When they returned to Saigon, Gary paced the office with a summons from ARVN headquarters demanding Linh’s immediate appearance. The identity papers he had submitted were all faked. “I knew it. I knew you were too good to be true. Who’s Tran Bau Linh? Huh? They think he’s a deserter from the SVA.”
“Hell if I know. Linh’s worked for me the last year.”
“How’s that since I introduced you a few weeks ago?”
“A year. I’ll go down and talk to ARVN. You know with a little grease, they won’t care.”
Linh followed Darrow outside.
“How we met…”
“We’ve worked together for a year.”
“You are sure?”
“Want to go soldiering again?”
“No.”
“A little flattery and some pictures of the boss go a long way. I noticed how late you stayed out so you wouldn’t run into my friend.” Darrow squinted in the sunlight, breaking into a grin. “We make a good team. No one is exactly begging to work with me.”
When Linh became Darrow’s assistant, the war was small and new. A bush war, a civil war in a backwater country. The American presence was the only thing that led Darrow there, a reluctant last stop before retiring from the war business.
They sat in the gloom of rubber trees in Cu Chi, the Iron Triangle region, after a firefight. Linh had stood up to get the picture, before Darrow knocked him down, and small bits of shrapnel had nicked him in the face and neck. Even the Leica he had been shooting with had been damaged. Darrow bent over the medic, making sure he cleaned out the half-moon-shaped nick on his cheek. “Now you have a beauty mark. Women love scars.”
“I can fix the camera,” Linh said.
Darrow took a long drag on his cigarette. “Don’t see how.”
Linh picked up spent shell casings and a metal fork. Darrow watched him, amused.
“Where’d you learn that? SVA doesn’t teach that kind of stuff.”
Linh shrugged.
“You’re the onion man. Peel back a layer and get another mystery.”
“No mystery.”
“I’ve read the NVA train photographers to work under any field conditions,” Darrow said.
“I’ve read that also.”
Darrow laughed. “They pose shots. Making heroes. Unlike us. We’re showing the truth.”
The rest of the company was out of earshot, but still Linh spoke softly.
“Make believe that a man’s father, a professor at the university in Hanoi, fought the French to free our country. And the French became the Americans. And the Nationalists became the Communists. And pretend the son learned to fix a camera with casings and a fork for the North, but that he found their promises to be lies. He escaped but was made to fight for the SVA. And pretend that after all this time fighting, all he wanted was to flee the war. If this was true, would you take this assistant?”
“Why doesn’t he run away?”
“He is tied to his country.” Linh rubbed his hand over his wrist.
Darrow took another drag on his cigarette, handed one to Linh. “This man has suffered enough. I’d be proud to work alongside him.”
Linh turned away. He could not help feeling he had lost face by telling so much, and yet he knew the Americans expected this, needed this abasement to feel comfortable.
“Question?” Darrow said. “This imaginary man who worked in the North, did he ever see Uncle?”
“I imagine… yes.” The more one told, the less real the story seemed.
“Where?”
“Outside Hanoi. Visiting a friend who served as a guard. A tiny village, just a few huts strung along a canal. A small vegetable garden, and he was bent over the rows for hours, weeding. All alone. He was only in his fifties but was sick with TB and looked ancient. Just a glimpse. He was just an old man weeding his garden. Hidden because he was in plain sight.”
They went out with an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) unit on patrol into a guerilla- dominated province. Darrow favored these small, specialized units who went native because they allowed him to understand the nature of the particular place better than the larger units that turned everyplace into an American base. Special Forces had agreed to let Darrow go along on the condition that there would be no mention of the mission, no pictures. He knew from past experience it was worth it simply to get the lay of the land even though it drove Gary crazy.
For days they walked in silence in the dim claustrophobia of jungle, not coming across another human being. Day melted into night that melted back into day. They lost track of time, staking out spidery trails, unable to move or talk-the only sound rain slapping against leaves.
Linh thought of the blank stone faces at Angkor staring out at nothing. Centuries passing without a single human voice intruding. Relieved by the sheer physical exertion, at night he sank down to the earth, asleep; in the morning he woke to find his hands clenched around his wrists, the skin bruised and chafed. The effect of the patrol on Darrow was unexpected. Maybe it was the time away at Angkor, sharpening his eye. After all the wars he had covered, this place spoke to him. The quality of the light on young American faces in this ancient land that was by turns beautiful and horrific. He had found his war.
The patrol spent the night in a small clearing, a village of six huts along a small tributary river. The people were kind, even killing a chicken in their honor, while the soldiers shared their rations. The chief brought out a bottle of moonshine to sip on. Leaving at dawn, they stopped by again five days later to get out of the rain and came upon only smoldering ruins. A dozen villagers dead, stinking in a thick sea of mud. Since there would be no acknowledgment that Americans were even in the off-limits province, no report of the violence. The enemy had been watching and had taken vengeance. An enemy that ruthless commanded a certain awe. Darrow realized that Vietnam was going to be a very different thing from other wars he had covered. The surface of things was just the beginning. The surface of things was nothing. Linh had it right: things hidden because they were in plain view.
Four of the soldiers disappeared down a path toward the west in hopes of finding the trail of the departing enemy. They would meet back in six hours. Darrow, Linh, and the remaining soldier retraced their steps to the original landing zone.
They waited another full day in the long elephant grass, unable to talk or play music or even start a fire to heat food. The sun beat down on their backs, the air heavy, a wet sheet, buzzing with insect energy. Linh, hidden in the tall grass, dreamed of running away. But where would he go? Finally, as protocol demanded, the soldier radioed for an extraction, although it would give away their presence and endanger the others.
And then like three lean and hungry wolves in the far distance, the missing soldiers appeared, carrying the fourth. They were struggling, exhausted, each stumbling with a leg or an arm of the fourth, now unconscious, soldier.
As naturally as Darrow had picked up the camera at the first sign of movement, he now put it down and ran through the field to help carry the wounded man. A decision without hesitation because it had been made and acted on a thousand times before.
As instinctively as Darrow going out across the field, Linh forgot his dream of running and followed him. The lines and dirt on the soldiers’ faces, the dry, unblinking stare of their eyes, showed the war had already started, the suffering begun.
No one had time to notice that Linh took a picture of Darrow helping to carry the wounded soldier. He was the only one in the shot without a weapon, the only one without helmet or flak jacket. For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be too brave.
Returning to Saigon, Darrow was gloomy. “Pictures would have shown what’s going on. Now nothing. If it’s not photographed, it didn’t happen.”
“Those villagers don’t care if they were photographed or not.”
