“From my parents.”
“Miss home? I do.”
“I hear you loud and clear,” Kirby said, his face relaxed now as he settled back, resting his head in the crook of his arm, relieved at the shared acknowledgment of fear. “I dream of that plane ride home. Girls waiting to jump the war hero. People so grateful, they give me a parade. Life like one of those stupid commercials.”
“It’ll happen,” Helen said, stirring at her dinner that now seemed more, not less, revolting. “You’re one of the lucky ones.”
He looked at her and crinkled his nose. “You’re putting me on.”
“No. Trust me.” She did not want this new role, giving encouragement where it wasn’t particularly warranted. She did not like knowing in advance the poor odds for a scared boy with no heart for danger.
“I can’t exactly collect if you’re wrong,” he said.
She handed him her dinner. “You’ll be on that plane.”
Kirby studied her face for a moment and moved closer to her, and Helen smelled the strong odor of the nuoc mam mixed with something sweet like candy. He spoke in a low whisper.
“Can I tell you something personal?”
“Sure.”
His face tightened. “That dream before was just a wet dream. I know it’s not going to be like that. I worry…” He stopped talking for a moment and swallowed hard. “What if everything’s changed? What if my parents are ashamed? What if I lose an arm or leg and my girlfriend goes off with one of those guys who thinks the war is a crock?”
Now she was the one scared. “You’ll be lucky, lucky, lucky.”
The next morning a fresh gallon of nuoc mam was opened with orders to swab down once more. They reached a supply road that showed signs of recent travel and set up an ambush. The renewed strength of the fish smell made her queasy; she couldn’t get down her breakfast. She sought out Linh and together they curled behind a berm to wait. The lack of fear was a new experience, but she’d reached the point of being almost bored. After half an hour she decided to tie a handkerchief over her nose; she began to root around in her bag when a loud explosion went off to her left.
Her eyelids closed and behind them a bright flash exposed a pink-veined starfish shape. The vision had a floating calmness to it so that she did not want to immediately open her eyes.
The platoon around her rose to crouching positions, firing round after round into the surrounding jungle until the air was thick with the smell of fired weapons. The captain signaled for end fire, but it took another minute before the order was passed along, and another after that before the firing actually stopped. In the middle of the path they saw the body of a lone Viet Cong who had come up to the ambush and lobbed a single grenade.
“Put a hose in his mouth, he’d be one heck of a sprinkler, man,” Kirby said.
Their cover blown, the captain radioed for an extraction. Helen, her ears still ringing, moved to get up when she felt a dull pain. She pushed up onto her knees and her head swayed hard to the left; a gush of warm liquid wet her lap. She reached down and gingerly touched her abdomen as the medic looked over.
“Oh,” she said absentmindedly, as if she had misplaced something.
Compresses and bandages applied, she lay back in the dirt, aware of how quiet all the men were around her. She had felt so sure of her invincibility that day that it seemed a poor joke that she got injured. All the warnings she had heard over and over came into her head-the sight of a wounded woman demoralizing the men.
“I’m okay,” she said to the medic. “Just a scratch. Cocktail time.”
The morphine made its way through her limbs, cushioning and cottoning sensation. It frightened her to be so lucid about her surroundings and yet unable to care about the outcome. Her first time in- country she had been obsessed with getting hurt, but this time the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. In her grief she had felt immune. The hard jarring of the stretcher into the helicopter registered as pain, but too far away to have anything to do with her. The last thing she saw as they lifted off was Kirby’s betrayed face. What kind of prophet couldn’t predict her own demise?
Linh squeezed her hand, spooled back her attention like a kite that kept straining away. “You okay?”
“Bad luck,” she said. “First time out.”
“Just a scratch, I think,” he said hopefully, but they both feared otherwise.
The initial surgery in the field hospital was a success, but that night she developed a fever, and by the next morning she was bleeding internally and was rushed back to surgery again, passing in and out of consciousness. All she remembered was waking up groggy in post-op, and the nurse shaking her head, saying it didn’t need to happen like that, the surgeons were butchers who weren’t used to operating on women. Later still, when she was more awake, the doctor came in and held her hand and said the hysterectomy had stopped the bleeding and saved her life; he wiped his face and said it had been a long night and then he left, and she was alone, listening to the clatter of incoming helicopters, the slow, labored breathing of the wounded in the beds around her.
When Linh came in, he bowed his head. “I’m sorry…” All the awkwardness between them since her return vanished.
“I survived.” She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.
“It should have been me.”
“Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it.”
When she was strong enough to be moved, she transferred to the abdominal ward on the USS Sanctuary off the coast. The recovery took more than a month, the wound slow to heal. The doctors on the boat blamed the field hospital doctor, who cut too many muscles; the field doctor blamed the medic for not cleaning out the debris sooner. Linh visited every day. The smell of rotting flesh so pervasive in the ward that he took lemons aboard with him and cut them in half, holding them to his nose and squeezing juice on his hands before and after going in.
As soon as she was strong enough to leave, Gary and he took her home to the apartment in Cholon. It would have been easier to stay at the Continental, but she insisted on the quiet of those rooms.
“What you see in this dive, I don’t know,” Gary complained. “I’ll have to have meals sent from the hotel.”
Linh and Helen looked at each other and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Everyone knows this is the center of the universe.”
Linh had a single shelf of books given to him by Darrow. In her confinement, Helen pulled down a volume, the cover splayed, the pages swollen and wavy with humidity. She read at random, her concentration shaky, following Darrow’s scribbling in the margins and his underlined passages. In Tacitus she found:
Fear and terror there certainly are, feeble bonds of attachment; remove them, and those who have ceased to fear will begin to hate. All the incentives to victory are on our side. The Romans have no wives to kindle their courage; no parents to taunt them with flight; many have either no country or one far away. Few in number, dismayed by their ignorance, looking around upon a sky, a sea, and forests which are all unfamiliar to them; hemmed in, as it were, and enmeshed, the Gods have delivered them into our hands… In the very ranks of the enemy we shall find our own forces.
She closed the book quickly. This was the way she dealt with books now, plunging in and out of passages as if they were glacial rivers too cold to be endured long. She could not imagine reading a book from cover
