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She said, I didn’t know it was you. I mean, how would I know? You were covered in dirt. You didn’t have a helmet on and it was all in your hair—Her hands moved to her own hair as she said the words. He felt the corners of his mouth rise, felt a wash of relief. She remembered. He let go her arm now, sure she would remain with him, that whatever would happen now had already begun, had taken hold. She looked down at the floor, a frown of concentration across her brow. I thought you were a marine, she explained.
No—he began.
Your hair is short like a marine and you had a first-aid pouch—
It was a tape recorder. The first-aid pouch is waterproof so I use it—
You weren’t wearing glasses.
They were in my hand.
I was sure—
Susan, he said, the first time he used her name. Think back. I had no weapon.
She looked down at the floor as though searching there for something she had dropped. He saw her shoulders move; she looked up and he realized that she was laughing. He tried to smile but could not. When had his life become so weighted he could not laugh with a beautiful woman?
Oh my God, she said. She sounded happy, relieved, a little overwhelmed, even. I thought I’d never see you again.
The truest advice she ever heard about combat reporting was that if you were really scared, you shouldn’t go. But the amazing thing about being around war so long—one of the amazing things—was how it began to feel normal; healthy fear melted away and was replaced by curiosity. The stories came daily, told at the bar or while waiting at the airport for a lift. They were printed in newspapers, cabled from the offices on Tu Do Street, and with every story of a firefight, a skirmish, a reconnaissance, a bombing mission, a search-and-destroy, came a sense of the increasing normality. It was exactly the way the horses she had trained became used to fire and smoke and crowds and sudden loud sounds: a simple system of approach and retreat. Not that she became immune to fear—in some respects she felt scared all the time—but she reached a place where it arrived too late to keep her from doing the dangerous thing.
She did not feel braver. It was more that over the weeks the battles themselves had moved toward her, moved toward them all, into every city, every ville, so that it no longer seemed such an odd thing to witness and report, then eventually to wait around when a rumor was in the air, and at last to request to be woken at 4 a.m. to go out on an operation. It happened naturally, a slow attrition of common sense.
Now, she packed ace bandages, iodine, cotton. She regarded bits of rope or twine with interest, carried duct tape even though it weighed so much, wore a thin leather belt with a strong buckle. These things became most ordinary, like packing socks or underwear. She didn’t think about why she packed them any more, though if asked she could tell you. Almost all battle deaths are caused by loss of blood.
Midnight, miles and miles from Saigon, out with soldiers in the jungle, absolutely riveted with concentration, unable to do anything but walk forward, she strained her eyes to keep track of Son, who was in front of her, and of the man in front of him. The line of soldiers stalked the land under the absolute darkness of a jungle night, putting the flats of their hands against the backs of the guys in front of them, training their eyes on to the tiny pieces of fluorescent tape tacked on to helmets, following the flashes of light that danced in the opaque screen of black as they marched. She held the hand of the man in front, and the man behind. There were no instructions required; they were all so scared that holding hands made sense. She had forgotten that she had not been drafted and had no need to be there, that she was not a useful part of the military machine. She had forgotten, had been in the process of forgetting for some time now, and had arrived at a place in which it hadn’t seemed at all extraordinary to go on this search-and-destroy mission. Following the column, part of it now, she thought how easy it would be to become lost, to somehow spiral out of this line of safety. If she were to get herself into trouble, this would be the place. It would be so easy to become momentarily separated and it would feel, she imagined, like losing your way in outer space. And then it happened. Not contact with the enemy, not the sudden rush of incoming artillery in her ears, but the same abrupt, unexpected tide of awareness that she had experienced before. In the middle of that night, in a manner that arrived like its own assault, while walking silently in a string of men barely out of their teens, it was as though she suddenly discovered where she was and how stupid she had been. It was, she realized, like being in the helicopter the first time she was on the receiving end of gunfire—she could not get away. She felt the sweat dripping down the sides of her body, flooding her forehead, her eyes. She would follow the men with assiduous care, with the same steady, silent footsteps, even though now she was out of her mind with fear, even though she would do anything not to have come on the operation. It happened to her the same way every time: the discovery always came too late, or in the wrong place, or the wrong circumstances. Each time that she came, however momentarily, to her senses, it was like being back in that helicopter months before, hearing the bullets like tiny hammers beneath her and wishing she could run.
Then don’t go.
Marc would tell her this late at night as they lay in bed. It was his answer to any hint of worry or doubt, any concern at all about things that happened—the chopper being hit, the awful night on the search-and-destroy mission. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything. Or she wasn’t supposed to admit it.
