Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Linh’s the best scout you could hope to find.”

Molina grimaced. “He gets it first if he leads us into an ambush.”

After he walked away, Helen tugged on Darrow’s arm. “This feels bad. We should get out of here.”

“You’re skittish.”

The soldiers moved out single file along the narrow trail of crushed shell that wound through the high sand dunes. Tanner walked point singing, “ ‘Hi, ho. Hi, ho. It’s off to work we go,’ ” making the soldiers around him snicker. Midmorning, the temperature climbed over a hundred, the sky a low, gloomy, saline white. The soldiers wore flak jackets open over bare chests. Under their helmets, they wore bandannas to keep sweat out of their eyes.

The first hamlet contained fifty adults. The huts clustered at the base of a chiseled limestone cliff next to the ocean. The villagers seemed friendly enough; they smiled and went through the charade of carrying on as if the soldiers were not there. A thorough search yielded nothing, and the soldiers got ready to move out again.

Linh and Helen entered a hut at the urging of an old woman who waved them in. The room was small and dark, filled from floor to ceiling with paper flowers. Rows of reds and yellows and white lined up. Linh hesitated, wiping his face. “She makes these,” he said, “for celebrations, for altars.”

The old woman spoke in a low mumble to Linh.

“What is she saying?” Helen asked.

“She’s afraid the soldiers will burn the village. She has a year of work inside. All on its way to be sold in Danang.”

“Tell her we’re on our way out.”

As they gathered on the edge of the hamlet, bunched up in a group, sipping from their canteens in the smoldering heat, lighting cigarettes, a mortar whistled down between the palms. Everyone dove, but when they rose, four men on the left side of the tree were dead, while two others crawled along the ground.

When they heard the strike, Helen and Linh pitched themselves against a sand dune next to the old woman’s house. All the fear that Helen thought she had recovered from came back tenfold. Her legs useless, acid in her throat. Darrow ran over, cameras hitting against his chest in his hurry. He put his hand on the back of her head. “You okay?”

She nodded.

“Linh, take care of her.”

Darrow was gone back through the smoke.

Captain Molina ordered the casualties pulled down the road, and called in air power. Helen watched as he held the radio receiver, his face wet and tight. She saw the tremor in his hand as he handed the receiver down to the radio operator.

The helicopters would come in from the west, forcing the fleeing VC toward the ocean, where the other companies would block their escape north and south. A young boy, Costello, had frag wounds to both legs, his skin peppered with black holes. Darrow and Tanner together pulled him along with the other wounded to the road. As the shock wore off, the kid trembled but made no sound.

Helen felt nauseous from the heat and the blood and the noise, but she picked up her camera and focused through the viewfinder. Molina stood over the boy, his face a mottled red, his lips tight and pulled back from his teeth. In the viewfinder, framed, he had a terrible kind of power. Helen framed a shot of him on the radio handset while the operator crouched next to him, fingers stuffed in his ears at the sound of another mortar, face clenched, reluctantly attached by the umbilical of the cord. Molina waved his arm and brought it down hard on his thigh as if he could will the helicopter’s appearance, oblivious to the flames snaking their way up a thatched roof behind him, oblivious to the comatose boy at his feet. If he had taken any more notice of Costello, he might have shot him.

Helen put down the camera, puzzled, when she saw blackened, fluttering shapes in the air like dark butterflies. The sight of his injured legs mesmerized Costello; Helen grabbed a plastic field poncho and draped it over his lower body.

“Let me see them,” Costello said.

“You’re not hurt that bad,” the medic said.

But Costello was past hearing.

“You’ll be okay,” Helen said. She said the words by rote, as if comforting a child, but she felt angry at his squeamishness when there were dead bodies yards away. There was a sense of release in the coldness she felt, her lack of concern for the man. She didn’t want his name and rank, or his picture. She wanted to forget him the moment he was on that helicopter.

Within minutes assault helicopters flew overhead and sprayed bullets and bombs over the village. An inferno, the fire created a hot wind that fed upon itself, heat upon heat, until Helen felt each breath she took scorched her lungs.

Linh pointed, and Helen again noticed a swarm of black fluttering shapes that looked like swallows or bats rising above the old woman’s hut. “Her flowers.”

Helen remembered when her father returned from duty in Italy. How he had brought her a red tin of amoretti. How he took the waxy wrapping as she ate each cookie, lit a match beneath it and smiled as it flew skyward like a spirit, to her screams of delight.

Although they watched the hut burn to cinders, the old woman was nowhere in sight.

The action seemed to be mostly over, and so it was a shock when a dozen men burst out of a tunnel opening at the edge of the village, the heat from the burning hut above the entrance roasting them in the tunnel, parts of their clothing curling off their backs in flame. They ran down the beach to reach the water, wanting to plunge in the wetness and stop the burning, but the running alerted the soldiers, who opened fire.

Linh yelled, but Darrow grabbed him. “No!” He pointed to Helen. “Stay between him and the soldiers.” She held Linh’s shoulder, felt the quivering of his muscles.

“They’re villagers, not VC,” he said.

Darrow ran down through the sound of the automatic weapons’ fire. So much smoke and the deafening pound of the helicopters-it was impossible to make out clearly what had happened.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters gone, the beach was strewn with bodies on the sand and down into the surf. An eerie quiet except for the keening cries of the village women who had a view of the beach. The mood of the soldiers had turned murderous. They went back again and again to the bodies of the dead men, as if they feared they would resurrect. Tanner took pictures, moving bodies with his foot into more graphic positions. “Don’t think this one is running anywhere,” he said to a soldier, who glared down, bayonet pointed.

Darrow’s forehead creased, his head bent down as he walked over. “That’s enough. Women are watching up there.”

Tanner turned and narrowed his eyes. “Don’t get jealous, Sam. You’re not the only photographer in Vietnam.”

A few of the soldiers glared at Linh as he moved along the beach with Helen. “How come he didn’t warn us?” they asked over and over.

“Because he didn’t know. He’s on our side,” Darrow said.

When the first medevac landed, Darrow joined Helen and Linh. “Let’s take this one out. We’ve got enough.”

Tanner stayed with the company.

As they walked by villagers placed under guard, Helen felt their eyes on her. The women clutched their children against their bodies, away from the guns. “Why aren’t they releasing them?”

“Interrogation. Can’t ask a dead man if he’s VC.”

“Maybe we should stay,” Helen said.

“The company’s out of control. More Tanner’s style anyway.”

Scared herself, Helen didn’t have the heart to argue. Later, she would regret giving up so easily and leaving. The change in herself proved by how little she thought of the villagers’ fate, how uneasy she was around her own soldiers. They flew to the field hospital and unloaded Costello, who floated on a large pillow of morphine, oblivious to their good-byes. The trip back to Saigon was a gloomy one.