“Nice little publicity stunt this morning. Who’d you pay to snap the pics, huh?”

“Get lost, Tanner,” Robert said, standing up.

“G.I. Jane, eh? Nice angle.”

“Maybe you should take a break from trampling over other people’s backs to get the story first,” Helen said.

“Nice talking to you,” Robert said to him. “Sorry you have to go.”

Tanner squinted at Robert, deciding if he was in the mood for a brawl. “All I’d like to know is who she had to screw this time.”

“Why?” Helen said. “Do you want his number?”

“That’s enough,” Robert said.

“We all know you’re not getting it from Bobby here,” Tanner said, and stalked out of the bar.

Robert sat back down on the bar stool, emptied his glass, and poured another.

“I wish the Marines would take him back,” Helen said.

“I’m your friend. It’s none of my business about you and Darrow. But you have to be careful. Tanner is a competitor. Not like me, too scared to leave Saigon and the official junkets. There’s going to be sore feelings if you don’t sweeten up.”

“You’re smart enough not to need the attention.”

Robert stiffened. “You don’t have to throw me a bone.”

Helen drank down her glass and looked into the bottom as if she might find answers down there. “If I was a guy, you wouldn’t tell me to worry about sore feelings.”

“If you were a guy, I’d tell you to punch him out. But I’ll tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t have bought this bottle of champagne, either.”

Helen laughed. This charade of light flirtation was necessary for both of them. “Can I admit something? Just between us? This feels good.”

“Enjoy it. You earned it. But be prepared.”

“What for?”

“For what comes next.”

In the morning her pictures and story headlined across a dozen front pages worldwide. Life magazine bought the series of photos and planned to use one as the cover for the following week; the contributor’s notes touted her as their first woman combat photographer for the Vietnam war.

She stared at her name in print with a feeling of relief that now she could stay on, no longer a joke. Six months before, no one would have believed her capable of this. Her only background a high school photography class and some work on the college newspaper taking pictures of football games. In a way, she had not believed it herself, but now she felt a sense of belonging to a fraternity, even if it was one that wasn’t sure it wanted her. As time went on, she would find herself welcomed and ignored in equal mea sure.

The nerve that she had hit was not the atrocity of the killing of the old man, which was a routine horror, nor the evidence that the SVA had run amok and was alienating the civilian population. Not even the angle that America was supporting dubious allies. Her plea sure started to chip away as she realized they were using Captain Tong threatening a woman photographer, an American civilian, to sensationalize the story. Her being a woman was the story.

The South Vietnamese government immediately protested to the American embassy, saying that the incident had been faked. Captain Tong denied Helen’s version, calling her a spy, although he couldn’t explain why Americans would be discrediting their own allies, but the pictures and the testimony of Captain Olsen were ample verification. The company’s mission was aborted because of the publicity alerting the VC of their movements. Olsen cabled her congratulations and said the company celebrated with brandy and cigars back in the safety of the base camp. There was even a movement under way to have an LZ named in her honor. Not Scanlon’s.

That night she turned down Robert’s invitation for dinner with the boys and spent the evening walking alone through the streets of Saigon. The adrenaline high of events now turning into a low of confusion. She had proved to herself what she hadn’t known before: that under the right circumstances she could be brave. An unknown gift, strange and random, like the ability to play an instrument or be good at a sport. But the memory of the old man poisoned her. His balding head; the sagging, dark eyes; the thin, sinewy legs splayed out. She felt guilt that, outside of his village, she was the only one to mourn his death; an arrogant thought, perhaps, but he had already slipped into the realm of statistic. Maybe now was the time to leave, to night, without a single good-bye.

She could see the potential for the war to undo her. There was hardly any way the incident could have turned out better, ways without number for it to have turned worse.

The street barbers closed up shop along the sidewalks, taking down the mirrors and shelves hung on the outside of building walls. Food smells made her stomach growl; she had not eaten since breakfast. Ducking down awkwardly at a soup stall, she pointed at what she wanted. The old man smiled and soon a large crowd stood watching her, giggling at the sight of a Westerner, a woman no less, squatting on the street and eating with chopsticks and ladle-style spoon. The official health brochures warned against eating the street food, but Helen was tired of obeying rules, tired of being frightened. This night she was immune. She slurped her soup the same way the Vietnamese man next to her was doing.

Finished with her soup, she rose to the claps of a few Vietnamese around her, impressed that she had eaten the whole bowl. She bowed and made her way back to the hotel.

In the lead article about Captain Tong, Scanlon being killed by a land mine while on patrol had been mentioned only in passing; his death was not newsworthy enough in the war. But, of course, his death was the only thing that day that mattered. The old villager’s death was another tragedy of unnewsworthy proportion. She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren’t in vain. As she hoped, with less and less confidence each day, that Michael’s had not been in vain. Too much waste to bear.

MacCrae’s words never left her thoughts. They want you to be part of their movie, don’t ever forget it. Their prescience haunted her, and if there was anyone she needed to talk to that night, it was him. Appropriate that he was now a ghost. Whatever victory she felt was cut neatly by the idea that her photos would be used for purposes she had not intended. She pictured MacCrae’s face across the table that night. An even more grim possibility. Would discrediting the SVA allow them to bring in more American soldiers?

The only tangible effect of her photos was the number of requests that came to cover Helen herself. Photo teams from the States wanted to go out and photograph her photographing the war. If she let that happen, she may as well go home because she’d be a spectacle. The journalist’s cardinal sin of becoming the center of the story. It embarrassed her, and she had Arnie turn them all down. And then an offer came from Life that she couldn’t turn down-staff photographer.

When Arnie finally got clearance to offer her a full-time position with the wire service, she blushed. “ Gary already made a big offer.”

“Yeah, I figured. Good for you. Hell, this is small potatoes here.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Arnie said. “You should find a nice soldier to marry.” Over the years, he had learned that each journalist had his own specific reasons for why he went into the battlefield. He guessed hers worked as well as anyone else’s.

She requested that her first assignment be to cover the Central Highlands and I Corps area, especially her brother’s Special Forces unit. Gary promptly ignored her, and she learned the price of being bought.

That night as she brushed her teeth, getting ready for bed, she heard a light rapping on the door. Her heart lifted, all the emotions of the week rushing out, hoping it was Darrow. She opened the door in her slip, but it was Linh standing there.