Читать книгу The Man from Saigon - Marti Leimbach, Marti Leimbach - Страница 6

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.

She’d only known Marc a few weeks then, the charge of electricity so strong between them it was as recognizable as an army flag. They could deny it—to the captain, to a dozen others—but it was obvious, palpable, a disaster in the making.

Under normal circumstances, if she were to think about the captain at all, she would have recalled with a small stitch of resentment the way he looked at her as if she was a nice little can of rations tucked into Marc’s own pack. But that is not what seems important now. What she thinks of now, what she wants most of all, is the ice cream. She is almost exhilarated by the thought of something cold and sweet and wet.

Son is studying the Vietcong, the ground, the treeline. She imagines he is assessing the chances of running into American soldiers. He frowns into the distance, then looks away, and she concludes that nobody is coming. The only sounds are jungle sounds: the rustling of unseen animals, of scurrying birds and monkeys and rats. Occasionally, she hears a series of long, piercing cries and she imagines that one of the hidden creatures is murdering another of them, and she is reminded of the cries of the men she heard during the ambush. She blames herself for being here now. She swats at the insects that flutter next to her head, confusing her in the heat and dust with the vibration of their wings and the constant stimulation of movement near her eyes.

As they begin again, moving out of the clearing, she asks Son once more if he thinks they will be shot. They are walking over splintered, dead branches strewn with new vines that grow easily over the broken land, around torn stumps already sprouting new buds, the land so fertile and determined it is a force of its own, as powerful as the war. For a moment she thinks she sees Son nod. This sends her into a desperate, pleading burst.

“Is that right, then?” she says. “Is that what is going to happen? We’ll be shot?”

He has no chance to respond. One of the soldiers indicates with his gun that she needs to keep moving. Walking is increasingly difficult. Her feet hurt; she is drying out. In a minute she’ll begin hallucinating, or perhaps she will fall. She feels invisible to the soldiers, who move them on like cattle. She feels invisible to Son; perhaps in his mind she is already dead.

Salt pills, the juice of a dragonfruit, water and shade. She is nursed with these simple things and when she wakes she has no idea how long she has been asleep. She thinks it has been a long time, but judging from the light still left in the day, it has been less than an hour. They begin again to walk. She feels better than before, but not great. She wishes Son would talk to her, just a few words every once in a while and she would be satisfied. He still does not turn around or slow his pace. Perhaps he has no choice. She is handicapped by her inability to understand what is said when the soldiers speak to him. Before they took her wristwatch, she had checked the time every ten minutes, comforted by the thought that it was the same time everywhere else as here in this wilderness. Now she feels adrift, out of synch with the world. The soldier with longish hair is ahead, the other two behind. The guards keep their rifles on their shoulders, or use them to point, like extensions of their arms and hands.

You get ground down to powder, then you get greased, that’s what a GI told her once, his summation of the life of an infantryman. He was missing two teeth, knocked out when he dove during an attack on a firebase that was nearly overrun. He struggled with the gap in his mouth, his tongue escaping so that he developed an unwelcome lisp. Then you get greathed, he said. You thtart getting religion. You thtart wanting God.

She understands now what he meant. It was this right here. Her feet ache. Her hands are scratched so that the blood beads against the skin, attracting flies. She watches the soldier with the long hair, the one in front, and wishes he’d trip a wire and leave nothing left of himself bigger than a stone. Then, just as she has this thought, the soldier gestures behind him, putting Son up front to act as his personal bomb squad to clear the path ahead. It bothers her to see Son there, a rifle trained on his back. She notices with relief when the guard lets the rifle drop once more. It is not difficult to imagine the soldiers getting bored with prisoners, shooting them for convenience’s sake, bringing their bodies to the river. It is unfortunate, she thinks, that she has such an imagination that she can envision the execution, or, as she walks the narrow, difficult path, almost see a booby-trap exploding. To be brave, she thinks, you need to be right here, right now, with no sense of what might happen in a few hours or days. To be very brave you need never to imagine consequences or sudden turns of events. You need, really, to have no imagination whatsoever, which is why (she concludes) good writers are not usually good combat reporters. Wrong temperament. Like bringing a race horse to a rock concert.

They rest, squatting on the jungle floor, sitting on their ankles in the fashion of the Vietnamese. The one with the narrow head, who was carving bamboo earlier, lays the shavings in a pile and then rubs two pieces back and forth, strikes a spark with a flint and makes a fire. The flames shoot up unexpectedly and he jumps back as though something live has sprung at him. This sends the others into giggles, their grubby faces smiling in a manner that seems genuinely warm. They are friends, Susan can see that. She observes them the way she might a herd of exotic animals with their own unknowable social order. A part of her understands they may be like her and Son, who have traveled together so long that they have become a kind of family, but she doesn’t dwell on this. Instead, she tells herself they are killers—all soldiers are killers—but she hopes they are not yet completely dead inside.

