The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (46 page)

After several hours, she slid down until her head was in Linh's lap, and he placed his hand over her ear to muffle the sound so that although she still could hear the barrages, the noise was distanced by the thickness of one hand. His cupped palm gave her the buzz of blood, the pulse of the ocean, the childish certainty that nothing could happen to her while she was protected in this way.

At four in the morning the frequency of the mortars increased, and a sergeant ordered Helen and Linh to move to the deeper back bunkers. Unfamiliar with the area aboveground, they asked to take their chances and stay put, but the sergeant wouldn't argue the point.

They crouched and scuttled across the broken, debris-strewn ground. The opening was supposed to be only ten feet from the observation bunker, but they traveled at least thirty feet until they ran into the tree line. They retraced their way back and veered to the left, finding a larger entrance than the sergeant described, but the shriek of incoming made the decision for them. Helen threw herself onto the ground inside, Linh at her back, the fall of several feet knocking the wind out of her while a mortar exploded twenty yards away. Underneath, in the darkness, she felt something smooth and clammy and realized she was sinking into human flesh.

Helen jumped, taking her chances outside rather than trapped in the ground. She doused herself with her remaining water, took her soiled shirt off over her T-shirt. She huddled against a low wall of sandbags. Mortars rang in her ears, strangling sound, and she could make out Linh's words only when he came close.

"Go back." He pointed to the observation bunker.

Nervous tears ran down her face. She couldn't stop them although she didn't feel afraid, didn't feel anything at all. The constant bottoming fear of being hurt or worse gone. But the biggest danger was after the fear left. She yelled at Linh, "Go ahead. I'm better out here."

He sat down next to her, and she shook her head, pushing at him to go away, but he stayed at her side. Later, when she calmed down, they crawled to another empty bunker for the rest of the night. The shelling continued until dawn. At first light they made their way back the observation bunker. The sergeant took a look at Helen and handed her his cup of lukewarm coffee made with a packet of instant and a heat tab.

Half an hour later, in the gray foggy light of morning, she saw American soldiers approaching through the trees. The sergeant took out his binoculars. Helen felt relief that the ordeal was over; her head dull, she felt something was wrong, but still no fear. Linh said the soldiers were coming from the wrong direction, not from the trail they had used. The sergeant trained his binoculars through the fog. When the soldiers were less than fifty yards away, Helen saw a lead soldier raise his machine gun. Her thoughts slowed. She felt cool and divorced from what was happening in front of her. Maybe the soldiers thought that Vietnamese were in the bunkers? The soldier opened fire, a spray of bullets, and Helen frowned, unable to comprehend the sight before her eyes. The sergeant screamed words to the other men in the bunker who opened fire on the men walking through the trees.

When the fog burned off, B-52s dropped canisters of napalm that set the surrounding hills on fire, the sky swirled gray and blue. Next came gunships, and this time they were able to get in and out unharmed. They had either broken the enemy or he had retreated.

Helen stood outside the bunker, looking at the area that she had only been able to grope her way through in the dark. In the white light of fog and smoke, she could make out the charred remains of trees and bodies. She brought her camera up to her eye, a relief. She followed the soldiers through the trees and took pictures of the dead Vietnamese in American uniforms. Those wounded lying silent, uncomplaining, resigned to their fate. Not expecting any help. Helen was struck by the foreignness of this reaction, the extreme capacity for hardship, and she couldn't help feeling a disagreeable respect. The Americans hated the enemy's willingness to use civilians, to dress in the enemy's uniforms, and yet playing by conventional rules would have lost the war.

American soldiers crawled out from beneath the ground, faces lean and dark, eyes like sharp knives from being afraid too long, uniforms molded to their bodies, patinaed by sweat and dirt. As they stretched stiff, cramped bodies and moved through camp, they grew more animated until Helen captured a shot of two soldiers lobbing a C-ration can like a football, a moment of relief at surviving the night.

She walked the camp and took pictures, simply a matter of composition and aperture and shutter speed. This was a bigger battle, with more casualties than she had ever before witnessed, and yet she felt less, actually felt nothing.

PFC Simmons walked beside her. "You here to make us fucking famous?"

She tried to sound normal, although she felt like a ghost floating above the scene. "Yeah. Sure."

"Fucking A. Ought to be some kinda reason for this. Besides you getting your pictures to Danang and having a scoop, talkin' about how brave you were."

After Helen had the
film she needed, she sat on a rock and waited. She had not eaten for twelve hours, had not slept in twenty-four. Sound still came to her muted, as if she were underwater. Linh photographed a mortar crew who had been there the whole three days. Since her return, a new dynamic to their professional relationship: Linh, a photographer now in his own right. They traveled together, but when they reached their destination they went through the professional courtesy of pretending to be invisible to each other.

As they made their slow way back down the hill, following the wounded, they passed living soldiers with dead eyes who did not even glance at them; Helen felt reinforced in her ghostliness. The piles of the dead had not been moved but were powdered in lime, which hid the features, making the bodies anonymous, making the living feel they were moving through a bizarre kind of catacomb.

They waited hours while the wounded were loaded and flown away.

As the infantry stretched chain-link around the LZ secured only hours before, peasant girls drifted in singly or in pairs from the nearby hamlets. They stood barefoot, dressed in faded cotton tops and black pajama bottoms, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, wordlessly soliciting. When a helicopter came in they forgot themselves, rushed up to the fence and poked their fingers through in their thrill to see the flying machines. Their fingers were as tiny and delicate as children's, a few with chipped nails painted in gaudy pinks and reds.

One of the guards went up to the fence and said something to a young girl with jet shoulder-length hair and a shiny turquoise shirt too large for her slight frame. Curious, Helen raised her camera as he took something out of his pocket, and as he unwrapped it, she saw it was a roll of Life Savers. He pushed his fingers through the fence and fed the candy to the girl, placing it directly on her tongue.