But I want to go, she said. She didn’t say that it was he who had woken her with his restless audible dreams, that she would not be up late at night worrying if he hadn’t startled her in the night with his voice. When he talked in his sleep he did not sound like himself. The first time she heard him she was frightened, waking momentarily to the thought that she was elsewhere, with a stranger, listening to a voice that seemed wholly detached from the man beside her.
He kept whiskey by the bed, always a glass of it, or a mug or paper cup. He took a long swallow now, then searched the ashtray, using a penlight so he could see. I’ve got a jay in here somewhere. Hand me those matches. Look, you go back to sleep. You’ll feel better later. It’s always worse at night.
What is worse?
She looked at him slyly. She wanted him to admit he had the same fears as she, though it would do no good even if he did. He shook his head, pushing himself up, so that his back leaned against the wall. He had a pillow on his lap, the ashtray on the pillow. Everything, he said. He might have said more, about how the dreams rise with you in the morning, that you eventually find there is no rest, but he did not. He sat in bed and smoked diligently until she fell asleep. In the morning he told her it was nice that she slept so well. He told her he was jealous.
Like everything in Vietnam, their relationship seemed to be on fast forward. They’d met for the second time at the party, and after that night he’d disappeared up north again and she was forced to put him from her mind. His face, which she had known from television when she used to watch from her apartment in Chicago as he broadcast from Vietnam, was now part of her daily thoughts. She associated him not with a network but with that bunker in Con Thien, that hotel room where they stood by the window, an electric storm, a particular song that kept being played on the record player. Back when she watched him as part of a news report, it had seemed as if he was broadcasting from a world far away and unreachable. Now it felt as if the television image of him was from another world, a ghost of him that visited the living rooms of people across America. She thought of him altogether too often, and then one day he arrived unannounced at her door, telling her he knew a very good restaurant, and asking if she had time for a bite.
She wasn’t all that shocked to see him. He’d somehow managed to get a cable to her, letting her know when he’d be back in town and asking if it would be all right to get in touch. Apparently, get in touch meant come and fetch her from her room.
It’s three in the afternoon, she said.
Should I come back later?
No.
Am I allowed in? Or are we going to stand here in the hall?
We’re going to—She didn’t know what they were going to do. She had a page of copy in her hand. Her fingers were stained from fixing typewriter ribbon that had gotten twisted. She wondered if there was black ink on her face. She wanted to appear bold, decisive, to be someone he would take seriously, who could surprise him. We’re going to your hotel, she said. I prefer it.
He tried not to show his delight. He looked around him—at the peeling walls, the scuffed floorboards with tiny holes throughout from some kind of insect damage, at the bare bulbs and places on the ceilings where water from long ago leaks, had stained the paint. I think I agree with you, he said casually.
She would have changed her clothes but there was nowhere in the room to undress except in the bathroom and Son had crowded photographs in various stages of development there. She ended up brushing her hair and checking her face with a hand mirror.
I didn’t know you were a photographer, he said.
I’m not.
He indicated all the black-and-whites clipped along the walls.
She told him they belonged to Son. I think you know him, she said. Now his expression changed and so she added quickly. It isn’t what you think.
Where is he now?
Son? She thought for a moment. I have no idea.
He just pops in when he feels like it?
She smiled. She didn’t like the way the conversation was going. He doesn’t have anywhere to live. No money. He sleeps on the floor, on a mat. I know it must seem very odd.
Very. He took her hand. You’ll need an umbrella, he said.
He wasn’t especially tall but in her recently purchased flat canvas sandals he seemed so to Susan. He guided her as they walked along the sidewalk, which smelled like a mixture of overripe fruit and urine. He told her about his most recent story. He offered her a cigarette. Whenever the conversation strayed from the subject of the war—what was being said, where he’d been, descriptions of the men in the company he’d gone out with, or who he’d recently spoken to from an embassy—he seemed all of a sudden nervous. She let him talk, learning from him but feeling, too, that this is what she could expect, a wildly attractive tutor, an alluring purveyor of knowledge about the war.
Where are you from? she asked.
New York, he said quickly. Then told her how he’d grown to prefer Danang to Saigon, how he really didn’t like it down here any more.
You’re married, aren’t you? Her question, injected into the conversation as it was, made him lose his train of thought.
Currently, he answered.
She didn’t mind. Not at first. In the circumstances in which they found themselves, it didn’t make all that much difference.
