Darkroom (32 page)

Finally, Colson approached me in confidence. “Carrick, I’m going to have to send you to meet Delta Company tomorrow without us. If I don’t get some kind of resolution for my men … It’s safer if you go.”

“All right,” I said, having grown weary of sitting around taking pictures of soldiers giving me the finger and villagers carrying about their business. Frankly, I wanted to go home.

Later that afternoon, Colson walked me out to the woods. His eyes darted around as he spoke cautiously. “I have good reason to believe that this area is about to heat up. VCs from the north will be here soon, and unless Delta Company gets here first, we’re sitting ducks.”

Frightening, but this was just the kind of event I came here to photograph. “I can take cover somewhere until it’s safe.”

“You should get closer to the rendezvous point. On the other hand—” Gunshots and the sound of women screaming interrupted.

With my camera ready, I turned and started for the village.

“No!” The CO gripped my arm so hard I gasped, had to bite my lip not to cry out like a child. “Whatever you do, stay out. You hear? Wait for my signal that it’s safe.”

I nodded, and he ran back into the village. He turned and pointed over me into the woods. “Take cover!”

78

Of course, no self-respecting photojournalist would allow personal peril to deter him. With my Graflex strapped and prepped, I waited until the CO entered the village. Then I followed.

I stood behind a thicket of tall grass and peered into the village through the viewfinder. What I saw went beyond horrifying, but what I heard was worse.

Pop
after
pop
, men young and old fell to the ground, their heads ruptured, their brains splattered red and gray against the wooden plank walls and on the ground. The soldiers of Echo Company were lining them up and executing them.

Some of the soldiers even held crying children’s faces and forced them to watch their parents meet their bloody demise. One little toddler screamed as the blood of his father splashed over his face.

I wanted to shout, “Stop it!” but I froze, trembling with outrage and, I’m ashamed to admit, fear. Then they lined the children up and gunned them down.

These were my fellow Americans! Once men of honor fighting for a cause, now soulless barbarians bent on vengeance. I snapped off as many pictures as my shaky hands could manage, though I thought I’d never want to look at them again.

But I hadn’t yet seen the worst. I heard women and girls
screaming, some behind the doors of the wooden huts, some of them out in the open. They were begging, pleading.

“Please!” one said, “take me, she’s only ten!”

How could this be happening? It was Mai Lai all over again. Where was Colson? What was he doing about this? Surely he’d stop these cowards who dared to wear the uniform of the United States Marines. I wanted to call out for him but knew I’d be shot on the spot if one of them found me.

Then I saw him.

Lieutenant Colonel Colson, Echo Company’s commanding officer, stood in the middle of the village, his hands on his hips, gun in his hand. Instantly, hope rose. Surely he’d put an end to this madness.

But when he removed his sunglasses and looked at one of the soldiers who dragged a young girl, kicking, screaming, with blood streaming down her bare thigh, I saw for that fateful instant something in Colson I could never have imagined: approval.

The soldier flipped off a smug salute and dragged the girl into a hut.

A scream. Then muffled.

The screaming stopped.

Disconcerting silence.

Then a gunshot.

Colson stood there, surveying the havoc wreaked by the soldiers under his command. Another one stopped by, removed his shirt, and flung it into a pile of blood-stained uniform shirts. Barely looking through the corner of his eye, Colson nodded, and the soldier ran off whooping like a banshee, ready to shoot or rape his next victim.

If ever hell had spilled over onto the earth, it was now. I stood there unable to do anything about it. Sinking to the ground, I covered my face and wept bitterly.

I nearly jumped when a young black man, Corporal Wilkins, barely out of high school by the looks of him, collapsed next to
me, clutching his rifle to his chest. “Oh, dear Jesus!” He grabbed my arm and shook it desperately. “Tell me!”

“What?”

“Just tell me!”

“Tell you what, soldier?”

“Tell me I’m dreaming, man. Please, tell me this is just a nightmare!”

I couldn’t. If only it were.

