Feigning interest, she walked over to the table by the window and was heartened to see the photo of herself on top of a pile of prints.

“Let me ask you one thing.” Darrow said.

“What?”

“Did you really come halfway around the world to a war zone so you could play house with a married man?”

She pressed her fingers into the table, stared at the photograph of herself while she tried to gather her thoughts, arranged her face enough to carry herself out the room. She picked up her photograph, crumpling it in her fist.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Darrow said. “I had a great time, but I’m just thinking of you.”

She turned and looked at him. “You had me fooled.”

“Why’s that? Didn’t you say you would never love someone like me? So what’s it now? Our Lady of Doomed Loves?”

“You are a grade-A prick.”

Darrow sat on the bed with his legs crossed and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Sad fact is, Helen, baby, I can’t save you.”

She slammed the door behind her, hating herself for the theatrics but grateful she had at least left before tears. Relief topped mortification. Plenty of time for that later. He was right-this wasn’t what she had come for.

In the dim hallway, she leaned against the wall. Sick at the absurdity of the dress and lipstick, she swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. The balled-up picture fell to the ground. When she looked up, Linh stood there. He kneeled to pick up her photo, smoothed it on his knee, and held it out to her.

FIVE. Chieu Hoi

Open Arms

Her bags remained packed in a neat pile in the middle of her hotel room, but the days passed by, one after another, and still Helen didn’t leave.

She could not face returning home a failure. A mode of being so ingrained she did not even recognize it. Her mother had remarried a year after their father’s death, a close family friend who had become widowed. As like their father as could be. When Helen cried before the wedding, in jealousy, in fear, in betrayal, her mother sat her down and gave her “the speech.” The speech would start with the particulars of the situation and then boil up to the universal truism that failure was not an option. Ever. “This man will be a good husband and a good father to you two. End of subject.”

When Michael and Helen were teenagers, they would hide on the beach and smoke pot and drink alcohol with friends and caricature their mother, her grim pragmatism, how she buried the second husband ten years later and declared that she was done with men. “ ‘Failure not an option,’ she probably told him in bed,” Helen said, thrilled by her rebellion.

A friend of hers, Reba, curly red hair spilling down her back, who had a crush on Michael, laughed so hard at the impersonation of their mother that liquid poured from her nose.

“She sounds like a monster.”

“No,” Helen answered. “She’s just that way.” It never occurred to her that there was anything wrong with such demands.

____________________

In her effort to prove that she could survive in Saigon and function without Darrow’s help, she befriended other journalists in town, went to official briefings, took the rickety blue-and-white Renault taxis out to Tan Son Nhut to photograph American and Vietnamese soldiers back from operations. She and Robert joined official army junkets that flew journalists out in transport C-130s to write and take pictures of scarred land and dead soldiers hours after the action ended. Robert was content doing his job, writing up his stories, but she found the whole process frustrating. Her pictures were no different from those of a dozen other freelancers selling photos to the wire services for fifteen dollars a picture.

The journalists were in a questionable fraternity while out in the field, squabbling and arguing among themselves, each sensing the unease of the situation. No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic: “I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker.” Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other.

In terms of the present moment, they were despicable to the soldiers, to the victims, to even themselves. In the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. In their worst moments, each of them feared being a kind of macabre Hollywood, and it was only in terms of the future that they regained their dignity, became dubious heroes. The moment ended, about to be lost, but the one who captured it on film gave both subject and photographer a kind of disposable immortality.

The wires sent her to cover human-interest stories-hospitals, charities, orphans, widows-but when she opened the paper and saw combat shots by Darrow as well as others, she knew that she was being sidelined. Of course, the truth of the war existed everywhere-battle and combat only a part of the whole-but her truth pulled at her from out on the battlefields. With her failure out in the field part of the public record, she didn’t know how to start again.

Another month passed; she grew more restless. Only skimming the surface of the land and the war, returning to her safe bed every night. The reporters that were satisfied at this level were like archaeologists piecing together fragments and guessing at the truth of something long since disappeared. She felt like a fake. She kept going on the after-battle junkets with Robert, embarrassed for them both, needing the drinks at the Continental bar each night.

At dinner with Robert, she tried to explain her dissatisfaction. Ever since the night she left with Darrow, Robert remained aloof, as if there were some irony that he alone was privy to. She understood he needed to save face. She had acted badly, and there was probably no fixing it. Outwardly they still joked and flirted, but they both understood that things had changed between them.

“Is it enough?” she said. “These pictures don’t feel like enough.”

Robert shrugged, bored and disappointed. A cruel thought ran through his mind that at least nurses didn’t bring their work with them. “You’re too earnest now.”

“Sorry,” she said, realizing her mistake confiding in him. She changed the subject by ordering another drink, but he wasn’t fooled.

“The only way to get the picture you’re talking about is to get so close you become part of it.”

But instead of deflecting her, his words gave her an idea. Now she went hunting at the air bases for stories. To go around official channels, see what was really going on, she copped rides alone on transport helicopters dropping rations and ammunition at distant firebases. Since there was no ostensible story, no combat, there was no restriction on her movements, either. Whenever possible, she tried to visit Special Forces camps in the hope of running into someone who had known her brother. There were men at the outposts half-naked in the heat, bodies coated by the inescapable dust and dirt that caused small boils on the skin, eyes wild from the isolation and the threat of danger. A few refused to talk with her, simply watched from the edges of the camp like feral dogs, but most were glad for the company. She sat and shared cigarettes, took their pictures, and talked while the chopper unloaded. In between the most banal questions-What’s your name? Where’re you from? How long you here for?-she caught glimpses of what she wanted.

At one landing base high in the foothills, the pilot decided to put up for the night. Pleased, she didn’t bother mentioning that it was against regulations for her, a woman, to spend the night out in the field. Inside the small sandbag-and-wood structure with the unmistakable barn smell of marijuana, Helen was introduced to a former Special Forces officer, Frank MacCrae, wearing an apron and cooking a vat of chili over a makeshift fire pit. At forty-five, he was considerably older than the other men, and unlike them he was at home there. He had lived in Vietnam more than seven years, spoke the language fluently, lived out in the villages.