The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  "Come up front for some real fun," he said.

  Helen nodded but felt relieved that if she tried, Olsen would pull her back.

  They started again down the wide dirt road.

  Helen had been briefed on the various kinds of mines and booby traps to be aware of, but now, thinking where to put each footstep while watching the terrain around them frayed her nerves. She should be doing five things at once; like learning to drive, it needed to all become automatic. Whatever Olsen said, she couldn't match her stride to the guy in front who was six feet tall. Constant guesswork whether a certain flat rock looked too inviting, if a patch of dirt seemed artificially mounded.

  At eight in the morning, the day was so hot that her fatigues were soaked. Sweat poured into her eyes, forcing her to tie a bandanna around her forehead to keep her vision clear. A soldier behind her, Private First Class Tossi, handed her a roll of salt tablets that she chewed one after another. One more supply she'd need to start carrying in her pack.

  "If you run out of salt tabs, suck on a pebble," he said.

  They approached a hamlet half an hour later, walking single file through a narrow break in the bamboo hedgerow that hid the village. The thatched dwellings were small, filthy, and sagging. The villagers looked at them with dead eyes and turned away, going about their business as if the troops were invisible. After they had passed, Helen saw a farmer turn an impassive face from the troops and slap his son so hard the child bawled.

  The Vietnamese in the countryside seemed more foreign than in the cities. Smaller and darker and more hostile, making the Americans moving through their village feel like awkward and hated giants.

  Tossi stood near Helen. "They give me the heebie-jeebies, the creepies, the way they are."

  After the hamlet was searched and secured, they sat in the shade of a grove of areca palms and pulled up pails of well water. Children peeked around the corners of huts and giggled as Helen took pictures of them. The men took off their helmets and poured whole buckets of water over themselves. Helen dipped her bandanna in the pail and wiped her face. Her vision swam. She opened a can of peaches, ate the whole thing in a few bites, and drank down the syrup. She bargained another can off Samuels in return for her ration of cigarettes.

  As they prepared to leave, a young Vietnamese woman walked up to Helen and handed her a woven palm conical hat. She had a narrow oval face, almond skin; the soldiers growled out a few wolf whistles as she knelt down. Helen bowed and gave her the two candy bars she was saving as a bargaining chip for more peaches.

  "Ohhh, baby, let me liberate you now!"

  "Shut up," Helen said. The men ignored Helen like a sister, but this woman was fair game. The hat, finely woven, had a pale flower painted along the brim. The girl bowed lower. "You're scaring her."

  The woman rose quickly and made off. Helen put the hat on and was amazed by how light and cool it felt.

  Nothing suspicious, they left the hamlet half an hour later, at ten o'clock, and continued on the dirt path that went along the river. The soldiers grumbled and finally Captain Olsen came up to her.

  "I can't order you, but the men want you to take that thing off."

  "It's just a hat."

  The way he looked at her left no doubt that it was a kindly worded order. With regret, she made a production in front of Olsen of laying it on the side of the road. When she looked back, the line of soldiers had detoured, each man taking his turn to step on it with clumsy, muddied boots. It was the first time she felt something pull back inside of her--a distrust of her own soldiers.

  Samuels offered her his bush hat. "Part of our pacification program. Don't get on the wrong side of our hearts and minds."

  She took the cap meekly. Later, she picked a yellow daisy at the side of the road and tucked it behind her ear. "Am I going to be accused of being a peacenik now?"

  Another hour, and they came to a small stream. The peasants crossed in narrow pole boats or walked across on monkey bridges made of single bamboo poles. The American soldiers were too big, loaded down too heavily, to try them. But Tossi, showing off, rushed halfway across one bridge before falling into waist-deep water. Everyone laughed and made catcalls. Even villagers stopped and hooted. The clowning was a relief, as if they were out on a nature hike.

  One of the privates shuffled down a bank into a solid clump of reeds to wade across the stream. Next thing, the concussion from an explosion knocked everyone flat: earth and shards of metal rained down. A pressure-detonated case mine sheared off his left leg and buttock; he lay screaming in the river, a sudden flush of red all around him as the water leaked his blood away.