The flame is for bits of fish and rice produced from a bag. The fish are old, dried, and yet her hunger makes it smell delicious. She longs to eat. She longs to talk to Son. They have bound her wrists with green wire. She does not understand at first why they find it necessary to tie her now, after so many hours without, until she sees that once they have tied her and Son’s wrists they can put away their weapons, lie down, relax. One of them stretches out on a rock; another makes a seat out of a log, then rushes back when he is attacked by ants. The soldier who lit the fire makes up the meal and brings it to the others. The soldiers eat, chatting as they do. They drink from their canteens and make jokes, particularly the smallest of the three, the one with the sword. He lies on his back, his sword above him, splicing the air with the dark blade, commenting in a manner that occasionally brings chuckles from the other two. They might have been friends together on a camping trip. When finally they have finished eating they offer some fish to her and Son, getting out cigarettes and smoking while she and Son eat awkwardly with their hands bound.

A few minutes later they turn, all at once, and stare at her. She would be startled, but she is too tired to be startled. All movement has been made slow by her exhaustion and the heat. It takes more than a tough look to raise her heartbeat, but it feels as though a pack of wolves has just woken up to her presence.

“What?” she says in English.

The thin one, the one who clubbed Son with his rifle, is the first to speak. He has a soft, high-pitched voice that is difficult to take seriously. “How long you work for American imperialists?” he asks in French.

To her it sounds like a line out of a propaganda leaflet. She ignores it at first, but the soldier repeats the question.

She looks to Son for guidance. He meets her gaze, then looks away.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she begins, and the question is repeated, same as before.

“I don’t work for them so much as explain to American women what is happening over here.”

He looks confused, probably because she said “women,” so she answers once more. “I describe the war for Americans in their own country. So that they know what is going on,” she says.

She thinks she should put up some sort of resistance, that at least she should refuse to answer certain questions. There would be dignity in opposing their efforts. Instead she answers casually, as though she is answering questions for a stranger on a bus, or when introduced to somebody at a party, rather than being interrogated. She would like to be the unyielding, self-possessed prisoner that Son is. He looks away from them, or straight through them. He answers nothing or shrugs. It makes no difference if they tie his hands or not; he behaves as though he is their superior in every way, speaking only when he wishes and refusing to be bullied. Even the food, which he picked at as though it were something he might discard at any moment, did not appear to interest him.

But there are no questions that require her silence. They interrogate her in a half-hearted way, mostly asking again and again whether she works for the American army—No. Whether she helps the American officers—No. Whether she knows of the atrocities committed by the Americans. What atrocities? The napalm, the killing of civilians. Yes, of course, I know about that. What do you think? I think it is bad. You are American? No. My mother is English. From England. I was born in Buckinghamshire. She does not tell them that it was on an RAF base, that she grew up eating Raisin Bran and peanut butter as often as Weetabix and marmalade, that she has lived in the US for almost the whole of her adult life. She does not say that the clearest memory she has of Buckinghamshire is an awful boarding school in which girls were not allowed blue jeans or tampons, the use of which was tantamount to declaring oneself a slut. The Vietcong soldiers confer for a moment. Then they say, But you look like an American! All white people look alike, she replies. The small one laughs. He is missing a front tooth; she can see a centimeter of curled pink tongue in the gap of the cage of his teeth, a snail in a shell. The missing tooth makes him look even younger. They’ve been captured by evil children, she thinks.

Because they have no idea what to do with her, or what to ask her, it seems, they move to questions about how people get engaged in America, and other odd questions about sex and marriage. American brides are not virgins, they say. Doesn’t the husband feel cheated? No. They don’t believe it. And perhaps because they don’t believe it, they go back to their original questions: Are you working for Americans? No. Do you help the American military? No. Do American girls sleep with several men before they get married?

They can’t speak English; their French is awful, a tangle of words beneath a heavy accent that itself would make communication difficult. They must think her French is terrible, too, because they wince and shake their heads and ask her to repeat everything. Moi no compris pas toi parler, they say, which means me not understood you to speak and is unlike any French she has heard. It appears no more refined language is possible between them unless Son acts as a translator, which at the moment he appears reluctant to do.

