Книга - The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters
Tatjana Soli


‘ tremendously evocative debut, a love story set in the hallucinatory atmosphere of war, described in translucent, fever-dream prose.’ Janice Y. K. Lee, author of the bestselling THE PIANO TEACHERWinner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, 2011As the fall of Saigon begins in 1975, two lovers make their way through the streets, desperately trying to catch one of the last planes out. Helen Adams, a photojournalist, must leave behind a war she has become addicted to and a devastated country she loves. Linh, her lover, must grapple with his own conflicting loyalties to the woman from whom he can’t bear to be parted, and his country.Betrayal and self-sacrifice follows, echoing the pattern of their relationship over the war-torn years, beginning in the splendour of Angkor Wat, with jaded, cynical, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, Helen’s greatest love and fiercest competitor, driven by demons she can only hope to vanquish.Spurred on by the moral imperative of documenting the horror of war, of getting the truth out to an international audience, and the immense personal cost this carries, Sam and Helen’s passionate and all-consuming love is tested to the limit. This mesmerising novel carries resonance across contemporary wars with questions of love and heart-breaking betrayal interwoven with the conflict.









The Lotus Eaters

Tatjana Soli












For my mom,

who taught me about

brave girls crossing oceans

For Gaylord,

with love and gratitude


…we reached the country of the Lotus-eaters, a race that eat the flowery lotus fruit…Now these natives had no intention of killing my comrades; what they did was to give them some lotus to taste. Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring us news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.

—HOMER, The Odyssey




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ue9e3ebb8-7d7e-5a3b-8309-c5e0c02ceedb)

Title Page (#u8abfe42c-6b8d-575e-80f9-313e82d29ffb)

Epigraph (#u9f76635c-3609-50ee-a037-6dfbb8728eb3)

ONE The Fall (#u3fd82978-984c-5b7b-a173-b17e8960acaa)

TWO Angkor (#u09673ac3-22c8-5685-9d07-a5644fdb48f2)

THREE A Splendid Little War (#u71217e24-9293-5f3b-bb15-c923e7a9ae99)

FOUR Indian County (#uec226642-20e8-5111-afec-da3bfea67385)

FIVE Chieu Hoi Open Arms (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX Haa To Civilize, to Transform (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN Hoi Chanh Defectors (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT Xa Village (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE Tiens Fairies (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN Thien Ha Under Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN Bao Chi Journalist (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE A Map of the Earth (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN Ca Dao Songs (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN Back to the World (#litres_trial_promo)

FIFTEEN Hang Hum Noc Ran (#litres_trial_promo)

SIXTEEN Tay Nguyen (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTEEN Nghia (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHTEEN Cat Cai Dau (#litres_trial_promo)

NINETEEN The Ocean of Milk (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY Dong Thanh One Heart (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




ONE The Fall (#ulink_a02a9e5c-d9e6-5046-8fc1-bb1390249bdc)


April 28, 1975

The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber’s razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade’s metal grabbing the sun. Unable to resist, she leaned down to pick it up, afraid someone would split his foot open running across it. A crashing noise down the street distracted her—dogs overturning garbage cans—and she snatched blindly at the razor. Drawing her hand back, she saw a bright pinprick of blood swelling on her finger. She cursed at her stupidity and kicked the razor, strop and all, to the side of the road and hurried on.

The unnatural silence allowed Helen to hear the wailing of the girl. The child’s howl was high and breathless, defiant, rising, alone and forlorn against the buildings, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading its complaint. Helen crossed the alley and went around a corner to see a small child of three or four, hard to tell with the unrelenting malnourishment, standing against the padlocked doorway of a bar. Her face and hair were drenched with the effort of her crying. She wore a dirty yellow cotton shirt sizes too large, bottom bare, no shoes. Dirt circled between her toes.

The pitiful scene begged a photo. Helen hesitated, hoping an adult would come out of a doorway to rescue the child. She had only days or hours left in-country. Breathless, the girl staggered a few steps forward to the curb, eyes flooded in tears, when a man on a bicycle flew around the corner, pedaling at a furious speed, clipping the curb and almost running her down. Helen lurched forward without thinking, grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her back, speaking quickly in fluent Vietnamese: “Little girl, where is Mama?”

The child hardly looked at her, the small body wracked with sobs. Helen’s throat constricted. A mistake, stopping. A pact made to herself that at this late date she wouldn’t get involved. The street rolled away in each direction, empty. No woman approached them.

Tired, Helen knelt down so she was at eye level to the child. In a headlong lunge, the girl wrapped both arms around Helen’s neck. Her cries quieted to soft cooing.

“What’s your name, honey?”

No answer.

“Should I take you home? Home? To Mama? Where do you live?”

Rested, the girl began to sob again with more energy, fresh tears.

No good deed goes unpunished. The camera bag pulled, heavy and bulky. As she held the girl, walking up and down the street to flag attention, it knocked against her hip. She slipped the shoulder strap off and set it down on the ground, all the while talking under her breath to herself: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” The child was surprisingly heavy, although Helen could feel ribs and the sharp, pinionlike bones of shoulder blades. The legs that wrapped viselike around Helen’s waist were sticky, a strong scent of urine filling her nostrils.

A stab of impatience. “I’ve got to go, sweetie. Where is Mama?”

She bounced the girl to quiet her and paced back and forth. Her mind wasn’t clear; why was she losing her precious hours, involving herself now, when she had passed hundreds of desperate children before? But she had heard this one’s cries so clearly. A sign? A sign she was losing it was more like it, Linh would say.

A young woman hurried across the intersection, glanced at Helen and the child, then looked away.

The orphanage was overflowing. Should she take the girl home with her? Once they abandoned this corner, she would be Helen’s responsibility. Could she take her out of the country with Linh? What had she been thinking to stop? Was it a trap? By whom? Was it a test? By what?

Helen stroked the girl’s hair, irritated. She had a heart-shaped face, ears like perfect small shells. A bath and a nice dress would make her quite lovely.

Ten, fifteen minutes passed. The idea of this being a sign seemed more stupid by the minute. Not a soul came, nothing except the tinny, popping sound of guns far away. Helen toyed with the idea of putting the girl back down. Surely the family was close by, was searching for her. No harm done in keeping the girl company for a few minutes. Not her responsibility, after all. When she began to kneel to deposit her back on the ground, the girl’s arms tightened to a choke hold around her neck, and Helen, resigned, strained back up. All wrong; a terrible mistake. A proof that she was failing. Linh would be worrying by now, might even try to go out to find her.

Helen bent and fished for the strap of her camera bag, putting it on the other shoulder to balance the weight. Maybe it was a sign. Insane, but what else could she do but take the child with her?

Halfway down the street, a woman’s voice yelled from behind them. Helen turned to see a plain, moonfaced woman with thin, cracked lips stride toward them.

“Are you her mother?” Helen asked, guilt welling up. “I wasn’t trying to take her—”

The woman yanked the girl out of Helen’s arms, eyes pinched hard. The girl whimpered as the mother swatted her on the leg and scolded her.

“She couldn’t tell me where she lived,” Helen said.

But the mother had already turned without another glance and stalked away. The girl looked over the mother’s shoulder, dark eyes expressionless. In a few more steps, they disappeared around the corner.

For the briefest moment Helen felt wronged, missed the weight on her hip and the sticky legs, but then the feeling was gone. How had the mother been so neglectful anyway? It rankled that she had not been thanked or even acknowledged for her effort. But with the shedding of that temporary burden, the old excitement buoyed up in her again. The possibility of the girl disappeared into the past. She’d better pull herself together. She picked up her bag, checked her watch, and ran.



On a normal day the activity in the streets so filled her eye that she hardly knew where to turn, torn whether to focus her camera on the intricate tableaus of open-air barbers on the sidewalk cutting their customers’ hair, or tea vendors sweating over their fires and flame-blackened pots, or ink-haired boys selling everything from noodles to live chickens to cigarettes, or old men with whisk beards as peaceful as Buddhas playing their endless games of co tuong. And, too, there was the endless flotsam and jetsam of the war: beggars and amputees thronging everyplace where foreigners were likely to drop money.

But today streets were vacant, the broken windows and smashed doors like gouged-out features of a face once familiar. The people gone, or rather hidden, the streets deformed by their absence.

Helen’s Saigon had always been about selling—chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn’t matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn’t bear that soon she would have to leave.

Closer to the center of town, there was activity. Gangs of looters ranged through the city like gusts of wind, citizens and defeated soldiers who now in their despair became outlaws, breaking into stores they had walked past every day for years, stores whose goods they coveted.

Helen hurried, sucking on the drop of blood at her fingertip, but couldn’t help her excitement, stopping to look, framing the composition in her mind’s eye: teenage boys, some in jeans, some in rags, breaking a plate-glass window; a crowd inside a ransacked grocery, gorging themselves on crates of guava and jackfruit; a young girl with pink juice running down her face and onto her white blouse. It had always fascinated her—what happens when things break down, what are the basic units of life?

Hours late. Helen walked faster, touching the letters in the top of her bag, letters that she had wasted the whole morning begging for, that undid the last bit of her foolishness, her wanting to stay for the handover. She hoped that Linh would have taken his antibiotic and morphine in her absence but guessed he had not. His little rebellion against her. He had forgiven her and forgiven her again, but now he was drawing a line.

At the central market, unable to stop herself, she held up the camera to her eye, shooting off a quick series—a group of men arguing, then carrying away sacks of polished rice, bolts of cloth, electric fans, transistor radios, televisions, tape players, wristwatches, and carton after carton of French cognac and American cigarettes. She was so broke she could have used a few of the watches herself to resell stateside.

Wind blew from the east, a tired, rancid breath carrying across the city the smells of rotting garbage and unburied corpses. The rumbling to the north might have been the prelude to a rainstorm, but the Saigonese knew it was the thunder of artillery, rockets, and mortar rounds from the approaching Communist armies. Her brain hot and buzzing, all she could think was, What will happen next?

The looters, figuring they would probably be dead within hours, were careless. They fought over goods in the stores, then minutes later dropped them in the street outside as they decided to go elsewhere for better stuff. Even the want-stricken poor seemed to realize: What good is a gold watch on a corpse?

Helen walked through the torn streets unharmed as if she weren’t a foreigner, a woman; instead she moved through the city with the confidence of one who belonged. Ten years before, she had been dubbed Helen of Saigon by the men journalists. She had laughed, the only woman from home the men had seen in too long. But now she did belong to the ravaged city—her frame grown gaunt, her shoulders hunched from tiredness, the bone-sharp jawline that had lost the padded baby fat of pretty, her blue gaze dark and inward.

Ten years ago it had seemed the war would never end, and now all she could think was, More time, give us more time. She would continue till the end although she had lost faith in the power of pictures, because the work had become an end in itself, untethered to results or outcomes.

She stopped on Tu Do, the old Rue Catinat, shaken at the gaping hole of the French milliner’s store. The one place that had always seemed impregnable, a fortress against the disasters that regularly fell upon the city, Annick guarding the doorway with her flyswatter in hand. But the doorway was deserted, the plate-glass window shattered. Inside, crushed boxes, flung drawers, but not until she turned and saw the two rush-bottomed chairs, empty and overturned, did she believe the ruin in front of her.

When life in Saigon grew particularly hard, Helen would go to the store, enjoying the company of Annick, the Parisian owner, her perfectly coifed dark blond hair, her penciled eyebrows and powdered cheeks, the seams of the silk stockings she insisted on wearing despite the heat. She had been the only female friend Helen had all these years.

At first Helen had not understood the Frenchwoman’s talents, did not understand that the experiénce coloniale made her a breed apart. Annick was an old hand at Indochina, having thrived in Saigon for two decades, coming as a young bride. When her husband died she had confounded her family in France by staying on alone.

The two women would retire to the corner café and drink espressos. Helen sat and endured Annick’s scolding about neglecting her hair and skin when only hours before she had been out in the field, working under fire. Helen smiled as the Frenchwoman pressed on her jars of scented lotions, remedies so small and innocuous that they made Helen love her more. Had Annick finally gotten scared enough to leave everything behind and evacuate?

In the smashed display window, the red silk embroidered kimono Helen had been bargaining for was untouched, although the cheaper French handbags and shoes had been stolen. The Vietnamese always valued foreign goods over Asian ones. Helen hadn’t worked a paying project in a while; her bank account was empty. Her last batch of freelance pictures had been returned a month ago with an apology: Sad story, but same old story. But that would be changing soon. The silk slid heavy and smooth between her fingers.

She had worn down Annick on the price, but the kimono was still extravagant. This was the game they played—haggling over the price of a piece of clothing for months until finally Helen gave in and bought it. Annick refusing to sell the piece to anyone else. Feeling like a thief, Helen undraped it from the mannequin, making a mental note of the last price in piastres that they had negotiated; she would pay her when she saw her again. In Paris? New York? She couldn’t imagine because Annick did not belong in any other place but Saigon.

The whole city was on guard. Even the children who usually clamored for treats were quiet and stood with their backs against the walls of buildings. Even they seemed to understand the Americans had lost in the worst possible way. The smallest ones sucked their fingers while their eyes followed Helen down the street. When her back was to them, she heard the soft clatter of pebbles thrown after her, falling short.



Helen picked her way back home using the less traveled streets and alleys, avoiding the larger thoroughfares such as Nguyen Hue, where trouble was likely. When she first came to Saigon, full of the country’s history from books, it had struck her how little any of the Americans knew or cared about the country, how they traveled the same streets day after day—Nguyen Hue, Hai Ba Trung, Le Loi—with no idea that these were the names of Vietnamese war heroes who rose up against foreign invaders. That was the experience of Vietnam: things in plain view, their meaning visible only to the initiated.

The city had ballooned in size, overwhelmed by refugee slums, the small historical district with the charming colonial facades hiding miles and miles of tin sheds and cardboard shacks, threats of cholera and plague so frequent hotels swabbed the sidewalks in front with ammonia or burned incense, both remedies equally ineffectual. Garbage collection, always sporadic, had been done away with entirely the last few weeks. In some alleys Helen had to wade ankle-deep through a soupy refuse, banging a stick in front of her to scare away rats.

A dark scarf covered her hair so she would attract less attention, but now she also wore a black cotton smock over her T-shirt to hide her camera. Soldiers had beaten up a few reporters already. Paranoia running wild. A camera a magnet for anger. The South Vietnamese soldiers, especially, were bitter against the press, blaming the constant articles on corruption for stopping their gravy train of American money. Not an exhibitionist people, they didn’t want evidence of their looting, their faces splashed across world papers, ruining chances of promotion at home or immigration abroad. Helen pitied them as much as she feared them. They were mostly poor men who had been betrayed along with everyone else abandoned in Saigon. If one was rich or powerful, one was already gone. Only the losers of history remained.



At the alley that led to her building, Helen folded the kimono into her lap and bent down into the stall as she did most days. She lifted a camera and took a quick shot, already thinking in terms of mementos. “Chao ba. Ba manh khoe khong?” Hello, Grandmother Suong, how are you?

The old woman stirred her pot, barely looking up, poured a small cup of tea, and handed it to Helen. She felt deceived, tricked into loving this Westerner, this crazy one. People gossiped that she was a ma, a ghost, that that was why she was unable to go home. “Why waste film on such an ugly old woman?”

“Oh, I only take pictures of movie stars.” Grandmother smiled, and Helen sipped her tea. “Read the leaves for me.”

Grandmother studied the cup, shook her head, and threw the contents out. “Doesn’t matter. You don’t believe. These are old Vietnam beliefs.”

“But if I did, what does it say?”

Grandmother studied her, wondering if the truth would turn her heart. “It’s all blackness. No more luck.”

Helen nodded. “It’s good I don’t believe, then, huh?”

The old woman shook her head, her face grim. Gossips said they saw the Westerner walking through the streets alone, hair blowing in the wind, eyes blind, talking to herself. Heard of her taking the pipe.

“What’s wrong, Grandmother?” They had been friends since the time Helen was sick and too weak to come down for food. People walked over from other neighborhoods just to sit at these four low stools and eat pho, because Grandmother Suong’s had the reputation as the best in Cholon. During Helen’s illness, the old woman had closed her stall and climbed the long flight of stairs to bring her hot bowls of soup.

“The street says the soldiers will be here tomorrow. Whoever doesn’t hang a Communist or a Buddhist flag, the people in that house will be killed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard those rumors—”

Grandmother gave her a hard look. “I don’t have a flag.”

Helen sipped tea in silence, watching the leaves floating through the liquid, imagined them settling into her doomed pattern again and again against the curved bottom of the cup. The future made her weary.

“The way it works, from what I know of what happened in Hue and Nha Trang, is that the women scouts come in before the soldiers. They go through the streets and hand out the flags. Then you hang them. Welcome the victors and sell them soup.”

The old woman nodded, the furrows in her face relaxing as if an iron had passed over a piece of wrinkled cloth. “They season very differently in Hanoi than we do.” She rapped her knuckles lightly on the back of Helen’s hand. “Listen to my words. They are killing the Americans, even the ones without guns and uniforms. Their soldiers and our own. All the Americans leave, but you stay.”

Helen shook her head as if she could dislodge an annoying thought. “Linh is hungry.”

“I took him soup hours ago. You are too late. War is men’s disease.”

Helen finished her tea and set the cup on the crate that served as table. The old woman filled a large bowl with soup and handed it to her as she stood up. “You eat to stay strong.”

“Did you read for Linh?”

The old woman’s face spread into a smile. “Of course. He pretends he doesn’t believe. That he is too Western for such notions. For him there is only light and long life. Fate doesn’t care if he believes or not.”

Helen dropped lime and chilies in her soup.

“Da, cam on ba. Thank you. I’ll bring the bowl back in the morning.”

“Smash it. I won’t be open again after today.”

“Why, Mother?”

“Chao chi. Toi di. I’m going to the other side of town so maybe they forget who I am. Not only Americans but ones who worked for Americans are in danger. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup.”

Helen stood in the stairwell, a cold, tight weight in her chest making it hard to breathe. She was afraid. Not so afraid of death—that fear had been taken from her years ago—but of leaving, having failed. Time to go home, and the thing that had eluded her escaped. Always it had felt just around the corner, always tomorrow, but now there would be no more tomorrows. Grandmother’s words of doom had spooked her. More time, give us more time.

