The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (17 page)

In terms of the present moment, they were despicable to the soldiers, to the victims, to even themselves. In the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. In their worst moments, each of them feared being a kind of macabre Hollywood, and it was only in terms of the future that they regained their dignity, became dubious heroes. The moment ended, about to be lost, but the one who captured it on film gave both subject and photographer a kind of disposable immortality.

The wires sent her to cover human-interest stories--hospitals, charities, orphans, widows--but when she opened the paper and saw combat shots by Darrow as well as others, she knew that she was being sidelined. Of course, the truth of the war existed everywhere--battle and combat only a part of the whole--but her truth pulled at her from out on the battlefields. With her failure out in the field part of the public record, she didn't know how to start again.

Another month passed; she grew more restless. Only skimming the surface of the land and the war, returning to her safe bed every night. The reporters that were satisfied at this level were like archaeologists piecing together fragments and guessing at the truth of something long since disappeared. She felt like a fake. She kept going on the after-battle junkets with Robert, embarrassed for them both, needing the drinks at the Continental bar each night.

At dinner with Robert
, she tried to explain her dissatisfaction. Ever since the night she left with Darrow, Robert remained aloof, as if there were some irony that he alone was privy to. She understood he needed to save face. She had acted badly, and there was probably no fixing it. Outwardly they still joked and flirted, but they both understood that things had changed between them.

"Is it enough?" she said. "These pictures don't feel like enough."

Robert shrugged, bored and disappointed. A cruel thought ran through his mind that at least nurses didn't bring their work with them. "You're too earnest now."

"Sorry," she said, realizing her mistake confiding in him. She changed the subject by ordering another drink, but he wasn't fooled.

"The only way to get the picture you're talking about is to get so close you become part of it."

But instead of deflecting her
, his words gave her an idea. Now she went hunting at the air bases for stories. To go around official channels, see what was really going on, she copped rides alone on transport helicopters dropping rations and ammunition at distant firebases. Since there was no ostensible story, no combat, there was no restriction on her movements, either. Whenever possible, she tried to visit Special Forces camps in the hope of running into someone who had known her brother. There were men at the outposts half-naked in the heat, bodies coated by the inescapable dust and dirt that caused small boils on the skin, eyes wild from the isolation and the threat of danger. A few refused to talk with her, simply watched from the edges of the camp like feral dogs, but most were glad for the company. She sat and shared cigarettes, took their pictures, and talked while the chopper unloaded. In between the most banal questions--
What's your name? Where're you from? How long you here for?
--she caught glimpses of what she wanted.

At one landing base high in the foothills, the pilot decided to put up for the night. Pleased, she didn't bother mentioning that it was against regulations for her, a woman, to spend the night out in the field. Inside the small sandbag-and-wood structure with the unmistakable barn smell of marijuana, Helen was introduced to a former Special Forces officer, Frank MacCrae, wearing an apron and cooking a vat of chili over a makeshift fire pit. At forty-five, he was considerably older than the other men, and unlike them he was at home there. He had lived in Vietnam more than seven years, spoke the language fluently, lived out in the villages.

When they sat down to dinner--a dozen soldiers, the pilot, and Helen--Frank was quiet at first, drinking down beer after beer in a few gulps, appraising her. The chili had a bright layer of orange oil on top, and the native hot pepper made her lips burn and then go numb. When Helen complimented him and asked for seconds, he flushed with plea sure and brought out a bottle of wine he had been saving. "I was keeping it for when we have a boar to roast, but what the hell." He eyed her cameras. "Nice. I used to have a good Nikon but banged it up... Miss my picture-taking days. So now they're sending girl reporters?"

"Not willingly," she said. "They didn't send me. I snuck out here on my own."

"How long you been in-country?"

"Two months."

"Two months. Oh, baby." He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, his white T-shirt freckled with reddish chili spots. "You came too late."

"How's that?" The heat of the chili beaded her forehead with sweat, and she wiped it with a napkin. That was her fear, that she had missed the biggest part of the war already. Her stomach started to churn.

