Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

That was the shot. Helen had endured the previous hours of terror to reach it, and yet when it came it satisfied her that the sacrifice had been worth it. Only in her stripped state would she have noticed something so small and so fraught. Later it turned out to be a cover and then led to her first award, but for her the value of the picture was that it returned her purpose-to find small glimmers of humanity.

Helen and Linh caught the last helicopter out and were dropped at a supply base that was supposed to be running more cargo flights from Tan Son Nhut. By the time they landed, the last flight had left, and they had no choice but to spend the night. The whole Highlands was in a state of emergency, and press seating was not a priority. Soldiers waiting to go in joked that the military powers were trying to get as many of them killed as possible before the rumored troop withdrawals.

The next day they waited again, Helen in the mess tent nursing a coffee, Linh stationed next to the air traffic controller, supplying him with cigarettes and sharing a flask of bourbon.

Their location was in a depressed bowl with ragged foothills all around, allowing only a short runway. The jungle seemed to bear down on their small patch of denuded territory, its tinsel of concertina wire, its hastily scratched-out bunkers. The jungle stood dense and majestic and unapproachable. The land itself against them; rice paddies and jungle and plateaus and mountains, all conspiring and waiting for their demise and disappearance.

Linh came in the mess tent and walked over to her table. “You doing okay?”

“What do the flights look like?”

“No one getting in or out now. We could be days.”

The wind was knocked out of her. She had to admit she was more shaken up than she thought; she needed to escape, although escape was getting harder to come by.

“The good news is that nobody else is getting in or out, either. The pictures are still in play.”

She could not blame him-this was their life-but the private’s words about a scoop echoed in her head in a nasty way. By late afternoon, she despaired that they would get out that night, but Linh came running into the mess after having talked his way onto the last cargo plane headed for Tan Son Nhut.

As they approached the plane, one of the flight crew came up to her with a white scarf, but the roar of the engine and her own muffled hearing made it impossible for her to make out his words, and finally he motioned for her to tie it over her nose and mouth.

“I don’t understand,” Helen yelled over the roar, and he pinched his nose. The scarf was greasy, and she brought it to her nose and smelled the sharp smell of Tiger Balm slathered in the center. She shook her head and handed it back to him.

Linh walked up the cargo ramp and stopped at the sight in front of him. Inside the hold, body bags filled the space from floor to ceiling. He walked backward down the ramp; speechless, he pointed. He stood on the ground, arms wrapped around his sides, while Helen found the harassed air controller who had not told Linh what the cargo was on the flight. He shrugged, unimpressed. If they refused this flight, he said, they would spend at least another night or two out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Helen said. “One more night.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Linh said.

They sat in the three feet of cleared space at the forward-most section of the cargo cabin. The smell penetrated, and she wished she had taken the offered scarf. A solid wall of broken bones and sliding flesh, the sight cleaned up and made civilized by being zipped away in rubber bags. She had to put something between herself and this sight and so she raised her camera. The great dark mass in front of her had power, but it was not her picture anymore. It had similarities with the photo she had taken years ago of soldiers piled on the convoy truck. Then she had been in shock at the carnage, determined to show it. Now each of the bodies before her were no longer anonymous, each was Michael, Darrow, Samuels, and all the others. The image valid, but she was unequal to it and lowered the camera. She had to find the smallest bit of redemption in a photo, otherwise taking it would begin to destroy her. Even if it meant risking the misconception that war was not as horrific as it was.

They sat and waited, cameras useless in their laps. Linh had made no motion toward photographing the scene.

Once they were airborne, the wind whipped through the open doors, diluting the stench but also creating a frightening ripple of bags, a hard flapping and flaying that was as bad as the earlier smell. Helen closed her eyes and tried to think of anything but where she was.

During the steep descent into Tan Son Nhut, fluids from the seeping bags sloshed forward in a small wave, and Linh felt a cool, viscous liquid soak through his pants. When the source of the wetness became evident, he put his hands down to try to stand up, but the slickness was like egg white against the metal floor, and he slipped back. Everything blacked in on him. He opened his mouth, but the engines drowned out sound.

Helen pulled him to her, her arms a vise around his waist, turned him away from the sight until they both stood clinging to the webbed wall, but even after he had regained his balance, still she kept her hold tight on him. This she could do. She would not let him go.

Love

His heart had been locked away for a very long time.

From the moment he shifted the weight of Mai’s body from his own arms to the earth, he chose not to feel again. He hadn’t held another woman in his arms until he picked up Helen from the sidewalk and carried her back to the room in Cholon.

One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.

The weight of Helen in his arms broke open memory. She invaded his heart, first in Darrow’s pictures, and then later through the casual touch of her hand, the smell of her hair, and finally the weight of her pain in his arms.

After she returned to Vietnam, he would wait for her in the crooked apartment, and while waiting he would roll an earring of hers in the palm of his hand, comforted by the thought that it had been against the delicate skin of her earlobe. He did not intend for Helen to know of these feelings; he was perfectly content not acting on them. The invisible carrying just as much weight as the visible in his world.

____________________

After Dak To, Helen asked Linh to take her back to the hamlet in the delta where she had stayed with Darrow. She wanted to recapture that sense of serenity she had glimpsed there. But the hamlet was nothing but ashes now, the villagers refugees. “They declared it a center of enemy activity.”

“We were there. It was safe.”

Linh shrugged. “Maybe we were wrong; maybe they were wrong. Either way the village is still destroyed.”

Helen was silent for a moment. “Don’t you care what is happening to your country?”

He turned away, angry, intending to leave until he regained possession of himself, but instead, for the first time, he turned back. He’d been around Americans long enough to get used to their blurting out feelings, and the desire in him to do so was overwhelming. “My war has been going on for nine years so far. I can’t take a vacation from it and go home and come back. The war is in my home.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those you can save. You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That’s a tourist’s sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographers who are tourists of the war.”