Her reputation had waxed and waned with the course of the war. Never a household name synonymous with Vietnam the way Bourke-White and Higgins were in their wars. Or the way Darrow had been. At thirty-two already middle-aged in a young man’s profession, but there was nothing else she was prepared for but war. Her ambition in the larger world had faded until there was only her and the camera and the war. She knew this war better than anyone—had been one of the few to live in-country continuously, out in the field, taking every risk. She wanted to stay for the end, cover the biggest story of her career, especially now since the news services and the embassy were insisting that all Americans leave. The holy grail, an exclusive that would fill both her depleted reputation and her bank account. But what if the promised bloodbath did happen? There was Linh. She would not endanger him.

Chuong, the boy who lived under the stairs, was again nowhere in sight. Helen paid him daily in food and piastres to guard the apartment and do errands. Mostly she paid him so the landlord would allow the boy to sleep in the stairwell, so Helen could be sure he ate. The small networks of connection falling apart. His absence was unusual, and Helen climbed the stairs, trying to ignore her sense of dread. No one is safe. Not even the ones who sold them soup. The old woman was usually accurate about the manic mood swings of the city. What if the city itself turned against her? Rumor swirled through the streets like burning ash, igniting whatever it settled on. She could still feel the bony rap of Grandmother’s knuckles on her skin.

Inside her apartment, Helen put the bowl on the floor, slipped out of her shoes at the door, and set them next to Linh’s. She threw off the smock, pulled the neckband of her camera over her head, and laid the equipment on a chair. The camera was caked in dust. She would have to spend most of the evening cleaning the lenses and the viewfinder. The shutter was capping exposures, so she’d have to take it apart. A long, tedious evening when already she was dead tired.

She pulled off her T-shirt and pants, the clothing stiff with sweat and dirt. The laundry woman had stopped coming a week ago, so she would have to use a precious bottle of Woolite from the PX and wash her undergarments herself in the small basin in her bathroom. She tugged off the black scarf and shook out her hair, standing naked in the dim room for a moment, enjoying the feeling of coolness, the air touching her skin. Outside, she had to protect herself, had to become invisible. No hair, bared throat, absolutely no hint of cleavage or breasts, no hips or buttocks or bared calves were permissible. When she had first gone into the field, a veteran female reporter, happy to be on her way out, advised her to use an elastic bandage wrapped over her bra to flatten the outline of her breasts. Even in the cities it was advisable to wear pants with a sturdy belt, the woman said, because it was harder to rape a woman in pants.

It had all come down to this. Losing the war and going home. Her heart beat hard and fast, a rounding thump of protest. Would she go home, missing what she had come for?

Helen picked up the kimono and quickly slipped it on. In the darkened mirror, she tried to see the effect of the robe without looking herself in the face. The war had made her old and ugly, much too late for any of Annick’s lotions to make a difference. She pulled a comb through her hair and started to take out the hoop earrings in her ears but decided against it.

“Is that you?” Linh called.

She heard both the petulance in his voice and his effort to conceal it. “I’m coming.” Tying the sash of her kimono, she went to a cabinet for a spoon and picked up the bowl of soup.

In the bedroom doorway, she stood with a grinning smile that felt false. Lying in bed, staring out the window, he did not turn his head. The soft purple dusk blurred the outline of the flamboyant tree that had just come into bloom. Impossible to capture on film the moment of dusk, the effect of shadow on shadow, the small moment before pure darkness came.

“I brought soup, but Grandmother said she already fed you.”

“I worried.”

She could tell despite his hidden face that his words were true, but what she didn’t know was that since he had become housebound, he spent the hours while she was away imagining her whereabouts, visualizing dire scenarios. Each time he heard her walk through the door, he said a quick prayer of gratitude, as if torturing himself in this way saved her. Too close to the end to take such risks, and yet he was helpless to stop her.

“I was trying to get home, but things kept catching my attention.”

She came forward in the dim room and sat on the edge of the bed to eat. She bent over him and kissed him gently on the lips. No matter that they had been together years, always a feeling of formality when they first saw each other again, even if the separation had been only hours. It had something to do with the attention Linh paid to her, the fact that he never took anyone’s return for granted. The feeling disappeared with his quick smile, the way he always reached out a hand to establish touch. He wore old pajama bottoms, stomach and chest swaddled in gauze that had a dull glow in the room.

He was unhappy, and she was the cause of his unhappiness, and yet she was perfectly willing to bull herself through the conversation as if the feelings underneath their words didn’t exist. Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

“I had many things to do today, my love.”

“The old crone read my fortune. Always the same—plenty of luck and a big family.” The remark made to sting.

When Linh turned to look at her, she noticed how sharp his cheekbones were, how his eyes were unfocused by pain. She caressed the half-moon scar on his cheek with her fingers. Whenever she asked how he got it, he changed the subject.

“You didn’t take your shots?” she said.

“Forgot.”

With his infection, unsafe even to be still in the country. When Linh reached out his hand, she saw a belt twisted around his wrist. “What happened?” She held his hand and unwound it, feeling the cold heaviness of the flesh underneath, the welts left behind. She rubbed briskly, willing the disappointment from her face.

“I was just bored, fooling around. Eat your soup.”

She looked at him. But this wasn’t the time to confront. Just shrug it off, move on. “I’ll change the dressings and give you a shot. Then I’ll front you a game of Oklahoma gin.” Linh was tall, slender, with the finely etched features of the warrior princes of Vietnamese legend, perfect until one’s eyes traveled to the scar that formed a half moon on his cheek and the ribboned skin on the wrist that he couldn’t leave alone, an ache. Both of them full of scars.

“Sit with me a minute. Tempting me with cards?” He fingered the sleeve of the kimono. “You couldn’t resist?” Equally appalled and in love with the fact that she could think of a kimono while their world was about to be lost.

She buried her face in his neck for a moment. Her only rest anymore when her eyes were closed, the images stopped. His skin felt hot and damp against her cheek. Fever. “Annick is gone.” They were both still for a moment. “A day, two at the most. Then I’ll achieve my goal—‘Last American Woman Reporter in Vietnam.’”

“We should leave now. While there is time.”

“Martin is still promising the city will never go,” she said. “There might be more time.” The American ambassador had lost a son in the war, and the end would force him, too, to face things he didn’t want to face. Better anything than that. “You distracted me,” Helen said, jumping up and going through the room to her film bag. She fumbled inside it and held up a thick envelope. “Guess what this is?”

“Then we’re ready. Let’s go now.”

Linh swung his legs to the floor and sat doubled over, hands gripping the bed frame.

“Yes. Your ‘Get Out of Vietnam Free’ card. Now you have two letters, Gary’s and the embassy’s. Insurance. But I had to sit through a two-hour lunch listening to how the press are tools of Hanoi. No wonder we lost.” She stood at the side of the bed, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, shaking her arms, trying to release tension.

“And what did you reply?”

“That photographs can’t lie. I said, ‘Make sure Nguyen Pran Linh gets to America, and as a bonus, I’ll leave.’ The country is going to disappear, be hidden behind a wall, and then the real stuff will start. All they want to talk about is identity cards, jumbled paperwork. How they have five different names on file for you.”

“We need to leave now,” Linh repeated.

“Not a moment past ‘The temperature is 115 degrees and rising,’ and the playing of ‘White Christmas.’” This was the clumsy radio signal for the beginning of the evacuation. She ran her fingers over his forehead, trying to brush away furrows of fever.

Linh smiled. “Does it strike you as an obvious signal? I predict the whole of the NVA Army is bent over radios waiting for it. A great cheer will go up.”

“Soon.”

“If you want to stay, we’ll stay.” He touched her hand. “You’re shaking.”

“Tired.”

He understood that this was an untruth, that she was afraid and running, and if he made the wrong move he would lose her. “Lie down.”

“First things first.” She readied the needle, gave him the injection.

Reluctant, knowing she had hours of camera repair work, she stretched out against him, shivering despite the heat.

After Linh had fallen into a drugged sleep, she got up and counted the ampoules of antibiotic and morphine left. A day’s supply, bought at triple the normal going rate on the black market. But there was no more bargaining. By next week, there wouldn’t be a black market for medicine at any cost.



Two days ago at the French hospital, the doctors had cleaned out Linh’s wound while he sat on a rough wood bench in the hallway, the rooms all filled to capacity, no drugs available. The doctor told Helen she was on her own finding penicillin and gave her a list of what would work in a pinch. The bullet had gone in at an angle and torn tissue on its way. The doctor left the young nurse with a needle and told her to suture him up. She was inexperienced, and the stitches were wide and irregular.

“Take him home if you want him to recover. We have no medicine, no food. They are abandoning patients,” she whispered.

Helen nodded, hired a cyclo on the street while two orderlies dressed in rags helped Linh out the door and down the stairs. His arms were outstretched, one on the shoulder of each man at his side, cruciform.

On a regular schedule, Helen swabbed out Linh’s wound, relieved that it had finally stopped draining. The skin was swollen and red around the bullet entrance and exit wounds. It had taken her a full day of scouring the city to get untampered-with antibiotic in sealed bottles. From her days in the field, she had learned the signs that things were starting to go bad—the pallor of the skin, the sticking sweat that didn’t dry. Linh was okay so far, although the fever troubled her. It was her fault he was wounded in the first place.



They had driven to the outskirts of the city to photograph what President Thieu was officially denying: that three million people had taken to the roads, refugees flooding into Saigon, that the South Vietnamese army was blocking entrance, trying to quarantine the city like a ship at sea. Thieu was blaming everyone else for his decision to abandon the Highlands. The mob scenes up the coast in Danang—airports overrun, people hanging on to the outsides of planes, weighing them down so they could not take off, women and children trampled—made everyone paranoid about the same disaster happening in Saigon.

From Martin down to her own contact at the embassy, the Americans were dazed by their impending loss and again forgot the Vietnamese. Negotiation was still considered an option, although the North Vietnamese made it clear they weren’t interested. Helen had been trying to sell pictures about the plight of the demoralized SVA, but Gary had told her bluntly that after ’73, when the American soldiers pulled out, Asian against Asian didn’t make the front page. The world was bored by the long, brutal, stupid war. Until a few months ago, there had been only a skeleton press in the whole country, but now reporters flooded in, waiting for the handover so they could write up the finale and fly back out.

Linh had been angry the last few months, angry at the government’s ineptitude, and, Helen suspected, angry at America’s coming betrayal. A fait accompli that the North had won, the least the government should do was facilitate a peaceful handover, avoid a panic where more of the population would be hurt. The government paid lip service to preserving peace and order even as the authorities scrambled like rats to abandon the city. Linh’s usual gentle temper gone, he insisted on proving Thieu’s lies. “Turning soldiers’ guns against their own people.”

The cab had dropped Linh and Helen blocks from the barricades, and they slowly walked through the alleys to come up behind the SVA soldiers, the last vestiges of the government’s power, armed and facing a sea of refugees. Men, women, and children dying from lack of food and water, and many, having nothing to lose, tried to break through the blockades of concertina wire and bullets.

They had been warned that no one could help them if they got in trouble. Linh flaunted the danger, and Helen got caught up in his anger as well. She was taking pictures of the crowd when there was a surge of people to the left of them. A young soldier who looked no older than fifteen panicked and unloaded a clip from his automatic rifle into the crowd. The recoil shook him like a giant shaking him by the shoulders, and he turned sideways in his effort to hold on to the gun. A bullet ricocheted off the wall of a building.

Linh kept walking, stumbled, walked on. This is the way one survived. The mind shuts down. He kept walking, swatting at the smudge of blood that was growing on his shirt, walking on as if he would die walking.

“Linh!” Helen cried. She saw the blood and pulled him down on the sidewalk, lifted his shirt. The wound was at the side of his abdomen. She pressed her finger against the hole and could feel metal as he grimaced. Relief that it hadn’t gone in deep. Helen used his shirt to bandage it. She rubbed her bloodied hand against her pants. Ironic, given all the times they had gone on far more dangerous runs, but Helen, now as superstitious as the Vietnamese, knew there was only a certain quantity of luck in each person’s life, and they had remained past theirs.

Now Helen woke up on the apartment floor, her hand rubbing against her leg, shaken by yet another nightmare. She got to her feet, stiff, and walked to the map hanging on the wall. After all this time the idea of Vietnam was still as distant now as it had been to her as a young girl when her father studied maps of French Indochina. She barely recalled his face, confused if her memories were her own or pictures of him, but she did remember him letting her trace the outlines of countries with her fingertip, and from that gesture, she had felt the conqueror’s feeling of possession. Now she had spent ten years in a country, South Vietnam, that had not existed on his maps, yet none of it was hers. Within a very short time—days, weeks, months?—it would disappear once more.

She had not imagined herself outliving this war. The country deep inside her idea of who she was; she would tear out a part of herself in leaving it. Darrow had seen to that. He said she would never survive the way she had been, and she changed, gladly. The girl she had been lost in the Annamese Cordillera, the untamed mountains that rose up behind the Central Highlands and folded themselves all the way back into Laos.

They had been out photographing a Special Forces reconnaissance mission when he woke her before dawn. The patrol was still out, and they watched the sun rise up out of the east and color the western mountains from a dull blackish purple to green. So many shades of green, Darrow said, that Vietnamese legend told that every shade of green in the world originated in this mountain range. The emerald backbone of the dragon from which the people of Vietnam sprang. Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.



Linh sighed in his sleep, and Helen laid a hand on the thin, strong muscle of his arm, willing away bad dreams. The way his dark eyes followed her the last few days made her nervous. As if he suspected her heart. Long ago she had become more ambitious than feeling. She had fallen in love with images instead of living things. Except for Linh.

He moaned, and her nails cut red half-moons in her palm.

Her brother’s death brought her to the war, but why had she stayed? Wanting an experience that wasn’t supposed to be hers? Join a fraternity that her father and brother firmly shut her out of? What did all the pictures in the intervening years mean? The only thing in her power now was to save Linh. It angered her, his refusal to leave without her. An emotional blackmail. But she supposed that finally the last picture would get taken, even if it wasn’t by her.

She picked up the camera and saw her face in the dusty lens, her features convexed. Was she to be trusted? She would kill for him, but would she also stay alive for him? An hour before dawn, her equipment clean and ready to go, her insides buzzed, a cocktail of lack of sleep and nerves. She fell asleep on the floor beside the bed.

They woke to the crumping sound of mortars on the edge of the city. She rose and was in motion, a prickling of adrenaline that she recognized when an operation was about to take place. Heating water for tea, swallowing a handful of amphetamines, she sponged herself off and packed a small carrying bag. Next to the door, she set down two battered black cases filled with film she had taken over the last week.

The last three years no one was much interested in pictures of a destroyed Vietnam. So Linh and she did humanitarian aid stories and began covering the ensuing crisis in Cambodia for extra money. Now Cambodia was off the list with the Khmer Rouge takeover. But when the actual fall of South Vietnam came, a photo essay recording the event would be very much in demand.

She had photographed the stacks of blackened corpses in Xuan Loc, had gone all over the city getting shots of the major players in the Saigon government, Thieu and returned Vice President Ky, who swore to stay and fight this time, while at their personal residences movers stacked valuable antiques—blue-and-white porcelain vases, peaceful gilded Buddhas, translucent coral and green jade statues carved into the shapes of fish and turtles—in the yard for shipment out of the country. And, of course, she had roll upon roll of the doomed people who had no special privilege, no ticket out. Looking at those faces, she felt a premonition like a dull toothache. Maybe inside these two cases she had finally pinned it down. Maybe these two cases would redeem her part in the war.

She stood by the window drinking tea, looking at the overcast sky, roiling clouds in varying shades from light pewter to the muddy, brownish gray of scorched earth. The breeze had turned sharp, the smell of rain and thunder promising a strong monsoon shower. Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable—its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hovering doom.

At the sound of a creaking bedspring, she turned and saw Linh awake.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“Time to go to the airport. Our bags are here. Your papers are on top.”

“We agreed you would go to the docks, get shots of the boat evacuation. Then the airport.”

“Does one more shot matter?” She spoke so faintly he could hardly hear her.

“Either they all matter or none of them did.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “I have a bad feeling.”

“We have plenty of time.” He was reeling her back, gently, from wherever she had been.

Jittery, she moved over to the bed and unwrapped Linh’s dressings. Skin puffy and inflamed, hot to the touch. It puckered over the nurse’s crude stitches like yeasted dough. Helen bit down hard on her lip as she rewrapped him. A new hollowness around his eyes.

“Another shot of antibiotic even though it’s early,” she said. “I’ll be back by noon. Leave the radio on. Listen.”

Linh nodded but seemed distracted, and Helen feared he was getting worse. She helped him up to the bathroom and then back to bed. She would have to hire a cab or cyclo to move him. She placed a pot of tea and a cup in a chair next to the bed.

“I should skip Newport, and we’ll just get started.”

“Go,” Linh said. Then he began to sing: “ ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…’”

She smiled, but her mind calculated potential problems each way. She assumed she could get out at any time but worried Linh was getting too weak. The trip would be hard on him until he reached a medical facility.

“Hurry,” he said. “Go have your final affair with Saigon. No regrets.”

She opened the refrigerator, the only one in the building, and filled the pockets of her smock with rolls of fresh film. At the door she pulled the neck strap of her camera over her head, then buttoned her smock.

She opened the door but stood, still undecided. “If I’m late, have Chuong help load everything on a cyclo and go ahead. I’ll meet you at the airport. Do you hear?”

He was silent, staring at the ceiling.

“Linh?”

“If you don’t return, I stay,” he said.

“Of course I’ll return.” The halfhearted ploy failed; he would not let her off so easily. “You just be ready.”

“You got it, Prom Queen.”

She pretended she had not heard him, banging the door shut and running down the splintering wood stairs that smelled of cedar and the sulfur of cooking fires. She was out into the street before she registered the continued absence of Chuong in the stairwell. That was what she had come to dread most, the continual disappearance of what she most relied on.