Marc was what Son politely called “not so cautious,” by which he meant the guy had a death wish. Susan’s and his was a misguided amorphous, sprawling kind of relationship with no obvious direction or end in sight. In other words, perfect for the time being. They met between stories, holing up in his hotel or anywhere else they could find, disappearing for a day and then emerging again, rushing out to get another story. It was exhausting and addictive. And among many other things, it had the effect on Susan of knocking away whatever remnants of common sense and perspective she had. She went out on more missions. She took more risks.
I’m thinking you might get killed soon, Son said one night. They were sharing a meal at the Eskimo, sitting shoulder to shoulder, eating off each other’s plates and talking about something else entirely—how the Americans had brought over enormous pigs from the States in an effort to increase the size of Vietnamese pigs, a silly operation that had resulted in no demonstrable gain as the smaller pigs ran away from the atrocious, slow monsters from the West. In the middle of laughing, Son had suddenly gone quiet and then issued his concern. If something happens to you—he began.
Nothing will, she interrupted. That was on the eve of an assault mission they covered. And she’d been right that time. Nothing happened—or rather, nothing happened to them.
Another telegram:
EXCELLENT STORY BUT FEEL YOU PRE TAKING TOO MANY RISKS STOP MAGAZINE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR RECKLESS REPORTING STOP BE MORE CAREFUL STOP
She could imagine her editor sitting in her houndstooth skirt with its matching jacket, the vein at her temple throbbing, her skin itching as though she had fleas, sleeves pushed up away from the clutter on her desk. Cursing Susan for making her sweat like this, she would dictate the wire to some trembling young secretary. The cost per word of such a wire was too high to include the expletives, which the secretary would understand must be deleted from the final dictation. That’s it! she’d say when she had completed the message. Now bring me a fresh pack of matches. Then she’d ball up some paper as the girl fled tfrom he office, the dictated cable in hand.
Susan was fond of the woman; she did not want to cause her an early stroke, so she returned as follows:
BEING MORE CAUTIOUS STOP FOLLOWING SUPPLY CONVOY TO REFUGEE CAMP STOP HOPE THIS COMPLIES WITH REQUEST STOP STOP WORRYING STOP
She and Son were traveling with the 9th Infantry to what she thought would be a safe enough place in the Delta, an area where huge camps were being set up for what were being called “refugees,” that is, people emptied out of villages thought to be enemy strongholds. Her reason for choosing the story was simple: she wanted a story that did not require her to walk miles or sleep on the ground or sit in a hole in the rain. Besides, there was her editor to consider. This was meant to be easy, the refugee story, with photographs of children and mothers and smiling soldiers. She wore a pair of utility trousers, a T-shirt and field jacket. The rain was easing off so that she could flip back the hood on her poncho, enjoying the cool air, talking to the guy next to her on the armored personnel carrier about his collection of fighting fish that—so she learned—were a species that originated in Vietnam. They’d been traveling over an hour now, a slow, uneventful journey; it might have been a tractor ride on a wet summer’s day.
She’d run out of water and was drinking from Son’s plastic bottle, the canvas flaps jigging with the movement of the track, her sunglasses making her nose sweat. She was handing him back the bottle when she heard gunshot. The bottle dropped. She wheeled toward the sound, the air cracking around her as though blocks of wood were being exploded close by, then a huge booming explosion that made everything shake.
It was as though the world was erupting beneath them. Great spouts of earth rained down as the ground, blasted with mortars, sent mud flying as though an enormous force was kicking it straight into her face, over her head. The M60 mounted on the hull of the track burst into life; she was deafened by the gun’s noise, which soared through her, lifting her up, making her weightless as though she were floating. She had always thought she was protected if only by the firepower of the men with whom she traveled. By the guns, the boxes of ammunition, the ever-squawking radios, the sheer volume of artillery. Joining the convoy, so heavily armored, hadn’t given her any concern, not a moment of worry; they were heading for a refugee camp, not trying to take a city. And now, this.
The first few blasts destroyed the vehicles in front and the ensuing attack came straight at those who stalled. She was traveling on the open back of the APC; there was no place to take shelter, and she realized suddenly that the feeling of floating was due, in part, to how hard she had to work just to hang on to the vehicle. They were reversing now off the road, bouncing over uneven ground, churning up mud, scraping against the brush, which itself sparkled with gunfire. The track was tipping one way, then another, lunging into the jungle, then reversing up again, the men above her yelling to each other, firing madly, the spent casings dancing on the track’s deck. She saw tracers to the rear, flashes from the enemy guns. She looked at Son, indicating wildly the attack which was coming from behind, hoping he could somehow alert the gunman. Instead he grabbed her arm, pulled her down and together they jumped off the track, running, wheeling and diving, tripping, getting up again. It was a crazy thing to do, to run blindly toward the bush, away from the approaching gunfire, but there were soldiers on the ground now, too, and they didn’t know what else to do.