  It was as unexpected and horrific as a traffic accident, and Helen sat frozen in place, stunned. But then, as a reflex, she lifted the camera and started shooting as two soldiers jumped in and dragged the private out of the water and onto dry ground. A Vietnamese man, close by the explosion, stood with an icicle-shaped piece of shrapnel coming out of his cheek.

  The medic shot the private up with morphine and tried to stanch the blood with a large compress. The wounded man moaned and cried out. When he saw Helen, he yelled to the medic, "I don't want a woman to see me this way." Stricken, she moved out of his sight, her courage failing her. Nothing left to do but wait for the medevac, the medic left to patch up the Vietnamese man.

  The private's screams spooked them all; they stole looks at him, praying for the dustoff to come faster. When the morphine took effect, Helen braced herself and went over. "I'll leave if you want me to." His hand reached out to her, and she held it.

  "Would you take my picture?" he said.

  "I did. The next one will be when I visit you in the hospital."

  "Now. Send this one to my mother."

  "You don't want your mother to see this."

  "Do it."

  Helen held her camera, wiping at her eyes so she could focus. He looked straight in the lens--cheeks and chest pitted with black shrapnel. One leg was straight out and ended in a boot, next to it there was a phantom space where the other leg should have been. A blanket was bundled around his groin.

  "Don't be so scared," he said. "You look so frightened you'd think it was your leg. You'll make it." He seemed satisfied and looked away. Ten minutes later he died.

  "I didn't find out his name."

  The medic looked impatient. "Scanlon. Private Scanlon."

  Helen nodded as if the name were an explanation.

  One soldier walked past. "Fucking Scanlon fucked up. And that's the whole fucking story."

  His body was zippered into rubber. And then he was as gone as if he had never existed, and they moved on.

  They crossed the stream in silence, for once walking in perfect formation, each alone with the new truth that if he died in the next moment, he would be as gone and as forgotten as Scanlon. The rage that filled her felt good, weighted her like a good meal or a strong drink, felt better than fear. The rage filled her so nothing else could get in.

  Besides stolen American antipersonnel weapons being used against them, as they had been on MacCrae, they had to watch out for the enemy's handmade traps that showed a peculiar genius. She had been told not to pick up any valuables such as books or hats or watches, to avoid lighters and canteens, to make a wide berth around unopened beer cans. Not to touch discarded enemy uniforms or helmets, and especially not VC flags because the enemy realized their souvenir value and booby-trapped them. Watch for obstructions such as large stones on a path or fallen logs or broken-down wheelbarrows. Keep an eye out for any unnatural appearance in fences, paint, vegetation, dust. Most of the men refused to use the outdoor latrines out of similar fears. After enough time, even the palm fronds waving in the wind came to look like razor-sharp knives.

  When the men stopped to rest, Scanlon's death unleashed their fears, and they passed around rumors they had heard: an officer sitting on a plush, mossy tree stump and blowing himself into a million pieces; a patrol coming upon an abandoned bunker and hearing the incessant crying of a b
aby, climbing down to investigate, and being incinerated. Endless war legends of booby-trapped hookers.

  "These people simply don't value life like we do."

  Helen heard that over and over. And, of course, after living through war for two generations, it seemed at some level to be true. Many of the Vietnamese seemed numb to the unrelenting death and destruction that was messing with these American boys' minds.

  It was hard to know what was true from what was false. Mostly, it depended on whose side you were on. Most of the time, the reality of a situation fell into a gray no-man's-land in between. The Americans called it "the Vietnam war," and the Vietnamese called it "the American war" to differentiate it from "the French war" that had come before it, although they referred to both wars as "the Wars of In dependence." Most Americans found it highly insulting to be mentioned in the same breath with the colonial French.

  At three o'clock they stopped to eat at the edge of the jungle that they would soon have to work their way through. The temperature more than a hundred and ten degrees, and the humidity almost as high. The men ate their rations in silence, and like a dealer Helen expertly traded her Lucky Strikes and C-rations of meatloaf for cans of peaches.

