. "Sounds like the rest of the convoy is blocked and ambushed. They want to know how to proceed."
"Damn it," the sergeant said. "Give me the phone." He looked around the bunker at the grim faces, then spotted Helen. "This is classified, sweets."
Helen left. An hour passed and the sergeant wheeled out from the bunker, short of breath. She approached him.
"The rest of the men caught it. We've got two left, hiding in the jungle."
She said nothing, tried not to think of the faces of the men she had joked with that morning. By nightfall, the radioman had lost contact, and it was concluded the two had not survived. Linh didn't stay with the Americans but went to sleep with the Vietnamese soldiers.
In the damp, stale air of the bunker, only flashlights were used for light. Sergeant Medlock sat on a crate next to Helen, hesitated, then passed her a flask; she took a deep drink. He asked why she had changed her mind about the convoy.
"I didn't. My assistant refused to go."
"Little coward saved your life. Bullheaded orders from headquarters. I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle; worked the stockyards. Let me tell you, no difference. Waste of lives. I don't want to be giving the orders for it."
The night stretched long and bitter, her thoughts chasing from fear to self-pity to animal joy at being safe. Around midnight she left the bunker for fresh air and a smoke. She nodded to the perimeter guards and offered them a cigarette. When they hissed to her that it would attract sniper fire, the risk wasn't enough to keep her from squatting down against the sandbag wall and cupping her hand over the tip until she sucked it down to a stub.
Damp and still. Fog curled in the far-off rubber trees, overhead stars poked through the clouds, spiked and fierce.
She hated the night, the stopping of activity. Sleep out of the question, stomach churning, bowels watery. Looking around, she wondered how she had gotten there, why she needed this. Such a cliche to expose the war, or even wanting to test oneself against it. Whatever else, the place was a magnet for evil, or had they, Americans, brought it with them, like the European colonists brought pox in their blankets to the New World? Nothing she would do, including photographs, could have any effect on it. Such a nunnish urge to find purpose or clarity or even to bring ease. Since she had arrived, she had merely been running from illusion to illusion--by turns obsessed, deluded, needy, full of herself, thinking she had achieved some small understanding. MacCrae stoking her vanity, but now she was simply lonely and tired and confused.
Chilled, she returned to the bunker and lay down fully clothed on the dirty cot, boots on, cameras an arm's length away; her mind unable to stay on any one thing for long, a revving engine. At three in the morning, she heard machine-gun fire, then incoming artillery. Their own mortars began, the empty whoosh of the shell out of the tube, and for the next hour there was the regular pounding of guns, slamming of ground. No one spoke inside the bunker, vulnerable flesh wombed in earth. In the dark, Helen pressed herself on her cot, longing for the relative luxury of her hotel room in Saigon, of having a good meal and an iced drink. Creature comforts taking an importance all out of proportion to what they offered. Again, she made herself small bargains--buying a silk scarf she'd had her eye on--if she made it out.
At four thirty in the morning, she dozed off and was awake again at five. Mortally weary. She rose, stiff, and washed her face with a napkin and water from the canteen. The sergeant handed her a cup of tepid coffee. The thought of food nauseating, but she traded out rations for fruit cocktail, ate two cans, then drank the juice.
At dawn a third convoy was ordered to get ready to collect the bodies of the first two failed missions. Linh sat at a small fire with the Vietnamese soldiers, boiling tea and rice for breakfast. She hesitated, not sure about approaching him. But when he caught sight of her, he rose at once. He walked her over to a low wall of sandbags and indicated she should sit.
"I want to apologize--" she began.
"I got a message through the radio--Darrow's helicopter was shot down in the Ca Mau area. Darrow is fine."
She felt the ground swaying underneath her at the possibility of something happening to him. "He's okay?"
Linh turned away, the expression on her face too painful. He had seen that expression in Mai's face and taken it for granted. "He said only scratches."
When the trucks began to load, he stood, hefted the pack of equipment onto his back, and walked over to her. They boarded without another word to each other. Now she couldn't remember why she had placed such importance on the mission; she resented the time it would take to complete. If only they would call it off, she could take the next flight out. She had badly lost face with Linh and didn't know how to make it up.
The trucks grinded through their gears as they climbed into the mountains along muddy, hairpin-turn roads. The wall of trees and plants on each side provided a thick screen that could have shielded any number of snipers. Sometimes a hole in the foliage allowed a sight line twenty or thirty feet into the jungle, sunlight filtering through the dense overhead canopy, turning individual shafts of light the color of honey.
Linh reached out to touch small white flowers clinging to the trunks of trees as they passed. The trucks climbed sullenly up the red dirt road, engines drowning out every sound, the only movement the bouncing, swaying bodies of the soldiers. Some of them turned outward and squinted into the jungle, fingering the clips of their machine guns, the rings of their hand grenades. Others simply stared at the floor of the truck bed or closed their eyes or prayed, resigned and unconcerned, weapons splayed under their feet. Plenty of time for fear when the trucks stopped. But Helen was hardly aware of her surroundings, barely noticed the jungle or the soldiers, wondering if it was true that Darrow was unhurt. What if she got hurt now, before she saw him?