They survived the initial, lethal minute. That was the first thing. They missed the ammo log that exploded, the fragments of burning metal, the small-arms fire that rang out around them. It was the right thing to run. They might have made it, too, but there was a kind of disorientation; the jungle seemed to swallow them whole. The fighting continued, went on and on. They didn’t know which way to move. They heard screaming; they heard the long cracking sound of machine guns. But they were out of voice range and never heard the call to mount up. The convoy moved on without them while they were still trying to figure out where the road was, where the shots were coming from. All around them was jungle, elephant grass and vines, the air full of carbine, the heat like someone holding a blanket over her head.
She didn’t feel frightened. When she saw the ammo log blow she imagined that the blast would roll toward her. The burning metal tumbled through the air so cleanly, she thought it would fly straight to where she was sitting on the track. One of the crew on the track had already been injured. She saw him crumple in a single, smooth motion, as though someone had suddenly removed all his bones. He fell on top of the track, amid the burning copper shell casings which would blister your skin if they touched you, then he slid toward the edge. She might have hoped the soldier wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t hold on to such a simple, humane thought. She’d seen him fall, his body halfway off the edge of the vehicle. She’d seen the people running and crouching, throwing themselves this way and that, falling, dying, all of this happening beneath the heat of a rising sun. It seemed impossible that they had been so effectively ambushed and, then, that she had survived by running toward the jungle. In the thick of the jungle, she felt amazed to be standing, to be whole, stunned so that for a minute she ran her hands over her arms, her legs, then turned to Son and did the same to him. To think that she was still alive! Even her friend, too, even him. She was not afraid, but grateful. Grateful to every animal and bird in this harsh land, to the sun and wind and to everything she observed, suddenly free, standing, breathing, sweating, living.
Now it was only a matter of getting back to the convoy. She did not realize it was already moving. She pulled Son’s arm, told him they had better get out of there. But he stood silent and immobile, as though he’d been planted in the ground like wood. She began to grow concerned. She took his shoulders and shook him, frowning into his still, frozen face, wondering if he had some injury she could not see, a hole in his body like the holes she’d seen in bodies before, a dial of blood rimmed by charred black flesh, sometimes small enough you had to look for it, hiding an enormous, tattered exit wound. But there was no bullet and anyway, he was standing. Though his breath came in shallow gasps and his eyes stayed fixed on the air in front of him, he had no injury she could detect, and there was no explanation she could imagine.
At last she saw him move. He swallowed, sucked his lips in, and spoke in a hoarse whisper so that she had to lean toward him to hear. She realized all at once what was happening, what held him there, unmoving.
Behind us, he said.
II (#ucc3a5431-3862-5ce0-84ae-aa629bd15372)
The targets were known to everyone. For example, the men who carried radios were targets. Her second month as a correspondent, a Spec-4 was killed in front of her and his radio, still squawking, was hit two more times before she had the sense to crawl back out of the way. Son was screaming at her, Get down! Move! The lieutenant whose radio the Spec-4 was carrying was nose down in the dirt, yelling like mad for a medic. There were more bullets; they sent up spirals of dust only a few yards from where she was, splintered the branches of nearby trees, made hard cracks in the air around her. She could hear all this, the lieutenant going crazy, his cheek to the ground, his mouth open, calling and calling for help for the dying soldier, Son shouting her name until his voice was hoarse. But she was stunned; she could not bring herself to move. She dropped on to the dirt, her eyes level with the radio operator’s shoulder. She kept staring at his chest where smoke spiraled up from two neat holes, looking at his arms stretched out casually on the ground, the plastic handset still resting in his open palm. He wore a wedding ring. She thought about it, but she did not touch her camera. Had he been a dead Vietcong she would have gotten out the camera, but this was an American. He had a letter from home folded carefully in the band of his helmet, his face toward the high, white sun, his eyes large, empty, no longer focusing, and still the smoke rising from him, his chest on fire, his heart.
There was more shouting and bullets and the whoosh of rockets overhead. She heard the radio calling to the dead soldier, asking his position, calling over and over, a desperate voice demanding his coordinates, until finally the next bullets came and then even the radio stopped. Suddenly, she woke up as though from a stupor, felt a rush of fear gathering inside her, the sensation so strong it was like having the wind knocked out of her. All at once she cried out, then crawled as fast as possible to a nearby anthill, a huge mound, baked hard, bigger than a rosebush. She hid there, her hands over her head, her chin in her chest, wondering what she’d been doing—what on earth—sitting in the open like that, so easy to pick off.
