Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

The pilot, Captain Anderson, was in his midtwenties, a big puppyish kid with a constant grin, unable to hide his plea sure in flying. Sunlight glinted off his blond, buzz-cut hair. Darrow smiled, and the sobering thought occurred to him that he was almost old enough to have a son that age. Where had the time gone?

After doing an aerial recon, Anderson got orders to drop in on a couple of forward firebases in the Parrot’s Beak. Isolated, the area was considered bandit country, riddled with VC and NVA positions. The night before, bases were attacked, and now enemy bodies, strung up in the perimeter wire, bloated in the hot sun as trophies.

Darrow and the pilot sat on the ground, their backs against sandbags, and ate C-rations, ignoring the fetid smell blowing in from the wire.

“I’m shy to say this, but you were the photographer when my dad served in Korea. You took his picture.”

“No kidding?”

“I swear it. Recognized the name right away.”

“That’s amazing. So he came home. And had you.”

“And five others. Wait till I tell him you were here.”

“That’ll be good. Very good.”

“Where you headin’ to after this?” Anderson asked.

“Heading home.” The words felt strange in his mouth, as if they had no connection to himself. After all these years, where was home? He felt at home right there, with this young man who could have been his son, but wasn’t.

The boy blew out a breath. “Home. You are one lucky-”

“Your father should be very proud. Do you miss home?” Darrow asked. In the bright sun, he thought the young captain’s face impossibly unlined, impossibly innocent. Had he ever been so young? Choked up, he pulled out a cigarette and offered one. Anderson took it but averted his eyes, and Darrow realized that he had missed that look, the toughness in the jaw, that the captain was boyish only in his joy of flying.

“I do and I don’t, you know?”

Darrow chuckled. “I’m there, guy.”

Anderson, egged on, sat up, nodding his head. “I mean, I’m in the groove here. Finally. I can do this. But there… it doesn’t make sense anymore. I don’t know if I trust it.”

“Me, either.”

“Then why you goin’?”

Darrow shrugged. “A woman. Couldn’t help myself.”

Anderson laughed out loud. “No shit? Well, good luck to you. You’re a braver man than me.” He took a long drag of his cigarette. “I’m supposed to be one of the best pilots. So they send me on all the tough stuff. Hero shit. So the chances of me eating it are better than if I was just a washout. How fucked up is that?”

“You don’t have to be the best pilot.”

Anderson laughed. “Wrong! I do, and they know it. Can’t help myself.” He thrust his hips lewdly. “Flying’s the only other thing I’ve ever been good at.”

The next day Anderson and Darrow were on their way to the firebase at Kontum.

The morning passed, uneventful, and Darrow spent the hours in a dreamlike mood, lulled by the closeness and speed of trees under his feet. Except for the earsplitting noise of the engines, it was a bird’s-eye view of the world, like boyhood dreams of flying before other dreams, dreams of war, had taken over.

He would take Helen to Angkor and show her the expression on one particular face. Serenity mixed with savagery. Only she could understand-the history of the place showed both a great lust and indifference for violence. And wasn’t that what they had become, Helen and he, interpreters of violence? A very twisted connoisseurship. They would sit on the warm stones in the evening, and he would whisper his greatest fears to her.

That the image betrayed one at last. It grieved and outraged, but ultimately it deadened. The first picture, or the fifth, or even the twenty-fifth still had an authority, but finally the repetition made the horror palatable. In the last few years, no matter how hard he tried, his pictures weren’t as powerful as before he had known this. Like an addict who had to keep upping the dose to maintain the same high, he found himself risking more and working harder for less return. He would never again be moved the way he was over that first picture of a dead World War II soldier. Was his own work perpetrating the same on those it came into contact with? A steady loss of impact until violence became meaningless? His ridiculous brawl with Tanner when in truth Tanner was the logical progeny of their profession. Maybe they deserved to be charged with war crimes, too.

He worried, as the trees sped by beneath his feet, that Helen did not believe he loved her other than by his leaving. But he would prove it to her in a hundred thousand ways.

They were flying over the Plei Trap Valley when Anderson, whom Darrow now imagined as his and Helen’s son, tapped him on the shoulder, yelling over the roar of the engine, the boyish grin absurd and comforting. “You okay?”

“Fine. The heat’s getting to me.”

“I got two wounded for emergency evac. We’re the only free ride around. Okay with you?” he asked eagerly, as if he were borrowing keys to his father’s car.

“Let’s go.” Darrow laughed and gave him a thumbs-up. He had gone a little deeper, and then not intending to, deeper still. Didn’t every man in every war believe that he would be the one to make it, to survive, to return home filled with tales? Darrow was no different. The unspoken truth of how each of them survived their time.

Minutes later they dropped into a combat spiral, and he felt the familiar wrenching of the stomach, the mouth going dry. And then a terrible shattering, as if the helicopter had been hit by lightning, smote by a giant hand instead of a rocket. Now the boy turned all warrior, face grim and masklike as they spiraled earthward; a tearing sound signaled the rear tail torn away. The green of the trees roared toward them with a sickening rush, and between the branches Darrow saw flashes of light. The smooth, brown warrior from the Lolei temple, the eyes wild. Reluctantly, Darrow lifted his now gravity-weighted head and looked at Anderson once more. Son. He took leave of him and looked out. A rush of green and then Helen’s face. The branches like arms reaching out. He calculated odds he had escaped from before as he heard the whooshing sound, the vacuum of air as the cockpit glass became as bright as a new sun. White knuckles and sunlight and her eyes. An infinity of green. Every shade of green in the world.

Songs

Name: Samuel Andre Darrow

Rank/Branch:

Unit:

Date of Birth: 7 May 1925

Home City of Record: New York City, NY

Date of Loss: 14 November 1967

Country of Loss: South Vietnam

Loss Coordinates: 14127N 1074920E (ZA045798)

Status: Missing in Action

Category: 1

Acft/Vehicle/Ground: OH6A

Other Personnel in Incident: Captain Jon Anderson

The mission to recover bodies had been denied for months because of enemy movements, the area considered extremely dangerous, but then recon reported the enemy had pulled out. An invisible veil lifted, and although nothing to the eye had changed-the hills remained just as green, the paths stretched out in their promise of innocence-the land officially became neutral again.

Linh and Helen went in with a Green Beret unit and two South Vietnamese rangers familiar with the terrain of that part of the Ho Chi Minh trail network. They went in on cargo transports, linking with a contingent of Montagnard mercenaries led by Special Forces officers.

After hiking through the morning, the main force went to destroy enemy bunker complexes, while their unit branched off and went on the five clicks to the crash site. Because the bodies had not been recovered, Darrow and the pilot were listed as MIA. The mislabeling of the truth angered Helen, and she climbed the hills in a spirit of righteousness. She had not wanted to bring her camera, but Linh insisted that they bring a minimum of equipment.