A soft knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She stood still, fingering her necklace, her mind flooding with horrors.

More knocking, more insistent.

Her heart jumped against her ribs. If it was the police, no one would be able to help her till morning. There were always rumors of arrests, people disappearing.

“It’s me. Please open,” Darrow said.

She grabbed a robe and pulled it over herself as she unlocked the door. Down the hall, her room boy with the long eyelashes was lying on his mat. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at them, a smile showing crooked, gleaming white teeth.

Darrow pushed her inside and shut the door.

“What is it?” she asked, but his hands gripped her shoulders, his mouth hard on hers. He had come straight from the party, clothes unchanged, skin still smudged with dirt and sweat, chin unshaven.

He pulled off her robe and pushed her back on the bed, his mouth on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

They made love urgently, without tenderness or words.

Afterward he buried his head in her neck, his arms so tightly around her that it hurt to breathe. A shaking in his shoulders. He wept, his head on her stomach, face turned away from hers in the darkness. Their first intimacy nothing, the usual war time coupling of people escaping fear, but now they entered a place of their own, invisible and not describable. Words like adultery small and meaningless against where they now were. When she woke at dawn, her room was empty.

It became their ritual-his arrival in her room at night. Sometimes to make love, sometimes simply to sleep.

No promises. When she did not see or hear from him for weeks, it no longer upset her. She understood; the war consumed. Her bags were finally unpacked by her room boy, who carried the empty suitcases away for storage.

Something shifted, infinitesimal, frail as a hair root reaching down through soil, anchoring the plant; no longer were there thoughts of leaving.

SIX. Haa

To Civilize, to Transform

After months of pestering military command, she obtained permission to go out on ground search-and-clear missions. The military was not happy having a woman out in the field overnight, but they relented. She learned the art of shouting like a drill sergeant, cussing out officers with expletives when they tried to deny her access, realizing that it gave her a surprise advantage in making her demands. They figured any woman that tough could hack it on her own. They trotted out the worn-out old objections of lack of bathroom facilities and lust in the soldiers.

“It can’t be worse than fighting them off in the officers’ club, can it?” Helen asked.

Chuckles and permission granted. It was also a trick she played on herself: knowing that if she was successful, it would be too humiliating to back out of going. At first, with the newness of the experience, there was an undeniable excitement as well as paralyzing nerves. But even with that, the fear didn’t stop. The hardest thing was to give meaning to what appeared to have none.

She woke at three in the morning and two hours later was riding a clattering helicopter through the dark. They were dropped in the Phong Dinh area in the smudged light of predawn. A known hostile area, as most of the countryside was now turning. The South Vietnamese troops insisted on flying in the next day straight to the village, letting the Americans patrol the surrounding area in advance.

The officers were unhappy having her along, so she knew if she couldn’t keep up on patrol they’d use that as an excuse to send her back. The only way she could keep up in the heat and physical exertion was to lighten her load. She stripped out a normal supply pack from thirty to fifteen pounds. Although she was issued a flak jacket and helmet, she stopped wearing them out in the field. She sat on the flak jacket on the choppers like the men did, but then she left hers behind. The soldiers laughed that she was trying to out-John Wayne them, but it was just a matter of mobility.

The captain in charge of the mission was a twenty-six-year-old Swede from South Dakota named Sven Olsen. He was stocky and muscled, with a bulldog jaw and a smile that quickly flashed and then was gone. His eyes were a cool, hard blue that did not give away his thoughts.

“The most dangerous times for the FNGs are the first few times out. They get themselves killed by stupid mistakes. Stay in the middle of the formation, next to me, that’s the safest place. Don’t crowd up on the guy in front of you because if he trips something, we don’t need two dead for the price of one. Try to walk in the footsteps of the guy in front of you. If he’s okay, you’ll be okay.”

They waded through greenish gray paddy water the temperature of blood. Two hours later they climbed up to a dirt road and stopped for a break; the temperature was already ninety. When Helen took off her boots, her feet were bluish and shriveled, with a circle of black leeches feeding on her ankles. She pulled iodine Syrettes out of her pack and opened them, dousing the leeches till they dropped off. The point man, Samuels, came over and started burning them off her with the end of his cigarette. Olsen had given her an army pamphlet outlining VC explosive devices to be on the lookout for.

Helen buried her face in the booklet so she wouldn’t have to watch the leeches spasm and smoke as they burned. “This says to bypass booby-trapped areas,” she said.

Samuels paused and took a drag of his cigarette before he started on the leeches again. “Then we should be patrolling Wyoming because this shit hole is honeycombed with the stuff.”

He had the wide-open face of the Midwest, empty and innocent, but his eyes reminded her of the men stationed at firebases too long. His tanned arms were knotted with muscles, a green dragon tattoo wrapping around the left forearm under his flak jacket. He had been in-country for eight months.

“Come up front for some real fun,” he said.

Helen nodded but felt relieved that if she tried, Olsen would pull her back.

They started again down the wide dirt road.

Helen had been briefed on the various kinds of mines and booby traps to be aware of, but now, thinking where to put each footstep while watching the terrain around them frayed her nerves. She should be doing five things at once; like learning to drive, it needed to all become automatic. Whatever Olsen said, she couldn’t match her stride to the guy in front who was six feet tall. Constant guesswork whether a certain flat rock looked too inviting, if a patch of dirt seemed artificially mounded.

At eight in the morning, the day was so hot that her fatigues were soaked. Sweat poured into her eyes, forcing her to tie a bandanna around her forehead to keep her vision clear. A soldier behind her, Private First Class Tossi, handed her a roll of salt tablets that she chewed one after another. One more supply she’d need to start carrying in her pack.

“If you run out of salt tabs, suck on a pebble,” he said.

They approached a hamlet half an hour later, walking single file through a narrow break in the bamboo hedgerow that hid the village. The thatched dwellings were small, filthy, and sagging. The villagers looked at them with dead eyes and turned away, going about their business as if the troops were invisible. After they had passed, Helen saw a farmer turn an impassive face from the troops and slap his son so hard the child bawled.

The Vietnamese in the countryside seemed more foreign than in the cities. Smaller and darker and more hostile, making the Americans moving through their village feel like awkward and hated giants.

Tossi stood near Helen. “They give me the heebie-jeebies, the creepies, the way they are.”

After the hamlet was searched and secured, they sat in the shade of a grove of areca palms and pulled up pails of well water. Children peeked around the corners of huts and giggled as Helen took pictures of them. The men took off their helmets and poured whole buckets of water over themselves. Helen dipped her bandanna in the pail and wiped her face. Her vision swam. She opened a can of peaches, ate the whole thing in a few bites, and drank down the syrup. She bargained another can off Samuels in return for her ration of cigarettes.