A cyclo stopped at a busy corner, and Helen jumped in before the driver could protest. After a wheedling argument, he grudgingly accepted three times the normal rate to go down to the Saigon River. People had decided to come out of hiding despite the twenty-four-hour curfew and the frequent pops of small-arms fire all around. A mile away from the port, the cyclo driver jumped off his seat and refused to go any farther. When Helen complained, he pointed a crooked finger to the solid wall of people. She got out, telling him she would pay double again his going fare if he waited an hour for her. Without a word, he calmly turned around and headed back downtown. Time more precious than money for once.

A rumor went through the crowd that two men had fallen into the water and had been crushed between evacuation boats. The fetid air smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. As Helen stood deciding whether to risk plunging into the crowd and getting caught out for hours, she spotted Matt Tanner behind a concrete barricade with another photographer. In the false camaraderie of shared danger, she was happy to see him. He waved her over.

“Madhouse, huh?” Tanner was tall and slope-shouldered, with a narrow, wolfish face, and when he laughed, which was seldom, he showed a forbidding mouthful of jagged teeth.

“This is new blood, Matt Clark. We’re the two Matts.”

“It doesn’t look good,” she said.

“Are you staying on, too?” the new Matt asked. He was young, with white-blond hair in a ponytail and wearing a black T-shirt with astrology signs all over it. She didn’t like the vultures dropping in now and made no effort to hide it.

“Heading out this afternoon.” Watching the crowd, Helen rubbed her hand along the rough concrete of the barricade, which was already crumbling. Cheap, South Vietnamese government-contract stuff that had been undercut for profit so much that it was already disintegrating back into sand from the constant humidity. For what USAID had paid for it, it should have been stainless steel. She looked down and saw a smear of red. The jagged edge had reopened the cut on her finger.

Tanner pulled out a handkerchief and wound it around her finger. “No need to shed blood. This isn’t even your country.”

“I forgot.”

“The airport’s worse than this. ARVN shooting at the crowd. Especially Vietnamese with tickets out. Hurt feelings and all, huh?”

“I hadn’t heard that.” A mistake to come. The embassy had told her it would be at least a week if not longer before the real squeeze began. Wishful thinking.

“If I wanted my ass out I’d head for the embassy, di di mau, quick quick. My guess is that it’s today, and they’re not announcing to avoid a panic. The hard pull is on.”

Helen shook her head. She disliked the way he looked at her, the smugness of his smile. The press corps knew all one another’s secrets, like an extended, dysfunctional family. Tanner used the long fingernail of his pinkie to scratch the inside of his ear.

“I meant to ring you up. Do you still have that Vietnamese working for you?”

“His name is Linh.”

“A couple of us are staying on for the changeover. Cocktails on the roof of the Caravelle to toast in the victors. Macho stuff. We need someone to translate.”

“He’s going out with me.” She looked Tanner in the eye, daring him.

He squinted back. “You two married?”

Everyone had suspicions but didn’t know. Helen shrugged.

“Then, honey, I’d get there yesterday fast.”

“Why are you staying?”

“Miss the biggest story in the world? You’re right. Crazy.” He looked out as the crowd swelled, then drew back. “To be frank, I’m thirty-five and haven’t won the Pulitzer yet. If I don’t come out of this place with it, it’ll be damn hard to win back in Des Moines. I’ll gamble being dead.”

Her desire was to stay, work her way down to the water as the bodies were fished out, record the faces desperate to leave, but she found Tanner’s reasoning so distasteful it made her decision clear. She bit the inside of her cheek as she put the lens cover on. The time she had banked on to get Linh to the airport was gone.

“Sorry you’re going to miss the party,” the new Matt said.

“Me, too.”

Tanner looked at her hard. “Take care of yourself. You know, you’ve paid your dues already, right?”

Helen made her way back toward downtown, fighting against the stream of evacuees. A rushing river of people, each intent on his or her private fate, blind to those around them. Even though Helen stood a full head taller than most of the Vietnamese, she had a hard time avoiding being pushed back toward the docks. Men and boys shoved with their arms and shoulders; a middle-aged woman knocked Helen hard in the shoulder with a cart loaded up with belongings. Did they really think they’d manage to escape with their lives, let alone with television sets and curio cabinets? But she understood the instinct—too hard to let go of what had been acquired with such difficulty.

What did she herself take? What did she have to show for ten years of devotion? A kimono, cameras, a few old photos of a life now gone?

Farther away from the docks, the pull of the traffic lessened. People eddied around her as if she were a rock in a stream. Her body ached, spent and tired. She tried to flag down a cyclo, but all had been commandeered by families to haul away household belongings. So she began the long walk home. It was only ten o’clock in the morning.



By the time she walked through her own building’s door, she felt as if she had been up for days, not hours. It had taken her twice the usual time to retrace her way home. On the first step of the stairway, the boy, Chuong, stood, his eyes big at the sight of her. He was one of the few plump street children, actually bordering on fat, and Helen felt chagrined that it was her money that led to his overindulgence in food. His red-striped T-shirt pulled tight across his belly.

As she opened her mouth to speak, they both heard a loud thud overhead as if something heavy had been dropped. They looked at the ceiling, but there was no further noise.

“Where did you disappear to?” Helen asked. “You’ve been gone for days.”

“Many important things. This morning soldiers come to building. Looking for good American things to steal. I tell them everything already stolen. Just old Vietnamese man dying upstairs. They go away.”

“Good,” Helen said, fear feathering along her back, a quick shiver. Just as likely Chuong had led them to the building in order to “liberate” her things. She no longer trusted the boy, and now it was simply a matter of figuring out how dangerous he was. “You did good.”

The boy held his ground on the bottom step like a cranky landlord.

“Oh…I’ll pay you now.” Helen pulled out a thick roll of piastres, as soft and crinkled as tissue. As they lost value each day, it took more and more paper, small, tumbling stacks, to get anything done. “Here. This will buy as much as your old salary.”

The boy looked at the bills in her extended hand, unimpressed, licked his index finger and smoothed his eyebrows. “Very bad soldiers. Kill anyone who lie to them.”

Helen took the rest of the bills out of her bag, paying out again as much. The piastres were almost all gone, but she figured they would be worthless to her soon anyway.

“Very good. You not number-one liar like other Americans.”

Helen did not bring up the delicate matter that she was paying him even though he had not been there for days. To save face, she should press him on the point, but she had lost her will. For his part, he showed none of the gratitude he had when she first helped him, years ago. Now she received only a smirk. Before she could ask him to commandeer a cyclo for them, Chuong jumped off the step and brushed past her, out the door.

Inside her apartment, the air was blue with the opulent scent of incense. Linh sat stiffly in a chair by the window. He never turned his head at her arrivals, and she always felt a small disappointment at this indifference.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Did you get your pictures?”

“Sure.” She put her arms around his neck. “I got them.” Instead of sweat and ointment, his skin smelled of soap. “Were you up?”

“Better. A shower and some packing.”

She knelt next to his chair and stared out at the flutter of red blossoms in the heavy, wet wind. The twisting gray branches bent under the corpulent flamboyant flowers, crowded so tightly not a hint of green leaf was visible.

“The rains are early this year,” Linh said. “The tree is blooming early.”

“The same time as last year. And the year before.”

“It seems early,” he said.

“I wish we could stay in this room and never leave it,” Helen said.

A gun lay on the floor next to the wall—the source of the sound she had heard in the stairwell. But she wouldn’t ask, just as Linh didn’t press if she got the boat evacuation shots. The usual delicate dance they did around the truth. Her truth was she longed to hide in this room, become invisible. As if the flimsy papered walls and thin door could save them. Out on the streets, without her camera, she felt vulnerable. No one knew of her panic attacks. What internal price she paid for exposure. Preferable to be shot through a door or curtain and to have the source of death anonymous and to die in privacy and alone.

Helen went to the table and mechanically labeled the rolls of film she had taken the day before. Nothing extraordinary. Or rather the extraordinary had become ordinary. Linh had repacked the film cases much better than she. On top lay a folded white shirt, as perfect as in a store display. When she saw the hopefulness of the neatly creased folds, a fresh shirt to begin a new life, she had to turn away. And then it took over as if steel had entered her bones. Everything, including love and fear, squeezed out of her body, and all that was left was determination.

“Chuong told me about the soldiers,” she said.

“What soldiers?”

“They came in downstairs. He sent them away.”

“No soldiers came. I watched from the window since you left.”

Helen nodded, still surprised at her own naïveté. “Were you going to guard the apartment?” she asked, pointing her chin toward the weapon.

Linh studied the gun as if seeing it for the first time. “If they came, I planned to kill myself.”

Helen sucked in her breath. No matter how long she had been in Vietnam, she still took things lightly, like an American. Linh’s quick acceptance of the worst case reminded her that it was not as hard to be brave with the promise of helicopters waiting to whisk you to safety, to home.

“We’re going now.”

She gave Linh the last two shots of morphine, hoping it would last till the embassy and American doctors could give him more. She put on her smock, retied a scarf over her hair.

As she picked up the two cases, the corner of one gave out, spilling out film rolls. The cases were worn and battered, the cardboard corners turned mushy. Helen had patched them with electrical tape, the only thing that didn’t disintegrate in the humidity. “Just a minute,” she said, running to get more tape and wrap the corner.

“Why don’t you get a new case?” Linh’s face set in impatience. The case was just another example of her difficult ways, her willfulness that was putting them both in danger. Yet he knew if he pushed at all, like a high-strung horse, she would balk.

“I know. I will,” Helen said, using a knife to cut the last tail of tape off. Like everything else, it had been provisional, meant only to last out her time there, but like everything else, the provisional had become permanent. Linh slung their tote over his good shoulder. She locked the thin wood door of the apartment, leaving the lamp with the red shade burning, and hurried down the stairs, but Linh took the steps slowly, stopping briefly on each landing. By the time she reached the stairwell, the journey before them had changed as in a fairy tale, grown difficult beyond imagining.

Outside, they plunged into a stream of people and were carried along. The ruttish noise deafening. Families argued over which direction to go, children cried, dogs barked, and on top of it all was the impatient blaring of horns as vehicles tried to force their way through. Far in the background, like the steady thrum of a heart, the sound of bombs exploding. The image of a bloodthirsty army approaching closer and closer made each person jog instead of walk, push instead of wait. Like a fix, Helen ached to pick up her camera and start shooting. What was the point of living through history if you didn’t record it?

Linh walked steadily, but his limp was more pronounced with his weakness, and there was a pallor to his face, his skin wet with a sweat that didn’t dry. Helen took a deep breath to keep her panic down, her mind calm. The biggest part of her job as a photographer to make the minute calculations between getting the picture and getting killed, a skill that she took refuge in, honed into instinct. Yet she had ignored her instincts, following the embassy’s assurance that things would unravel slowly. Cutting that timeline in half had still been too lenient. Yesterday, when she had been told the city wouldn’t be lost, that all Americans and dependents would get out in time, she should have run to the airport.

Down Tan Da, a street usually full of restaurants, metal bars were pulled across all the doors and windows.

Hard to walk close to the buildings because of the mounds of garbage, hard to walk in the street without being run down. Helen moved ahead of Linh, navigating the easiest path through the debris that littered the street. Broken glass crunched underfoot. People dropped or abandoned things as they went. Clothes everywhere, plastic bags bulging with household goods, pieces of furniture and old rusted bicycles, a sewing machine and a frayed bedroll.

Helen guided him to the wall of a building, and Linh crouched, holding his side, and took deep breaths, huffing out air through his open mouth. She watched him suffer and hated herself more each minute.

“You okay?” she asked.

“More air.”

She felt his drenched shirt. “Give me the bag.”

“You already have the cases.”

“We’ll move faster.”

Linh nodded and handed her the tote.

The traffic stopped ahead, some kind of checkpoint. Helen helped Linh into a doorway of a building and left the bags with him.

Five minutes later, she came back, her face stern as she grabbed the bags. Linh noticed her hands trembling. “Come on, let’s turn around. Some ARVN colonel types are trying to catch deserters. Executing them on the spot. I don’t want them getting hold of your papers.”

They retraced a block and headed down a side street off An Dong Market. Along the sides of the road, more and more old people squatted on the ground, their faces closed down with despair. Children shivered at street corners despite the heat, eyes blinking hard and hands holding tight to whatever toys or clothes they carried, separated from their families. Almost a Danang. It always seemed to come to this moment in a war when the strong fought to survive and the weak fell. Civilization a convenience for peacetime.

Inside her head, a clock ticked off the minutes they were losing. Her shoulders already hurt from the weight of the film cases. Everyone knew Ambassador Martin was delusional, hiding in the embassy, afraid to call it quits. But Helen had calculated that when the hard pull finally came, the U.S. military wouldn’t dare leave until every American and all the related Vietnamese staff were taken out. They could never afford that kind of bad publicity. Days if not weeks of flights. Not like the British embassy that flatly abandoned its Vietnamese staff. Impossible to anticipate the breakdown of the city within hours, having to make it all the way on foot, with bags and a weakening Linh. It wasn’t supposed to fall apart like this.

Two blocks over from An Dong they turned up another street parallel to the checkpoint, weaving back and forth through alleys to avoid soldiers, wasting precious energy. Helen got lost and left Linh several times while she rechecked major street names. Halfway up Tran Hung Dao, at the front of a loose crowd of people, gunfire sounded behind them. The crowd panicked, trampling those in front, and Helen was shoved hard against her back, knocking her down on her hands and knees. She reached for Linh, and together they scrambled to the sidewalk, pressing themselves behind an overflowing garbage bin. Linh sat on the sodden ground, chest heaving.

Helen moved to the front of the trash bin and looked back south to the head of the street. There were about ten men, drunk and swigging from liquor bottles. Dressed half in uniform, half in civilian clothes, unclear if they were ARVN trying to melt into the civilian crowd or the local coi boi, cowboys, thugs, masquerading as soldiers in order to loot with less interference. They fired into the crowd and laughed as they watched people trample over one another in their desperation to flee.

One of them was dressed in a satin shirt that hung down over camouflage pants with army boots. He pointed a rifle at a group of women cowering on the opposite side of the street from the garbage bin. The men surrounded the girls, pulled one away from the rest and pushed her into the deep alcove of a doorway.

Helen looked up and down the street, hoping for some diversion to rescue the woman. Nothing she could do without getting herself and Linh killed. The always present “white mice,” city police, usually on every corner, now nonexistent.

Her only means taking out her camera, ready to shoot.

An older woman from the group, a mother or aunt, screamed and ran forward toward the alcove, and one of the soldiers shot her. Captured on film. The curse of photojournalism in a war was that a good picture necessitated the subject getting hurt or killed. Helen blinked, tamped emotion.

The men gathered the rest of the women together, guns trained on them, probably planning to execute all witnesses. A frame. The girl from the alcove ran back into the group, face bloodied, pants torn. A frame. One of the men with an angry blade of a face. Frame. He jerked his head around, making sure no one saw what they would do next, and then his eyes locked on Helen across the street. A frame. And another.

“Dung lai! Stop!” he shouted, and the men abandoned the women and ran across the street with their guns aimed. The women, forgotten, clambered away.

Helen stood up. “Bao chi. Press. The press is to have protection.”

Everything went black. When she came to again, she was flat on the ground, the rough surface of the street like nails in her back, her face covered in a warm liquid that turned out to be her own blood. The one who had rifle-butted her in the head screamed and pointed to the camera with his gun, but he seemed far away, everything seemed very far away, and Helen separated from herself, detached, amused by the absurdity of his shooting a camera. Didn’t he realize there were always other cameras? Her only thought that these men must be soldiers because normal street thugs wouldn’t care about pictures. Another soldier, his face round and childlike, with a sprinkling of acne across the cheeks, came and held the point of his rifle so close to her temple she could feel the heat from the muzzle, could tell it was the one used on the dead woman across the street.

Time unraveled. Had she passed out again? She finally found it, a sense of peace after all these years; for whatever reason, she was unafraid, and wasn’t that something remarkable for a poor little scared girl from California? Maybe it was no worse than closing a book. But then everything tunneled again to the present. Again, she was on the street and sick to her stomach. The asphalt under her head, tar from the street, garbage, and the acrid smoke of a fired gun, although she no longer remembered one firing, and she felt a childish fear that she would die in a foreign place.

The Vietnamese believed the worst way to die was far from home, that one’s soul traveled the earth lost forever, but this place was as much her home as California, she had lived out some of the most important moments of her life here, and if that didn’t qualify a place as home, what did? She knew retired military men who had come back to live in Vietnam, married Vietnamese women, and fathered children, with no intention of ever leaving, who still considered Ohio home. That was wrong. California was infinitely far away. California was gone. Even her dreams were shaped by this land—rice paddies stretched flat to the horizon, mountains and jungles, fields of green rice shoots and golden rice harvests like rippling fields of wheat, lead curtains of monsoon rain, bald gaunt hides of water buffalo, and, too, Saigon’s clotted alleyways, the destroyed tree-lined avenues, the bombed-out, flaking, pastel villas, even their small crooked apartment with the peacocks and Buddhas painted on the door. The battered, loving, treacherous people. Her heart’s center, Linh. An undeniable rightness in ending here.

A blinding flash of white, an explosion, and when she looked up at the soldier with the child’s face, he was gone, or rather partly gone, half his head and neck scooped away, and then he toppled, bouncing up off the pavement an inch before settling back down to the earth. The thugs were silent, suddenly sobered, a pack of feral dogs, and with the capriciousness of the violent, one by one they turned and jogged away.

Helen pulled herself up and turned her head, a tendril of pain curling up her neck, and saw Linh sitting braced against the wall, legs tucked against his chest, the gun from their apartment balanced on his knees. What toll had been exacted from him in saving her over and over again? A roll of the dice. Helen knew the soldiers could have just as easily decided to shoot them.

Her last bit of shiny luck used up, now there would be only the rattle of her empty bag with each step.

The women returned and surrounded their shot friend. Taking her remaining camera out of one of the cases, Helen went over and crouched, taking pictures of the outstretched woman. Staring up at the lens, eyes dark and empty, hiding a secret. One of the women moved a hand in front of her. Without thought, Helen batted it out of the way. Risking her own and Linh’s life, she’d earned this one and took the shot. Her due. The women enclosed their friend. After a moment, a wail.



Now Linh struggled to get up on his feet; no protest when Helen lifted the two black cases and their tote. They ran.

After a block, they slowed down to a walk, and after another few blocks they both stopped to catch their breath. They hobbled. A small spot of blood spread on his shirt.