"The good ol' days are gone."

"Oh, not this again," one of the soldiers said.

"See... we were just learning how to do business here, but they screwed it all up. It's easier to send soldiers, easier to throw money at corrupt leaders who'll play ball with us. Easier for us to just take the damn thing over."

"Did you know my brother, Michael Adams? He was here two years ago; died last year. Plain of Reeds area." A deep burble rose from her stomach, and she regretted taking the second bowl of chili.

"Not familiar with. Who was his captain?"

"Wagner, I think? Project Delta?"

"It's a small world up here. Didn't get to meet him. A damn shame." Frank smiled as Helen's eyes watered, a belch escaped. "Not used to good home cookin'?"

The pilot, bored, got up and signaled the others to go over to another table for a game of poker.

Helen felt as if she would explode. "The report was just the generic 'Died a Hero' stuff."

Frank examined the ceiling and blew smoke rings. "Our government is creating a show. All that shit years ago about Diem being the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia. Did the English riot in the streets against Churchill? Did he imprison or kill his opposition? That was all a PR campaign courtesy of
Life
magazine."

"Maybe Diem tricked us."

Frank shook his head, gently at first and then harder. "No! No, no, no. Everyone knew he was a crook from the get-go. That's why they chose him."

"So why?" She stood, clinching her bowels. She'd have to make a run for the out house in the dark.

"Now you're going!" He banged down all four feet of the chair on the floor and clapped his hands. "Start thinking like a reporter about your own side, too. Why aren't you satisfied with the pabulum they fed you about your brother? Friends of mine started poking around--it was not appreciated. Got stonewalled, their stories weren't considered credible, they were reassigned back to the States. Visas and military passes revoked. I'm impressed if nothing else by the single-mindedness of the enemy. I can't take their hate personally."

"You aren't one of those conspiracy-theory crazies?"

"Just remember," he yelled as she ran outside, "where there's smoke, there's usually a bale of marijuana close-by."

She groped her way in the darkness, and she didn't know which was worse--her stomach or the fear of sniper fire. When she came back, they talked several more hours into the night, Frank so full of information that Helen wished she had a recorder on because she simply couldn't absorb it all. Finally he stood and stretched. "Bye, sweetheart. I'm out tomorrow for a five-day patrol."

"Take me with you," she said.

"No way, baby girl." He leaned down close to Helen's ear, and she smelled chili and beer on his breath. "They want you to be part of their movie, don't ever forget it."

"Please let me go with you." She blushed. After all, she was the girl with
The Quiet American
under her bed.

He went off to a corner of the room and came back with a small stitched bracelet. He motioned her to stick out her wrist. "Here. It's from the Yards. Good people. Now you're one of us."

"That means no."

"Can I ask
you
a favor?" Frank asked. "A smell of your hair?"

She nodded, and felt a scratch of whispers and a peck on her cheekbone.

"I want to know what's really going on."

He inhaled with a deep gulp. "I'm a sucker for beautiful hair." He sighed. "I'll never admit I told you this. My little present for you, so you can sleep better to night. Didn't know your brother, but I knew Wagner's unit went in to assassinate some local chieftain along the Laos border. They were dropped into this mud hole, didn't know that the dry area on the map became a lake at the wrong time of the year, heavy and thick like quicksand, and they were stuck; when the bullets started flying they realized they had been ambushed; sitting ducks, the whole unit wiped out minutes off the plane. Crying shame. Shit like that doesn't happen to us."

"Take me tomorrow," she said.

"I'll sleep on it. Be up at five."

But when she woke up at five the next morning, MacCrae had already left camp.

"So what's he involved in?" she asked, trying not to show her disappointment.

"What isn't he involved in is a better question," a soldier answered with a laugh. "Frank and The Cause."

She handed the soldier one of her Leicas. "Tell him he owes me. Tell him to use it and bring me back pictures."

