Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

As they waited, four LRRPs, called Lurps, walked in from the bush. They high-fived the platoon digging in for the night, nodded thoughtfully to the bags at the edge of the clearing, then squatted under a tree and began to boil rice and dried meat. These types, MacCrae’s kind of guys, worked in deep cover, adapting to native ways and language.

Linh went over and joined them. Exhausted, Helen sat on a box of rations. She was surprised when one of the men held out a plastic cup to Linh, and more surprised when he accepted, squatting down to drink with them. By the jerk of Linh’s head and the guttural laughter of the soldiers, she guessed it was the local hill tribe moonshine, a fermented alcohol made of rice, lethal stuff.

The helicopter came in, and everyone turned away to shield their faces. The whole camp pitched in to unload supplies. Two of the Lurps jumped up, jubilant and drunk, and each took one end of the first body bag and swung it up on the floor of the helicopter, where it landed with a hard thud.

“Careful!” Helen yelled.

The two men stared at her with blank expressions. “They won’t feel a thing anymore, dolly,” one of them said to the howling laughter of his companions.

Helen stared at them and at Linh sitting there, a part of them. “I’ll remember that when I carry your bag.”

The soldier made a motion with his hand as if he had touched something hot. “Sssssss!”

Helen watched as the next bag was loaded in carefully, almost tenderly.

Linh staggered up to her. “We’re not going out. We’re going on patrol with them.” He nodded his head back to the Lurps eating their dinner.

“You’re drunk.” Helen’s gaze took in the group of men who were oblivious to their presence. “Do they know this?”

“Already arranged.”

“By who?”

He wagged his head. “Me.”

She rubbed her boot back and forth in the dirt, a long, tired arc. “I’m beat. You go. I’m going back on this ride.”

Linh grabbed her arm. “For me, this time. Without questions.”

She hesitated. After Darrow’s death, she felt strange around Linh. The memory of the three of them together making the absence more painful. “I don’t have enough film.”

“Enough for the job.”

“Which is?”

Linh studied her face, looking for something. “You said you wanted to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail. Still do?”

After three days, Helen no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon. Even Darrow changed from a pain outside, inflicted, to something inside, a tumor, with only its promise of future suffering. The fastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war-would outlast time itself.

They traveled straight west for three days, illegally crossing the border at some point, and continued on. They moved beyond rules; she, in her grief, was also beyond rules. Gradually, as happened each time, Helen was absorbed by the details of the patrol-the heat, the terrain, the soldiers-till nothing else existed. She was impressed by the obvious relish with which they went about their job, hardwired for it in a way other units were not. They lived deep in the land; traveled through it like ghosts. No base camps or supply drops. Understood there would be no mercy if they were caught. They made do with very little-whatever was on their backs or taken from the land.

Deep in the wilderness, Helen experienced the longed-for slipping beneath the surface, losing the sense of herself as separate from her surroundings. After five days all thought of the war was gone. Only movement and land covered, the safety of the men and herself. She lost her tiredness, lost her appetite. Simply ate and slept enough to have the strength to keep walking. The idea of taking photos small and beside the point. The Lurps mostly ignored her except for the one who had made the body bag comment. After a week he came up and complimented her: “You’re almost invisible.”

On the tenth day they received a click-hiss on the radio, a signal an NVA convoy would be passing within hours. They set up positions in the bush with a clear view of a wide dirt path that crossed a quick-moving river. The sound of the water concealed them against accidental noise.

Linh and Helen cut branches to create a tripod inside a large bush, then hid the camera and zoom lens with leaves. Linh attached a cable release for the shutter. “When they come, no movement. No framing. We have to be lucky. If your hands shake, no problem.”

She listened and did what Linh told her without question. Enacting a ritual to summon a spirit, conjuring an enemy that had for the most part remained invisible and otherworldly. Beyond belief that such a force could be made up of individual people, and she wondered if it was the same for the North Vietnamese-did they fear the magic of the Americans, with their planes and bombs? Their endless machines. Each time the Americans came across fresh footprints of rubber sandals, they stared at them with a kind of queasy awe. The only tangible evidence of the enemy’s existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.

Hours passed that held the weight of days. Ten feet away, Helen heard the click-hiss of the radio again as the Lurp nodded up and down the line and then shut it off. More hours, with only a minimum of movement. The day overcast and cooler, a thin fog curled at the top of the mountains, and the first enemy soldier materialized on the path without a noise.

How young they seemed.

Barely out of boyhood in their shabby khaki uniforms, thin so that their pants, rolled up, revealed the large knobs of knees. The AKs strapped across their chests looked too big for them to handle, children playing war with their fathers’ guns. Their faces so serious and yet they moved with the energy of teenagers, confident in their steps. When the first soldiers came to the river, they stopped and scanned it up and down, but they were at the narrowest and slowest-flowing part-the Lurps made sure of that before setting up positions-and Helen pressed down on the cable release over and over, hoping that just by sheer numbers she would come up with a usable frame, the click of the camera inaudible over the gravelly sound of the running water.

The first soldiers waded in their rubber sandals halfway across the river, the rushing water reaching waist-high so that they had to raise their weapons. Behind the point guard, soldiers came with heavy loads strapped onto bicycles, a bamboo pole across the handlebar and another from the seat of the bike for steering. One of them said something to a soldier in the stream, and the young man again scanned the river up and down and shrugged.

The bicycles shuddered in the river, the rushing water tugging against the canvas bags, forcing the drivers to cross quickly, almost at a jog because the power of the current would tire them, soaking the bags heavy and making their jobs harder. More than fifty bicycles passed in an hour.

Next came a kind of crude wagon balanced on four fat rubber tires. Two soldiers directed it, one front and one back. Halfway across the river, a front tire caught on something underwater, and the force of the soldier pushing from the back made it go in deeper, splaying the wagon sideways so it was at a forty-five-degree angle to the bank. The two soldiers tried to straighten it, then back it up, but the vehicle wouldn’t budge.

Now the soldiers closest to the Americans stopped on their side of the riverbank, laid their bikes down and slipped off their packs, and waded into the water to free the wagon. It took eight men to get it moving, and when they reached the other side, the steep bank was too slippery, and the wheels couldn’t gain traction. An order was given to cut down poles to create a ramp.