Finally, the one with the long hair says, “What does your father do for a job?”

“He’s dead,” she tells them. It is true. He died of an aneurism last year. She thinks, with some regret, that he’d never have approved of her working in a war zone, that he’d have done everything possible to prevent her from going.

“Dead?” He studies her carefully “In the war?”

“No. He was too old for this war. He was sixty—” This is too much information. She doubts these soldiers know how old they themselves are, what day they were born, let alone how old their fathers are. She repeats, “Mort. Il est mort long-time.”

They nod, satisfied. Their fathers are probably dead, too, she concludes.

Apparently, the green wire that held her wrists during their meal is necessary also for this period of interrogation. Afterwards, they free her and ask her to take photographs of them with Son’s camera. They want her to take the pictures but only when the barrel is pointed her way, and only as they appear to be taking aim. She asks to stop—again, her imagination is too fertile for this game—for what if they thought it would be amusing to have her take a photograph as they pulled the trigger? She tells herself to stop thinking so much and tries to take comfort in the fact that it is only through the frame of her camera that she sees them training their rifles on her. She comes to this realization—that they’ve relaxed their guard, that they don’t seem the least interested in killing—and it serves as a tonic to calm her. Even so, she asks them to please allow her to put the camera down. She does not want to take any more pictures, she explains. She’d like to give back the camera now.

They appear mildly disappointed. The thin one spits, then turns away abruptly. The one with the long hair gives orders for them to carry on marching. Their new manner is to carry their weapons with the absent constancy with which small children carry their favorite teddies. The guns are there, are always there, but they have all grown accustomed to the guns, herself included, so that they seem almost as though they aren’t real, or are never fired, or contain no bullets.

“That’s an interesting sword,” she tells the soldier with the sword. He holds it up, smiling at it as though it were something he has made himself. It’s an ugly sickle with a crude handle, but he presents it now to her as though it is a work of art birthed from his own genius.

“This is from an automobile spring,” he tells her, running his finger along the air above the blade. “And see this handle? From a howitzer.”

She nods, amazed. So he did make it. Seeing it as a composite of its many parts, she has to admit there is genius involved.

A soldier’s relationship to his weapon is complicated. She recalls the time a platoon she was with fired continuously in a “mad minute” because they heard a branch snap among the trees. The noise came from every direction, even from the ground, rising up through her feet, her legs. It passed through her and she felt her body as a thin veil, a kind of skin through which sound pulsed. There was no real reason for the explosion of fire. It was only that they’d been carrying so much ammunition; they were tired of hauling it all. Afterwards, she could not hear properly. She sat on a stack of ration boxes and wrote messages on a steno pad to Marc, who was with her. Smoking, listening to that single sound eeeeeeeee e spinning in her mind like an insect, her writing pad out, her water bottle almost empty, she felt suddenly exhausted, running only on nervous energy. She might have curled up next to Marc but it was too hot for that and, anyway, she would never have shown him any affection in front of the soldiers.

I keep thinking that somebody is just there, or there, she wrote, then indicated the treeline, watching us and deciding exactly when to shoot and which one of us to shoot first.

Marc sat with his legs folded, knees bent, his shirt loose around his neck. His utilities had a tear in the pocket from overstuffing them with TV batteries and cables. Through the hole, she could see the white skin of his thigh, a strong contrast to the brown of his arms, his hands. He shook his head, dismissing her fear.

It’s like a movie in my head, she wrote. How do I make it stop?

He got her to play a game in which he wrote a line from a song and she had to guess the song. Then another game in which you filled up boxes on a hand-sketched grid. He drew her away from her thoughts. He wrote, You’re beautiful.

They played hangman and he wrote out PEACE.

She thinks how far away he seems now, belonging to another time. She recalls his face, his dark hair with a crown in front so that if he cuts it too short it sticks straight up. The war had produced a few early gray hairs that clustered by his temples, some new lines by his eyes from squinting in the sun. She has known him six months and in six months he has become far too important to her. She blames the tide of her affections on the war, too. It seemed to transform everything to extremes.

“Here, look! Look, you!” It is the soldier with the sword. He is frustrated because her thoughts have drifted. He commands her attention again as a pesky younger brother might. A younger armed brother, she reminds herself, and nods quickly at the soldier and his sword, indicating she is paying attention. “This is very sharp,” he says, and holds the dark sharp edge near her palm. He wants her to admire the blade, which he has honed to a thin, lethal plane; the handle which allows a strong grip. She looks down at it, but will not touch it. It is how Marc would behave, unimpressed, a little bored. Along with the sprinkling of gray hair, Marc has also acquired here in Vietnam a bold, incautious wit that she is able to assume at times, as though having been with him so much she has assimilated this part of him.

