every ounce of privacy annihilated to the extent that even the toilets were set out starkly in rows on a long wall with not so much as a screen between them. It did something to you, set in motion a kind of uncertainty that was easily manipulated by whoever was in charge.
She reminds herself that the men in control now are only three youths who somehow became separated from the rest of their unit during the ambush. It was almost by obligation that they took her and Son prisoner. And though their rifles are menacing enough, they have immature, bland faces. They only want her things for the novelty value. When she reminds herself of all this she feels more herself, and she can believe, however fleetingly, that the whole thing is a game. As if any moment they will release her and Son, and then all scatter behind trees, count to twenty and start again.
That is how she will tell it, she decides, if she gets the opportunity.
Hours later she is not sure she will get the chance; the mood of the soldiers has changed. They’d been excited at first by what their prisoners had in their pockets, but now they appear bored with the whole thing. Miles into the march she is surprised they don’t just shoot her and Son and have done with it. They are weary. When they pass under low branches they are attacked by red ants which seem to wait for their prey, dropping down on them as they pass and biting at their collars. Like Susan, the Vietcong have to dig the ants out or squash them beneath their clothes. They swear in Vietnamese just as she would swear in English, if she dared to speak at all. The soldiers look at Son and Susan as if the ants are their fault. At rest stops they glare at them with hatred, Susan thinks, as though it is they, the VC, who have been taken prisoner by these inconvenient others.
She supposes it is the responsibility of guarding that weighs on them, especially in the heat of the day. For her part, she is too frightened to hate them. There are times she is so certain they will kill her that she almost wishes it would be said aloud. She thinks the admission might help prepare her for the act, like anesthesia. By mid-afternoon her head is swimming. There is a pain in her left temple that tracks her pulse. All at once, almost without meaning to, she says, “They will take us someplace and shoot us. Near a swamp or a rice paddy. In a field.” After many hours of saying nothing she is suddenly talking to herself, talking to Son. He doesn’t answer, but he is giving her a curious look as though she’s inexplicably sprouted a tail. She’s feeling giddy; perhaps that is why he is staring at her. They sit beneath a cluster of trees. Her feet are numb all the way up to her knees. She is being allowed some water and she wishes there were enough so that she could drink for as long as she wanted, pour it over her head, over her feet which are dead to her now, so that it feels like she is walking on stumps.
One of the soldiers has collected some bamboo that he is carving carefully for reasons she does not understand. She is aware of the heat, the air swollen with moisture, but she no longer seems to be sweating. She hears herself speak and it sounds like someone else talking, not her. “They’ll stand us on the side of a bomb crater, shoot us, and then we’ll fall in,” she says. Her mind flashes images, sometimes disjointed, as though she is dreaming. She sees craters and bones, tall dry grasses, the white sun. She shivers and wonders why; thinks it must be her own fatigue making her imagine this. The craters look like convenient graves. She’s seen them full of water, newly alive with marine life, and wondered then how the fish managed to find their way into bomb craters. She has seen soldiers bathing in them, peasants fishing in them. She’s also seen a body or two. She thinks this is remarkable, that she could die now in a hollow of the earth, in the footprint of an explosive whose origins are from some Midwestern town half a planet away.
Her skin has gone strangely cool. Her lips taste of salt. Son is staring at her. The soldiers seem not to notice, perhaps not to care. For a moment she thinks she might fall asleep, right here, right now. Her head begins to dip, her eyes closing. She realizes she is becoming a heat casualty. She has seen troops medevac’d on stretchers in the same condition. Her awareness of this startles her. She recovers long enough to ask for more water.
“Can you walk?” Son asks. These are his first words to her in many hours and they feel good, like the water itself. But though he has spoken only once, the sound echoes in her mind so that it feels he is asking again and again: Can you walk, can you walk? Part of her, the part that is thinking straight, still rational, knows that it is heat exhaustion that is the problem. She drinks as much as she is able, then nods and stands up. Her feet are bleeding, she realizes, but she can walk.
They reach a clearing made some time ago by US troops who, judging from the look of the place, had apparently wanted to land a helicopter right here in the jungle. She studies the tree stumps that have been blown up, charred wood, charred ground, a lot of sudden sunshine that comes through like a knife. She feels almost drunk, her legs jelly, her arms shaking, the cool sweat like the glistening oil of a snake. She is glad there are no craters near by, even though she knows she is only imagining what might happen, that nobody has told her, told her anything really.
The soldiers are busy scouring the land, looking for leftover C-rations, matches, cigarettes, gum—anything the soldiers may have left behind. There is a fair chance they’ll find something valuable. Marc once told her it was not uncommon for the Americans to bury a whole carton of C-rations rather than carry it. He told her this as they stood in a wooded area, a fire behind them from where the troops had burned a Vietcong hideout. She watched a GI walk to the river’s edge to dump a load of rations, then get another box and do the same again. What’s he doing? she asked. Marc looked up from his notepad, blinked into the sun, and explained. She’d had no idea. It was like a thousand details of this war that were a mystery to her. She looks now as the three Vietcong soldiers pick up bits of garbage, an empty Salem pack, a cracked Bic lighter. If found, rations are treasure to the Vietcong, better than money, which they seldom have a use for except to surrender to their superiors.
She imagines the Americans back again, the soldiers who made the clearing. With their M16s, their bandoliers, grenades and knives and helmets. She wishes them back and for a moment she smiles, picturing the face of a captain she met while out with Marc on a story in Gio Linh. She didn’t think she’d paid that much attention, but there is his face in front of her now, the slightly wild glaze of his expression, the thin upper lip, the whites of his eyes bright against his face, which is dark with earth and sun, with insect repellent and dust.
He’d stood in a clearing waving an ice-cream cone as he spoke. There’d been a story about how the troops were under-supplied, with TV footage of them describing how they might run out of C-rations at this rate. Command had reacted, first by getting after the reporter about “misreporting,” and second by sending barrels of ice cream and ammunition out to the soldiers immediately. She watched the captain talk between slurps of ice cream, which melted faster than he could eat it, running down his sleeve, attracting insects which he picked out with his fingers. They’d blasted out a temporary landing zone to get in a chopper for a wounded soldier and it looked like the clearing where she sat now. She half expected to see the white wrappers, the Popsicle sticks, packaging from dressings, cigarette butts. She half expected to see that captain’s grubby face, the dusty, sagging uniform, the reassuring gun.
You shouldn’t have said what you did, Davis, the captain had told Marc. Ruins morale, a story like that.
Wasn’t me, Marc said. I didn’t even know about it.
It might not be you who did it, but it was your network, that’s for goddamn sure. I mean, why can’t you people get on the team?
Marc sighed. I didn’t know the guy who did that story. We’re not all that friendly, the press. To each other, I mean.
I don’t know. You look awful friendly to me, the captain said, moving his gaze from Marc to Susan and back again. Getting altogether too friendly, I’d say.
She’d only known Marc a few weeks then, the charge of electricity so strong between them it was as recognizable as an army flag. They could deny it—to the captain, to a dozen others—but it was obvious, palpable, a disaster in the making.
Under normal circumstances, if she were to think about the captain at all, she would have recalled with a small stitch of resentment the way he looked at her as if