The lieutenants leading platoons were targets. They allowed her to tag along with her steno pad. They allowed her to ask questions, to share C-rations and cigarettes, to dig a hole at night and sleep among the men, but not to walk point with them up front. They did not want her killed. It wasn’t that a lieutenant had any reason to favor her. She was of no use to them—if she died, if she didn’t—but she would not know to be wary of dried leaves, which can sometimes be old camouflage hiding an explosive. Or that an unusual object on the ground—a VC scarf or helmet—would blow her arm off if she touched it. They protected her by keeping her among them, and she cherished that protection. The commanding officers would not say this to her face, but a dead woman was not good for morale.
Son they did not worry about. Put him up front. Put him behind, in the middle, anywhere at all. He was male, Vietnamese, a journalist—who cared?
Radar equipment was a target. Artillery pieces were targets. Anything was a target, but there were values attached. A helicopter was worth a great deal. A reporter was not worth much, possibly nothing at all. Most of the ones who died were shot by accident or tripped a mine, at least before the war moved into Cambodia. Then it all changed. September 1970: twenty-five reporters killed that month alone. By then she was out of the war. She got a letter from a friend who was still there telling her Kupferberg was dead. Sanchez was dead. Jenkins was missing. Ngoc Kia, dead. She hung up her coat. She sat down on the steps. She thought, Everything in my life is poisoned. She thought, Don’t let me go back. But of course she wanted to go back. She would always want to.
But in 1967 she did not know any correspondents who had been killed, did not know any personally. You could die. Anyone could die; you didn’t even need to go out on combat assaults for that. Poisoned in a crowded street in Saigon from a hypodermic needle, or blown up while standing exposed at a bus stop waiting to board one of the military buses with steel mesh bolted over the windows to stop grenades. If you went out, or if you didn’t. Hotels were bombed. Church buildings. A secretary for the CIA heard a noise in the street, went to the window, and was killed when a car bomb exploded. Nobody meant to kill her, her specifically. There would be a lot of blood shed, then nothing for a week, a month, so that you began to relax. Then it started again. Marc’s cameraman, Locke, called it “the life cycle,” an ironic name, she thought. Marc was even more philosophic, saying “If it happens, it happens.” But one thing she thought she knew was that she herself was not a target, was never a target.
Yet here she is, with three guns trained on her.
The three Vietcong stand in a formation, one more forward than the others, rifles out, balanced in their hands so that the muzzles are aimed straight at her. She has not seen guns pointed in her direction before. She is used to seeing the sides of the barrels, the curves of the magazines, the focus of the soldiers who carry the weapons directed at some far-off target, not her. She remains completely still, as though for an X-ray, frozen in place, not sure whether to raise her hands. The soldiers must be assessing how dangerous she and Son are, studying their belts for weapons, searching the brush behind them for soldiers, for the green army uniform, the canvas-sided boots. Suddenly, one of them lowers his weapon and comes forward under the protection of his comrades, who stand ready to fire.
The soldier who approaches them is tall for a Vietnamese, with a narrow head like a rocket. There is a ferocity to his movements so that it feels to Susan as though a wild animal is charging them. He directs his attention at Son, whom he regards as though he has been hunting him for months, for years even, as though he knows him and hates him, as though there is some dreadful business that needs settling and which gives the soldier every right at this time to knock Son hard in the chest with the butt of his rifle and send him sprawling to the ground.
She sees Son’s head rock back, his knees collapse. She watches as he goes down with a grunt, his head rolling back as he falls. Her hands fly to her mouth, her eyes stare; she wishes she could turn away. He is on the ground, on his knees. The soldier turns now to her, glaring as she reels back, her body tense, expecting a blow. But he does not hit her. He shouts at her in Vietnamese, kicks Son, and issues an instruction she doesn’t understand. Son manages a response which includes the words bao chi journalists. There is a pause as the soldier takes this in. He mutters a short sentence also containing the word bao chi, and Son responds once more, his focus still on the ground, unmoving. The others remain ready to fire.