Frank was right in
one way: The knowledge about Michael's death released her as knowing the worst can. Although it was as horrific as anything she imagined, she no longer had to imagine. But she was just as unwilling to leave as before; the mystery of what drew men like MacCrae to risk everything was bigger than Michael's death.

She rode out with
the helicopter pilots high over the land of the delta south of Saigon, trailing over the endless paddy fields that reflected up at them like broken pieces of a mirror. The dull green of choking jungle and sinewy-limbed mangrove swamp contrasting with the light green of the new rice; the land only rarely broken by signs of human habitation--small clusters of thatched roofs or an occasional one of red tile. From above, the land appeared empty and peaceful, only farmers bent in the paddies or orchards. She sat like a tourist, enthralled by the dirty green and reddish brown rivers, slow and thick-moving like veins pumping life into the land.

It felt safe looking down from high in the air, protected by the metal of the machine and the speed of its movement. The confidence of the pilots infected her. Many of them were her own age, some as young as her brother.

She went out on dozens of runs, routine and without contact. A fact of war that in both combat and photography there were great stretches of nothing, boredom, and the only thing left to contemplate was the land itself that had brought them there. For a time she was content to commune with the mystery of it. But once she relaxed to the fact of nonevent, of safety, curiosity began gnawing at her again.

On each assignment, she would question soldiers about what they had seen of Vietnam. Their answers were strangely resistant.

Mostly, their worlds were sealed by perimeter wire and bunkers, bounded by the luxuries of C-rations, sodas, cigarettes. They lived in a universe limited to their weaponry and machinery, their chain of command, and so in the most fundamental sense it did not matter in which country they fought. They were immune except to the most basic facts of topography and weather. Vietnam was not mysterious to them, not the history or the land or the yellow faces. Uncovering the secret of place was considered nonessential. The mystery that held them was their own survival, the beauty and inscrutability of battle, the shining failure of death. To them, Vietnam was nothing more or less than what they purchased during R&R in the bars and the streets of Saigon and Danang. It was generally concluded a secret not worth knowing. Helen concluded that coming to Vietnam was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

The first time she
rode in a gunship, sitting behind the gunner in the open door of the fuselage, the wind howling like a hurricane through the interior as they dropped through the air in a combat-landing spiral, she grabbed the webbed walls for support, but all the fearlessness she had gained from the transport flights vanished. She made bargains: If she survived this one flight, she was done and would go home. Or at least stay in Saigon and cover vaccine drives.

The gunner pointed his big gloved hand down, and she saw an enemy fighter appear from out of the tree line. He bent down on one knee and aimed his BAR rifle at their plane. It would be a miracle if he could down a chopper with it. Helen couldn't hear the high scream of bullets, but quarter-sized holes appeared in the sides of the plane, splinters of sunlight like angry eyes. He had managed to hit them.

After months of hearing about the elusiveness of the enemy, this man in his dark pajamas seemed anticlimactic. Even though he was trying to kill them, Helen felt more afraid for him, fear rolling in her gut at the unevenness of the battle, the lone man crouched in the tall, burning grass, the spreading shadow of the gunship passing over him.

Helen got the photograph of him aiming at them as the gunner let loose a round. They were almost on top of the man, so that the force of the first spray of bullets made him fly up and backward like a wind. Helen kept taking pictures until the film ran out. While she sat down on the floor to reload, hands shaking so badly that she had trouble opening the camera, he blew into parts in the spray of bullets.

When she climbed out of the plane back at the airport, ears ringing from the deafening thunder of the engines, the pilot gave her a thumbs-up and invited her for a beer. He had soft, moist eyes, and said that the beauty of the country made the violence especially awful, like slashing a pretty woman's face. She sat in the officers' club, stiff with sweat and fear, and listened to him talk about a girlfriend back home, the hope of a job in the airlines after his service was up. Neither spoke of being fired on or of the killed enemy, except to write it up in the military report. Helen didn't yet understand that conjuring up the future was the duty of the living, what they owed to the dead.