.

       1963

      Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war. He stood outside his parents’ thatched hut in the early morning, the touch of his wife’s lips still on his, when he smelled a whiff of sulfur. The scent of war. This part of Binh Duong was supposed to be safe. He had heard no shots, but nothing remained secure for long in Vietnam.

      Mai’s voice could be heard rising from inside the hut, defiant, rising, the song tender and lovely among the tree leaves, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading, then the flourish of the trill in the refrain that they had rehearsed over and over. An old widowed man, coming out from his hut on the other side of the river, stopped at the sound, which was like a bow gliding across a reed, recalling his own beloved wife’s face, a tight rosebud from forty years earlier.

       For the river, we depend on the ferryboatFor the night, on the young woman innkeeperFor love, one suffers the fateOf the heart…I know that this is your village.

      The war was a rival stealing her husband away. Mai peeked through the door and sang clearer. Wanting to lure him back into her arms. As if they were in their school days again, and she could seduce him to miss classes and go to the river for the day, listening to her songs. The war would end soon. If she could only keep him with her, he would be safe.

      Ca, Linh’s youngest brother, appeared at the side of the hut and mimed Mai’s performance, putting his hand delicately to his cheek and holding his legs primly pressed together while throwing out his hip like the French chanteuse in Dalat they had made fun of. Linh and Mai burst out laughing.

      Mai’s tears too painful, Linh had forbidden her to see him off, her belly large with their first child. A boy, the midwife had predicted, because of how high she carried the baby—tight under her heart.

      The night before, the family had performed the play Linh had written, and the villagers had stomped the ground and hooted and gotten drunk in approval. Linh still felt a warm tingle of pleasure in his hands and face at the thought of its success, but Mai had not let him enjoy a minute of it. The roaring audience demanding she sing her solo four times had emboldened her, and she wanted to leave for Saigon that very day.

      “How can I leave? A deserter? They shoot deserters.”

      “They shoot soldiers, too.” Mai held her belly, a hand at each side, and took deep breaths with her eyes closed, a new habit that unnerved him. “They have no time with poor soldiers like you. In Saigon, we’ll use false names. After the baby is born, I’ll get a job singing.”

      Linh didn’t know what to do; he wanted to be a simple man, but fate pulled like a weight on his shoulders. He steeled himself with the thought that he was going off to fight so there would be no war in his son’s future. Mai didn’t understand that the families of deserters also suffered. Nor did he tell her that her sister, Thao, was already on her way to Saigon, even though her voice was many shades rougher than Mai’s. If she had known, the earth would have broken open with her wails, and Linh couldn’t deal with women now.

      This is how history unfolds: a doubt here mixed with certainty there. One never knew which choice was the right one…

      He tested the air again to catch the reek of fired weapons, but the odor was gone. Had it been real or only his imagination?

      

      At thirty years old, Linh had already been in the army for four years. He had joined the northern army, then escaped to the South only to be conscripted by the SVA. A lackluster soldier. Sick of the war, but an able-bodied man had no other choice if he wished to stay alive. The flowing robes of a poet suited him better than the constricting uniform of a soldier.

      Mai thought he should become a singer, a kind of matinee idol, to make the women swoon. She did not acknowledge how the years of soldiering had changed him—the slight limp from a piece of shrapnel in his foot when he was tired; the look in his eye, a new uncertainty. He was like a man with a golden tongue who is suddenly asked to conduct business in an unknown language.

      His father had been a scholar, a professor of literature in Hanoi, and in his youth, Linh had shown a passion for writing poetry and putting on plays. But the war squeezed out everything else. Every young man was forced to take sides, either the northern or the southern army. Sometimes, over the years, one ended up fighting for both sides at different times. A paradox, he would later discover, the Americans could not accept.

      Wounded in the foot, for a time he gladly traded in his gun for an army clerical job near his family. The workload was light, his paperwork never collected, and pretty soon he no longer bothered with it but went back to plays. A romantic young man, always dreaming, he hoped he had somehow slipped between the cracks, been forgotten. He and Mai planned their escape to Saigon, but he couldn’t tell her he delayed because he was afraid. After almost a year, his father’s bribe money ran out, and his company had informed him it was time to pick up a gun again.

      Linh posed in front of a mirror in his uniform, playing the part of soldier. Squaring his chin. He wanted to look brave but thought he looked more confused than anything else.

      Mai’s fears were partly true. The last time he had left he had not seen his family or his new bride for two years. When he left now, there was no knowing when he would see them again. He lifted the large bag of rice cakes Mai had given him. Her instructions were to come back before the cakes were all eaten.

      The Americans had started to join the SVA on missions as advisers. Giant, they towered above Linh and the other soldiers as they handed out sticks of gum and cigarettes. Linh learned to recognize the Americans because they smiled more than the French, and because of their perfect, straight, white teeth. Always impulsive, Linh immediately decided these new foreigners were an improvement over their old masters.

      The advisers stood with their legs spread apart, feet planted in big boots, and hands on their hips, nodding and conferring with Linh’s captain, Dung, who everyone knew was a fool. He wore a long white silk scarf around his neck, copied from some old American movie, and the majority of his attention was spent in keeping it clean. Jaws snapping with chewing tobacco, the Americans stood over the felled bodies of two Viet Cong, their bodies as small and gray and lifeless as river birds, their tattered black shorts barely covering their thighs. Did it escape everyone’s notice that the South Vietnamese soldiers more resembled their enemies than their allies? After all his years in the army, Linh still could not bear to look at the dead, and he hurried off to check supplies.

      The first American Linh met was Sam Darrow, a tall, birdlike man who didn’t smile like the others. Darrow, slouched over, still stood taller than the other Americans. Thin, he had sharp limbs that jutted out from his rolled-up sleeves, the skin stretched across large, bony wrists. His thick-framed glasses were a part of his face, head moving from side to side like a bird’s, as if trying to add angles to what he saw. Linh stared at the name, DARROW, and another name, LIFE, stenciled on his jacket. Cameras that Linh had only dreamed about owning hung from around his neck, one on an embroidered Hmong neckband, one on plain leather.

      “Come on,” one of the advisers yelled. “Take some snaps of us.”

      Dung checked his hair in a small gold mirror that he pulled from his pocket. He preened as Darrow sauntered over.

      “I don’t think…” he said.

      “Don’t worry about thinking,” the adviser said. “Take a picture.”

      “You got it.”

      Darrow took off the lens cover and carefully checked the film. Then with a barely perceptible flip of the middle finger, he opened the aperture all the way so that the film would be overexposed, ruined. For the next ten minutes, recognizing what Darrow had done and the fact that none of the others had a clue, Linh could barely breathe as he watched Darrow pose Dung all around the camp, even going so far as to have him mug over the bodies of the two corpses. “That should do you,” he said, rewinding the film, snapping the cap back on, smiling at last.

      “Does