She feels so tense she thinks she may faint, and she wonders if they will shoot her as she falls. The first soldier nudges Son with his foot. A second approaches, this one smaller with bushy hair sticking out every direction, and Susan sees that he has a sword in one hand, his rifle in the other. He starts speaking in a rapid, insistent manner, pointing to the sky with the sword, a crude weapon that looks as though it has been made from burnt metal. All around them are flying insects, the sun so bright she squints and still cannot see. It is like being inside an overexposed photograph. Her vision fades at the edges. For a moment she thinks they are going to kill Son with the sword, bringing it down upon his head as he crouches on the ground. She cannot take this in, how they are going to kill them now as easily as if the act were a culling of stock. But the soldier seems more interested in what he sees above him, in the pale, hot sun scorching from its height above the scrub and trees. The sword does not come down on Son’s neck. Nobody is to be killed, at least for now.
Son is told to get up. He rises, his hands arranged behind his head, his neck bowed. The third of the young soldiers is with them now. He has an air of certainty about him, and circles as though assuming ownership, his weapon more loosely held than the others. They are talking, a rapid exchange that means nothing to Susan until Son speaks to her in French. His French is as good as his English, much better than hers. He does not meet her eyes.
“They want us to move fast now,” he says. “Before the air strike.”
Being captured, she discovers, is a feeling of being trapped, but worse even. Being trapped and buried alive. Son carries himself stiffly, his shoulder swollen from the earlier blow, one leg of his trousers torn at the knee with a gaping hole that seems to get larger by the hour. Her field jacket is tied around her waist, slightly damp from the morning rain and her own sweat, smelling like warm grass and mold. She has lost her hat and has only a scarf to keep her hair out of her face, the sun off her head. For now, the sun is not a problem. They walk through a dense stretch of jungle that allows in only the darkest green-hued light. The jungle has a fairytale aspect to it, with huge leaves, vines that hang like snakes, tongues of fungus that poke up from the ground. It has a smell, too. Rotting vegetation, stagnant water, hot wet earth. Her breath feels scorched in her lungs. She takes in the air and it feels empty to her, unable to deliver the oxygen she needs. She wonders how she stays standing, walking. She thinks she can feel the gaze of the soldier behind her, his eyes on her back, his rifle close enough so that she could reach back and touch it. She listens to the sounds of the jungle, the whistles and rustles, the birds through the trees, their own footfalls on the jungle’s floor. Everything spooks her. If she thinks too much about the soldier behind her she will scream.
These first hours are like no others she has experienced, not even when she pressed herself into the earth under fire. They are almost unbearable. She knows she is lucky to be alive. During the ambush, when she reeled back from the first explosion and saw the truck in front buck and collapse on its side, then heard the small-arms fire open up, she squeezed her eyes shut and listened, had no choice but to hear the cries of the wounded around her. That, too, was terrible. The battle had lasted only a short while. A matter of minutes, not even a quarter of an hour. They had run so that they would not be hit in the crossfire, and because they feared the vehicle might explode. They’d run because running was instinctive. Now, of course, she wishes they had not. She always knew it was possible to be wounded, to be shot, but it never occurred to her that she’d stumble upon the Vietcong in the same sudden, slightly incredible way that you might come across moose in a forest, and end up captured.
The plain, dark uniforms, the bushy, unkempt hair, the faces which appear younger than they are make the Vietcong seem more like a small band of lost boy scouts than enemy soldiers. They were separated from their unit when it scattered during the firefight. They had been as lost as Susan and Son were at the moment of their meeting. It was all a dreadful coincidence. Two have AK-47s. One has what looks like a Soviet semi-automatic. They have grenades and Chicoms, the appalling sword. The sword is what disturbs her most. The soldier who has it seems to enjoy swiping the air with the blade as he walks. It bothers her more than the guns and grenades, more than their acetate map that they carry, discussing where to go. The map is blackened with mildew, with little pockmarks like the actual craters that gouge the land. And it belongs, she realizes with a start, to the US Army.
“What are they going to do with us, Son? Please talk to me—tell me what they are saying—”
He won’t reply. For some reason, whatever she asks Son, he will not answer. He scowls and moves one leg in front of the other, sometimes rubbing his palms along the sides of his shirt. The sweat trickles from his forehead, his sideburns, making a damp patch beneath each arm and across his chest. She wants to know if he has any idea where they are being taken, what his guess would be, whether he is injured from where the gun struck him—anything. But he will not reply or turn her way. Perhaps this is what happens to people in such extreme circumstances. They go inward, forgetting the allegiances they once had, thinking only of survival. The minutes, then hours, pass in a dull, tense silence.
By noon, the jungle is a dark oven through which they travel. In only a few hours she has endured capture, marching, abandonment, with no prelude to these lessons. They walk, all of them tense. The Vietcong have the guns, which is why they are in charge, but there is a feeling they are as miserable as their captives, obliged to fasten themselves to these stray, anonymous people, to take charge, to point the weapons at them. Though they began the march with purposeful, angry strides, now in the early part of the afternoon they have sunk into a steady, weary step. They chat infrequently. There is a concentration of movement, on placing one foot in front of the other, every action slowed by the heat. This is no different with them than all the times she has been with the Americans, though now she is expected to move more quickly. Even so, the rhythm of their steps, the steady, almost mechanical pace is the same.