Eventually, after an hour or so, all the screaming and crying and shooting stopped. Amidst the morbid quiet, bird songs returned, the sun shone warmly on my shoulders. I lifted my eyes to the hills, where palm fronds stretched out like a mother’s soft fingers touching clear skies.

Echo Company vacated the village, though only momentarily, as I would soon discover. That’s when I started taking the pictures of the bodies. Discreetly, while no living soul was around. Horrible as it was, this must not be forgotten.

The pictures I took of that massacre refused to leave my memory. The images of the children’s broken and violated bodies, the gaunt, white-haired elders on the ground, their dead eyes wide in disbelief, they have haunted me every night since this happened.

I finished the film roll and switched it out for a new one. Who would have thought that roll of film in my vest would alter my life forever?

“I thought I told you to keep out!” Colson’s thundering voice startled me out of my stupor. I turned and found him standing, his face haggard, but tall and dignified. His entire demeanor exuded absolute justification and self-righteousness.

“You just stood by.”

“There was no stopping them, Carrick.”

“You stopped Lieutenant Marks. For simply walking away.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

He put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I don’t expect you to understand the intricacies, the psychology of war. But I’ll tell you
this, these men are on the brink. If they fall apart before Delta Company arrives, we’ll all die out here when the VCs attack.”

“You can’t possibly believe—”

“This goes beyond personal beliefs and comfort. You see what those pinko dogs did to Ross? There’s not enough of him left to send back to his family for a funeral.”

“But still …”

“Want to tell a story? Take some pictures of his remains! Show the world what those animals did to him!” He sniffed and wiped his brow. “These boys are tighter than family. They need closure.”

It seemed Colson spoke from his true convictions. I felt nauseous. “Killing innocent women and children, old men and women, raping ten-year-old girls, you call that closure?”

“It’s barbaric, I know. And for the record, I never touched one of them.” He paused and squinted as he stared out at the blood-covered ground. Then in a calm voice: “It was for the greater good, don’t you get it?”

I didn’t. But he spoke with such sincerity, I actually started to wonder if my objections were naive. After all, I was a recent college graduate who’d barely experienced life as a civilian. What did I know of war and human nature?

He put his arm around my shoulders and led me away from the center of the village. As we continued, the soldiers of Echo Company began piling the bodies in a trench at the edge of the community.

“It’s tragic what’s happened here, Carrick. It truly is. But this is war. Soldiers get a little lost when they can’t see their enemy. When a good man, a brave soldier, is caught off guard because these damned Commies dress like rice farmers and shred his body into minced meat—it’s enough to make the toughest marine crack!

“If I don’t allow them to release some of that stress, we risk losing ground. And if that happens, everything we’ve fought for, all the lives of brave men like Private Ross, will have been lost in vain. I’m sure you can understand that.”

Disputing his argument would have made me feel stupid. “I don’t know.”

“You’re an American, dammit, think like one! We don’t claim to be perfect, we’re only human, all of us. But one thing we do—we put our country and her interests first. And you’re going to do the same.”

“What do you mean?”

He nodded toward my camera. “Take the film out.”

“What?”

“You heard me. No one must ever know about this. Give me the film.”

I couldn’t even think of a reply. It was like asking a priest to destroy a sacred scroll. This was the physical manifestation of my entire purpose as a photojournalist: to bring the truth in pictures to the world in a way that words alone could never do.

I knew where this was going, though, and feigned compliance. With the film full of photos of the mass grave actually resting in my pocket, I removed the unexposed roll from the Graflex.

He snatched it out of my hands. “I’m sorry to do this, but it’s our duty to protect the honor of our nation.” With that, he tossed it into a wood-burning stove.

At the edge of the filling trench, one particularly enraged soldier howled and tossed the body of a small boy into the pile. I swear, if my camera were a bayonet, I would have given that soldier the business end of it.

Colson cleared his throat, stared down at the dirt. “I know what you’re thinking. But understand this. This was one of those tough choices someone in my position must make. I pray you never have to find yourself—”

“Condoning rape and murder? Destroying the evidence?” As far as he knew, anyway. “The choice isn’t that difficult.”