They reached a straight part of the road that leveled out, a slight depression muddied with the remaining trickle of a steam struggling across it. The abandoned trucks, noses buried in jungle, impeded their way.
Engines were cut and clips slammed home; the new silence rang in Helen's ears. She ducked at the shriek of a bird, and the soldiers in the truck snickered. Odds were good that the enemy had long since departed, but still they moved forward with slow, deliberate steps.
The first thing was the vinegary sweet meatlike stench. An elemental imprint on the brain one recognized without knowing why. The instinct was to run, but instead the soldiers crawled forward, and Helen reluctantly followed. Clouds of birds and insects flew up as they neared. The ground littered with the detritus of battle--ammunition casings, a destroyed radio, hastily moved sandbags, bloodied bandages; weapons stolen.
A swarm of translucent orange-winged insects rose up, a kind of locust, and underneath Helen saw a flash of strawberry blond that she at first mistook for a clump of flowers. Two thick, loglike shapes covered with leaves, and going closer, she saw they were the bloated legs of a body. And then a few feet farther the lucky bush hat. Two soldiers rolled the remains into a rubber poncho, but the body did not move away in one piece. She turned away and vomited.
"That's what you get, bringin
g women out here."
She rinsed her mouth with water from her canteen and let the tears dry on her face as she pulled the lens cap off the camera. Most of the scenes too horrific to be used, but she took the pictures anyway because she had to keep her hands and her mind occupied. The promises of leaving replayed themselves in her mind. In this place filled with death, it was impossible to believe that Darrow remained unhurt. She wanted to go to Linh and be reassured all over again, but she couldn't get him away from the other soldiers.
So she turned to the work. During their days wandering Saigon, Helen hadn't known more than loading the camera and shooting, centering the images so they could be cropped, but Linh taught her how to extract the meaning out of a shot. It seemed impossible to concentrate on light, shutter speed, and aperture in the middle of combat or even in its aftermath, but those were the peculiar requirements of the job. Now the distance of technique saved her.
He had told her to picture the image being formed; the idea of light going through the lens, striking the translucent emulsion, staining it dark. The more light, the longer the length of time, the darker the stain. Those areas most saturated by light--by intensity and duration--called latent images. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. All the grays had to be sorted out, lights and darks contrasted, even if it meant making them up. She saw that even pictures that purported the truth involved a great deal of discretion and taste and choice, that subject matter and angle and intent were as involved in image-making as they were in the military briefings.
After the area had been searched, Linh stood apart looking down a gully along the side of the road. Helen went to stand near him, hoping he would say something more about Darrow, but when he remained silent she squinted into the gully. "What is it?"
"Look at those white flowers. Everywhere on this hill. I noticed them while we were in the trucks."
Not understanding such callousness, she stared hard at his profile for a minute. "How did you know the rescue convoy would be attacked?"
"You mean do I have 'spy' knowledge? Do I have a secret phone to Viet Cong headquarters? Medlock knew it was a death mission. He had no choice. When the NVA leave a few alive, it is to lure more in. Guerilla tactics. I was a soldier once."
The Vietnamese troopers complained about having to load the bodies onto the truck. Sergeant Medlock and another officer argued with them. Voices grew pitched and strident. Finally the Americans, even though there were fewer of them, loaded alone, and then the Vietnamese grudgingly helped. By the time all the bodies were on the truck, tension was high.
Helen took a shot of the back of the loaded truck with its inert human cargo like a sculpture from a circle of the Inferno. She knelt and framed the truck like a mountain, the focus sharp on the tread of the tires, the matching tread of the boots of the dead. The darkness of the surrounding jungle and the light on the road made it seem the most forlorn spot in the world.
"Man, let's blow this place," one of the soldiers said.
The trucks rumbled back to life. Helen rode in a jeep with Medlock while Linh rode with the Vietnamese soldiers in the trucks.
When they arrived back at base camp, the Americans went into the mess tent to eat while the bodies were loaded into helicopters for transport back to Saigon. Helen didn't know what else to do, so she followed the officers and stood in line for hamburgers and more fruit cocktail. She sat at table and spooned peaches into her mouth although they tasted obscene to her.
"Did you see the price of the new radios they're selling down at the PX?"
"It's easier to buy radios and trade them for cigarettes. Sell them on the black market and make a fortune."
"I'll start my retirement fund right in Saigon," Medlock joked from down the table.
"Next time I'm in town, I'm going to load up on chocolate."
A pause, a moment of panic because Helen did not hear half their words, so lost was she in the memory of the strawberry-haired soldier's chocolate, but then Medlock asked if anyone had caught the football scores from the paper. The world went on.