“I need water,” he gasped. They searched the surrounding storefronts in growing desperation, and in that panic, that low point, she heard the beating of helicopter wings, as beautiful as a piece of music, and she craned her neck to see over the buildings. The sound was still far off. She smashed the glass door of a restaurant, went to the bar, picked up a glass from a neat row of them turned upside down, and filled it with water from a clay cistern on the counter.

The spot of blood had doubled in size. She pulled out a clean T-shirt from her bag. “Hold this against it.” When he finished the glass, he quickly turned away and retched. She picked up the film cases again but left the tote behind, unable to bear the weight on her shoulders and neck any longer.

They walked, this time more slowly, so slowly that any of the old people along the streets could have kept up.

Her head throbbed from the rifle butt, and she fingered a crust of dried blood in her hairline. Should she discard the two black cases to keep moving on? But it was as if she were abandoning each person captured on a frame of film. She remembered one shot in particular, a baby that had been trampled by the crowds of refugees on the outskirts of town. The guards had set up barriers right next to the body without touching it. He lay on his side like a small animal curled up in leaves in a forest. Myriad stories like this. This human being already gone, except as a dark spot on a lighter background of negative. If the print were published, the child would achieve some kind of immortality, however flimsy. Each of those kinds of pictures diminished the taker.

Helen hefted the straps higher on each shoulder, skin rubbed raw, and kept walking.

Linh held an arm across his stomach and picked up a walking stick lying in the street.

“Put your hand on my shoulder,” she said.

They walked down the center of main thoroughfares now, incapable of taking the more roundabout route of small streets and alleys. Luckily, hardly a vehicle was on the road anymore. If soldiers or coi bois came upon them now, they would be unable to run away. The traffic thinned even more as they approached the residential section where the American embassy was located. Here the streets appeared deserted, and she felt cheered that the hardest part of the ordeal was nearly over.

Linh collapsed against the trunk of a large tamarind tree. The neighborhood was old here; the branches arched over the streets in an umbrella of shade. Many of the trees on other streets had been chopped down to make room for tanks. A pair of helicopters came in, and Helen saw them clearly now down to the runners, heard the throbbing of one as it hovered over the embassy grounds, waiting for the first to land.

“We’re close now,” she said and squeezed his hand.

He leaned against the tree, holding on to it to stay upright, his face as wet as if he had just doused it with water. The blood spot on his shirt was as large as an outstretched hand. He gave her a stiff nod.

“We can’t stop again,” Helen said. “Next stop is inside.”

This was as bad as her worst patrols, each step an act of will, the urge to lie down overwhelming.

A block away from the embassy, a new noise joined the cacophony of helicopters and distant artillery. A silky, rustling sound, constant yet changing like the rolling of the ocean. Helen and Linh turned the last corner and came to a standstill.

A sea of bodies spread before them, not an inch of ground empty, bodies limited only by the buildings they were crushed against, from the front of embassy gates to the other side of the boulevard. Not a static, passive crowd, but a turbulent ocean of people eddying around motorcycles and islands of stacked suitcases, people surging and dashing themselves up against the solid metal gates of the embassy front like waves crashing against the rocks of a forbidding coast, breaking and falling back onto themselves.

Helen stood, numbed by the sight of Americans locking themselves away, fleeing. She glanced at Linh, who barely registered the turmoil around him. If he lost consciousness, it would be over for both of them.

“Give me the gun,” she said.

Too weak to argue, he handed it off to her. If anyone used it, it would have to be her. Helen took off the safety and placed her index finger on the trigger. In all her years in-country, she had never carried a weapon, had refused to make a decision to defend herself. Yet Linh had just killed to save her.

Shouldering her way into the back of the throng, moving toward the side entrance, her fingers firmly locked around Linh’s wrist, she figured even if they made it inside, the film cases would have to be sacrificed at some point along the way. But not without a fight.

The first people who felt the pressure of her pushing turned with angry glances but shrank away once they saw her.

She looked down to her blood-covered smock, realizing it wasn’t her own blood but the child-faced soldier’s. Her stomach flopped. She wanted to rip the smock off, but there was hardly room to lift her arms. If she released her grip on Linh, he might go down under the feet of the crowd. So she let go her grip on the gun, dropping it into her smock’s pocket, and reached up and pulled the black scarf off her head. She wiped dried blood off her face, wiped the smock, then let go of the scarf and watched it suspended between the bodies of people before it disappeared from sight as if in quicksand.

In the hot wind her hair blew, and the faces around her registered the fact that she was an American, or at the very least a Westerner, and more compelling than resentment was their realization that staying close might be a ticket out. “Make way for the dying American, make room for the dying American.” And so Helen and Linh were surrounded and nudged through the crowd, and after two hours they were pressed into the grillwork of the side gate.

She felt delivered, grateful for the Marines with their crew cuts and black-framed glasses, elated at the sight of their uniforms and reassured by the M16s across their chests that rendered her own attempt at self-protection ridiculous. Almost delirious, head throbbing, legs like paper, she realized that she was still on the wrong side of the gate, the guards so overwhelmed they didn’t see her.

All around her voices were raised to the highest pitch—pleading, Vietnamese words falling on deaf ears, begging in pidgin English for rescue. People bargaining, trying to bribe at this too-late hour with jewelry and gold watches and dirty piastres pushed through the bars of the gate, valuables flung inside in this country where wealth was so scarce.

A man close to Helen held out a baby. “Not me. Take my baby. Save my son.” He would pay one million piastres, two million, and as he met silence on the other side of the gate, he cried and said five million, five million piastres, money that he had either amassed over decades or stolen in minutes. He opened a sack and shoved bundles of the bills through the gate to obligate his son’s protectors, unaware that to these Americans his money was worthless, less than Monopoly money, that these soldiers were scared of this dark-faced mob, unable to grant safety even to one baby, that all they wanted was to protect the people already inside and escape from this sad joke of a war themselves.

Helen’s arm jerked down as Linh collapsed behind her, his legs buckled, and she screamed in Vietnamese, forgetting, languages blurring, then realizing her mistake, screaming in English, “Let us in. I’m American press.”

The Marine’s head turned at the sound of her words. “Jesus, what’s happened to you?”

“Let us in.”

“Open the gate,” he said, motioning to the guards behind him.

As the gate opened, more Marines came to provide backup, aiming automatic rifles into the crowd.

The guard put a hand against Linh’s chest. “He can’t come.”

“He works for the American newswires. He’s got papers.”

“Too late for papers,” he said. “Half the people out here have papers.”

“Damn you,” Helen screamed. “This man was just wounded saving my life.”

“Can’t do it.”

“He’s my husband.”

“I suppose you have a marriage certificate?”

“He stays, I stay. And if I get killed by the NVA, the story of the embassy refusing us will be in every damned paper. Including your name.”

The guard’s face was covered in sweat, already too young and tired and irritable for his years. “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anymore. Get in.” He came out a few more steps, grabbed Linh, then Helen, and flung them inside like dolls. The man with the baby tried to grab Helen’s arm, but the Marine punched him back into the net of the crowd. As they passed through the gates, five or six Vietnamese used the chaos to rush in. They scattered into the crowd, invisible like birds in a forest, before the guards could catch them. Guns fired, and Helen hoped they had been fired into the air. No more blood on her hands this day. With a great metallic clang, the gate shut again.

The lost opportunity frenzied the crowd outside. Heads poked over while Marines stood atop the walls, rifle-butting bodies off.

Inside was crowded but calmer. Americans stood by the compound buildings while Vietnamese squatted on every available inch of grass.

They were searched and patted down. “Ma’am, you’ll have to turn that in.”

Helen looked at the guard bewildered until she realized they had found the forgotten gun in her smock. Not only that, but she had managed somehow to keep both film cases. The guard led her over to the compound swimming pool, where she tossed it in to join the fifty or sixty guns already lying along the bottom.

“I need a medic,” Helen said.

The guard nodded and went off. Helen grabbed Linh’s shoulders and supported his weight as he lowered himself and stretched out on the ground. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. Several minutes later an American in white shirtsleeves came over with a black kit. “You hurt, miss?”

“Not me. Linh was wounded a couple of days ago. He’s bleeding.”

The man helped unbutton Linh’s shirt and unwrapped the bandages. “I can clean him up, but he needs attention from doctors on ship.”

“How long before we go?” Helen said.

“They’ll call you.”

Helen nodded.

“How about I look at that bump on your head? Looks like you might need some stitches yourself. Don’t want a scar.”



Hours passed. Helen and Linh sat on the grass, propped against the film cases. Papers were being burned inside the compound buildings, the endless secrets of the war, smoke and ash drifting in the air, settling on the people, the ground, on top of the water in the pool like a gray snowfall. After the adrenaline wore off, Helen was bone-weary. She nibbled on a few uppers, then brought warm sodas and stale sandwiches from the makeshift food service operating out of the abandoned embassy restaurant.

“We made it,” she said. “Happy, happy.”

“Still in Saigon. We just managed to crawl into a new cage.” Linh held his side, his face drowsy with dull pain.

Helen leaned in close to him. “I pushed it too far, but it all worked out. No damage done.”

“No damage.”

“When I took the picture of that woman, I was angry that the shot might get ruined. And then I thought, What have I become?”

Linh shifted and grimaced at the pain. “Just be with me.”

“I want to.”

“You didn’t start this war, and you didn’t end it. Nothing that happened in between is your fault, either.”

Helen’s face was expressionless, tears running down it, without emotion.

“You don’t believe me.” He wiped her face dry, but already her attention was slipping away. “None of it had anything to do with us. We’re just bystanders to history.”



The sky darkened. Linh’s head rolled to one side as he fell into a deep, drugged sleep. People near Helen worried about the Marines being able to keep back the crowd outside. The Vietnamese going out were classified as dependents of the Americans, although for the last decade the Americans had depended on them to survive in this harsh country. Traitors by association. The number of people per flight was minuscule compared to those waiting, like taking water out of a bucket an eyedropperful at a time.

The noise from the helicopters was deafening, but in between Helen could hear the distant rumblings from Gia Dinh and Tan Son Nhut, a constant percussion that matched the throbbing in her head. The noise much closer than this morning; lifetimes seemed to have passed in the intervening hours. Linh trembled in his sleep.

An embassy employee walked by, and Helen stopped the man. “How much longer? This man needs medical attention.”

“Could be all night.” He looked at her sternly, tapping his pencil on his notepad for emphasis. “Americans are being boarded now. Especially women. Go inside. He’ll be taken care of later.”

In the convoluted language of the embassy, trouble. She woke Linh, tugging him onto his feet, harnessing the straps of the film cases around her neck. They joined the end of a long line going up the stairs to the roof. She flagged one of the Marines guarding the entrance. “I need to get this man on a helicopter.”

“Everyone takes their turn.”

She rubbed her forehead. “No. He’s been shot. He’s going to die without medical attention.”

“There are a lot of people anxious to get on the plane, ma’am. I don’t have any special orders concerning him.”

A rumpled-up man with a clipboard came up. He was in his twenties, with a beaten-up face that looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“I’m Helen Adams. Life staff photographer. This is Nguyen Pran Linh, who works for Life and the Times. He’s wounded and needs immediate evacuation.” Helen figured under the current circumstances no one would find out about her lies, the fact her magazine had pulled her credentials. Weren’t they trying to kick her out of the country, after all?

He scribbled something on his clipboard. “Absolutely.” He scratched his head and turned to the Marine. “Medical evac. Get someone to escort them to the front of the line. And get someone else to explain why to everyone they’re bumping in front of. Tell ’em he’s a defector or something.”

“You’re the first person today who’s actually done what he said,” Helen said.

“I’m a big fan of yours, Ms. Adams.”

“I didn’t know I had any.”

“You covered my older brother. He was a Marine in ’sixty-eight. Turner. Stationed in I Corps.”

“Did he—”

“Back home running a garage in Reno. Three kids. The picture you took of him and his buddies on the wall. He talked about meeting you. I’ve been following your work since.”

“Thank you for this. Good luck,” she said. “We’re going to need a whole lot more than luck.”



One Marine carried the film cases and another half-carried Linh up the jammed staircase. They went through a thick metal door and more stairs, waited, then climbed up a flimsy metal ladder staircase and were on the roof. The air filled with the smells of exhaust and things burning, a spooky campfire. To the north and west, Helen saw the reddish glow of hundreds of fires and the few streaks of friendly red tracers going out against the flood of blue enemy tracers coming in. The odds visibly against them. The throbbing of her head had become a constant buzz, but she didn’t want to take anything, wanted her mind to keep clear.

The helicopter jerked down onto the roof, landing like a thread through the eye of a needle, and her body went rigid. The beating rotors and the screaming of the engine so loud, the Marines shouting unintelligible boarding instructions that she didn’t have time to explain to Linh. His eyes fluttered half-closed. A young man from one of the wires stood next to them, going out on the same flight.

The Marines signaled their group to move out, and they crouched and ran under the hot rotor wind. At the helicopter door, Helen grabbed the young newsman’s arm.

“Get these to someone from Life on board the ship.”

“Sure. But why?”

“I’m going out on a later flight.” Until the words fell out of her mouth, she hadn’t accepted that she had made room for this possibility.

The Marine started heaving the film bags on, the tape coming loose and hanging off like party streamers. “Hurry up, people. Ma’am, get on.”

Helen backed away. Her stomach heaved, sick in soul.

“Look after him,” she yelled to the stranger. “His name is Nguyen Pran Linh. He works for Life. Get him a doctor immediately.”

Linh looked up confused, not comprehending Helen wasn’t boarding. When he did, he struggled back out of the helicopter. “You can’t—”

“Stop him!” Helen screamed, backing away, blood pounding in her ears, sick that she was capable of betraying again. The Marine and the young man forced Linh back inside and buckled him in. She watched as, weak as a child, he was strapped into the webbing, saw his head slump to the side, and was relieved he had passed out. She ran to the helicopter, crouched inside, begged a pen and scribbled a quick few lines on paper. She put his papers and the note inside a plastic bag, tied it with a string around his neck, the same way she had handled the personal effects of countless soldiers.

In front of the waiting men, Helen bent and put her lips to Linh’s forehead and closed her eyes. “Forgive me. Em ye’u anh. I love you.”

Back out on the landing pad, the wind whipped her hair and dug grit into her skin, but the pain came as a relief.

The Marine stood next to her. “Get on the next helicopter out. Everyone here is not going to leave.”

“What about them?” she said, shrugging her shoulder at the great filled lawn below.

“Better a live dog than a dead lion. And they eat dogs in ’Nam.”

The helicopter’s door closed, and the Marine crouched and guided Helen back to the doorway, and he shook his head as she made her way back down the stairs.

Helen stood on the lawn and watched the dark bulk of the machine hover in midair for a moment, the red lights on its side its only indicator. Because of the danger of being fired on, the pilots took off in the dark and used projector lights on the roof only for the last fifteen feet or so of the landings.

A mistake, she thought to herself, a mistake not to be on that helicopter. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Her insides tingling electric as if there were bubbles running through her blood.

As much as she had prepared herself for this moment, she was at a loss. What was she looking for? What did she think she could accomplish? If she had not found it yet, what were the chances that a few more days would change that? She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.

Blood had been shed by one side; blood had been shed by the other. What did it mean?

The helicopter swayed and the nose dipped, a bubble of shuddering metal and glass, and then it glided off across the nearby tops of buildings. Safe. Tiny and fragile as an insect in the night sky. Helen felt bereft, betraying Linh, and all she could hope for was the cushion of delirium before he realized what she had done.

The Vietnamese on the grounds of the compound grumbled about the length of the wait, complaining that the Americans were not telling them anything but “It’ll be okay. You’ll be taken care of.” When they protested their thirst, the Marines directed them to the pool. The sight of Helen standing outside on the grass reassured those close-by—obviously the evacuation wasn’t over until every American, especially a woman, was gone.

Helen dreaded a repeat of the mob scene outside, the potential for it to turn violent, and made her way to one of the outer concrete walls of the compound and lay down on the cool, dead grass under a tree. The roaring grew quieter and quieter, the calming outside conflating with her state inside, until she almost felt herself again. In the middle of chaos, she slipped into a deep sleep and woke up to rusty clouds of smoke passing the faint stars and moon.

She took her camera, attached a flash, and began taking pictures. The Vietnamese watching her grew visibly disgruntled. A journalist wasn’t a real American; everyone knew they were crazy.



In the early hours of the morning, when many of the evacuees had fallen into a disjointed sleep, Helen noted a thinning in the ranks of Marines on the grounds of the compound.

An hour before dawn, the last perimeter guards withdrew, and as Helen followed, taking pictures, the barricade slammed down and was bolted—a final rude barking of metal—locking her and everyone else out. The first to notice the lack of guards were the people still outside the embassy, who had never gone to sleep, who remained frantic and now tore at the gates. The people inside the compound heard the roar and rushed the building only to find tear gas and a steel wall between them and escape.

Canned dreams and cynical promises crushed underfoot like bits of paper.

The outside gates were scaled and burst open from the inside as the last helicopters loaded on the roof. People poured in, flooding the compound in a swell of rage. Helen took a picture of a Vietnamese soldier aiming his machine gun at the disappearing helicopters, pulling the trigger, tears running down his face. Bullets sprayed the night air now tinged by dawn to the east. Understanding that their chance was gone, the crowd destroyed and looted. Helen watched a small Vietnamese woman haul a huge desk chair upside down on her head out the compound driveway. A man left with a crate of bagged potato chips.

A shabbier conclusion than even Darrow had foretold.

Now she walked through the same gates unopposed, ignored, made her way home down the deserted streets as if in a dream. Too incredible that the whole thing was finally over. Rumors were that the NVA would arrest any Western journalists and shoot them on the spot, the “bloodbath” that the Americans warned of, but she figured the reality would fall something short of that.



She came alone to the moon-shaped entrance of the alley, puddled from rain, then entered the narrow, dark throat of the cobbled path. At her crooked building, she looked up and saw her window lit, the red glow of the lampshade, and her heart, not obeying, quickened. Their old signal when Darrow had come in from being in the field. Except that he had been dead seven years now. With Linh gone, time collapsed, and it felt strangely like the start of the story and not the end. Exhausted, Darrow would be sleeping in their bed, damp from a shower, and she would enter the apartment and go to him.