“What you think?” says the soldier. He looks proudly at the sword, holding it up in front of him.

“I think you could use it to shave,” she says. “That is, if you ever needed to.”

The soldier nods, unsure of her meaning.

In Saigon she had become accustomed to sudden violence, expected but nonetheless surprising. People speculated; there wouldn’t be anything today, or this week, or until such-and-such a time. She walked the streets with reporters in tiger suits—their canteens and cameras and tape recorders strapped on to them, some holstering pistols—and just in front of them would be civilian women on their way to a tennis game, looking sporty and white, like women in country clubs all over America. The expats ate lavishly, whatever else was going on; the best restaurants were run by Corsicans, the best clubs by Vietnamese women. A restaurant on the Binh Loi Bridge was blown up—partially blown up—not once, but three different times and still they gathered there because of its position along the river and because it was built on stilts and was therefore irresistible for at least a single visit. Once, while between courses at another restaurant near by, she pointed out the window to where she swore she saw a VC soldier. Her companion, Marc’s cameraman, Don Locke, said, Yeah, wouldn’t surprise me, and asked the waiter for more fish sauce for his chiko rolls. She tried not to worry. The magazine liked her stories; they wanted more. Her editor cabled her to tell her she could sell her combat pieces elsewhere if they couldn’t use them. Locke ate his chiko rolls. She thought, Maybe I’m just seeing things.

And (mostly) she did not worry. Few reporters were wounded, fewer killed. What were the chances? The tennis players rode in their air-conditioned elevators; French women sunbathed at the sports club, lying on their backs and squinting up at the F-100s soaring overhead. The helicopters dove low so that they could see the bathers, who rolled on to their backs and waved with their fingers. These women weren’t afraid. They pointed their breasts to the unseen pilots above, smiling as though to a friend. Vietnamese officers’ wives had grand social schedules. For them, Saigon was one big party. She became friendly with a girl named Nicola, who was having a longstanding affair with a lieutenant colonel who’d re-upped twice just to stay near her, and who frequently flew her to his base for parties. Hippies traveled from around the world just to check the place out. No one thought they were taking risks. And when they went home they told their stories, exaggerating all the dangers that they never themselves truly believed.

“Son, I’m so scared,” she whispers now. She is in a hammock, he is on the ground. Even at night the jungle smells like a stagnant pond. Tonight, the world around her is so black she cannot tell if her eyes are open or shut. It is difficult to assume a relaxed expression or focus her gaze normally. Her vision seeks a destination and she finds herself straining to see in the darkness so that she has to blindfold herself with her hands. She wonders if they will kill them in their sleep, why they haven’t killed them already, why they haven’t let them go. She doesn’t know anything, she despairs, not even if her eyes are closed. It seems unfair, all this confusion.

The guards take turns sleeping. The one on duty sits as though in a trance and may be asleep; he has not moved in at least an hour, though time is distorted now and she cannot honestly tell. He has not moved anyway.

Nothing makes sense. In the morning they will either be killed or get up and march. She doesn’t know why she should die, or why they are marching, because she has no idea where they are heading anyway. Perhaps the Vietcong soldiers are lost. They certainly seem unable to find their unit. They are as stranded and alone as she and Son, but it is they who have the weapons.

“I’ve had enough,” she says now, a phrase she might have used about a bad phone line, no seat on the bus.

From Son comes a whining noise, like that of a dog, and when she hears it she realizes he has, indeed, been listening, noticing, that he has not been nearly so removed as he appeared all day. She feels his hand on her back through the thin material of the hammock, and with that touch she becomes calmer, more solid in herself. He rubs his palm in a short circular motion, then leaves it still for a long time. She cannot remember anything being so comforting. She’d like to reach to him, but dares not. It is the first time—the only time—he has touched her.

She met Son in a hospital in Pleiku about a week after her arrival in the country. He’d come in from the bush with a bunch of soldiers from the 4th Division, his lip cut, the blood all down his shirt, making the green cotton black. The lip looked awful, swollen so that he appeared to be pushing it out like a pouting child. It was the end of the day now and he was arguing with a nurse that he didn’t need any stitches, just give him a needle and thread; he’d do it himself. He claimed he’d stitched himself before in the field and it hadn’t even gotten infected. Please, he said as the nurse clasped his chin. Ah do it!

The nurse held his jaw in her hand, dabbing iodine on his face. Don’t move, Tarzan! she said.

