Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

Helen pulled it out and handed it to her, but after a quick look, Lan put it down, unimpressed.

The servant girl came and brought soft drinks and peanut butter spread on crackers. Lan’s parents had used the money from the magazine, plus donations that came in, to start several businesses and were thriving on the black-market economy. When Linh asked about the relatives in the camps, the servant girl whispered that the parents got angry when they had come with outstretched hands.

After they finished the soda and crackers, Helen asked Lan to put on her prosthetic so they could take pictures outside; the girl answered there wasn’t one.

“Why not?”

“The old one hurt,” Lan said.

“No one have time to go to Saigon,” the servant girl whispered. “She’s grown too big.”

“People bring me things now,” Lan said. “Much better.” After pictures were taken, Lan grew bored and returned to her game with the other girls. She didn’t bother saying good-bye.

As they packed their equipment in the jeep, the father reappeared. “You get good picture?”

“Yes,” Linh said. “Many thanks.”

“I know other children with problem. More pictures.”

Linh, red-faced, shoved the last bags in.

They drove in silence. A convoy ahead of them stopped, the road had washed out; at least an hour before traffic moved again. They turned off the motor, left the jeep in its queue of vehicles. At the edge of the road, a farmer plowed the rice paddy that abutted the ditch. As a reflex, Helen took pictures-it would be decades before the market needed more scenic shots. Maybe decades from then, these pictures would be historical, like the ones hanging in her bedroom, showing a vanished world.

Linh stood off to the side, his hands in his pockets.

“I wanted to rescue her,” Helen said. “Rescue fantasies. I needed to rescue her.”

“She wasn’t yours to save.”

“Of course not.” She wasn’t Darrow’s, either. He had been just as naive, thinking that Lan would give him meaning after all these years of feasting on war. No, better to just kick out all the props, to be clear-eyed about one’s reasons for being there.

Linh shrugged. “When my father was a young boy, the French wanted the people to forget their country. They taught us that our ancestors, the Gauls, had blue eyes. Now we forget with gold watches and peanut butter.”

They stared in silence at the rice paddy, the late-afternoon sun sending sparks off the water, the farmer and the water buffalo gone home.

“My mother told me,” Linh said, “if I got up very early in the morning before everyone else and went down to the rice paddy, I would hear the hum of rice growing. The women sing a ca dao, a work song:

For a single grain of rice

So tender and scented

In your mouth…

What effort and bitterness!

Helen stretched. “I’m taking you out for a big dinner when we get back to Saigon.” She had felt ashamed at Lan’s house, so obvious that the American’s beneficence simply corrupted.

Linh began to refuse but stopped when he saw her look of disappointment. After their intimacy during her illness, he didn’t know how to act with Helen in public. He didn’t know what to do with this woman.

“Good. It’s settled,” she said.

He smiled, at a loss.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I am thinking I would like to sit at the Continental and drink a very cold gin and tonic and eat a club sandwich.”

On assignment as part of a “pink team,” a hunter/killer helicopter team, Helen and Linh squeezed together in the observer seat of a tiny Loach on their way to join Cobra gunships going out on a mission. The pilot was early and asked if they wanted to run a little “scenic recon,” a joyride through the mountains along the Laos border.

“The two of you together aren’t as heavy as the gunman.” The pilot laughed, finding the idea especially hilarious that morning.

They sat pinned against each other, the front of the helicopter a bubble floating over the land, nothing blocking their view but the metal floor and control panel. The razored mountaintops tangled in fog. The observation heli cop ter hung, birdlike, over trees and wrapped itself between rocky peaks plunging hundreds of feet into narrow ravines, dark even at noon. They hovered over giant waterfalls, bamboo thickets, hardwood forest, broadleaf jungle, all interlaced with small, jewel-like fields of elephant grass. In an hour, the only human they spotted was a lone Montagnard tribesman.

Helen’s eyes hurt from the strain of searching for movement in a sea of green, the ride so vivid it was like a dream of flying, a magic carpet ride. Trees flew beneath her feet. The rush of green and sunlight lulled her, the pilot pulling up and the machine shuddering against gravity. She had a vision then, an infinity of green, her body tingling with heat despite the cool air in the helicopter. She burned and closed her eyes.

Linh, sitting next to her, scanned the terrain through binoculars. He placed his hand over hers, then gave her the glasses and pointed to a rocky cliff. “See, Helen? Come back now,” he said in her ear above the roar of the engine.

As she focused the glasses on the dirt track under the cliff, a tiger stepped out into full view. The orange and black stripes burned against her eyes after the torrent of green. The animal stood calm, detached, eyeing the land below him. Only total isolation would give him the arrogance of ignoring the pounding machine overhead. He stood for another moment, head lifted, testing the air, as the helicopter swung around to pass over him, the pilot maneuvering for a closer sight line, his hand reaching for the M16 at his feet, but in a single flex of movement the animal stretched, his body attenuated long and thin, a wisp of smoke blown away, and the rock ledge was empty.

“Damn, did you see that?” the pilot shouted, elated.

Helen smiled at the pilot and looked ahead, but what she felt was the brief second Linh’s hand had covered her own. Like a single jolt of electricity. He was right. She had been far away, closed off, but now she could see. She leaned and whispered, “I’m here with you now.”

Western Highlands

The war changed, and she was changed within it.

A major battle was mounting in the Dak To valley area in the Central Highlands, the same area that had seen horrific battles years earlier in the war. A paratrooper squadron that Helen had covered several times before had been defeated, and now infantry companies were being sent up to fight entrenched enemy positions.

Rumors were that the handful of remaining soldiers had called down strikes on their own position, hoping that if they missed a direct hit, they might escape in the chaos.

To Gary she insisted on covering the story-they were her soldiers and her area-but when she went to the bathroom afterward, she could not stop her hands from shaking. Foreknowledge a curse.

“You don’t have to go,” Linh said.

“I want to. The soldiers don’t get to choose.” What she meant was that she needed to, that the tension she felt was the thing she had been missing in California. That adrenaline coursing through her.

“You’ve already proved you’re brave.”

“Every good war picture is an antiwar picture. Why am I here otherwise?” She laughed at Linh. “Stop worrying. Anyway, I’ve become one of the charmed, haven’t you heard?”

The Vietnamese called them the Tay Nguyen, the Western Highlands, because in their minds they still saw the country as a whole, not accepting the artificial divisions of north and south.

Names were important.