She reached the lacquered Buddha door and found the brittle wood crushed in at knee level as if someone had kicked it hard with a boot. After all this time to finally be broken now. No one bothered stealing from this building. She wondered if Chuong had done it in spite after they had left. She ran her fingers over the worn surface, now splintered, touching the peacocks and the lotus blossoms that signified prosperity and long life and wisdom. She looked at the various poses of the Buddha in his enlightenment. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.

This was the way one lost one’s homeland. The first things lost were the sights, then the smells. Touch disappeared, and, of course, taste was quick to follow. Even the sounds of one’s own language, in a foreign place, evoked only nostalgia. Linh had no memory of the final helicopter flight over Saigon. No feeling of this being the end of his war. When he tried to recall anything, he saw, or rather felt, the beating of the rotors overhead in slow motion, like the pulsing of the wings of a great bird. A heartbeat. Darkness, then blinding light, then darkness. A strong mechanical wind that drove small bits of stone and dirt into his skin as he was pushed into the belly of the bird. Her broken face.

There was the familiar lifting of the helicopter, stomach dropping into feet, but for the first time he didn’t feel his inside righting itself after gaining altitude. He feared he might be dying, afraid that in lifting off from the embassy roof, his soul had dropped away. The images of his family, mother and father, brothers and sisters, Mai, Darrow and all the countless others, all passed before his eyes. And Helen had slipped between his fingers at the last minute, lost. Idly he wondered as he flew through the night if it might not be better to die right then.



The American ship rose and fell with the waves, but despite his fever, Linh held on to the railing. After the doctors had bandaged him up, he slowly made his way on deck. The sick room reminded him of a coffin. The medication they had given him made him faint-headed, but he had to see the sky, breathe the air.

He squinted to see the last of the dim landmass like the humped back of a submerged dragon through the hazy air, but the ship had already begun the long journey to the Philippines. He could not tell if it was the shadowy form of land on the horizon or merely the false vapor of clouds.

Superstition held that if one traveled too far from one’s birthplace, one’s soul would fly out and return home, leaving one nothing more than a ghost, but if that were true the whole world would be filled with nothing more than wanderers, empty shades. Women’s superstition.

He felt an isolation that would grow to become a new part of him, an additional limb. Among the Americans on board, he was a Vietnamese, but even among the refugees, he had little in common. Most were happy to have escaped. Some had sacrificed everything, including families, to be on board. But he had never taken sides. His only allegiance was to Helen, and she had forsaken him.

A young man walked up to shake his hand, and Linh had a dim memory of his face aboard the helicopter. A full, childish face with skin too tender and unformed for a beard.

“Shouldn’t you be down below?” the young man said. He had been moping around for hours, sorry for himself that he had missed the war and thinking of how to make an interesting story of the little that he had seen. When he saw Linh, his eyes lit up with possibility.

“Do you know where Helen is?” Linh’s legs were shaky, and he gripped the railing to keep standing.

“Not to worry. I gave the cases to a reporter from your office. They’re being transferred as we speak. I had no idea who she was. Man, she’s a legend.”

“Is she on board?” Linh repeated, sterner, closing his eyes with the strain of thought in his addled brain.

“No, not on this ship at least, no. Isn’t she staying to cover the changeover?”

Linh said nothing, simply looked into the opaque blue surface of the water. He had suspected that she might try such a thing, but he never guessed that she would try it without him.

“I just arrived in Saigon two weeks ago.” He glanced at Linh hopefully.

Linh remained silent. Over the years, he had doubted her love, if that love could only exist in war, if she insisted on staying partly because their love was only possible in his own country. But now he knew that she did love him. Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.

“I mean, I hurried! Left the day I graduated college.” He laughed. “And I missed the whole damned war.”

How would Linh manage to get back to her?

“Maybe we can talk? Later? When you’re feeling yourself? Fill me in. What it was like? I found out who you are. You’ve worked with everyone.”

Linh made a sweeping gesture with his hand, letting go of the railing, his legs slipping out from under him.

The young man grabbed him as he was about to slide under the railing. “Watch it there, mister! You’re coming with me down to sick bay.” He took Linh’s arm. “That was close.”

“I’m fine,” Linh said, although it was obvious to them both he was too weak to stand alone.

“Sorry, but I’m responsible for you. Don’t worry about her. Rumor is she’s charmed. They’ll probably be kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours. She’s well-known. The Communists don’t want any bad publicity.”

Linh closed his eyes and saw sun-bleached fields of elephant grass, the individual blades prostrating themselves, bowing over and over in supplication. That was how one survived, and yet Helen had never learned to bow.

“What they don’t want are any witnesses to what happens next.”




TWO Angkor (#ulink_9a8d249c-6478-538c-92b2-e87ce92b9835)


1963

Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war. He stood outside his parents’ thatched hut in the early morning, the touch of his wife’s lips still on his, when he smelled a whiff of sulfur. The scent of war. This part of Binh Duong was supposed to be safe. He had heard no shots, but nothing remained secure for long in Vietnam.

Mai’s voice could be heard rising from inside the hut, defiant, rising, the song tender and lovely among the tree leaves, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading, then the flourish of the trill in the refrain that they had rehearsed over and over. An old widowed man, coming out from his hut on the other side of the river, stopped at the sound, which was like a bow gliding across a reed, recalling his own beloved wife’s face, a tight rosebud from forty years earlier.

For the river, we depend on the ferryboatFor the night, on the young woman innkeeperFor love, one suffers the fateOf the heart…I know that this is your village.

The war was a rival stealing her husband away. Mai peeked through the door and sang clearer. Wanting to lure him back into her arms. As if they were in their school days again, and she could seduce him to miss classes and go to the river for the day, listening to her songs. The war would end soon. If she could only keep him with her, he would be safe.

Ca, Linh’s youngest brother, appeared at the side of the hut and mimed Mai’s performance, putting his hand delicately to his cheek and holding his legs primly pressed together while throwing out his hip like the French chanteuse in Dalat they had made fun of. Linh and Mai burst out laughing.

Mai’s tears too painful, Linh had forbidden her to see him off, her belly large with their first child. A boy, the midwife had predicted, because of how high she carried the baby—tight under her heart.

The night before, the family had performed the play Linh had written, and the villagers had stomped the ground and hooted and gotten drunk in approval. Linh still felt a warm tingle of pleasure in his hands and face at the thought of its success, but Mai had not let him enjoy a minute of it. The roaring audience demanding she sing her solo four times had emboldened her, and she wanted to leave for Saigon that very day.

“How can I leave? A deserter? They shoot deserters.”

“They shoot soldiers, too.” Mai held her belly, a hand at each side, and took deep breaths with her eyes closed, a new habit that unnerved him. “They have no time with poor soldiers like you. In Saigon, we’ll use false names. After the baby is born, I’ll get a job singing.”

Linh didn’t know what to do; he wanted to be a simple man, but fate pulled like a weight on his shoulders. He steeled himself with the thought that he was going off to fight so there would be no war in his son’s future. Mai didn’t understand that the families of deserters also suffered. Nor did he tell her that her sister, Thao, was already on her way to Saigon, even though her voice was many shades rougher than Mai’s. If she had known, the earth would have broken open with her wails, and Linh couldn’t deal with women now.

This is how history unfolds: a doubt here mixed with certainty there. One never knew which choice was the right one…

He tested the air again to catch the reek of fired weapons, but the odor was gone. Had it been real or only his imagination?



At thirty years old, Linh had already been in the army for four years. He had joined the northern army, then escaped to the South only to be conscripted by the SVA. A lackluster soldier. Sick of the war, but an able-bodied man had no other choice if he wished to stay alive. The flowing robes of a poet suited him better than the constricting uniform of a soldier.

Mai thought he should become a singer, a kind of matinee idol, to make the women swoon. She did not acknowledge how the years of soldiering had changed him—the slight limp from a piece of shrapnel in his foot when he was tired; the look in his eye, a new uncertainty. He was like a man with a golden tongue who is suddenly asked to conduct business in an unknown language.

His father had been a scholar, a professor of literature in Hanoi, and in his youth, Linh had shown a passion for writing poetry and putting on plays. But the war squeezed out everything else. Every young man was forced to take sides, either the northern or the southern army. Sometimes, over the years, one ended up fighting for both sides at different times. A paradox, he would later discover, the Americans could not accept.

Wounded in the foot, for a time he gladly traded in his gun for an army clerical job near his family. The workload was light, his paperwork never collected, and pretty soon he no longer bothered with it but went back to plays. A romantic young man, always dreaming, he hoped he had somehow slipped between the cracks, been forgotten. He and Mai planned their escape to Saigon, but he couldn’t tell her he delayed because he was afraid. After almost a year, his father’s bribe money ran out, and his company had informed him it was time to pick up a gun again.

Linh posed in front of a mirror in his uniform, playing the part of soldier. Squaring his chin. He wanted to look brave but thought he looked more confused than anything else.

Mai’s fears were partly true. The last time he had left he had not seen his family or his new bride for two years. When he left now, there was no knowing when he would see them again. He lifted the large bag of rice cakes Mai had given him. Her instructions were to come back before the cakes were all eaten.

The Americans had started to join the SVA on missions as advisers. Giant, they towered above Linh and the other soldiers as they handed out sticks of gum and cigarettes. Linh learned to recognize the Americans because they smiled more than the French, and because of their perfect, straight, white teeth. Always impulsive, Linh immediately decided these new foreigners were an improvement over their old masters.

The advisers stood with their legs spread apart, feet planted in big boots, and hands on their hips, nodding and conferring with Linh’s captain, Dung, who everyone knew was a fool. He wore a long white silk scarf around his neck, copied from some old American movie, and the majority of his attention was spent in keeping it clean. Jaws snapping with chewing tobacco, the Americans stood over the felled bodies of two Viet Cong, their bodies as small and gray and lifeless as river birds, their tattered black shorts barely covering their thighs. Did it escape everyone’s notice that the South Vietnamese soldiers more resembled their enemies than their allies? After all his years in the army, Linh still could not bear to look at the dead, and he hurried off to check supplies.

The first American Linh met was Sam Darrow, a tall, birdlike man who didn’t smile like the others. Darrow, slouched over, still stood taller than the other Americans. Thin, he had sharp limbs that jutted out from his rolled-up sleeves, the skin stretched across large, bony wrists. His thick-framed glasses were a part of his face, head moving from side to side like a bird’s, as if trying to add angles to what he saw. Linh stared at the name, DARROW, and another name, LIFE, stenciled on his jacket. Cameras that Linh had only dreamed about owning hung from around his neck, one on an embroidered Hmong neckband, one on plain leather.

“Come on,” one of the advisers yelled. “Take some snaps of us.”

Dung checked his hair in a small gold mirror that he pulled from his pocket. He preened as Darrow sauntered over.

“I don’t think…” he said.

“Don’t worry about thinking,” the adviser said. “Take a picture.”

“You got it.”

Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. “That should do you,” he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.

“Does America train in war better than it trains in photography?” Linh said.

Darrow smiled. “A smart guy.”

“I’m Linh. Tran Bau Linh.”

“You, Linh, are a sly one. How about if I ask Dung over there to assign you to help me today? Keep our little secret?”



The company decided to make camp that night about half an hour from Linh’s village, planning to move out in the morning. They had not even gone to sleep when the first bombs went off nearby. The new advisers used their shiny new radios to call in for an air bombing of the surrounding area. Linh would never talk about the events of that night. The memory burrowed deep inside him and remained mute.

This is how the world ends in one instant and begins again the next.

The only way Linh knew how to make the journey from his old life to a new one was to take one step, then the next, and then another. Now, when there was nothing left to save, he deserted. No longer caring what they did to him, he continued on the highway south, unmoored, for the first time in his twenty-five years of life utterly alone. Each day he ate one of Mai’s rice cakes, until the supply began to dwindle, and then he broke them in halves, and as the number grew smaller still, he broke the cakes into quarters and eighths, until finally he was eating only a few grains a day of Mai’s cakes, food that tasted of her and no one else, and then finally even that was gone.

During his first months in Saigon, he wandered the streets, working as a waiter in a restaurant, a shoeshine boy, a cyclo driver. No family, the things that had weighted his life buried. At night he felt so insubstantial he held his sides to make sure he himself didn’t blow away like a husk. The smells and tastes and sounds of the city entered him, but they did not become a part of him. His only thought was to earn enough for food and shelter, no more. By accident, he had lodged into an eddy of the war—to think of the future or the past was to be lost again.

In this vacuum, he grabbed for the lifeline of attending English lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon on his neighbor’s balcony. Although he was already fairly fluent from his father’s lessons, Linh went because it made him feel like a child again. Too, there was a more serious purpose: Linh’s father had been proficient in both French and English, telling his sons that in order to defeat them one must always know the language of one’s masters.

The teacher needed the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using “Don’t,” she said, “Give it a miss.” “Don’t go down the street” became “The street, give it a miss.” Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.

In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is. The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are peaceful, they are the enemy. We kill; they die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.

On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh passed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life, handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face shiny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.

“You have a job?” Linh said. “I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow.”

Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. “I didn’t know Darrow had any friends.” Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.



Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. “Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp space. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn’t for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff.” Gary figured the young Vietnamese man’s reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had a new assistant.

Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rushing beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.

They drove the empty, hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.

“You’re right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride,” Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. “People talk too much anyway.” He was a man who didn’t let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn’t question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh’s silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.

By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment—cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.

Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. “Complainer. But not when there is a tip.”

Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn’t moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.

During a break, the workers collapsed into the shade. Samang gossiped among his coworkers that the Westerners would kill them by working through the heat of the day. Darrow bellowed out a laugh and with his long strides moved to greet the new arrivals. He was even taller and thinner than Linh had remembered, as if his figure had attenuated during the months that had passed. Or had Linh’s misfortune bent him? Made him smaller in the world? He recognized the American’s large bony wrists.

Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past assistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.

“You’re as red as a lobster!” Darrow said.

“The climate’s killing me. Look who I found!” Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. “Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?”

“Sure.” Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude. Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary’s jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He cocked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. “How are you, my old friend?”

“Why don’t you make foil shields for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?” Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.

Darrow let out a big laugh. “My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course.”

Linh smiled but said nothing.

“You really do know each other?” Gary asked.

“Why would you bring someone who I didn’t know?” Darrow said.

Gary looked back and forth between the two men. “You’re one funny guy. That’s what I love about you. He’s going in with you to the delta and Cu Chi. Lots of good stuff there. Cover stuff, you know? Another Congo. How can one man be so lucky? Chop, chop.”

“Got it.” A mixture of feeling angry and tired, and something else—a strange, gauzy sensation that Darrow recognized as fear. Did Gary sense that he was hiding out? Trying to forget about Henry? That he was waiting for something? A sign that things were safe again? Why didn’t Gary go hump through Cu Chi and risk getting his ass blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his assistant. Darrow’s business was faces, but he hadn’t recognized this one—Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in hell.

“So how much longer, you think?” Gary asked as they walked back toward the jeep.

“Till I get the picture.” He played Gary, pulled his chain, unfairly resenting the push. After all, it wasn’t his fault—this crisis of nerve. Henry broke the illusion that they were charmed because they carried cameras instead of guns. It would pass. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The accumulation of deaths and horrors and jitters that got him. The curse of curses was that he was good at war, loved the demands of the job. What was frightening was he had developed an appetite for it. Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appetite would win, and his shrewd boss counted on that.

Gary stopped in front of the jeep, and in a gesture of bravado slammed his hand down on the trunk. He barely kept himself from wincing and crying out in pain. “It’s going down now, man, and you should be the one getting it. This old pile of rocks will still be here when the war’s over.”

Darrow wagged his head. “Did you know that the French who discovered Angkor asked the peasants who was responsible for creating it? They answered, ‘It just grew here.’” More and more it seemed to him a possibility just to sit out the war where he was.

Gary wiped his face and shook his head. “That’s truly crazy.”

“You never know.”

“How’s that? Who cares about this tourist crap? Just hurry back home, okay?” Gary tapped the driver on the shoulder to start the motor. “And take it easy on this new guy. My hunch is that he bullshitted me to get the work. Let’s put it this way—there’s no waiting line for the job.”

“Sure you don’t want to spend the night? Hang out a couple of days?” The truth was he liked Gary’s callousness, his will to do anything to get the picture, because that was the way Darrow used to be. And he didn’t want to be alone another night, and didn’t have much faith in Linh as a drinking buddy.

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I want to do, hang in this godforsaken place—Angkor What?”

“The gods will strike you for that.”

“Add it to the list, baby. I don’t care how good the stuff is you’re smoking. Get me back to Saigon with air-conditioning and ice cubes. Headquarters is busting me about hiring women, you think you have problems?”

“I’m hurt. Thought you’d want to watch a genius in action.” Darrow slapped his palm against the jeep hood.

“Don’t take a week? Right?”

“Hurry, Gary. Get out of here before the sun goes down and the monsters come out.”



After the jeep had left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but the black weight that was the suck and pull of the war had arrived, and it pressed down on Darrow’s shoulders. He should tie himself down to one of the big stones to keep himself there, to avoid Gary’s siren call. He smiled into the shade where Linh was standing. Too bright; he couldn’t make out Linh’s expression. The day he met him had indeed been dipped in hell, Darrow assigned to cover the joint operations as American advisers walked the SVA through a basic search mission. When they were fired on, the advisers called down airpower, but it dropped short, falling on them and civilians. A free-for-all clusterfuck. The SVA panicked and started firing on their own people, on civilians instead of the enemy, who had probably long retreated. The next day as they reassembled, the man assigned as his assistant was AWOL, nowhere to be found. He had seemed an unenthusiastic soldier. Perhaps he had used the chaos as an excuse to slip away. Perfect, Darrow laughed out loud, finally the type of assistant he deserved.

For the next week, Linh lived in the jungle side by side with Darrow. They rose at dawn, ate a simple breakfast of rice, fish, vegetables, and the dark Arabic coffee Darrow had become addicted to in the Middle East, insisting on brewing it himself. They worked all through the day with a crew of a dozen men, including the two brothers who were his favorites, taking hundreds of exposures, spending hours to light a subject, sometimes to the point of sending Veasna shimmying up a tree to strip foliage that was blocking the sun. One day, Veasna spent five hours picking half a tree away, leaf by leaf. He came down dehydrated, and Linh fed him glass after glass of water while Darrow hurried to get the right late afternoon light.

