Samuels blew air out through his lips in a slow hiss, the fight knocked out of him.
“No, I don’t think you did.” Horner looked tired but kindly, like a father urging his son to finish a necessary task. “Go back across.”
The other men shifted, but Horner held up his hand. “Just Samuels.”
No movement except for the scanning of Horner’s binoculars over the paddy.
“No,” Samuels said.
Horner sighed and put down the glasses. He brushed a dried weed off his shirt. “That’s an order.”
In a burst of energy, Samuels was on his feet, his revolver unholstered. “You go.”
Horner’s skin went red; he seemed more offended than frightened. “You’re looking at a court- martial, mister, unless you put that thing down,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. When Samuels didn’t move, he leaned forward. “Now, I said.”
“It’s not even loaded, you stupid fuck.” Before Horner could get close, Samuels turned the gun at his own head, grimaced, and fired. Everyone crouched for a minute, unable to comprehend what had happened.
As they laid him out, Horner got on the radio, ordering an immediate medevac. Helen knelt down next to the corpsman.
Samuels’s helmet was still on, and as the medic pulled off the compress wrapped under his nose to his neck, a wave of black passed over Helen’s eyes. The forehead, the eyes, the nose, all of it was the old Samuels, but the lower jaw was missing. Blood poured in luxuriant gushes down his chest. The entire crescent of his upper teeth was laid bare; she quickly turned away. The corpsman grabbed a large body compress and pressed it up into the hole beneath the nose.
“Hold this down tight, okay?”
Helen nodded and held, breath gone, pressure behind her eyes as if she were going to pass out.
“Don’t press on the neck,” the corpsman yelled as he punctured the skin, creating a trache hole. “You’ll block his breathing passage.”
Helen followed orders instinctually. She looked into Samuels’s eyes, and his look said he couldn’t believe in the reality of what had happened, either. She leaned down to his ear. “Don’t you give up on me.”
A few minutes later his body went into convulsions, the torso bouncing as if an electric current pulsed through him, legs stretched out and trembling, arms reaching, throwing Helen and the corpsman off.
“I need help to hold him down!”
One of the solders came, knelt on the other side of Samuels, and pinned his arms. The medic couldn’t give morphine because it was a head wound. After a minute, Samuels’s body relaxed, the tension loosened. His eyes, which had been wild and fierce with pain, now flattened out. When she looked into his eyes, his gaze was cool and impersonal, a great distance and solitude in them.
The medic wrapped an elastic bandage around the compress and over the helmet. “No need taking it off and having things spill out.”
Helen moved off, hands covered in blood. She didn’t want to dig out her bandanna from her camera bag, smearing blood on her equipment. Too afraid of snipers to get water from the paddy, she settled for wiping her hands on her pants. Horner sat on a rock alone, face crumpled and worn, years of training all unraveled in minutes.
When she returned to Samuels, she concentrated on his tanned arms, still perfect, the dragon tattoo still wrapped around the muscled left forearm. She took his hand and held it to her.
When they placed him in the helicopter, Helen got on also. “I don’t want him to be alone.”
The corpsman squeezed her shoulder. “He’s not going to make it, okay? Nothing you can do either way to change that.”
At the field hospital, stretcher bearers ran Samuels into the tent. An hour passed. The noise of the planes and jeeps, the rushing of the medical staff, unreal after the silence of the forest.
Finally a nurse came out to have a cigarette and offered one to her. “Honey, you need to clean up.”
Helen wiped her hands against her pants and felt the dry crustiness of them.
“Over there,” the nurse said. “The supply building. Hot water and soap, a cot to lie down in. You need it.”
“Samuels?” Helen said, barely able to mumble the words, her mouth dry, tongue thick.
“Oh, sorry, honey. Didn’t make it to the operating table. Somebody should have told you.”
Helen nodded her head. Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.
“Come on,” the woman said. “Let’s get you cleaned up and fed.”
After the nurse went back on duty, Helen returned to the supply building. Inside, it was hot, close, and dim, the only light from a row of exposed lightbulbs at the front of the building and the cracks of light through the rough, uneven seams of the metal walls. Racks of metal shelving stood eight feet tall, piled with supplies as tight as the stacks in a library. The air smelled of cardboard and plastic. As promised, a small cot was made up in one of the rows.
Helen put her equipment underneath the cot, then stretched out. She rolled onto her side, dragging her muddy boots across the blanket, too tired to take them off. Her arms and legs and chest trembled so that she had to clench her teeth as if against cold, and yet her skin was bathed in sweat. Beyond tears. She longed for something, anything, even physical pain, to provide a diversion.
“ Adams.”
She did not know how much time had passed, but she woke to the sound of a helicopter coming in. The flights had been constant, the radioed battle that Horner’s unit was joining, the wounded piling in. She prayed that Horner had delayed the unit but knew he wouldn’t. Just as he wouldn’t take blame for breaking Samuels. Although now he would die in shame, Samuels had simply chosen the method of his suicide. Horner’s way would have earned him a metal for bravery. It sickened her. She heard a soldier calling her name again. This was her ride to rejoin the company.
She rolled off the cot and crawled on her hands and knees farther into the rows till she reached the farthest, darkest corner. She sat on the floor balled up, with her back against a box, her knees drawn into her chest, her forehead resting on them.
“ Adams! Where the hell is she?”
The door opened, and her name echoed against the thin metallic walls. Helen breathed in, held her breath until she could feel her pulse throbbing. The door slammed shut.
“Where did the girl photographer go?”
Helen rolled down on her side, the ground cool and smelling of moisture like a damp basement. She tucked her fist under her chin. When she closed her eyes, she saw Samuels as he had been next to her under the plastic partition, and then she fell asleep.
Hours later, she left the supply building and searched out the air controller.
“We couldn’t find you for the supply run.”
“I’ve got enough film, and I need to send it out. When’s the next flight to Danang?” She held her breath, the lie so obvious.
He looked at his clipboard, bored. “Cargo flight at sunset.”
“I’ll be in the mess tent.”
She sat on a bench and stared at the table. She stood at the LZ half an hour before the plane was ready to take off. She had already boarded when a soldier ran up with her camera bags that she had left behind, forgotten, in the supply building.
When Helen returned to Saigon, she was relieved to find Darrow and Linh on an assignment in Cam Ranh Bay. In the apartment, she continued her hiding, camped under the mint green bedspread, trying to forget what had happened, including her own humiliating part in it. A pain throbbed behind her eyes-she could not
