Then he left his friend there and ran up the steps of the watchtower to check on the other women. Hien found three women lying on the floor of the watchtower. They were writhing, crying and laughing at the same time, pulling their hair and tearing at their clothes. A woman who was younger than the others ran toward him, holding her head. She didn’t have the laughing disorder, Hien could tell, but he knew she would soon suffer from it. Hien began to tremble as he stood in front of the naked, writhing women. He had witnessed plenty of death in his life as a soldier, but this scene overwhelmed him. He felt a part of him that had been dormant for a long time suddenly awaken and begin kicking around violently. He had the urge to disappear and forget everything.
But eventually he regained his composure. He thought he might know how to cure this laughing disorder that the women were suffering from. He vaguely remembered hearing about a particular treatment for it when he was a kid. He activated the safety on his gun, just to be sure to avoid any accidents, then brought the gun up to his shoulder and pointed it directly at the women.
“All right, you Viet Cong women, listen up!” he shouted. “Where are the supplies? Tell me now or I’ll blow your brains out!”
It was like magic—all of a sudden the women became sober and silent. They looked around for a moment, slightly bewildered. Then, realizing what was happening, they grabbed their own guns and aimed them at Hien, ready to pull the trigger. But fortunately Hien’s friend was watching from below.
“Don’t shoot!” the other soldier cried out. “He’s one of us.”
The women noticed the star on Hien’s hat and uniform and slowly lowered their guns. They looked at each other and seemed suddenly embarrassed to realize that they were naked in front of three male strangers. Terrified, they ran off into the forest, wrapping their bodies around trees and quietly sobbing. Even Thao—the only one not suffering from the laughing disorder—ran off into the woods. She really loved her comrade sisters and pitied the fact that they had never been in love. It wasn’t until dark that the five of them returned to the depot and climbed up the watchtower.
The three male soldiers had already left. They’d scribbled a note on a page torn from a small pocket notebook: “Hello, comrades! We’ll get our supplies from a different depot and send you a doctor. You must remember, our dear comrades, that this is war. Please forgive us. Farewell!”
A few days later, a nurse came to the depot and gave the women some white pills. But it seemed unnecessary; the laughing disorder had already passed. Now the women seemed calmer, though they looked as if they’d suddenly aged by twenty years.
After that people started referring to this forest as the Laughing Woods. Instead of using the approved secret code for the depot, people would say, “Today I’ll go to the Laughing Woods depot to get my supplies.”
A few months later the Laughing Woods depot was ordered to move to another location, closer to the battlefield. One day an enemy company attacked the depot. At the time, Thao was suffering from malaria fever and was unconscious. The other four women hid her under a secluded tree deep in the forest and returned to the watchtower to fight off the enemy. But this was no combat fairy tale. The women knew they couldn’t win, so they used their last bullets to take their own lives.
Once the fever passed, Thao regained consciousness. The enemy had already withdrawn. All alone now, she buried the women painstakingly with her own hands, which were still weak from the fever. These women were heroines. Their names should have been printed on the front page of newspapers. Instead, this seemed like business as usual.
The night before the attack had been hot and suffocating. As they sat around chatting, one of the women had asked Thao to tell them again about her boyfriend. As usual Thao blurred fact and fiction in the stories about her loyal prince, and the women were captivated. But as they prepared for bed and Thao stepped into her mosquito net, Tham, the leader of the group, caressed Thao’s face and said, “Do you think you devote too much love to him? I don’t know why, exactly, but I’m worried about you. You’re the only one among us who has ever really known happiness. When the war is over, you’ll return to the city. Make sure you don’t let men just love you out of pity.”
Thinking back, Thao remembered that she had been upset with Tham for saying this. But now Tham and her other three comrades were dead. A bayonet had pierced Tham’s chest. Before, when they’d bathed together in the creek near the depot, Thao had secretly stared at Tham’s breasts and thought, Venus’s breasts cannot be more beautiful than hers. She had wished that she had similar breasts.
Now Thao gently pushed the bodies of her comrades into the graves, covered them with a thick layer of leaves, then filled the graves with soil. She planted four pink crepe myrtle trees over the graves and watered them with what was left in her canteen. The arid soil sizzled as the water touched it. Steam hovered around Thao’s legs.
Eventually Thao was taken to a military hospital to recover. While she was there, she learned that Hien, the soldier who had saved them from the laughing disorder, had been killed in combat. The rumor was that Hien’s supervisor had commended his heroic sacrifice; the supervisor was on the verge of submitting the paperwork to Hanoi requesting that Hien be given the official honorary title of Hero when the political instructor came across the following lines from