Darrow figured at that rate, he could spend the rest of his natural life photographing the grounds and never have to see another dead soldier. Yet at night they could hear thunder on the horizon, the war’s pulse, beckoning.

The two men shared a small room like a monk’s cell, crowded by a mountain of photographic equipment Darrow insisted on cleaning and moving it into the room each night so none of it would be stolen. Veasna usually stayed behind to help clean, while Samang hurried to town to chase women.

“So, Boss,” Veasna said. “You get me good job?”

“I’ll certainly put in a word for you in Saigon,” Darrow said.

“No, Saigon. I stay number one in Cambodia.”

“But there’s nothing here. No war.”

“Less competition then.”



Often Darrow stumbled across Linh in out-of-the-way corners, writing on scraps of paper that he quickly put away when approached. He caught glimpses of words and was surprised they were in English. His little AWOL friend a never-ending mystery. Nights in the stone city, when the workers returned to the village, seemed haunted to Linh. Darrow worked away, oblivious to his surroundings, the obsession of his work keeping him from the luring obsession of the war, but Linh felt ill at ease in this mausoleum. In the stillness, the place swarmed with gliding shadows. He, Samang, and Veasna took their meals in the village. Veasna talked about how the Cambodian traditional life was being ruined by the royal family, how they needed to return to the roots of the village, the communal life of the family. He said Samang had gotten corrupted by spending time in Phnom Penh. Linh stayed to drink tea and talk with the other Vietnamese and Cambodians on the project. Many talked of broken families, hardships, and escaping across the border to avoid being conscripted into the army.

The first night Linh came back too early and saw a woman from the village leaving Darrow’s room. The lamplight outlined her figure as she stood outside, as full and rounded as the carved apsaras on the walls of the temples. Darrow came to the doorway and pulled on the cloth around her hips, reeling her back inside. After that, Linh made sure he did not come back till midnight.

“Where are you so late?” Darrow asked when Linh came in.

Linh did not like this man’s disingenuousness.

“Found a girlfriend?”

“I’m married.”

“Sorry. Of course not.” Darrow nodded. “Stay for dinner sometimes. I like conversation. And I cook.”

“You have friends.”

Darrow smiled. “Lovely, huh? My God, lovely. Naked, she’s the replica of the ancient statues here. Brought to life. As if no time had passed since this place was built.”



One hot afternoon, the air as heavy as stone, Linh sat alone on a terrace far away from where they worked. They had been up since before the sun to capture the light on the buildings at dawn. Sleepy, eyelids weighted, Linh heard only the stillness, broken by the occasional shrill cries of the monkeys who scampered across the warm stones in search of offerings of fruit. The monkeys were feared. They bit and sometimes were rabid, and the workers trapped them and roasted the healthy ones for meals.

He had knotted a piece of jute rope and slipped his hands through the circle, then proceeded to twist so that the rope bit a tighter and tighter figure eight around his wrists. At each tightening, he felt a burning and then relief, his mind filled only with the white-hot sting of his wrists instead of the deeper pain that was always there. So preoccupied by heat and pain, he did not notice Darrow passing by.

Darrow disappeared and then returned minutes later, drenched with sweat. “How about it?” he called to Linh from across a courtyard. Pretending ignorance, he climbed the stairs in his big, loping gait, carrying two beers. Linh was so dazed he did not notice Darrow’s heavy breathing, did not know that Darrow had run back to his room like a madman, torn open a cooler, grabbed two beers, then run back.

Bound, he nodded, too late to hide the fact of the rope.

Darrow leaned over with a knife and cut the twisted rope between the purpled wrists. Acting as if it all were the most normal thing in the world, he then pried the caps off the bottles and handed one over. He’d noted the freshness of the scars when Linh first arrived. Darrow knew the wreckage of war. “Let’s talk.”

Linh rubbed his hands against each other, felt the tug of his callused palm, blood slow like sand through his veins.

“You were Tran Bau Linh last we met. An SVA soldier.”

“That man is dead. Now I’m Nguyen Pran Linh.”

“Okay.”

“I shouldn’t have lied that I’d worked for you.”

Darrow rubbed his face. “A cursed day, the day we met.”

“Yes.”

“Does this”—Darrow waved his hand at the rope—“have to do with that night? You disappeared.”

Linh looked away. “I do good work for you?”

“Best assistant I’ve had.”

“Is that the price to keep my job? To tell you?”

Darrow took a long sip of his beer and looked across the nearby jungle. “You don’t trust me yet. That’s okay.”

“You’re happy here?” Linh asked.

“Like getting a chance to explore the pyramids. Gary’s a good guy, but he doesn’t get it. I’ve had enough war, you know? Hell, of course you know. Just can’t quite get around to quitting. So whatever your reasons for being here are, okay by me.”

Linh took a slow sip of his beer. “You think you are in a peaceful paradise here. But you’re hiding in a graveyard. Their violence is simply past, ours is happening now. Each stone laid in place here is laid on top of blood. Violence all around you, but you don’t recognize it. It’s easy for you—you don’t belong here.”

“I didn’t make the war. I was just a mediocre photographer, headed toward wedding shots. War made me famous.”

“What about duty?”

“Far as I can see, you don’t belong, either. Officially disappeared.” Dar-row stared at him. “So why not run?”

Linh bowed his head and was silent so long Darrow thought he would not answer.

“From what happened to me, there is no running. ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.’”

Darrow was speechless at his Milton-quoting, AWOL soldier-turned-assistant. What in the world more would he find out about this man?



On their day off, Linh woke to the usual smell of cardamom-scented coffee being brewed but then smelled something else—sweet like the French bakeries in Saigon. He found Darrow outside nursing a skillet over an open fire.

“Pancakes,” Darrow said, not turning. “My wife sent me a box of mix. It even has dried blueberries in it. And a bottle of Vermont syrup. Get a fork.”

“You’re married?”

“She thought it would make me homesick. You know how women are.”

“I’ll never get over my wife’s love.”

Darrow looked at him. “I’m sorry…”

Linh waved away the apology. He didn’t want to be one of those people who couldn’t stand another’s happiness. “She would make my favorite, banh cuon, rice cakes, each time I left.”

When breakfast was ready, Linh looked down at the golden cake on his plate, the brown puddle of syrup.

“Dig in!” Darrow said.

Linh took a bite and gagged. The texture and the sweetness and the flavor, all peculiar. He poked at the blue pools of fruit in the cake with the prongs of his fork and felt queasy.

Darrow ate a stack of five cakes, along with cup after cup of coffee. “This takes me home.”

When he turned away, Linh threw the pancake into the bushes behind him. When Darrow turned around again and saw the empty plate, he smiled and plopped another on it, despite Linh’s protests. “You’re turning more American by the minute.”



Later in the morning, Veasna had a question about drop dates, and Darrow was nowhere to be found. After searching for an hour, they finally tracked him down to where he stood in front of the carved stone face of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Motioning Veasna away, Linh watched Darrow study the sculpture—blank, unseeing eyes, serene smile of the lips, the chips and cracks and lichen, shadows that changed the expression as the sun crossed it—until nightfall. Linh could work with such a man.

At his usual late hour, Linh returned from the village and stretched out on his mat. Darrow, as always, wide-awake and reading. Glass of scotch at his side, he insisted Linh join him with a small glass. Linh wet his lips with the alcohol—he would have drunk it even if it was poison to please—then closed his eyes and felt the walls spin. When Darrow came across interesting parts in his book, he read them aloud, regardless of whether Linh, muddled with drink, had fallen asleep or not, so that Linh acquired his knowledge of Mouhot’s history of the ruins in dreamlike segments. He would never be sure if the stories were real or his imagination.

The king of Cambodia, along with an entourage that numbered into the thousands, went elephant hunting through the dense forests northeast of the great lake, Tonlé Sap, in the year 1550. In some places, passage was so restricted that his slaves had to cut away vegetation and trees in order to pass through. They came upon a particularly thick, overgrown place through which they could make no progress. Finally they realized these were solid stone walls beneath the dense foliage—the outer wall of Angkor, rediscovered by the Khmers after having been forgotten since the twelfth century.

One day when work had finished early, Darrow rounded the corner of a building and ran straight into Linh, who quickly stuffed a scrap of paper away into his pocket. “What are you writing all the time?”

“Nothing. Scribbled poems, stories.”

“Really?”

“I used to write plays.”

“Let me read them? You write in English, don’t you?”

Linh looked down, his skin flushed. “Sometime, yes, maybe.” His hand a firm no over his pocket. When he came to his room to go sleep that night, he found a new thick spiral notebook and a package of ballpoint pens on his mat.

Finally, the last picture taken, exposures packed away in their cans, Darrow could not prolong the inevitable any longer. Finally he would go. He would not starve himself any longer, but must gorge himself on war. On their last day, as the trucks were loaded, he walked among the workers, handing out small gifts. Veasna and Samang were nowhere to be found. Since Linh had taken the morning off, Darrow went into the village alone with only a translator. He hoped to catch a glimpse of the young woman who came nights, who fed him the soft-fleshed jackfruit and mangosteens, but knew he could not ask for her. He wanted to make the brothers a farewell gift of an old Rolleiflex that he had taught them to use. Unable to find anyone, Darrow had the translator question the villagers. Long minutes of back-and-forth, indecipherable, while Darrow sat on a rock, sweating and swatting at flies that he hadn’t noticed while he was under the spell of his work. A shaking of leaves, and the young woman appeared from behind a banyan tree. She leaned against the trunk and rubbed her hand against her thigh, a smile on her lips, and Darrow felt twice as bad about going. Finally a shrug from the translator.

“What?” Darrow said in a raised voice. His irritation, a breach of etiquette. The girl’s hand dropped from her thigh, and she hurried away. Screw the camera, more than anything else he had an overpowering urge to run after her for one last meeting.

“Samang die of snakebite two days ago. Veasna is in mourning.” The brother had been climbing the side of an overgrown wall of the ruins when a cobra lurched out and bit him in the thigh.

Darrow slapped at the air. “Why didn’t anyone tell us? We have anti-venom. A doctor is only a few hours away.”

“He die fast. Not want to bother you.”

Shaken, Darrow returned to the camp, slammed his belongings into bags, the spell of the place broken—the girl, the temples, the pancakes—all of it ridiculous and driving him crazy; he just wanted to get back to real work.

Linh walked in and considered him.

“You heard about Samang?” Darrow snapped.

“It is sad.”

“Not sad! Stupid. Ignorant. It didn’t need to happen. Forget this place.”

“Samang could have been working on other job when the snake found him.”

“But he wasn’t. He was on my job.”

Linh picked up his bags. “I’ll go check equipment on the trucks.” He turned away, then turned back. “He was very lucky, doing his duty, earning to support his family. You should give the camera to Veasna. If he does well, he can earn money. That is all that matters to Samang now.”

Darrow snorted and shook his head. He shoved a heavy case out the door with a hard push of his foot. “I hope I’m not as lucky as Samang.” He grabbed a towel and wiped off his face, put his glasses back on. “Damn unlucky in my book.”

“And then there is the young lady you entertained. Their sister-in-law. Widowed with two small children to feed. It would be thoughtful to give her some money so she could do something besides sell her body to foreigners.”

The Europeans, upon finding Angkor, refused to believe that the natives could have built the original temples. Briefly they entertained the thought that they had found Plato’s lost city of Atlantis.

The young woman dropping pieces of warm fruit into Darrow’s mouth had given him a false sense of understanding that was lost again, that did not transport to the modern world, where a syringe and a dying man were separated more by fatalism than actual distance. He felt like that ancient king hacking through the jungle, stone walls of his own treasure barring his way.

Before leaving Angkor, Linh dropped a sheath of torn-out notebook paper on Darrow’s lap.

During the reign of King Hung there lived two brothers, Tam and Lang, who were devoted to each other. They were orphaned at a young age and came to live with a kind master who had a beautiful daughter. As they grew up, both brothers came to secretly love the girl, but the master gave her hand in marriage to the older brother, Tam. The young man and woman were blissfully in love, so much so that Tam quite forgot about his younger brother, Lang.

Unable to stand his unhappiness anymore—the loss of the two most important people in the world to him, and his jealousy at their happiness—Lang ran away, and when he finally came to the sea and could go no farther, he fell on the ground and died of grief, and was changed into a white, chalky, limestone rock.

Tam, realizing his brother was gone, felt ashamed of his neglect and went in search of him. In despair of not finding him, he stopped when he reached the sea, sat down on a white, chalky, limestone rock, and wept until he died, changing into a tree with a straight trunk and green palm leaves, an Areca tree.

When the young woman realized that her husband was gone, she went in search of him. Worn out, she finally arrived at the sea, and sat down under the shade of an Areca palm, with her back against a large white chalky rock. She cried in despair at losing her husband until she died, and changed into the creeping betel vine, which twined itself around the trunk of the Areca palm.

“Yours?”

“A famous legend of Vietnam. As best as I can remember. So you begin to understand where you are.”

“It’s sad. Tragic.”

“These are our national symbols. We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even.”



When they returned to Saigon, Gary paced the office with a summons from ARVN headquarters demanding Linh’s immediate appearance. The identity papers he had submitted were all faked. “I knew it. I knew you were too good to be true. Who’s Tran Bau Linh? Huh? They think he’s a deserter from the SVA.”

“Hell if I know. Linh’s worked for me the last year.”

“How’s that since I introduced you a few weeks ago?”

“A year. I’ll go down and talk to ARVN. You know with a little grease, they won’t care.”

Linh followed Darrow outside. “How we met…”

“We’ve worked together for a year.”

“You are sure?”

“Want to go soldiering again?”

“No.”

“A little flattery and some pictures of the boss go a long way. I noticed how late you stayed out so you wouldn’t run into my friend.” Darrow squinted in the sunlight, breaking into a grin. “We make a good team. No one is exactly begging to work with me.”



When Linh became Darrow’s assistant, the war was small and new. A bush war, a civil war in a backwater country. The American presence was the only thing that led Darrow there, a reluctant last stop before retiring from the war business.

They sat in the gloom of rubber trees in Cu Chi, the Iron Triangle region, after a firefight. Linh had stood up to get the picture, before Darrow knocked him down, and small bits of shrapnel had nicked him in the face and neck. Even the Leica he had been shooting with had been damaged. Darrow bent over the medic, making sure he cleaned out the half-moon-shaped nick on his cheek. “Now you have a beauty mark. Women love scars.”

“I can fix the camera,” Linh said.

Darrow took a long drag on his cigarette. “Don’t see how.”

Linh picked up spent shell casings and a metal fork. Darrow watched him, amused.

“Where’d you learn that? SVA doesn’t teach that kind of stuff.”

Linh shrugged.

“You’re the onion man. Peel back a layer and get another mystery.”

“No mystery.”

“I’ve read the NVA train photographers to work under any field conditions,” Darrow said.

“I’ve read that also.”

Darrow laughed. “They pose shots. Making heroes. Unlike us. We’re showing the truth.”

The rest of the company was out of earshot, but still Linh spoke softly.

“Make believe that a man’s father, a professor at the university in Hanoi, fought the French to free our country. And the French became the Americans. And the Nationalists became the Communists. And pretend the son learned to fix a camera with casings and a fork for the North, but that he found their promises to be lies. He escaped but was made to fight for the SVA. And pretend that after all this time fighting, all he wanted was to flee the war. If this was true, would you take this assistant?”

“Why doesn’t he run away?”

“He is tied to his country.” Linh rubbed his hand over his wrist.

Darrow took another drag on his cigarette, handed one to Linh. “This man has suffered enough. I’d be proud to work alongside him.”

Linh turned away. He could not help feeling he had lost face by telling so much, and yet he knew the Americans expected this, needed this abasement to feel comfortable.

“Question?” Darrow said. “This imaginary man who worked in the North, did he ever see Uncle?”

“I imagine…yes.” The more one told, the less real the story seemed.

“Where?”

“Outside Hanoi. Visiting a friend who served as a guard. A tiny village, just a few huts strung along a canal. A small vegetable garden, and he was bent over the rows for hours, weeding. All alone. He was only in his fifties but was sick with TB and looked ancient. Just a glimpse. He was just an old man weeding his garden. Hidden because he was in plain sight.”



They went out with an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) unit on patrol into a guerilla-dominated province. Darrow favored these small, specialized units who went native because they allowed him to understand the nature of the particular place better than the larger units that turned everyplace into an American base. Special Forces had agreed to let Darrow go along on the condition that there would be no mention of the mission, no pictures. He knew from past experience it was worth it simply to get the lay of the land even though it drove Gary crazy.

For days they walked in silence in the dim claustrophobia of jungle, not coming across another human being. Day melted into night that melted back into day. They lost track of time, staking out spidery trails, unable to move or talk—the only sound rain slapping against leaves.

Linh thought of the blank stone faces at Angkor staring out at nothing. Centuries passing without a single human voice intruding. Relieved by the sheer physical exertion, at night he sank down to the earth, asleep; in the morning he woke to find his hands clenched around his wrists, the skin bruised and chafed. The effect of the patrol on Darrow was unexpected. Maybe it was the time away at Angkor, sharpening his eye. After all the wars he had covered, this place spoke to him. The quality of the light on young American faces in this ancient land that was by turns beautiful and horrific. He had found his war.



The patrol spent the night in a small clearing, a village of six huts along a small tributary river. The people were kind, even killing a chicken in their honor, while the soldiers shared their rations. The chief brought out a bottle of moonshine to sip on. Leaving at dawn, they stopped by again five days later to get out of the rain and came upon only smoldering ruins. A dozen villagers dead, stinking in a thick sea of mud. Since there would be no acknowledgment that Americans were even in the off-limits province, no report of the violence. The enemy had been watching and had taken vengeance. An enemy that ruthless commanded a certain awe. Darrow realized that Vietnam was going to be a very different thing from other wars he had covered. The surface of things was just the beginning. The surface of things was nothing. Linh had it right: things hidden because they were in plain view.

Four of the soldiers disappeared down a path toward the west in hopes of finding the trail of the departing enemy. They would meet back in six hours. Darrow, Linh, and the remaining soldier retraced their steps to the original landing zone.