When Linh came inside, Helen was drinking coffee. "Can I talk with you?"
She felt exhausted and not up to dealing with him. Their relationship was wearing on both of them. She sighed but didn't want to make matters worse. "Can it wait?"
"I told Darrow we're going back to Saigon now. He wants for you to fly down to Mekong Delta today."
"He's really okay?" Helen hesitated. "About yesterday..." She was mortified by what now seemed like a temper tantrum on her part.
"I check when we're okay for flying out." He walked away, brusque, but he didn't want to be tampered with any longer. Easier to keep a distance. With Darrow, that had been acceptable. She wanted more, wanted too much, pushed him past his limits. What she wanted, finally, more than he was willing to give.
EIGHT
Xa
Village
Helen and Linh flew low over the southern Mekong area to An Giang province, controlled by the Hoa Hao sect that opposed the Viet Cong. One of the few safe areas in the country, it was where Darrow had decided to stay and recuperate.
The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange--fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun. The soil so rich from the emptying of the Mekong that crops grew year-round, and the local food supply remained ample even during war time, allowing villages and hamlets to unspool loosely along the canals and rivers instead of circling tightly in privation behind bamboo hedgerows as in the north.
As they made a first pass over the dirt airstrip, Helen could see Darrow standing by a jeep with two other civilians. He stood straight, slightly too formal in this loose, watery world. A white short-sleeved shirt, his right arm supported by a cotton sling, he looked thinner, his brown hair shorter, eyes invisible behind the glare of his glasses.
She ducked under the wash of the rotors and ran, embracing him so that he winced as she pressed his shoulder. Linh followed, forgotten.
The reality of Darrow's injury struck her with new force, frightened her all over again. "Are you okay?"
"Except from your manhandling," He smiled and held her off. "Meet some friends. They've offered to put us up while my shoulder heals."
Both of the men worked for USAID, handling rice production and irrigation in the area. The younger one, Jerry Nichols, had a sunburned face and blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, giving him an albino look. He pumped Helen's hand and smiled, his mouth crowded with large teeth. The other man, Ted Sanders, was portly, with buzz-cut hair, also retired military, polite and formal in front of her.
"How long are you here for?" Helen asked. Darrow's attitude irritated her, the presumption she had nothing better to do.
"An eternity. Four weeks. But I haven't had a vacation in five years, so I'm overdue."
His hesitation went unnoticed except by Linh. Only he would understand how Darrow must have bargained as the plane went down--how many times could one escape unharmed? The fear that the crash had paralyzed him again like in Angkor.
Linh came up, and Darrow moved to embrace him. Seeing the easy friendship between the two men, Helen thought how stupidly she had handled things.
"You took good care of her."
"But you have got sloppy without me, it seems." He would have given anything for it to be only him and Darrow in the village, the way it had been in Angkor. A woman changed everything.
"These damned helicopters can't seem to stay in the air."
They got into the jeep, Helen sliding across the hot and dusty canvas, stepping over the semiautomatics lying on the floor. Nichols drove them a short way along the washboard dirt road to the hamlet of thatched buildings straddling a wide bend in the Hau River. The jeep stopped in front of a small
hut in a shaded grove of coconut palms and mango trees.
"Home, sweet home," Darrow said.
"Are you sure this shack's okay?" Ted asked.
"She's a girl with simple tastes."
"We don't all go native like Darrow," Nichols said. "If you get tired of it, we can offer steaks and hot showers."
"Go away, guys. If she changes her mind, we'll show up for dinner."
The two men ignored Linh; he had hardly gotten out of the jeep with his bag before it raced off, covering him in dust.
The front of the hut was a narrow veranda of dirt floor and thatched overhang supported by thick poles of bamboo. Large clay cisterns filled with rainwater formed the boundary with the outside. The framework was bamboo, walls and ceiling interlaced palm fronds with a layer of rice straw on top that smelled thickly of grass in the heat of the day, reminding Helen of sleeping in a barn loft as a child.
Inside was a single room with a dirt floor, a low wood table used for eating, sitting, and sleeping. Around the sides of the room were additional clay pots filled with rice. In the corner was a stack of woven mats.
A young woman in dark blue pajamas, Ngan, carried in a tray with small ceramic cups of mango juice. An older Vietnamese man entered, and she bowed low. He was the village chief, Ho Tung, an elegant man with flowing silver hair and features softened by time like soapstone. After he welcomed them, he stalled long enough to share a cup of juice before leaving.
"We are very cosmopolitan in An Giang, used to Westerners," he said. "After all, my granddaughter lives in St. Louis."
"Really?" Darrow said.
"We have not heard from her in two years, but her last letter said that in St. Louis it snows. That things move very quickly."
"I'm sure that is true."
"That is how I've learned most excellent English."
Helen pictured the granddaughter living alone in the great foreign city, working long hours in some invisible job, yet back in her village she was a celebrity. After Ho Tung left, Ngan carried in their bags.
