seduction. He stroked her arm. But later, when she was naked and lying spread out on the bedding, when he felt his hardness begin, it felt like a desecration of Mai’s memory. What type of a weak man was he? He pulled away from her, head hidden in hands in confusion and disgust. Thao got up, slammed a cup in the sink, went to check on the baby.
Weeks passed, and the agreed-upon time to leave drew further and further away as they approached it. Darrow, swept into the pull of the war, gave terse answers when Helen questioned him.
In desperation she accepted an assignment to go with him and Linh into the field. Four other reporters were joining them to Quang Ngai province. Darrow almost always chose to work alone, hated the “junkets,” but he accepted this situation. To Helen, it proved Robert right in guessing Darrow’s desire to cover anything, indiscriminately.
It wasn’t until they had already boarded the cargo plane for the first leg up to Danang that they realized one of the four was Tanner. As soon as he noticed Darrow, he came over, cracking a tight smile over his small, yellowish teeth. He held out his large hand. “Let’s forget that other day.”
Darrow paused, then clasped the man’s hand. “What other day?”
Tanner nodded his long, narrow head. “That’s it, man. The war’s bad enough, we don’t need to fight each other.”
The journalists divided up between two companies. Helen was irritated to see that Tanner had joined theirs; his presence would only grate at Darrow. Bad luck. The companies had orders to sweep three hamlets and meet back at base camp if they didn’t encounter resistance.
When they met the commanding officer, Captain Molina, a slight, dark-complexioned, humorless man, he told them his company had been ambushed the day before, although it had sustained no casualties. The coolness of his report belied the tension visible in the troops. Helen saw spooked faces; the eyes of the soldiers hard and distrustful. Jumpy. Hot and without sleep, walking around with fingers tight on the triggers of their weapons. Linh’s presence created a stirring, soldiers growling low to each other, casting long, stony looks. Molina went to talk with his NCO and returned.
“He can’t come along,” he said, pointing his thumb at Linh.
Darrow stretched his arms overhead, then bent to retie his bootlaces. “Do you have any moleskin you can spare? I think I’ve got the beginning of a blister.”
Molina took off his helmet and wiped his face. “Sure.”
Darrow untied the laces and began to pull off the boot. “He’s accredited, and he’s been my assistant for the last four years. I can’t do my job without him.”
Molina moved closer. “The men are a little wired after yesterday. Thing is, I can’t guarantee his safety.”
“Can I quote you? Their commanding officer?” Darrow pulled off his boot and his sock. “Besides, who speaks enough Vietnamese to question these villagers?”
Tanner had come up and stood listening. “Listen, Molina, these guys are okay,” he said. “They’ll make your little company look like heroes.” The captain went back to talk with his men.
They waited in the shade of a large granite boulder, drinking warm sodas someone had scrounged up. Darrow nodded at Tanner. Linh stood to the side. “Too much, huh?” Darrow said, rolling his eyes. “Too much. What kind of captain admits he can’t control his men?” Fifteen minutes later, Molina came back saying they reluctantly agreed.
“Linh’s the best scout you could hope to find.”
Molina grimaced. “He gets it first if he leads us into an ambush.”
After he walked away, Helen tugged on Darrow’s arm. “This feels bad. We should get out of here.”
“You’re skittish.”
The soldiers moved out single file along the narrow trail of crushed shell that wound through the high sand dunes. Tanner walked point singing, “ ‘Hi, ho. Hi, ho. It’s off to work we go,’ ” making the soldiers around him snicker. Midmorning, the temperature climbed over a hundred, the sky a low, gloomy, saline white. The soldiers wore flak jackets open over bare chests. Under their helmets, they wore bandannas to keep sweat out of their eyes.
The first hamlet contained fifty adults. The huts clustered at the base of a chiseled limestone cliff next to the ocean. The villagers seemed friendly enough; they smiled and went through the charade of carrying on as if the soldiers were not there. A thorough search yielded nothing, and the soldiers got ready to move out again.
Linh and Helen entered a hut at the urging of an old woman who waved them in. The room was small and dark, filled from floor to ceiling with paper flowers. Rows of reds and yellows and white lined up. Linh hesitated, wiping his face. “She makes these,” he said, “for celebrations, for altars.”
The old woman spoke in a low mumble to Linh.
“What is she saying?” Helen asked.
“She’s afraid the soldiers will burn the village. She has a year of work inside. All on its way to be sold in Danang.”
“Tell her we’re on our way out.”
As they gathered on the edge of the hamlet, bunched up in a group, sipping from their canteens in the smoldering heat, lighting cigarettes, a mortar whistled down between the palms. Everyone dove, but when they rose, four men on the left side of the tree were dead, while two others crawled along the ground.
When they heard the strike, Helen and Linh pitched themselves against a sand dune next to the old woman’s house. All the fear that Helen thought she had recovered from came back tenfold. Her legs useless, acid in her throat. Darrow ran over, cameras hitting against his chest in his hurry. He put his hand on the back of her head. “You okay?”
She nodded.
“Linh, take care of her.”
Darrow was gone back through the smoke.
Captain Molina ordered the casualties pulled down the road, and called in air power. Helen watched as he held the radio receiver, his face wet and tight. She saw the tremor in his hand as he handed the receiver down to the radio operator.
The helicopters would come in from the west, forcing the fleeing VC toward the ocean, where the other companies would block their escape north and south. A young boy, Costello, had frag wounds to both legs, his skin peppered with black holes. Darrow and Tanner together pulled him along with the other wounded to the road. As the shock wore off, the kid trembled but made no sound.
Helen felt nauseous from the heat and the blood and the noise, but she picked up her camera and focused through the viewfinder. Molina stood over the boy, his face a mottled red, his lips tight and pulled back from his teeth. In the viewfinder, framed, he had a terrible kind of power. Helen framed a shot of him on the radio handset while the operator crouched next to him, fingers stuffed in his ears at the sound of another mortar, face clenched, reluctantly attached by the umbilical of the cord. Molina waved his arm and brought it down hard on his thigh as if he could will the helicopter’s appearance, oblivious to the flames snaking their way up a thatched roof behind him, oblivious to the comatose boy at his feet. If he had taken any more notice of Costello, he might have shot him.
Helen put down the camera, puzzled, when she saw blackened, fluttering shapes in the air like dark butterflies. The sight of his injured legs mesmerized Costello; Helen grabbed a plastic field poncho and draped it over his lower body.
“Let me see them,” Costello said.
“You’re not hurt that bad,” the medic said.
But Costello was past hearing.
“You’ll be okay,” Helen said. She said the words by rote, as if comforting a child, but she felt angry at his squeamishness when there were dead bodies yards away. There was a sense of release in the coldness she felt, her lack of concern for the man. She didn’t want his name and rank, or his picture. She wanted to forget him the moment he was on that helicopter.