Da nun show may! he said. He was a scrapper; he never stopped talking.

Why’re you moving so much? You want to split that lip worse? The nurse had her eye on his lip, squinting into it as though down a scope glass. She was angling his face for better light. On her smock was her name, Tracy Flower, sewn neatly in what might have been the same stitch being applied now to Son’s lip.

Da nuns! he tried again. Dey show may!

Nuns? Are you talking about nuns? I’m not a nun. Stop moving.

Tah so!

She let go his face and he cupped his hurt lip behind his palm to shield it. He saw Susan watching and pretended he had not. She could tell this by the way he moved away all at once, as though discovered. She’d seen him earlier while walking the lines of beds, trailing the triage nurse, passing through screens thin as kite silk that separated the living from dying, and again outside the muddy exit where the grim drums of gasoline lined up above their nests of fire. She had seen him and had felt instantly drawn to him, a feeling powerful enough that she had needed to remind herself it was invisible. It was as though he knew her, or wanted to know her, and she felt it that way, as a kind of invitation.

The nuns showed me how to sew, he said quickly before the nurse could grab him again. Susan realized now why he had got her attention. It was not the wound to the lip, not Son himself, but how he spoke during the temporary moment he had his jaw back. It wasn’t only that his English was good, though that in itself would cause her to take notice, but that the vowel sounds were British. That is what had seemed so oddly familiar to her. She knew the voice. She’d heard it that day at JUSPAO when she’d infuriated the lieutenant colonel by insisting he tell her what a WBLC was. Sampan, she remembered, and the voice of a young Vietnamese journalist who said, Can we have confirmation that a WBLC is a sampan, sir?

Son tried to smile now, but the lip prevented it. Susan smiled at him, but only for a moment. The nurse was giving him instructions again. She had a soft but commanding voice, reminding Susan of one of her father’s sisters, who had that same way of telling you what to do in the nicest fashion, but with an authority that meant you better do it.

Nuns? she was saying. Well, that’s just grand. Now keep still!

The nurse was as tall as he was. Her hair, pinned at her neck, had come loose from its clip and she blew it away from her eyes, still holding on to Son. He finally gave in, sighing into her palm, and stood quietly for the stitches. Susan could see the grit on his neck, the red mud smeared on his trousers, the caking of dirt around his fingernails. He was just in from the field and he’d sweated so much his hair rose straight up from his head as though the light were sending a current through him. He seemed to be trying to move away from the nurse and stand still at the same time, almost jogging in place. Finally, he gave up the struggle and stood without wincing as she put line after line of neat stitching across his mouth. In the middle of the procedure, in a gesture as casual as a wave, he held up a camera, angling it on to the concentrating nurse, and snapped several shots of her stitching his lip.

Who is that? Susan asked another nurse, someone she’d tagged herself on to, a woman named Donna who did not object to being followed around. Donna held two bottles of urine pinned under one arm and a third in her right hand. They didn’t have anything as useful as Foley bags but had to improvise even in this regard, using empty water or saline bottles to collect urine. The hospital operated out of little Quonset huts, corrugated-iron buildings, like pig arcs, maybe half a mile from the landing strip. Sometimes rockets intended for the airstrip hit the wards by mistake. They used to operate out of tents, held in place by sandbags, and the sandbags still lined the walls.

You’re still here? Donna said. She dried her palm against her thigh, pushed a swatch of heavy bangs from her forehead, and gave Susan an amused, slightly disapproving look. She wore a long smock with sleeves that she rolled as high as they would go on her arm. The smock was stained a rust color with damp patches beneath the arms. She nodded down at her bottles. You want a job?

Susan said, I really wanted to interview a surgeon, but I haven’t talked to one yet—

No, and you won’t, Donna said.

Then you’ll be stuck with me a little longer.

That’s okay. You on a deadline?

Susan told her yes, though this was not strictly true.

You can bunk with us. But really, I should make you do something! Donna moved with purpose, with the stamina of a plow horse. Everywhere she went in the ward she picked up one thing, deposited another; she carried rolls of bandages, ringers, drugs, sheets, plaster, splints, these items balanced across her chest or on her hip. You’re a nice girl, Susan, and we don’t mind you being here. But a reporter in a hospital! I mean, no offense, sweetheart, but really. Titties on a tomcat, you are.

They ran into Son in front of a supply room. What are you doing here? Donna said, and he slouched off, was herded off, in truth. Susan nodded at him, then looked at Donna, making a question with her hands.

Who knows? the nurse answered. Some gook with a hurt lip. Who gives a