They waited another full day in the long elephant grass, unable to talk or play music or even start a fire to heat food. The sun beat down on their backs, the air heavy, a wet sheet, buzzing with insect energy. Linh, hidden in the tall grass, dreamed of running away. But where would he go? Finally, as protocol demanded, the soldier radioed for an extraction, although it would give away their presence and endanger the others.

And then like three lean and hungry wolves in the far distance, the missing soldiers appeared, carrying the fourth. They were struggling, exhausted, each stumbling with a leg or an arm of the fourth, now unconscious, soldier.

As naturally as Darrow had picked up the camera at the first sign of movement, he now put it down and ran through the field to help carry the wounded man. A decision without hesitation because it had been made and acted on a thousand times before.

As instinctively as Darrow going out across the field, Linh forgot his dream of running and followed him. The lines and dirt on the soldiers’ faces, the dry, unblinking stare of their eyes, showed the war had already started, the suffering begun.

No one had time to notice that Linh took a picture of Darrow helping to carry the wounded soldier. He was the only one in the shot without a weapon, the only one without helmet or flak jacket. For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be too brave.



Returning to Saigon, Darrow was gloomy. “Pictures would have shown what’s going on. Now nothing. If it’s not photographed, it didn’t happen.”

“Those villagers don’t care if they were photographed or not.”

“You have time to get out of this, you know,” Darrow said. He still did not understand that the worst had already happened to Linh.

“So can you.”

But that was not true. Darrow knew they were both caught.




THREE A Splendid Little War (#ulink_46ae4dc9-e53f-5cc3-8575-afd7fb09c4fb)


Saigon, November 1965

The late-afternoon sun cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them—either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.

The dusty military jeep came to a rubber-burning stop in front of the Continental Hotel, scattering pedestrians and cyclos like shot, and a barrel-chested officer jumped out of the back to hand Helen down from the passenger seat.

“What service,” she said, laughing. “How much of a tip should I give?”

“Just promise you’ll have drinks with us.”

“Promise.”

“We’re only stationed here a few more days.”

“I will,” she said, and started up the steps of the hotel.

“Remember we know where you live, Helen of Saigon,” the soldiers shouted, laughing, peeling away from the curb with a blaring of the jeep’s horn that caused pedestrians to flinch, to stop and turn. The Americans at the terrace tables closest to the sidewalk grinned and shook their heads, but the Vietnamese out on the street simply stared, expressions impossible to read.

Linh shared a table with Mr. Bao. They both watched the scene unfolding on the street in silence, saw the tall blond woman in high spirits dusting her hands off on her pants, patting her hair back into its ponytail, the crowd parting as she moved up the sidewalk, skipping up the stairs of the hotel.

Mr. Bao shook his head, turned and spat a reddish brown puddle on the floor to the chagrin of the busboy, who hurried for a rag. “They think this is their playground.”

Already tired of the meeting with Mr. Bao, how the old man spoke right into his face, warm puffs of breath assaulting him, stale as day-old fish, Linh signaled for another bottle of mineral water. “Another whiskey, too,” Bao said. For a professed proletarian, Mr. Bao certainly seemed comfortable using the Continental as his personal lounge.

“Add a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my shopping list.”

Linh had been working for Darrow for a year, had finally moved into his own apartment in Saigon and begun to have some normalcy in his life, when Mr. Bao showed up one night at the café he frequented. Although he didn’t make clear which department he worked in, what was clear was that he had an offer from the North impossible to refuse. “Tran Bau Linh, we almost didn’t recognize you. It does us good to see how you’ve prospered in the world since your untimely departure from the party,” he said. He had the square, blunt face of a peasant. As well, he had the unthinking allegiance to the party line. Linh was surprised that they hadn’t already killed him.

“We have big plans for you,” he said. “You will do your fatherland proud after all.”

The job was fairly innocuous. A couple times a month, he would report to Bao on where Darrow and he had been. Any frequent newspaper and magazine reader would know as much. The idea was to know the enemy. Linh made sure to bore Mr. Bao in minutiae to the point that he buried anything that could be of value. Most of their meals were spent talking of the food. If Linh chose not to cooperate, Mr. Bao made it clear that he would never hear the bullet that killed him. “You are lucky that you have a use, otherwise you would not still be here talking with me.”

The sky had turned a darker gold by the time the woman came back down into the lobby wearing a blue silk dress the color of the ocean at dusk. Her heels made a delicate clicking sound on the floor as she crossed to the bar where her date for the evening, Robert Boudreau, was standing. Linh imagined the air turned cooler where she had passed. “I have to leave now,” he said, getting up.



The bar was packed, standing room only, almost all men, but Helen spotted Robert in the corner.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My ride back from the hospital didn’t come through. I had to bum a ride from some army officers passing by.”

Robert turned with his drink and looked at her. “You clean up pretty well. I’ve got the prettiest girl in Saigon. That’s worth the wait right there.” Robert was on staff at one of the wires and had been wasting time in the front office when she came in looking for freelance work. Sensing that she was entirely overwhelmed, he quickly made himself indispensable.

He had a squat build, beefed shoulders, and a muscular chest that caused him to move with a thick, heavy grace, like an ex-athlete. Too, like an ex-athlete, there was the sense that his best days were behind him. A little too neat in dress, a little too Southern and patriotic in politics, he didn’t fit in with the younger journalist crowd beginning to filter into the city. Helen was the kind of girl he dreamed about showing off back home, but coming across her in Saigon seemed on the edge of a miracle. The coup he was devising that afternoon was sweeping her off her feet, romancing her until his assignment was up, returning home with her on his arm, a salve and a cover to an unspectacular foreign career.

She grinned. Back home, she had been considered on the plain side, but here the attention of being a rarity was unlike anything she was used to.

“Have a sip of rum for the road.” He gave her his glass, a heavy, square one with a solid crystal bottom that made her hand dip from its surprising weight.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I needed that.”

“You should come home to New Orleans with me. Plenty of the good stuff down there. I’ll put you in one of those big ol’ houses in the Garden District, and we can fill it with kids.”

“Robert, honey,” she said, batting her eyes and using a phony, thick Southern accent, “I came to Saigon to escape all that.”

“Let’s go. Everyone’s already left for the restaurant.”

They stood on the sidewalk while Robert haggled over the fare to Cholon with two cyclo drivers. Dark, lead-colored clouds had moved in and now begged against the tops of buildings, the humidity and heat so intense Helen felt as if she were walking fully clothed into a sauna. A shimmer in the air. She pushed past Robert and the drivers, ducking under the umbrella covering of one of the cyclos just as a sheet of rain crashed down. The city changed from gold sepia hues to shades of silver; the air, rinsed of its smells, recalled the closeness of the namesake river. Water beaded on the bunched flowers standing in buckets along the side of the road.

“Pay the fare, Robert,” she shouted, laughing, as he climbed in the second cyclo behind her, dripping wet.

The suddenness of the rains still seemed magical to her. Not like back home, where a few drops gave warning and then slowly increased. With the blink of an eye, a sudden Niagara. The monsoon had the tug of the ocean as if it were trying to reclaim the land.

Especially in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon, the shower didn’t slow the heavy pace of business. People simply covered themselves with an umbrella, a piece of plastic, whatever was on hand, and continued on. Both of the drivers were soon drenched but didn’t bother with rain gear, their shirts and shorts soaked and clinging to their stringy frames, water squelching out from their rubber sandals, as they serenely pedaled on. When they stopped in traffic, Helen turned to see her driver close his eyes and lift his face to the sky. When the other cyclo pulled next to her, she leaned across and whispered to Robert, “He doesn’t seem to mind the wet.”

“Probably the only bath he gets every day,” Robert said. He had been stationed in more than five countries since he started reporting, and he took pride in the fact that he remained immune and separate from each of them. He looked forward to the time when all the thrill of the exotic drained away for Helen, too.

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“He can’t understand me, honey.”

“I don’t care. It’s not nice.”

“You’re right. He’s probably a cyclo driver by day, a VC operative by night. Unless he’s a homeless refugee whose village we destroyed. By all means, I want to be nice for Helen.”

She glared at him. “Maybe he’s just a cyclo driver trying to make a living.” She reached over and pinched Robert’s arm.

“Ouch! That hurt!”

She giggled, not as naive as Robert thought she was but playing the part. “Stop making fun of me.” The truth was Saigon was dirty and sad and tawdry, and the catastrophic poverty of the people made her weak with homesickness. She found the Vietnamese people’s acceptance and struggle to survive terrifying, and she wondered again what the United States wanted with such a backward country.

“Helen, nothing is ever simple here.” He guessed she was shrewder than she played, but he appreciated her tact. He was tired of the hard-eyed local women who tallied their company by the half hour.



A few blocks away from the restaurant, the traffic bottled to a stop. A snarl of cars, trucks, carts, motorcycles, and bicycles. Standing still, the air turned an exhaust-tinted blue around them. The delay caused by an overturned cart ahead. Its load of fowl—ducks, geese, swallows—spread across the street in various stages of agony. Loose, downy feathers floated into the puddles until, waterlogged, they sank underneath, creating a cloudy soup. A group of Chinese men argued in loud voices. The birds inside the bamboo cages had toppled into the street. They quacked and honked in fright. Many of the birds had been trussed and hung upside down on the sides of the cart, left alive for freshness. Now many of these were half-crushed but still alive, flapping broken wings or struggling with snapped legs and backs. The owner of the cart pulled out a half-moon hatchet and began to lop their heads off. Dirty, orange-beaked heads were thrown into a burlap sack. A thin ribbon of bright red joined the muddy river of water running down the middle of the street. The cyclo drivers looked on, no intention of moving till the road was cleared.

“I can’t watch this,” Helen said. Since she arrived a few weeks ago she had made an effort to avoid the ugliness in the city and now it was unavoidable, blocking her path.

“Okay, we can make a run for it. The restaurant is only a street away.”

The rain lightened to a heavy drizzle, and Helen stood in the road looking at the mess of wet feathers and blood, shivering, waiting as Robert paid the fare. A dog watched from an alley and made a sudden run past Helen, swooping down and grabbing a duck. Helen saw the white underside of its belly in his mouth as the dog sped past with his prize, an old man in pursuit with a broom. Splashing up water and mud, the dog paid with one wallop to his rear end before he disappeared around the corner with his prize. The man who caused the cart to overturn agreed to buy all the birds, and the final detail of the price was being negotiated. The uninjured ducks in the cages quacked madly as the owner made a grab for them, dashed their heads on the ground, and used the hatchet, tossing the bodies into a box.

Helen ran over and motioned with her hand not to kill them. She pulled dollars out of her purse and handed them to the old man, who grinned at her and bobbed his head.

Robert came up to her. “What’re you doing?”

“I want him to set them free.”

“What do you think the odds are for a freed duck in Vietnam?” The ridiculousness of the situation made him feel protective of her. Maybe he could love such a woman. She would never last here long.

“He understood me. He’ll take them to the country or something.”

Suddenly the rain started full force again. Robert grabbed her hand, and they ran, laughing.

“One of those ducks will probably be on your plate by the time we order,” he said.

They arrived at the restaurant and were forced to stand in the doorway by a grim-faced maître d’ who demanded towels be brought from the kitchen for them to dry off. He stood in front of them, arms folded across his chest, tapping his foot as they waited. Helen looked down and saw he wore women’s shiny black patent-leather shoes.

Robert took Helen’s elbow and led her to a large table of reporters at the far end of the room. When the men at the table saw Helen, conversation stopped. Helen’s wet hair fell in stringy strands; her dress had turned the dark blue of midnight. Some of the faces looked stony, others outright hostile. A few were bemused. The lack of welcome was palpable.

“You look like a goddess risen from the sea,” Gary said.

“Did you swim here from the States?”

“Everyone, this is Helen Adams. She’s a freelancer just arrived a week ago,” Robert said.

“So now the girls are coming. Can’t be much of a war after all.”

“Quick work, Robert. What do you do? Wait for all the pretty ones to deplane at Tan Son Nhut?”

“Funny.” Robert made introductions around the table. “And that’s Nguyen Pran Linh down there. He’s the poor bastard who has to help that scruffy-looking guy at the end, the famous Sam Darrow. More commonly known as Mr. Vietnam. Either the bravest man here or the most nearsighted.”

The table broke up in laughter and catcalls. The awkwardness lingered.

“Don’t you usually bring nurses, Robert?”

Darrow rose from the end of the table, unfolding his long legs from under the low-set table. His skin was tanned, his graying brown hair curling long around his ears. His hands smoothed out the rumpled shirt he wore. The furrow between his eyes, though, was not dislike. He just couldn’t stand the sight of another shiny, young, innocent face landing in the war, especially a female one, and he was irritated with Robert for bringing her. Still, she looked pitiful and wet, already tumbled by the war, and he wasn’t going to let the boys go after her. He gave a short bow, his assessing, hawklike eyes behind his glasses making her self-conscious.

“Excuse the poor welcome,” Darrow said. He looked down at the table and picked at his napkin, then continued. “Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.”

“Watch out, Robert. Incoming.”

Gary laughed too loud and turned away. “Where are my lobster dumplings? Get the waiter.”

“I propose a toast to the newcomer,” Darrow said. “Welcome to our splendid little war.”

“Getting less splendid and little by the day,” Robert said. He sensed his mistake in bringing her there.

Darrow raised his hand to push his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and Helen noticed a long burled scar running from his wrist up to his elbow, the raised tissue lighter than the rest of his arm. He lifted his glass and spoke in a mock oratory:

“And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,They murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:‘Who on earth could blame them?’”

“My God,” Ed, a straw-haired man with a large nose, said. “Do you have crib notes in your egg rolls or what?”

“Now he’s showing off. Making us all look like illiterates.”

“Fellows,” Darrow said, “most of you are illiterates.”

Everyone laughed, the tension broke, and Helen sat down. Darrow had okayed her presence. Gary passed a shot of scotch to her to join the toast. She picked up the glass and emptied it in one gulp. The table erupted in cheers.

“You flatter me,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong Helen.” She knew he had taken pity on her, but she wouldn’t accept it.

The white-coated waiter brought a platter of dumplings, filling her plate.

The effect of her arrival over, the conversation resumed its jagged course. “So I’m out in Tay Ninh,” Jack, an Irishman from Boston said. “And I have my interpreter ask the village elder how he thinks the new leader is doing. He says Diem is very good.” Grunts and half-hearted chuckles around the table.

“Oh man, looks like we’re winning the hearts and minds, huh?” Ed said.

“So I tell him Diem was a bad man and was overthrown two years ago,” Jack continued. “He asks very cautiously who the new leader is.”

“You should have said Uncle Ho.”

“Only name anyone recognizes anymore.”

“So I said to him Ky was in power,” Jack said.

“What does he say?”

“‘Ky very good.’”

Guffaws and groans. “So much for the domino theory. The people don’t care which way it goes. No one cares except the Americans.”

“The French would make a deal with Ho himself as long as they could keep their plantations and their cocktail hour. Just go off and be collective somewhere else, s’il vous plait.”

Helen stopped eating. She wanted simply to observe and hold her tongue, but she couldn’t. “I don’t agree.”

“What’s that, sweetheart?” Ed said, eyes narrowing.

“That the people don’t care. They cared in Korea. Everyone wants to be free.”

“What do you think, Linh? Our mysterious conduit to the north.”

Linh looked up from his plate. “I think this rice is very good.” The table burst out in laughter and when it died down, he continued as if he had not noticed the interruption. “Many people in this country haven’t had such good rice in years.”

“Our Marxist Confucian mascot. ‘Let them eat rice,’” Jack said.

“I’m sorry, but what do you know about Korea?” Darrow asked. “You’re just a baby now. You could have been prom queen last year in high school.”

Maybe, after all, she would not escape the night unscathed. “My father died there. Nineteen fifty Chosin. My brother was in Special Forces. He died in the Plain of Reeds last year.”

Darrow refused to offer sympathy. “Half of this table is probably here out of curiosity,” Darrow said. “The other half out of ambition. Of course it’s not the excitement that draws us. We’re in the business of war. The cool thing for us is that when this one’s done, there’s always another one—Middle East, Africa, Cambodia, Laos, Suez, Congo, Lebanon, Algeria. The war doesn’t ever have to end for us.”

“You’re just a starry-eyed mercenary, huh, Darrow?”

A long silence followed, time enough for plates to be cleared and drinks poured, while Helen and Darrow stared at each other, then looked away, then looked back. The most arrogant man she had ever met; her face burned with anger.

“Wrong. I was prom queen four years ago.”

Chortles and some hand claps. “Here, here.”

“Where you from?”

“Raised in Southern California.”

Robert coughed, wanting to divert whatever was happening across the table. “What do you all think of the army’s estimate that the war will be over in a year?”

Darrow sipped at yet another drink. “It’ll be over if we quit. Isn’t anyone reading Uncle Ho and Uncle Giap? ‘We’ll keep on fighting if it takes a hundred years.’”

“You don’t believe that? No one fights a hundred years.”

“I absolutely believe that. You would, too, Ed, if you ever left your air-conditioned hotel room and slogged out in the jungle with us.”

“I’ll leave the heroics for you. Framed your Pulitzer over your desk yet?”

Darrow smirked, a shamed, lopsided smile. “Actually it was sent to my wife, so I’ve never seen it. I believe she hung it up in the john. She feels the check was the best part of the deal. Making up for my piddling salary.”

Chuckles around the table. “Cry me a river, Darrow.”

As curfew approached, the restaurant emptied; people hurried away with full glasses and bottles, promising to return them in the morning. The waiters pointedly stripped off tablecloths, turned over chairs. A bucket and a mop were propped at the door to the kitchen.

Jack turned to Helen. “So, should we have come here in the first place, lass?”

“To this restaurant?” She smiled. Laughter. “In the briefing today they said eighteen hundred men have died so far. Eighteen hundred, including my brother.”

“It’s never too late, Prom Queen. Get out while the gettin’s good,” Darrow said.

“So what about a country’s manifest destiny? What woulda happened if America had never come?” Jack said.

“We might all end up speaking Vietnamese someday?” Robert said. Laughter.

“Vietnam’s destiny has not been her own for a long time. What about the French?” Ed asked.