  After half an hour, they rose again, but two soldiers remained on the ground, sweat-glazed, their skin the color of unripe fruit, from heat exhaustion. Another dustoff, and Helen felt a flutter in her stomach as the planes lifted and flew off. After all, she had the burden of choice. The rest of the soldiers hefted their packs and started into the jungle.

  Helen could have left--this patrol wasn't promising to yield any worthwhile pictures--but they had allowed her to come, had accepted her among them, and to her it was a point of honor to remain till the end.

  Out in the open, the main danger came from the ground, but in the jungle danger existed at every height. Thick vines, accidentally touched, might swing back with a grenade at the end. Thin green bamboo, if tripped, was capable of whipping back with barb-point arrows.

  She could see only a few feet in any direction, and claustrophobia made her long for the open paddies and roads they had just so gratefully left behind.

  Under their feet the ground liquefied into a mud of vegetation that gave off a sour, green smell, like a thick, algae-filled pond. Behind her, Captain Olsen reached a hand out against a large green trunk and triggered a tiger trap from overhead. The board came crashing down with its rusted long spikes, but the new plant growth impeded it, and he just had time to roll off the path--only the edge of the board grazed his right forearm. They all squatted in place on alert as the medic bandaged him. He examined the rotting, rusting board and determined it had been there for years, if not decades.

  "Probably had a Frenchman's name on it," Olsen said, laughing.

  At six o'clock they broke through the jungle and found themselves on dry ground again. They had not encountered a single enemy soldier, yet it seemed the land itself, inhospitable and somber, was their enemy, bristled at their trespass, wore down their spirits.

  They walked a quarter of a mile and stopped in a field at the side of the road, under an old French watchtower. The soldiers pulled out entrenching tools and dug in for the approaching night. Helen sat down, body aching, muscles quivering. Only the first day of a three-day patrol completed. She sat smoking a cigarette, a new habit, and watched the last golden light over the jungle. The air like velvet, filled with folds of pollen and insects. Once in a while, far away, she heard the sharp caw of a wild bird or the eerie wail of a monkey. The soldiers joked that you could throw a pit of fruit on the ground and come back a week later to find a tree, a week later and find it full of fruit, a week after that and find an orchard.

  As the light faded to a deep purple, they watched a group of peasant women make their way home. The women talked animatedly until they saw the soldiers in the dark field, and then they grew silent.

  "Well, boys, looks like we're on the map now," Olsen said. If the enemy didn't yet know their location, they soon would.

  "Don't they know we're here to save their asses?" Tossi complained. "Whoever heard of being afraid of the people you're saving?"

  "Maybe somebody forgot to translate that into Vietnamese," Samuels said.

  Olsen, Samuels, Tossi, and Helen huddled in the shallow foxhole to smoke and sleep while a perimeter guard kept watch in shifts. At first Helen tried to stay awake but kept nodding off; she gave up and slept even after the rain started, merely pulling the plastic poncho over herself. The bottom of the foxhole filled with water, but she guarded her camera equipment in an airtight plastic bag set on her stomach. The guys had great fun with the fact that she stored her film in condoms.

  At dawn, stiff and wet, they drank lukewarm coffee and ate canned ham and eggs before breaking camp and moving out.

  "You okay?" Tossi asked.

  "I'm fine," she said. "Just cold. And wet. And muddy."

  Tossi handed her a flask and some pills.

  "What?"

  "The pharmacy is open."

  She nodded and swallowed them daintily, an obedient child.

  By eight o'clock it was again more than ninety degrees. The sun stiffened their wet uniforms. They arrived at their rendezvous point and waited for two Chinooks to bring in the company of South Vietnamese paratroopers to form a joint sweep of a ville consisting of nothing more than two dozen grass huts. The Vietnamese troopers jumped briskly out of the helicopters. They appeared small and clean and rested compared to the American soldiers. Their uniforms were freshly pressed.

