Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Take me tomorrow,” she said.

“I’ll sleep on it. Be up at five.”

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

“So what’s he involved in?” she asked, trying not to show her disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lied to herself, broke her promises to go home or at least to stay in Saigon after that flight because the whole event had been so surreal, so un-weighted, so anticlimactic, because the pictures were too far away from the man and showed the horror in miniature, which carried meaning only when the events were explained. Pictures could not be accessories to the story-evidence-they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.

Her arsenal of supplies became her protection. She would triple-check each item because she believed that without any one thing she might anger what ever god was keeping her safe. She carried two Leica bodies on crossed neck straps, bandolier style, one under each arm, with three lenses, a 28, 35, and 90mm, all purchased on the black market, as well as her tailor-made fatigues and canvas para boots. Annick had taken her shopping and then to lunch as if it were the most natural thing in the world to go on a shopping spree for war. Ridiculous and comforting. She carried a film case on the helicopter, but in the field she fastened the film rolls to her camera straps. She counted the weight down to the ounce, wouldn’t consider carrying the added weight of a weapon. Her only concession to vanity was always wearing her pearl earrings.

Only a couple of weeks after meeting MacCrae, word reached her that he had been killed. She felt a grief all out of proportion to the brief time she had known him. Maybe it was his age, but he reminded her of the generation of her father. So clear that they had had unfinished business with each other. The pilot who introduced her to him handed her a bag MacCrae had left for her, and in it was her camera and a KA-BAR knife in a beaded Montagnard sheath. She took the camera to Gary, asked if he would help her expose the film. One shot, the rest of the roll empty-a newborn, still smeared with blood and mucus, umbilical cord stanched, in large white hands. Behind, unfocused, a woman lay on the ground. The mother? She seemed peaceful, seemed asleep, but it was a worrying picture. Whose hands? Why outside?

“Let me buy it,” Gary said.

“It’s not mine to sell.”

She walked with Robert through the bookstalls in Saigon as she told him about MacCrae’s death, and he frowned. A young American civilian passed them and greeted Robert.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said. The two men stood aside and talked quietly, heads bent.