“The French were on their way out,” Robert said.

“Only because Ho found something stronger than them,” Darrow said. “If the French had never been in Vietnam, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to unleash the genie from the bottle.”

“And what a genie she is.”

“Well, geniuses, we’ve figured out world politics for one night. I say we adjourn.”

“Fine.”

“Sounds good. Sports Club or the Pink?”

Outside on the sidewalk, the men formed a large, boisterous circle, but Linh stood off to the side. He said his good nights and walked away alone. Helen watched his slight, solitary figure move away. No matter how they patted him on the back and bought him drinks, he would always be on the outside of this good-old-boys’ club.

Robert turned to Helen. “I need to go to the office. Is it all right if Jack takes you back to the hotel? I’ll meet you back there in an hour or so for a nightcap?”

“Sure,” Helen said, disappointed the night for her was already over, conscious that she, too, was now being excluded from the boys’ club.

“I’ll take her,” Darrow said. He walked up and stood next to Robert, hands dug in his pockets, head hung down studying something on the sidewalk.

“No, it’s out of your way, I’m sure,” Robert said.

“Actually, I was…going that way.”

Robert looked straight at him, his usual deference blown. “Where?” he said. “You don’t even know where she’s staying.”

Darrow smiled. Everyone waited. “Everyone new stays at the Continental.”

“Jack said he would take her,” Robert said.

“I have a room there, too. Remember?”

“I’ll go with Sam,” Helen said. She gave Robert a shrugging, apologetic look, as if the choice were out of her control. “Maybe I can win a few arguments by the time we reach the hotel.”

The men, entertained, realized the sparring match was over with a clear winner. Ed grabbed at his heart in mock agony and staggered on the sidewalk. Robert bit his lips together; his face reddened. Jack clapped him on the back. “Come on, we’ll drop you off, laddie.”

Two jeeps with drivers pulled up, and they piled in like frat boys going out on the town.

“You two be careful now. The streets can be dangerous late at night.” From inside one jeep, they heard, “Easy come, easy go, huh, Robert?” Laughter as the jeeps sped off.

“Well, I’ve put us in the middle of a little scandal, I’m afraid,” Darrow said.

“We haven’t done anything.”

“But we will.”

“We won’t.” Helen stood in front of the restaurant and looked up into his face. A paper lantern behind her cast a gold light on the edge of his high cheekbone, on his glasses so she couldn’t see his eyes. “That was sudden,” she said.

“That’s one of the keys to life here. Sudden and sublime. Sudden and awful. Everything distilled to its most intense. That’s why we’re all hooked.”

“You don’t scare me. Tell me, does the great Sam Darrow always get the girl?”

“He never got the girl. Why would he be here otherwise? The boy who can’t talk learns to take pictures. Did you know you have blood on your dress?”

Helen looked down and saw the spatters along the hem that hadn’t been visible when the fabric was wet. Her face tightened at the memory. “The ducks…and a dog running by with a body in his mouth.”

Darrow bent and wiped at the fabric with a handkerchief but the blood had dried. “Can you walk in those things?” he said, pointing to her heels.

“Sure.”

“I’d like to show you something. It isn’t far.”

“I don’t know…we should be getting back.” She didn’t feel nearly as bold alone with him as she had in front of the group. She was too lonely and homesick to trust herself being attracted to someone.

“Come on. I don’t bite.”

They walked down the narrow, crooked streets. Storekeepers had pulled down signs, mostly ones in French, a few in Vietnamese, and were replacing them with ones written in English. Skirting around vendors on the sidewalk, Helen and Darrow occasionally brushed shoulders.

She didn’t know if she liked him, but she saw a passion for the work and for the country that was missing in the others. “My presence wasn’t appreciated tonight,” she said.

“The boys?” Darrow said. “They’re okay.”

“They don’t want women here.”

“Wrong. They think you’re a novelty. A fun toy. Wait and see what they act like when they consider you a threat.”

She felt his hand at the small of her back as she stepped around some packing crates. He hesitated, then asked what had happened to her brother.

“The letter said he died a hero in a firefight. Sacrificed himself for his buddies. I loved my brother, but that doesn’t sound like him.”

“That would be enough reason for most to stay away,” Darrow said.

“I took care of Michael while my mother worked. After Dad died. When he broke a toy, I’d glue it. Whenever he got in fights with the other boys, I’d defend him.” She laughed. “I even gave him advice about the girl he had a crush on in junior high. I told him whenever he needed me, I’d always be there. And, of course, I wasn’t. For the most important thing, I was nowhere near.”

Helen looked down at the bloody marks on her dress, frowning. “How could I bear to live out this small life of mine back home?”

“You came too late. The good old days are all over.”



As they left the main thoroughfares, they turned left, then right, then left again. They doubled back and went forward, circled, until it seemed they had gone a very long way but not traveled far at all. Darrow leading her until she was so disoriented that her only compass was his arm in front of her. A new world, or an old world hidden, only half the stores lit by electricity, and then usually no more than a bare lightbulb swinging high on the ceiling, the rest dimly illuminated by kerosene lamps that flickered and made the rooms look alive. Many of the stores barely larger than closets, a mystery to figure out what they put up for sale in their crowded interiors. One sold paper—newspaper, writing paper, butcher paper. Another store sold twine. Still another, only scissors and knives. Food vendors crowded in portable stalls. The smells of spices she could not name blended with the sweet incense burning in the stores, all of it cloying the smell of diesel and sewage and the ever-present river.

They came to the moon-shaped entrance of an alley that was flooded across from the rain. It narrowed to the dark throat of a path.

“The streets are known by the guilds on them—noodle street, sail street, cotton street, coffin street. So if you want a driver to bring you here, say you want to go to the meeting place of silk street and lacquered bowl street.”

“Why would I want to come here?”

“It’s this way,” he said, ignoring her.

Helen looked down at the oily, pitch-black water doubtfully as Darrow stepped into it. It covered his ankles.

“They don’t get around to fixing the dips and the potholes very often.”

“Maybe we should do this another time. Curfew is only an hour away,” she said.

Without warning he scooped her up in his arms and carried her through the puddle. Chinese and Vietnamese crowded the wide mouth of the alley, the women giggling and pointing. Helen heard men barking out comments she couldn’t understand. On the other side of the puddle, Darrow kept holding her.

“Put me down now,” she said. “This is stupid.”

He kept holding her.

“Put me down,” she said. He slowly lowered her but kept her tight against his body. When her feet touched the ground, she was still in the cage of his arms.

“If you don’t stop this, I’m going to leave.”

“How? Now I have a moat holding you back. You’ll ruin your lovely shoes.”

She sighed. “I’ll take off my shoes and carry them as I run through your moat. Believe me.”

“I believe you.”

They entered the alley, the buildings now close together, and the lights within the storefronts dim. The darkness and closeness enveloped them; they walked shoulder to shoulder, Darrow holding her hand, and in the velvety pitch of the alley she did not let go. Not a person passed them, but there was no feeling of solitude in the night. Instead the passageway felt teeming, even crowded; it seemed to her that if she reached out her hand she would touch a body, someone pressing against the wall, holding still and waiting until the two of them passed by. For a moment, the image of the Vietnamese man, Linh, came into her mind, how he stood away from the group and went off by himself. Was he standing somewhere close, watching them now, holding his breath?

They walked in silence and came to a two-story, yellow stucco colonial building that leaned to the left as if it were gossiping with its neighbor. The facade wore faded, long ocher streaks from the rains and humidity, the patina like that of the moldering buildings in Venice. The roof and the entrance portico were tiled in a cobalt blue Chinese ceramic, the corners curved upward into points like the upturned corners of a sly mouth. An unsettling mix of cultures that created a strange beauty. The front door of the building was made of lacquered wood. On it were painted squares depicting the various scenes of Buddha’s enlightenment.

“Beautiful,” Helen said, tracing her hand along the panels.

“A lacquer artist lived here. When he couldn’t pay his rent, the landlord demanded he make something of equal value.”

Helen looked at peacocks perched atop rocks, elephants striding through bamboo, tigers crouched in palms, the great spreading of a bodhi tree, and pools of lotus blossom.

“It should be in a museum.”

“That’s part of what I love here. Everything isn’t locked away behind glass and key, you live with history as part of your life and not just on a field trip. The legend is that he worked on it a year. And when it was done, he ran away and was never heard from again.”

“Why?”

“It was during the war with the French. He couldn’t make a living and marry his girl, so she married a soldier. I don’t know if it’s true or a folktale. But the door is real. A friend of mine lived here. I still keep the place.”

“I thought you had a room at the Continental.”

“That’s the room that Life pays for. My official residence. This is my real life.” Darrow opened the door and waited for her to move inside.

They walked up the shadowy stairs that leaned to the right for a few steps, then to the left, as if nailed together by someone who felt ocean swells under his feet. The wood felt light and hollow like balsa, the middle of the struts bending under the weight of each footfall with a small groan.

“Are you sure these are safe?”

“This is a very old building. They’ve held so far.”

In front of a thin, scuffed door, Darrow pulled out an old-fashioned brass skeleton key and turned the lock. “This key only opens this door and a few thousand others in Cholon.”

Inside, he flipped on a small lamp with a red silk shade with beaded fringe that gently swished against his hand. The room smelled dusty and unused, like the stacks of an old library. He sneezed and walked to the window and opened it. The room was threadbare, furnished with only an old iron bed, an armoire, two wooden chairs, and a table. The only ornate decorations in the room were a large mirror in a scrolling gilt frame and the lamp.

“That’s a very feminine touch,” Helen said, nodding at the red glow of the shade.

“Henry, the guy who rented this place, was involved with a Vietnamese girl. It looks like it’s her taste. I let her take what she wanted, but she left this behind.”

“Where is Henry? Did he go home?”

“He was home. He was American, but he loved Vietnam. The war tore him up. I’ll show you some of his work—he was on his way to becoming a hell of a photographer.”

“Where is he?”

“Died two years ago covering an operation in the delta. Henry was reckless. I refused to go out with him on assignments. But he knew the dangers. That’s one lesson of etiquette you need to learn here—never ask what happened to someone. The answer is usually bad.”

“Not a very lucky apartment for its owners.”

“Not a very lucky country. Henry gave me a key. It’s the one place I could escape when I needed.”

Helen went to the open window and leaned on the sill. She smelled dust and rain, heard people walking down the alley, the tinny sound of Vietnamese pop music from a transistor radio. “Are you escaping now?” she asked.

“Trapped now is more like it.” And then, as if in answer, the room went dark. “Great Electric of Saigon at it again.” Darrow groped his way to the table and lit a candle.

Up and down the dark street, the slow pulse of flames like fireflies appeared.

“Why did you bring me here?”

Darrow stood next to her, reticent, and stared out the window as if he were waiting for something to happen. He did not want to say it was because she had appeared scared shitless tonight, woefully inadequate for what she had come to do. Neither did he want to admit he found her beautiful.

“You see the tree in front of the building? It’s bare now, but in the spring it blooms large red flowers. Henry and his girl used to have parties each spring to celebrate the tree blooming. Very Tale of Genji, very Asian.” Darrow chuckled to himself. “Henry loved all that shit. Swore he’d never go back to the States. Said America scared him more than any war could.”

“What happened to the girl of the red lampshade?”

Darrow shrugged. “I don’t know. Disappeared. Found someone else. The local women don’t have much choice once they start taking up with white men.” Darrow justified his own actions with the native women that if not him, they would offer themselves to someone else. He treated them kindly and then promptly forgot them. The grand, futile gestures of renunciation, fidelity, bored him; he had become a practical bourgeois in wartime. “There’s something lovely here, yet even as we look, even as we have contact with it, we change it. So why are you going out with that blowhard, Robert?”

“How rude. We’re friends.”

He poured two glasses of scotch from the armoire and handed her one. The glass was heavy, square, with a solid crystal bottom.

“Aren’t these from the hotel bar?”

He grinned. “Keep forgetting to return them.”

She sipped her drink in silence, listening to the outside sounds, the heaviness of the warm air moving through the room. He refilled their glasses and sat across from her.

“I like it here,” she said finally. What she didn’t add was that it was the first time she’d felt safe since she’d arrived in-country.

“This is the real Vietnam. When I come here, my mind slows down…I can imagine what is good about the place, what the people want to keep. The Continental and the Caravelle, the air-conditioning and room boys and ice cubes, make you forget where you are. The war groupies starting to descend. Restaurants and nightclubs booming, parties every night. Saigon is their Casablanca or Berlin. It’s the scene now. All these daughters of the country-club set descending with their copy of Graham Greene under their arm…sorry for the speechifying, I’m drunk.”

Helen set down her glass on the floor. “You’re saying I shouldn’t be here.”

“Should you?” His eyes took her in, coolly assessing. “Don’t ever believe that staying here won’t change you.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“I had Robert take me to the dinner tonight because I knew you would be there.”

Darrow raised his eyebrows. “Should I be flattered?”

“All they’ve let me do so far is human-interest features—widows, orphans, wounded soldiers. I need someone to get me out in the field.”

He blinked, not wanting to admit his hurt feelings at how unromantic her reasons were. Usually the battle-weary reporter spiel worked. “Only a handful of women are covering the war. None doing combat. It’s too dangerous, too spooky out there. The men don’t like it, either. It’s hard work. It’s hard for me. I’m forty years old, I look fifty, I feel sixty.”

“My brother wrote me a letter before he was killed. He said no matter what happened he couldn’t regret coming. I needed to see for myself. And the only way to become famous is to cover combat, right? I dropped out of college because I was worried it would be over by the time I graduated.” Later, she would cringe at her crassness, but at the time it had seemed daring to reveal such an unflattering truth. How could she explain the years of being a tomboy, refusing dolls and dresses, always hanging out with the boys? Her father and Michael shared the idea of soldiering, and she had been left out. She cried when she had to stay in the kitchen with her mother, told to bake cookies. Michael’s taunts as they went out shooting—You can’t come, you can’t come.

Darrow knelt in front of her. He liked her a little less now, so it made it easier to seduce her.

“No one can say I didn’t try. Go out with me on patrol tomorrow. You’ll have your own bite of the apple. You’re going to get it anyway…right?”

“Right.”

This girl, filled with ambition and doubt and passion. Like himself. Utterly unlike his wife, who was cool, clear, and sharp—a constant obstacle to his doing what he loved. A mystery why she had married him just to make him guilty over what he did. Their arguments ran in circles like a dog chasing its tail: It’s the only thing I’m good at, he’d shouted, but the truth was it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

“Are we fine? I mean, things between you and me?”

Helen reached and gently pulled off his glasses. Despite her playacting, she was terrified by what she saw in the hospitals, and the idea of turning down a man she wanted tonight seemed ridiculous. What if she were gone tomorrow, like Henry? She frowned. “Is there something between you and me?”

He put a hand on each side of her chair, and she noticed his hands shaking. That was good; neither was practiced at this seduction thing.

“Nerves. I’m steady in the field. Downtime fallout.”

She ran her fingers along the scar on his arm. “How’d that happen?”

He shrugged. “An angry husband.”

She laughed.

“I think it was Algeria. Hard to remember one from another. We should discuss this. Are we open about it, or do we try to keep it secret?”

“Cat’s a little out of the bag.”

“True. But are you prepared? A married man’s mistress?”

He folded the glasses into his shirt pocket. With his index finger he lightly traced her upper lip. Pressing harder, he went down her lower lip, pressing on the fleshy bottom till it spread into a dark flower. He kissed her.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She was not beautiful, but she did not correct him. She let it go that she was beautiful enough for that moment.

“Tonight is just ours. Nothing to do with tomorrow, okay?” he said.

She nodded and pulled away from him, stood up, and walked across the room to the mirror. Back home time seemed to stand still; she was always impatient, restless. In Vietnam everything moved at a flash speed that had nothing to do with normal life. She tried to hold her breath and become as still as the room. “You didn’t ask why I came here tonight.”

“I figured you’d tell me if you wanted to. I’ll find out soon enough.”

“Robert said you were one of the charmed. He said everyone tries to stick close to you because they think they will be safe.” As the words came from her mouth, she realized how foolish she sounded, like a child.

“Poor Robert still believes in the Tooth Fairy.”

“I already asked him to help me. He refused.”

“Well, good for him.”

“He said you have no morals. That you’ll do anything for a picture. That you would have no scruples about bedding a woman or letting her go out in the field.”

Darrow sat back on his heels a moment, winded. He got up and moved behind her, slowly unfastening the back of her dress, one button at a time. “But you came anyway. I didn’t finish the passage at the restaurant tonight. Last time I was out on a mission, the only paperback I had was a battered copy of The Iliad. I would memorize passages:

“ ‘Ravishing as she is, let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind…for us and our children down the years an irresistible sorrow.’”

A growl came from deep within the building, and the electricity struggled back on, first at half power, then all the way. Out of the darkness, plunged into light, she felt confused. Cheap, more like it. Dress half pulled off and her bra showing. Desire shrank. She pulled away, reached to refasten the buttons that had been undone. “We should be going. Robert will be at the hotel…”

“Really? Did you suddenly get frightened of yourself?” He watched her flushed face as she moved around the room, gathering her things. Not as easy as he had thought. Was he being played? Even so, she intrigued him. Perhaps at long last he had met his match in female form? “Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? Did you leave anyone behind?”

“No. If there had been anyone that important, I wouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have been so selfish.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“How so?”

“Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you’re given. Don’t you think it’s a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?”

She walked past him and out the door. “I’m leaving…with you or without you.” Down the hallway, she refused to look back, not wanting to acknowledge that if he didn’t follow her by the time she reached the alley, she would most certainly be lost.

When she and Michael were kids, their favorite game was hide-and-seek. Helen would search for the most difficult hiding places possible, and time would turn into eternities; often she would fall into a daydream and forget she was playing a game. She would wait in the darkened cubby, desperately wanting to be found.




FOUR Indian County (#ulink_a095b2f3-59b3-5c92-b897-2ca30fce2761)


At the Bien Hoa Air Base, Helen stood in the shade of a metal storage shed, a faded red stenciled BEWARE above her head; the words below disappeared, peeled off by the sun and rain. The area to be patrolled was considered a cleared one, the search of some marshland and two hamlets routine, establishing presence and nation building.





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