The only animation the Vietcong have shown came shortly after they set out, once the air strike had come and gone and they could hear it in the distance. The trees hid the billows of black on the horizon, but she could imagine the spiraling smoke, the planes disappearing one by one. Susan had a bag of watermelon seeds in the pocket of her fatigues, the sort of thing you buy before the Tet holiday and eat with friends. The Vietnamese soldiers took it, along with everything else she owned: her papers; a “women’s interest” story—about a triple amputee, six years old, who with remarkable prosthetics was now able to walk and use a spoon; extra socks; money; MPC notes; a signaling mirror; T-shirt; compass. They sat with their canteens and passed her comb from man to man, giggling. They tested her pens for ink. It was as though these unremarkable personal things were valuable bounty; they examined each item carefully Then they took her boots—a means of controlling her movements, kinder than tying—her gold cross, hairbands, a letter from Marc.
“Anything more you need?” she said as they tried to figure out what the Kotex was, holding it against make-believe wounds as though it were a dressing.
They have taken Son’s map, binoculars, matches, insect repellent, gum, and his cameras, which he handed over only reluctantly. They have taken everything she owns except the clothes she wears and her hammock. Without the weight of her possessions she is looser, lighter, able to move more freely, and yet Susan feels more exposed. If she could cloak herself in the things that are hers, she might stave off the disorientation which is arriving, she knows, not because she feels it yet but because it has been described to her by others, by women she once interviewed in an Illinois State Prison, for example, who were locked up for such crimes as “lascivious carriage,” which meant they had lived with a man out of wedlock. Once the women’s clothes and possessions were confiscated, once they had been dressed identically and doused with lice powder, their personalities themselves began a process of unraveling. The draftees she had interviewed some months previously reported the same feeling after their civilian clothes were discarded, their heads shaved so that they could not recognize themselves in a mirror, and every ounce of privacy annihilated to the extent that even the toilets were set out starkly in rows on a long wall with not so much as a screen between them. It did something to you, set in motion a kind of uncertainty that was easily manipulated by whoever was in charge.
She reminds herself that the men in control now are only three youths who somehow became separated from the rest of their unit during the ambush. It was almost by obligation that they took her and Son prisoner. And though their rifles are menacing enough, they have immature, bland faces. They only want her things for the novelty value. When she reminds herself of all this she feels more herself, and she can believe, however fleetingly, that the whole thing is a game. As if any moment they will release her and Son, and then all scatter behind trees, count to twenty and start again.
That is how she will tell it, she decides, if she gets the opportunity.
Hours later she is not sure she will get the chance; the mood of the soldiers has changed. They’d been excited at first by what their prisoners had in their pockets, but now they appear bored with the whole thing. Miles into the march she is surprised they don’t just shoot her and Son and have done with it. They are weary. When they pass under low branches they are attacked by red ants which seem to wait for their prey, dropping down on them as they pass and biting at their collars. Like Susan, the Vietcong have to dig the ants out or squash them beneath their clothes. They swear in Vietnamese just as she would swear in English, if she dared to speak at all. The soldiers look at Son and Susan as if the ants are their fault. At rest stops they glare at them with hatred, Susan thinks, as though it is they, the VC, who have been taken prisoner by these inconvenient others.
She supposes it is the responsibility of guarding that weighs on them, especially in the heat of the day. For her part, she is too frightened to hate them. There are times she is so certain they will kill her that she almost wishes it would be said aloud. She thinks the admission might help prepare her for the act, like anesthesia. By mid-afternoon her head is swimming. There is a pain in her left temple that tracks her pulse. All at once, almost without meaning to, she says, “They will take us someplace and shoot us. Near a swamp or a rice paddy. In a field.” After many hours of saying nothing she is suddenly talking to herself, talking to Son. He doesn’t answer, but he is giving her a curious look as though she’s inexplicably sprouted a tail. She’s feeling giddy; perhaps that is why he is staring at her. They sit beneath a cluster of trees. Her feet are numb all the way up to her knees. She is being allowed some water and she wishes there were enough so that she could drink for as long as she wanted, pour it over her head, over her feet which are dead to her now, so that it feels like she is walking on stumps.
