and placed his hand on her stomach.
“If you don’t leave when I count to three, I’ll scream. Wake them all up.”
He withdrew his hand. “Just remember this. I go to sleep every night dreaming about lying next to you in that foxhole. That’s as close to a woman as I’ve been in a while.”
“My heart breaks. Good night, Samuels,” she said loudly, and he was gone in another squeak of plastic. In the dark, she heard chuckles all around.
At dawn they broke camp and walked, single file, along a narrow dirt road; tree trunks and leaves and vines and bushes on each side so dense they formed a solid wall, curving overhead, forming a shadowed tunnel.
Samuels avoided her all morning, walking point, while Helen trudged behind Captain Horner. If possible, the captain’s face seemed even thinner and bonier than the day before. When he spoke to her, the sight of his Adam’s apple made him seem oddly vulnerable.
Now that she had exiled herself from Samuels and the other men, Horner seemed to have a change of heart and was anxious to include her on the mission, bring her to see his side of things. “This area is a major trade route for supplies from the north. We’re supposed to figure out where they are and then bring in airpower.”
“Sounds tough.” She wondered if he was too green to know that he was being sent out as bait to see what was in the area.
“I don’t get asked for my opinion on operations, you know?”
“Sorry.”
“My goal is to get all these guys back to base in five days.”
“Gotcha.”
His profile was to her, and she saw his Adam’s apple go up and down, twice, before he spoke. “I didn’t mean for those men to die.”
Helen looked up in surprise, but Horner’s small, stony eyes revealed nothing, and it seemed as if the words had not come from him. “Understood,” she said.
“But you don’t write. I mean, you’re only a photographer?”
Horner enforced strict discipline on the men. No talking, five feet between each man, fire only when fired upon. Despite herself, she was impressed. They walked for two days in deep backcountry, not encountering another human being. Later, Helen would remember the patrol with the haziness of hallucination, the silence so complete it made one’s ears ring. If one stood still, one could hear an undercurrent, a hum, to the forest, even the sound of water on leaves, trees dripping moisture as if they were perspiring.
Giant teak trunks blocked the sun, and the vegetation lay thick and snarled below; unseen animals crashed away through the brush while birds screamed overhead. A russet-colored dust floated in the air. The ground a springy compost that left behind perfect footprints; Helen thought of Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail. During the heat of the day, the air was so hot and thick it tasted green on the tongue, like swallowing a pond.
It was not Helen’s job to keep track of where she was, only to follow the man in front of her, and so the days became a series of rutted paths climbed, narrow grassy valleys traversed, rocky dry streambeds to be crossed. In the morning, they woke to a thick fog that reduced visibility to the end of one’s arm, muffling sound so that their voices seemed to have been snatched away. By noon, the sun burned away the fog. In a clearing, with blue sky overhead, the light emerged, harsh and chalky and forbidding.
Although their attention was strained, constantly on the lookout for an ambush or mines, the silence, as palpable as the sunlight, made them dreamy. Helen found long stretches of time when her mind was empty, her thoughts ceased; her present and immediate future and even her past, all receded. As free as she had ever felt in her life. The illusion grew within her that she had always been in this forest. At times it seemed as if they were the only human beings left on the earth, and it was simply a fantasy to think that cities like Saigon or, for that matter, Los Angeles existed.
Two nights after the incident with Samuels, Helen dropped off a pack of cigarettes on his bedroll. The next morning, she found a small pyramid of canned peaches on her pack. Samuels moved back in formation so that he walked in front of Helen again, taking back his role of big brother.
“You stay right behind me. I’m charmed. No mine is going to get me.”
On the fifth morning they reached their objective, a small plateau overlooking a valley with a village below. The relief on Horner’s face made Helen start to like the man. When they opened radio contact, they got orders to abandon their patrol and move as quickly as possible to the main road and head north. A convoy would pick them up en route and join them to two companies that had run into heavy NVA fire.
They fanned out and moved quickly down the gentle grass slope, their long, loose strides stirring up hundreds of greenish yellow grasshoppers that jumped waist-high in their path. Helen felt like the prow of a ship, grass brushing her thighs, flecks of green-gold insect life like the spray of water from a bow. The sun fell in heavy, flat planks, smothering sound, the great silence of the forest extending to the valley so that she felt they had been bewitched. Nature hushed and waiting for a misstep on their part to yawn awake.
They reached the rice paddies bordering the village. As far as they could see in any direction, no human being visible, their enchantment continued. The surface of the paddies feathered in the imperceptible breeze.
“Let’s have three men go through the paddies,” Horner said.
The men looked down or away. They weren’t returning to base but were heading to combat; no one wanted the extra danger of the paddy. The men had told Helen that Horner ordered the men who had died to scout a paddy after a villager confessed it was mined.
“Who wants to volunteer?” Horner again asked, and the men, again, remained silent.
Helen felt sick to her stomach, the calm of the last week gone. For the first time in the five days, she desperately needed Linh or Darrow.
Finally Samuels coughed. “Captain, we need to meet up with the convoy. Why don’t we skirt the paddy and village to reach the road quicker?”
“Negative. We will finish the original mission.”
Samuels took a deep breath, and Helen wanted to reach out a cautionary arm but didn’t.
“With all due respect, sir. An empty paddy in the middle of the day is a live one.”
Two of the men shook their heads and began to hand off extra equipment.
Horner nodded, satisfied. “We’ll need one more,” he said, staring down at his map.
“Oh, fuck it,” Samuels said, and threw off his equipment.
Helen crouched down and took a picture of the three men standing at the edge of the paddy. She got one picture of Samuels knee-deep in water, turning to give the other two a thumbs-up with his dragon- tattooed arm.
Ten minutes later she heard the shrill whistling of a mortar shell from the village. They all ducked, but Helen looked in time to see the explosion of water all around Samuels. The other two men in the paddy splashed through the water, reaching him as shells burst at their old positions. They all ran to the shelter of a paddy dike.
“Shit!” Horner yelled. He flattened on the ground, and when he saw Helen rise to take a shot, he screamed, “Down!” After a few minutes, the shelling stopped. The three men in the paddy scuttled back across the water and scrambled up the bank, collapsing next to Helen.
Samuels was panting. “Not a scratch.”
The men chuckled and spread out, gulped water from their canteens.
Figuring she had enough shots, Helen took off her lens and put the camera away, intending to have a smoke.
“That was close,” one of them said.
“Everyone’s okay,” Horner said.
“No thanks to you, stupid motherfucker,” Samuels said and glared up at Horner.
Horner scanned the village with his binoculars but said nothing. The other two soldiers remained silent. The air tense, Helen almost wished another mortar would fire just to distract them.
“Goddamn West Point asshole,” Samuels continued.
“Did you make it to the other side of the paddy?” Horner asked sadly.
