“Because your stories are interesting.”
He winced, remembering. “I know what I haven’t told you about yet. I’ve been putting it off. There’s a whole other world underground. Tunnels the Vietcong dug years ago, filled with booby traps and gooks we called tunnel rats. I was in one once. That was the most terrifying experience in my entire life. I would prefer to get shot over taking my chances in one of those again. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I don’t need to hear about it.”
“Sometimes we humped through the worst of the jungle in silence, only to hear the scream of an explosive just before it hit and blew everything up. We saw so much. In the beginning, I puked a lot. I saw parts of men that should never be seen. But I was with my brothers, and we kept each other relatively sane. At some point I guess I toughened up. I had to. You gotta keep moving, or those body parts could be yours.”
“A friend of mine just got a letter about a Canadian nurse in Vietnam. She discovered some horrific things over there, and I wondered if you’d heard of them.”
“Like what?”
She decided to skip over the part about the Canadian government funding targeted killings. She wanted to learn more about that before she started spreading talk.
“She talked about villages getting burned, of civilian men and women and children being slaughtered. Did you see that ever?”
He nodded and looked away. A young man in a greying bathrobe strolled past their table, humming to himself.
“She hinted that sometimes it wasn’t the North Vietnamese that killed them, but the CIA.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Vietnam is crazier than the craziest sucker in this building. And every man over there is a product of the insanity.”
She had avoided directly asking about combat for a while, but he was so calm now that it felt like the right time, so she did.
“Can you tell me more about what your unit did over there?”
“We walked, we hid, we killed, we blew things up… we laughed sometimes. And other stuff.”
“Like what?”
He narrowed his eye, thinking back. “I’ll tell you about recon. Five or six of us would go humping in the boonies for four or five days at a time, locating enemy base camps and reporting their movements. We had to move like snakes through those trees, because Charlie was always listening. It was his neighbourhood.”
“Charlie. That’s slang for the North Vietnamese?”
“Yeah, among other, less friendly names. And there are also the Vietcong, the communists in South Vietnam.” He puffed out a breath. “On recon, we were supposedly hunting, but really, we were the ones being hunted. Everybody knew that if you walked into an ambush, you probably wouldn’t come out. Flak vests and metal helmets were too bulky to wear on those missions, so we wore regular camo without protection, and we smeared grease on our faces. We couldn’t let our rifles jingle against our backs as we walked, so we cut the slings off and carried them by hand. Everything we needed to survive was in our packs, plus one of the men always carried a radio so we could report what we found. That thing weighed twenty-five pounds. It’s nearly impossible to carry it without making a sound.”
“How do you know where you’re going in that jungle? I’ve seen it on television. Everything looks the same. How can you communicate with each other? How do you know if you’re being seen?”
“Well, if they see you, it’s too late,” he said flatly. “We communicate through hand signals mostly.” He stuck his fingers together and extended them, then he bent his elbow so his hand fell in a chopping movement. “That’s ‘fall in line,’ meaning get back in formation before you step on a claymore. A land mine.” He dropped his flat hand, palm side down, toward the ground. “That one’s obvious. It means to get down, whereas if you raise it in a fist, you’re telling everyone to freeze. And if you are indicating the position of incoming enemy fighters, you use the numbers on a clock. Like straight ahead is my twelve. Directly beside me on my left would be my nine, and behind me is my six. Get it?”
“So you are sitting at my ten?”
“Exactly.”
She was spellbound, listening to him. What did his facade of calm suggest? Was he the smooth surface of a lake with a sea monster lurking beneath, or was he the ocean after a storm, the churning sand within slowing and settling?
The more time Marion spent with Daniel, the more she thought of her father. What had he seen during his combat days? What had he done? Whatkind of strain was he still suffering with? And yet, he lived a relatively normal life. He did his job, went out with friends, came home for dinner. He’d raised two daughters.
Why was Daniel here in this place, while her father was in his home? Daniel had calmed immensely since he’d first arrived at the institute. He hadn’t had an episode in two weeks. Together, they had worked on differentiating between nightmares and hallucinations, then helping him find his way through both. He needed to be prepared. They were going to push him out of the hospital soon.
She tried to ignore the ache she felt, knowing he would be gone. It was unprofessional. She’d gotten far too attached to Daniel. As he spoke, she watched his lips and listened to every syllable. She held her breath when he described a perilous occurrence, stared openly into his remaining eye. She even felt a girlish rush in her chest when he flexed his fingers, imagining the strength in them.
In fourth year at university, her favourite lecturer, Dr. Perkins, had talked about the ethics of physician-patient relationships, including the clear rule that there be no sexual bond at all. At the time, Marion hadn’t considered that to be anything with which she must deal. Now it weighed heavily on her conscience.
“I don’t expect I could bum a cigarette.”
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head to break her reverie. “I don’t have any.”
“That’s okay.” He hung his head. “You know, I think of my unit every day. Who’s been killed since I left? I wonder if I’ll ever see any of them again.”