“From your perspective, no. But you’re only responsible for your own life and well-being. When you’ve got the interests of your entire nation in your hands, everything changes.”

“The important things don’t.”

“I get it, son. You’re young, idealistic. But if this war can teach
you anything it’s this: it’s time for you to grow up. America can’t have another Mai Lai dangling from her neck, you hear? When news of it broke out, the Ruskies equated us to the stinking Nazis. Can you imagine what it would do to our credibility in the global community if
this
came out?”

“God help us all.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “God will judge each of us accordingly. But I don’t serve God; I serve my country. And if He damns me to hell for protecting the honor of my nation, then so be it.” He stood tall now, his chest high and his voice deepening. “Now, can I count on you never to so much as whisper a word of this to anyone?”

“You’re insane.”

“Not for me, Carrick. For your country.”

I didn’t feel it in my heart, but on many levels, he made sense. I felt a part of me gravitating toward his rationalizations. Perhaps that part felt complicit and sought any form of absolution. It troubled me that I actually felt the pull. But in truth, I was a man sentenced to death by having his limbs tied to two horses, poised to run off in opposite directions.

79

XANDRA CARRICK

I’m trembling, holding back tears. “Daddy, how could you?”

“You don’t understand. This whole time—”

“You participated in the cover-up. All those people in Bình Sơn, Mom’s brother. That’s what you’ve been hiding from us all these years!”

“Don’t you see? Her brother was that third Vietcong! I didn’t know at the time, but right after I saved your mother, she asked me to go back and find him. She’d just come back from Saigon and didn’t know what had happened in her village. But I knew. Nobody survived.

“I went back to look for the gold cross he was wearing, just before Echo Company incinerated all the bodies. There was a tattoo on his arm identical to those of the other two VCs they caught. He was the reason the Vietcong set up shop in your mother’s village. I couldn’t tell her that.”

Kyle quietly remarks, “The official report stated that the entire village was destroyed when Vietcong soldiers took it as a stronghold.”

“That’s what Colson wrote.”

The floor has vanished beneath me, and I’m falling endlessly into a dark pit. I pull away from Dad, revulsion rising up from my belly.

“He convinced you it was in the best interest of the United States to keep quiet?”

“It was more than that.”

“You’ve been living a lie since you met Mom. How can I believe anything you say?”

“I had to protect you both.”

“By lying to us? Who
are
you?” I’m pacing around the room. Every now and then, Kyle tries to calm me down, but I just walk right past him.

“You think it was easy for me? I haven’t slept peacefully since. Their ghosts still haunt me every night.”

“Why didn’t you ever talk to us? Ever since we moved to Manhattan, you just pulled away. We thought—I thought it was me. That you were disappointed, that maybe you wanted a son instead.”

“It wasn’t anything like that. You have no idea what I had to do.”

“You didn’t have the guts to come forward, so you shrunk away. All my life, I just wanted … but you just … You thought giving me this stupid camera could compensate?”

Dad slams his fist on the end table. The little vodka bottle tips over, but it’s empty. “Don’t you see? It’s all connected; the atrocities, the murders of those vets. And now it’s falling apart, kicked up to the next level, because of you.”

“Oh, so I’m to blame!” My furious steps stop short when my foot hits my backpack. That accursed camera. I reach down and pull it out, pieces rattling, and thrust it at him. “You know, maybe there’s a reason I’ve been given this ability to see visions. Maybe there’s a reason this camera ended up in my hands.”

Without the usual warning, a sudden rush of heat runs through my body like electricity. I fall forward into Dad’s arms.

“Xandra!”

A sudden detonation of light, sweeping wind, and the images obliterate the walls.

Dad and I float in a sea of temporal vignettes. His eyes are squeezed shut, and I can’t seem to get through to him. We’re watching a young Peter Carrick carrying my mother through gunfire in Bình Sơn.

Next, in a New York apartment, they’re doting on a baby girl—me.