That was the shot. Helen had endured the previous hours of terror to reach it, and yet when it came it satisfied her that the sacrifice had been worth it. Only in her stripped state would she have noticed something so small and so fraught. Later it turned out to be a cover and then led to her first award, but for her the value of the picture was that it returned her purpose--to find small glimmers of humanity.

Helen and Linh caught
the last helicopter out and were dropped at a supply base that was supposed to be running more cargo flights from Tan Son Nhut. By the time they landed, the last flight had left, and they had no choice but to spend the night. The whole Highlands was in a state of emergency, and press seating was not a priority. Soldiers waiting to go in joked that the military powers were trying to get as many of them killed as possible before the rumored troop withdrawals.

The next day they waited again, Helen in the mess tent nursing a coffee, Linh stationed next to the air traffic controller, supplying him with cigarettes and sharing a flask of bourbon.

Their location was in a depressed bowl with ragged foothills all around, allowing only a short runway. The jungle seemed to bear down on their small patch of denuded territory, its tinsel of concertina wire, its hastily scratched-out bunkers. The jungle stood dense and majestic and unapproachable. The land itself against them; rice paddies and jungle and plateaus and mountains, all conspiring and waiting for their demise and disappearance.

Linh came in the mess tent and walked over to her table. "You doing okay?"

"What do the flights look like?"

"No one getting in or out now. We could be days."

The wind was knocked out of her. She had to admit she was more shaken up than she thought; she needed to escape, although escape was getting harder to come by.

"The good news is that nobody else is getting in or out, either. The pictures are still in play."

She could not blame him--this was their life--but the private's words about a scoop echoed in her head in a nasty way. By late afternoon, she despaired that they would get out that night, but Linh came running into the mess after having talked his way onto the last cargo plane headed for Tan Son Nhut.

As they approached the plane, one of the flight crew came up to her with a white scarf, but the roar of the engine and her own muffled hearing made it impossible for her to make out his words, and finally he motioned for her to tie it over her nose and mouth.

"I don't understand," Helen yelled over the roar, and he pinched his nose. The scarf was greasy, and she brought it to her nose and smelled the sharp smell of Tiger Balm slathered in the center. She shook her head and handed it back to him.

Linh walked up the cargo ramp and stopped at the sight in front of him. Inside the hold, body bags filled the space from floor to ceiling. He walked backward down the ramp; speechless, he pointed. He stood on the ground, arms wrapped around his sides, while Helen found the harassed air controller who had not told Linh what the cargo was on the flight. He shrugged, unimpressed. If they refused this flight, he said, they would spend at least another night or two out.

"It doesn't matter," Helen said. "One more night."

"Let's get out of here," Linh said.

They sat in the three feet of cleared space at the forward-most section of the cargo cabin. The smell penetrated, and she wished she had taken the offered scarf. A solid wall of broken bones and sliding flesh, the sight cleaned up and made civilized by being zipped away in rubber bags. She had to put something between herself and this sight and so she raised her camera. The great dark mass in front of her had power, but it was not her picture anymore. It had similarities with the photo she had taken years ago of soldiers piled on the convoy truck. Then she had been in shock at the carnage, determined to show it. Now each of the bodies before her were no longer anonymous, each was Michael, Darrow, Samuels, and all the others. The image valid, but she was unequal to it and lowered the camera. She had to find the smallest bit of redemption in a photo, otherwise taking it would begin to destroy her. Even if it meant risking the misconception that war was not as horrific as it was.

They sat and waited, cameras useless in their laps. Linh had made no motion toward photographing the scene.

Once they were airborne, the wind whipped through the open doors, diluting the stench but also creating a frightening ripple of bags, a hard flapping and flaying that was as bad as the earlier smell. Helen closed her eyes and tried to think of anything but where she was.

During the steep descent into Tan Son Nhut, fluids from the seeping bags sloshed forward in a small wave, and Linh felt a cool, viscous liquid soak through his pants. When the source of the wetness became evident, he put his hands down to try to stand up, but the slickness was like egg white against the metal floor, and he slipped back. Everything blacked in on him. He opened his mouth, but the engines drowned out sound.

Helen pulled him to her, her arms a vise around his waist, turned him away from the sight until they both stood clinging to the webbed wall, but even after he had regained his balance, still she kept her hold tight on him. This she could do. She would not let him go.

SEVENTEEN
Nghia

Love

His heart had been
locked away for a very long time.

From the moment he shifted the weight of Mai's body from his own arms to the earth, he chose not to feel again. He hadn't held another woman in his arms until he picked up Helen from the sidewalk and carried her back to the room in Cholon.

One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.

The weight of Helen in his arms broke open memory. She invaded his heart, first in Darrow's pictures, and then later through the casual touch of her hand, the smell of her hair, and finally the weight of her pain in his arms.

After she returned to Vietnam, he would wait for her in the crooked apartment, and while waiting he would roll an earring of hers in the palm of his hand, comforted by the thought that it had been against the delicate skin of her earlobe. He did not intend for Helen to know of these feelings; he was perfectly content not acting on them. The invisible carrying just as much weight as the visible in his world.

_______

After Dak To, Helen
asked Linh to take her back to the hamlet in the delta where she had stayed with Darrow. She wanted to recapture that sense of serenity she had glimpsed there. But the hamlet was nothing but ashes now, the villagers refugees. "They declared it a center of enemy activity."

"We were there. It was safe."

Linh shrugged. "Maybe we were wrong; maybe they were wrong. Either way the village is still destroyed."

Helen was silent for a moment. "Don't you care what is happening to your country?"