One of the soldiers has collected some bamboo that he is carving carefully for reasons she does not understand. She is aware of the heat, the air swollen with moisture, but she no longer seems to be sweating. She hears herself speak and it sounds like someone else talking, not her. “They’ll stand us on the side of a bomb crater, shoot us, and then we’ll fall in,” she says. Her mind flashes images, sometimes disjointed, as though she is dreaming. She sees craters and bones, tall dry grasses, the white sun. She shivers and wonders why; thinks it must be her own fatigue making her imagine this. The craters look like convenient graves. She’s seen them full of water, newly alive with marine life, and wondered then how the fish managed to find their way into bomb craters. She has seen soldiers bathing in them, peasants fishing in them. She’s also seen a body or two. She thinks this is remarkable, that she could die now in a hollow of the earth, in the footprint of an explosive whose origins are from some Midwestern town half a planet away.
Her skin has gone strangely cool. Her lips taste of salt. Son is staring at her. The soldiers seem not to notice, perhaps not to care. For a moment she thinks she might fall asleep, right here, right now. Her head begins to dip, her eyes closing. She realizes she is becoming a heat casualty. She has seen troops medevac’d on stretchers in the same condition. Her awareness of this startles her. She recovers long enough to ask for more water.
“Can you walk?” Son asks. These are his first words to her in many hours and they feel good, like the water itself. But though he has spoken only once, the sound echoes in her mind so that it feels he is asking again and again: Can you walk, can you walk? Part of her, the part that is thinking straight, still rational, knows that it is heat exhaustion that is the problem. She drinks as much as she is able, then nods and stands up. Her feet are bleeding, she realizes, but she can walk.
They reach a clearing made some time ago by US troops who, judging from the look of the place, had apparently wanted to land a helicopter right here in the jungle. She studies the tree stumps that have been blown up, charred wood, charred ground, a lot of sudden sunshine that comes through like a knife. She feels almost drunk, her legs jelly, her arms shaking, the cool sweat like the glistening oil of a snake. She is glad there are no craters near by, even though she knows she is only imagining what might happen, that nobody has told her, told her anything really.
The soldiers are busy scouring the land, looking for leftover C-rations, matches, cigarettes, gum—anything the soldiers may have left behind. There is a fair chance they’ll find something valuable. Marc once told her it was not uncommon for the Americans to bury a whole carton of C-rations rather than carry it. He told her this as they stood in a wooded area, a fire behind them from where the troops had burned a Vietcong hideout. She watched a GI walk to the river’s edge to dump a load of rations, then get another box and do the same again. What’s he doing? she asked. Marc looked up from his notepad, blinked into the sun, and explained. She’d had no idea. It was like a thousand details of this war that were a mystery to her. She looks now as the three Vietcong soldiers pick up bits of garbage, an empty Salem pack, a cracked Bic lighter. If found, rations are treasure to the Vietcong, better than money, which they seldom have a use for except to surrender to their superiors.
She imagines the Americans back again, the soldiers who made the clearing. With their M16s, their bandoliers, grenades and knives and helmets. She wishes them back and for a moment she smiles, picturing the face of a captain she met while out with Marc on a story in Gio Linh. She didn’t think she’d paid that much attention, but there is his face in front of her now, the slightly wild glaze of his expression, the thin upper lip, the whites of his eyes bright against his face, which is dark with earth and sun, with insect repellent and dust.
He’d stood in a clearing waving an ice-cream cone as he spoke. There’d been a story about how the troops were under-supplied, with TV footage of them describing how they might run out of C-rations at this rate. Command had reacted, first by getting after the reporter about “misreporting,” and second by sending barrels of ice cream and ammunition out to the soldiers immediately. She watched the captain talk between slurps of ice cream, which melted faster than he could eat it, running down his sleeve, attracting insects which he picked out with his fingers. They’d blasted out a temporary landing zone to get in a chopper for a wounded soldier and it looked like the clearing where she sat now. She half expected to see the white wrappers, the Popsicle sticks, packaging from dressings, cigarette butts. She half expected to see that captain’s grubby face, the dusty, sagging uniform, the reassuring gun.
You shouldn’t have said what you did, Davis, the captain had told Marc. Ruins morale, a story like that.
Wasn’t me, Marc said. I didn’t even know about it.
It might not be you who did it, but it was your network, that’s for goddamn sure. I mean, why can’t you people get on the team?
Marc sighed. I didn’t know the guy who did that story. We’re not all that friendly, the press. To each other, I mean.
I don’t know. You look awful friendly to me, the captain said, moving his gaze from Marc to Susan and back again. Getting altogether too friendly, I’d say.
