Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

The medic looked impatient. “Scanlon. Private Scanlon.”

Helen nodded as if the name were an explanation.

One soldier walked past. “Fucking Scanlon fucked up. And that’s the whole fucking story.”

His body was zippered into rubber. And then he was as gone as if he had never existed, and they moved on.

They crossed the stream in silence, for once walking in perfect formation, each alone with the new truth that if he died in the next moment, he would be as gone and as forgotten as Scanlon. The rage that filled her felt good, weighted her like a good meal or a strong drink, felt better than fear. The rage filled her so nothing else could get in.

Besides stolen American antipersonnel weapons being used against them, as they had been on MacCrae, they had to watch out for the enemy’s handmade traps that showed a peculiar genius. She had been told not to pick up any valuables such as books or hats or watches, to avoid lighters and canteens, to make a wide berth around unopened beer cans. Not to touch discarded enemy uniforms or helmets, and especially not VC flags because the enemy realized their souvenir value and booby-trapped them. Watch for obstructions such as large stones on a path or fallen logs or broken-down wheelbarrows. Keep an eye out for any unnatural appearance in fences, paint, vegetation, dust. Most of the men refused to use the outdoor latrines out of similar fears. After enough time, even the palm fronds waving in the wind came to look like razor-sharp knives.

When the men stopped to rest, Scanlon’s death unleashed their fears, and they passed around rumors they had heard: an officer sitting on a plush, mossy tree stump and blowing himself into a million pieces; a patrol coming upon an abandoned bunker and hearing the incessant crying of a baby, climbing down to investigate, and being incinerated. Endless war legends of booby-trapped hookers.

“These people simply don’t value life like we do.”

Helen heard that over and over. And, of course, after living through war for two generations, it seemed at some level to be true. Many of the Vietnamese seemed numb to the unrelenting death and destruction that was messing with these American boys’ minds.

It was hard to know what was true from what was false. Mostly, it depended on whose side you were on. Most of the time, the reality of a situation fell into a gray no-man’s-land in between. The Americans called it “the Vietnam war,” and the Vietnamese called it “the American war” to differentiate it from “the French war” that had come before it, although they referred to both wars as “the Wars of In dependence.” Most Americans found it highly insulting to be mentioned in the same breath with the colonial French.

At three o’clock they stopped to eat at the edge of the jungle that they would soon have to work their way through. The temperature more than a hundred and ten degrees, and the humidity almost as high. The men ate their rations in silence, and like a dealer Helen expertly traded her Lucky Strikes and C-rations of meatloaf for cans of peaches.

After half an hour, they rose again, but two soldiers remained on the ground, sweat-glazed, their skin the color of unripe fruit, from heat exhaustion. Another dustoff, and Helen felt a flutter in her stomach as the planes lifted and flew off. After all, she had the burden of choice. The rest of the soldiers hefted their packs and started into the jungle.

Helen could have left-this patrol wasn’t promising to yield any worthwhile pictures-but they had allowed her to come, had accepted her among them, and to her it was a point of honor to remain till the end.

Out in the open, the main danger came from the ground, but in the jungle danger existed at every height. Thick vines, accidentally touched, might swing back with a grenade at the end. Thin green bamboo, if tripped, was capable of whipping back with barb-point arrows.

She could see only a few feet in any direction, and claustrophobia made her long for the open paddies and roads they had just so gratefully left behind.

Under their feet the ground liquefied into a mud of vegetation that gave off a sour, green smell, like a thick, algae-filled pond. Behind her, Captain Olsen reached a hand out against a large green trunk and triggered a tiger trap from overhead. The board came crashing down with its rusted long spikes, but the new plant growth impeded it, and he just had time to roll off the path-only the edge of the board grazed his right forearm. They all squatted in place on alert as the medic bandaged him. He examined the rotting, rusting board and determined it had been there for years, if not decades.

“Probably had a Frenchman’s name on it,” Olsen said, laughing.

At six o’clock they broke through the jungle and found themselves on dry ground again. They had not encountered a single enemy soldier, yet it seemed the land itself, inhospitable and somber, was their enemy, bristled at their trespass, wore down their spirits.

They walked a quarter of a mile and stopped in a field at the side of the road, under an old French watchtower. The soldiers pulled out entrenching tools and dug in for the approaching night. Helen sat down, body aching, muscles quivering. Only the first day of a three-day patrol completed. She sat smoking a cigarette, a new habit, and watched the last golden light over the jungle. The air like velvet, filled with folds of pollen and insects. Once in a while, far away, she heard the sharp caw of a wild bird or the eerie wail of a monkey. The soldiers joked that you could throw a pit of fruit on the ground and come back a week later to find a tree, a week later and find it full of fruit, a week after that and find an orchard.

As the light faded to a deep purple, they watched a group of peasant women make their way home. The women talked animatedly until they saw the soldiers in the dark field, and then they grew silent.

“Well, boys, looks like we’re on the map now,” Olsen said. If the enemy didn’t yet know their location, they soon would.

“Don’t they know we’re here to save their asses?” Tossi complained. “Whoever heard of being afraid of the people you’re saving?”

“Maybe somebody forgot to translate that into Vietnamese,” Samuels said.

Olsen, Samuels, Tossi, and Helen huddled in the shallow foxhole to smoke and sleep while a perimeter guard kept watch in shifts. At first Helen tried to stay awake but kept nodding off; she gave up and slept even after the rain started, merely pulling the plastic poncho over herself. The bottom of the foxhole filled with water, but she guarded her camera equipment in an airtight plastic bag set on her stomach. The guys had great fun with the fact that she stored her film in condoms.

At dawn, stiff and wet, they drank lukewarm coffee and ate canned ham and eggs before breaking camp and moving out.

“You okay?” Tossi asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just cold. And wet. And muddy.”

Tossi handed her a flask and some pills.

“What?”

“The pharmacy is open.”

She nodded and swallowed them daintily, an obedient child.

By eight o’clock it was again more than ninety degrees. The sun stiffened their wet uniforms. They arrived at their rendezvous point and waited for two Chinooks to bring in the company of South Vietnamese paratroopers to form a joint sweep of a ville consisting of nothing more than two dozen grass huts. The Vietnamese troopers jumped briskly out of the helicopters. They appeared small and clean and rested compared to the American soldiers. Their uniforms were freshly pressed.

“Do you ever get the idea,” Tossi whispered, “that we’re on the wrong side?”

“Hey, they know it’s too dangerous out here at night. We’re the only ones stupid enough to get our asses blown off,” Samuels said.