Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

A black soldier, PFC Simmons, stood next to Helen. “Looks like we’re none too early.”

“They hung them out, sending them up here alone,” she said.

“Then what about us, lady?” he asked.

Nothing for Helen and Linh to do until daylight but sit and wait, the air rotten with the smell of bodies in the woods around them, smoke from the fires dotting the surrounding hills. Her eyes stung. She tried to wash them out with water, but it was no use, so she closed them and tried to rest, pressing against the damp dirt wall of the bunker. She dozed through the night, grabbing fistfuls of minutes, only to be startled awake by the slamming of rockets, the hiss of metal shards driven into what ever they came into contact with, the overhead dirt roof slowly trickling down on them.

After several hours, she slid down until her head was in Linh’s lap, and he placed his hand over her ear to muffle the sound so that although she still could hear the barrages, the noise was distanced by the thickness of one hand. His cupped palm gave her the buzz of blood, the pulse of the ocean, the childish certainty that nothing could happen to her while she was protected in this way.

At four in the morning the frequency of the mortars increased, and a sergeant ordered Helen and Linh to move to the deeper back bunkers. Unfamiliar with the area aboveground, they asked to take their chances and stay put, but the sergeant wouldn’t argue the point.

They crouched and scuttled across the broken, debris-strewn ground. The opening was supposed to be only ten feet from the observation bunker, but they traveled at least thirty feet until they ran into the tree line. They retraced their way back and veered to the left, finding a larger entrance than the sergeant described, but the shriek of incoming made the decision for them. Helen threw herself onto the ground inside, Linh at her back, the fall of several feet knocking the wind out of her while a mortar exploded twenty yards away. Underneath, in the darkness, she felt something smooth and clammy and realized she was sinking into human flesh.

Helen jumped, taking her chances outside rather than trapped in the ground. She doused herself with her remaining water, took her soiled shirt off over her T-shirt. She huddled against a low wall of sandbags. Mortars rang in her ears, strangling sound, and she could make out Linh’s words only when he came close.

“Go back.” He pointed to the observation bunker.

Nervous tears ran down her face. She couldn’t stop them although she didn’t feel afraid, didn’t feel anything at all. The constant bottoming fear of being hurt or worse gone. But the biggest danger was after the fear left. She yelled at Linh, “Go ahead. I’m better out here.”

He sat down next to her, and she shook her head, pushing at him to go away, but he stayed at her side. Later, when she calmed down, they crawled to another empty bunker for the rest of the night. The shelling continued until dawn. At first light they made their way back the observation bunker. The sergeant took a look at Helen and handed her his cup of lukewarm coffee made with a packet of instant and a heat tab.

Half an hour later, in the gray foggy light of morning, she saw American soldiers approaching through the trees. The sergeant took out his binoculars. Helen felt relief that the ordeal was over; her head dull, she felt something was wrong, but still no fear. Linh said the soldiers were coming from the wrong direction, not from the trail they had used. The sergeant trained his binoculars through the fog. When the soldiers were less than fifty yards away, Helen saw a lead soldier raise his machine gun. Her thoughts slowed. She felt cool and divorced from what was happening in front of her. Maybe the soldiers thought that Vietnamese were in the bunkers? The soldier opened fire, a spray of bullets, and Helen frowned, unable to comprehend the sight before her eyes. The sergeant screamed words to the other men in the bunker who opened fire on the men walking through the trees.

When the fog burned off, B-52s dropped canisters of napalm that set the surrounding hills on fire, the sky swirled gray and blue. Next came gunships, and this time they were able to get in and out unharmed. They had either broken the enemy or he had retreated.

Helen stood outside the bunker, looking at the area that she had only been able to grope her way through in the dark. In the white light of fog and smoke, she could make out the charred remains of trees and bodies. She brought her camera up to her eye, a relief. She followed the soldiers through the trees and took pictures of the dead Vietnamese in American uniforms. Those wounded lying silent, uncomplaining, resigned to their fate. Not expecting any help. Helen was struck by the foreignness of this reaction, the extreme capacity for hardship, and she couldn’t help feeling a disagreeable respect. The Americans hated the enemy’s willingness to use civilians, to dress in the enemy’s uniforms, and yet playing by conventional rules would have lost the war.

American soldiers crawled out from beneath the ground, faces lean and dark, eyes like sharp knives from being afraid too long, uniforms molded to their bodies, patinaed by sweat and dirt. As they stretched stiff, cramped bodies and moved through camp, they grew more animated until Helen captured a shot of two soldiers lobbing a C-ration can like a football, a moment of relief at surviving the night.

She walked the camp and took pictures, simply a matter of composition and aperture and shutter speed. This was a bigger battle, with more casualties than she had ever before witnessed, and yet she felt less, actually felt nothing.

PFC Simmons walked beside her. “You here to make us fucking famous?”

She tried to sound normal, although she felt like a ghost floating above the scene. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Fucking A. Ought to be some kinda reason for this. Besides you getting your pictures to Danang and having a scoop, talkin’ about how brave you were.”

After Helen had the film she needed, she sat on a rock and waited. She had not eaten for twelve hours, had not slept in twenty-four. Sound still came to her muted, as if she were underwater. Linh photographed a mortar crew who had been there the whole three days. Since her return, a new dynamic to their professional relationship: Linh, a photographer now in his own right. They traveled together, but when they reached their destination they went through the professional courtesy of pretending to be invisible to each other.

As they made their slow way back down the hill, following the wounded, they passed living soldiers with dead eyes who did not even glance at them; Helen felt reinforced in her ghostliness. The piles of the dead had not been moved but were powdered in lime, which hid the features, making the bodies anonymous, making the living feel they were moving through a bizarre kind of catacomb.

They waited hours while the wounded were loaded and flown away.

As the infantry stretched chain-link around the LZ secured only hours before, peasant girls drifted in singly or in pairs from the nearby hamlets. They stood barefoot, dressed in faded cotton tops and black pajama bottoms, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, wordlessly soliciting. When a helicopter came in they forgot themselves, rushed up to the fence and poked their fingers through in their thrill to see the flying machines. Their fingers were as tiny and delicate as children’s, a few with chipped nails painted in gaudy pinks and reds.

One of the guards went up to the fence and said something to a young girl with jet shoulder-length hair and a shiny turquoise shirt too large for her slight frame. Curious, Helen raised her camera as he took something out of his pocket, and as he unwrapped it, she saw it was a roll of Life Savers. He pushed his fingers through the fence and fed the candy to the girl, placing it directly on her tongue.