  "Do you ever get the idea," Tossi whispered, "that we're on the wrong side?"

  "Hey, they know it's too dangerous out here at night. We're the only ones stupid enough to get our asses blown off," Samuels said.

  The Vietnamese trotted along the dikes in textbook perfect formation. The Americans had to lumber along with their packs to keep up, like overly protective parents.

  "Sorry, Adams, looks like no pics for you today," Captain Olsen said. "If they're eager that practically guarantees the area has been cleared of VC. No action today."

  The Vietnamese troopers stormed the empty ville, M16s sweeping back and forth erratically. They stopped and struck heroic poses against empty buildings as if they were rehearsing a movie. Helen didn't take a single picture. Excited and trigger-happy, a few of the SVA soldiers shot at a pig, the squeals unnerving Helen. They missed the lucky animal, who escaped. The Americans hung back, not wanting to get caught in the line of fire. As predicted, the place was empty, save for stray dogs and chickens. The sun beat a harsh white off the dirt, the only shade provided by a few old fruit trees, the ground underneath them littered with rotting mangos and papayas that perfumed the air. A few old women, tending children, stood warily in doorways.

  The SVA troopers abruptly dropped their guns and declared lunchtime. A dozen chickens were procured, butchered, and cooked over open fires. The Americans stood in a knot, watching, weapons at the ready, until Captain Olsen shrugged and told everyone to take lunch. Then the Americans dropped their packs and opened up cans. A few Vietnamese soldiers came over to bum cigarettes and practice their English, but for the most part the two groups stayed separate. Captain Olsen communicated with his Vietnamese counterpart through hand signals. Captain Tong was small, trim, and finicky, with a wisp of mustache and two gold incisors that flashed in the sun when he smiled.

  The Vietnamese troopers took a siesta after lunch that lasted two hours, and as the American soldiers had nothing else to do, they also gratefully stretched out in the shade and went to sleep. The heat was unbearable and made everyone lethargic. Captain Olsen stayed awake with the radioman, communicating with headquarters and asking how to proceed. Orders were to accommodate Captain Tong at all costs.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Helen watched an old man in peasant pajamas sidle up from the back of the ville. The guards searched him but found nothing. Had he come from the fields or had he been hiding in one of the huts the whole time? He walked to the main communal sq
uare, stared balefully at the pile of feathers and discarded chicken parts, and moved off. A few minutes later, he came back. The guards searched him again, found him clean, and again let him through. Now he seemed agitated, and he talked to himself as he approached the Vietnamese troopers.

  Helen turned away until she heard shouting between one of the Vietnamese soldiers and the old man. She asked Captain Olsen what was going on.

  "I don't know what they're saying, but my guess is that the old guy is unhappy about his 'donation' to the war effort. We've complained to headquarters about it. We're under orders not to take anything that isn't offered. But not to interfere with what the Vietnamese soldiers do. Let them work it out between themselves."

  Helen held up her camera and framed shots as the soldier turned his back on the old man. Insistent, the old man grabbed his shoulder as another soldier approached him. Now the old man talked louder to the second soldier, frenzied, his hands flailing, pointing at the chicken remains when the first soldier spun around and kicked him hard in the leg. The old man was on the ground when Captain Tong strode over and barked some commands. The old man dramatically shook his head.

  Unnoticed, Helen moved closer as Tong pulled out a .45 revolver.

  The old man struggled to his knees, tears in his eyes, not frightened but agitated, and kept talking and pointing to the chicken remains.

  Helen's heart knocked so hard in her chest that her breath came out shallow and rasping. No way is this happening, she thought. She crept forward, kneeling, as Tong's soldiers moved away from him, sensing his rage; she got closer to frame the shot when Tong, standing stiff, stuck his right arm straight out, the revolver against the old man's head. She kept shooting. Surely, she thought, it's only a threat, surely--until the deafening explosion, the gun fired at close range. She kept shooting--the old man's head shattered like the carnage of ripe papayas under the trees, body spread-eagled on the ground, thrown by the power of the blast, blood hosed up and down the front of Tong's pants.