Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“The war doesn’t stop for long,” Robert said.

“It’s been that way forever,” Annick said, and finished a full brandy in one gulp. “A land of continuous siege.”

“Jack knew that. He said it didn’t matter who we backed, that the people didn’t care. So why do we?” Helen said. She herself felt trapped, too scared to go out in the field, too scared to give it up and leave. “I mean… we have a choice. Why don’t we leave?”

Nobody spoke.

“I’ll be back.” Robert went to the kitchen.

Annick leaned over. “Is that him?”

Helen nodded.

Annick shook her head. “Poor Helen.”

Lights were turned off in the living room, and small white candles were passed out. “ ‘Silent Night.’ In memory of Jack.”

Helen looked at the faces around the room, at the makeshift decorations, and felt closer to the people in that room than to people she had known all her life back home. It had only just begun for her-people disappearing from her life. Not only people she loved, but people she knew only casually, people whom she knew only by sight. The familiar world chipped away each day.

After dessert, guests made excuses to hurry away. No one could rebound from the news. Robert came and said they should get back to the hotel before curfew. Helen nodded, hoping that Darrow would come out, would take her away again to the crooked apartment, but, of course, that was all over.

In her hotel room, Helen kept the lights off. With difficulty, she banged open the rusted window to let in fresh air. In Vietnam everyone wanted windows shut to keep things-heat, humidity, bugs, bullets-out. After midnight, the only noise the swish of a police jeep blading down the wet streets. The male reporters were still enjoying themselves inside bars or in the brothels that locked their doors till dawn.

She took off her clothing and, with the deliberateness that came from drinking too much, hung each piece on its hanger. In the morning, she’d go out to Ben Cat and tag along on a sweep made by combined forces. She would eat Christmas Day rations with the soldiers. The thought of the greenish half-gloom under the trees depressed her. Already sick of the war. The overhead fan creaked as she paced the room, smoking and drinking bottled water to stop the spinning in her head.

She had gotten used to water at room temperature. Annick could spot Americans across a room because of their insistence on having ice. Ice tinkling in glasses. Anything to deny the crazies-inducing temperature. The military had contracted out the manufacture of ice-making plants to keep up with the insatiable American demand for ice cubes, ice cream, anything frozen, and now the Vietnamese were beginning to have an appetite for it. Helen had taken picture upon picture of Vietnamese children eating ice cream, and those were the ones always printed-they made readers happy, an example of America ’s civilizing process.

She longed for the refuge of Darrow’s room, but she denied herself its Spartan comforts. It was true-the soft beds and rich food and even the ice cubes, all of it a kind of game, keeping her from feeling things. The beginning of some kind of understanding had come as she sat in the tin-roofed school house at MacCrae’s funeral, but it had been too ephemeral, had disappeared before she could get her mind around it.

A soft knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She stood still, fingering her necklace, her mind flooding with horrors.

More knocking, more insistent.

Her heart jumped against her ribs. If it was the police, no one would be able to help her till morning. There were always rumors of arrests, people disappearing.

“It’s me. Please open,” Darrow said.

She grabbed a robe and pulled it over herself as she unlocked the door. Down the hall, her room boy with the long eyelashes was lying on his mat. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at them, a smile showing crooked, gleaming white teeth.

Darrow pushed her inside and shut the door.

“What is it?” she asked, but his hands gripped her shoulders, his mouth hard on hers. He had come straight from the party, clothes unchanged, skin still smudged with dirt and sweat, chin unshaven.

He pulled off her robe and pushed her back on the bed, his mouth on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

They made love urgently, without tenderness or words.

Afterward he buried his head in her neck, his arms so tightly around her that it hurt to breathe. A shaking in his shoulders. He wept, his head on her stomach, face turned away from hers in the darkness. Their first intimacy nothing, the usual war time coupling of people escaping fear, but now they entered a place of their own, invisible and not describable. Words like adultery small and meaningless against where they now were. When she woke at dawn, her room was empty.

It became their ritual-his arrival in her room at night. Sometimes to make love, sometimes simply to sleep.

No promises. When she did not see or hear from him for weeks, it no longer upset her. She understood; the war consumed. Her bags were finally unpacked by her room boy, who carried the empty suitcases away for storage.

Something shifted, infinitesimal, frail as a hair root reaching down through soil, anchoring the plant; no longer were there thoughts of leaving.

To Civilize, to Transform

After months of pestering military command, she obtained permission to go out on ground search-and-clear missions. The military was not happy having a woman out in the field overnight, but they relented. She learned the art of shouting like a drill sergeant, cussing out officers with expletives when they tried to deny her access, realizing that it gave her a surprise advantage in making her demands. They figured any woman that tough could hack it on her own. They trotted out the worn-out old objections of lack of bathroom facilities and lust in the soldiers.

“It can’t be worse than fighting them off in the officers’ club, can it?” Helen asked.

Chuckles and permission granted. It was also a trick she played on herself: knowing that if she was successful, it would be too humiliating to back out of going. At first, with the newness of the experience, there was an undeniable excitement as well as paralyzing nerves. But even with that, the fear didn’t stop. The hardest thing was to give meaning to what appeared to have none.

She woke at three in the morning and two hours later was riding a clattering helicopter through the dark. They were dropped in the Phong Dinh area in the smudged light of predawn. A known hostile area, as most of the countryside was now turning. The South Vietnamese troops insisted on flying in the next day straight to the village, letting the Americans patrol the surrounding area in advance.

The officers were unhappy having her along, so she knew if she couldn’t keep up on patrol they’d use that as an excuse to send her back. The only way she could keep up in the heat and physical exertion was to lighten her load. She stripped out a normal supply pack from thirty to fifteen pounds. Although she was issued a flak jacket and helmet, she stopped wearing them out in the field. She sat on the flak jacket on the choppers like the men did, but then she left hers behind. The soldiers laughed that she was trying to out-John Wayne them, but it was just a matter of mobility.

The captain in charge of the mission was a twenty-six-year-old Swede from South Dakota named Sven Olsen. He was stocky and muscled, with a bulldog jaw and a smile that quickly flashed and then was gone. His eyes were a cool, hard blue that did not give away his thoughts.

“The most dangerous times for the FNGs are the first few times out. They get themselves killed by stupid mistakes. Stay in the middle of the formation, next to me, that’s the safest place. Don’t crowd up on the guy in front of you because if he trips something, we don’t need two dead for the price of one. Try to walk in the footsteps of the guy in front of you. If he’s okay, you’ll be okay.”