The Photo

Fiction story of a soldier finding a photo of a girl on an enemy's body. The soldier eventually tries to locate the woman decades after the war ended. Setting: Vietnam

      “I got six in the river.  Starting my run,” the Cobra pilot yelled over the mic.  His snake had just cleared a small hill and found a squad of North Vietnamese Army regulars starting to cross the shallow river.  He nosed the Cobra over, transforming into an angry wasp and let loose with his mini gun.  “Eat this….”  The last words were lost in the BRRRRRP of a thousand rounds streaking toward the hated enemy.  A short two-second pass and he called, “Got ‘em.  Send the Animals in to finish them off.”

            The Cobra pilot had set a dozen of the NVA on the ground.  Some were sprawled on the sand, some half in and out of the water.  A couple had crawled back into the bushes along the bank. 

            Animals: six American infantry riding in the Slick, just waiting for an opportunity to fight.  “There’s a clearing about fifty yards from the river.  We’ll set you there,” Our pilot yelled over the noise of the chopper blades. 

            “Don’t know how many there are so look out for yourself,” our Sergeant yelled. 

            Jumping from a drifting, hovering chopper is thrilling for it leads to the greatest game of all: the original mano e mano.  Kill or be killed.  “Martin, you take point,” the Sergeant yelled at me.  “Gotcha.”  I turned and started in the direction where the NVA lay, baking in the tropical heat.  “Hurry.  But be CAREFUL,” the Sergeant needlessly added.

            Walking at a hurried but careful pace, I started for the river.  I had gone about thirty yards and saw movement ahead.  I pulled the trigger on my M16 and fired a one second burst.  Ten rounds of American anger shredded the leaves of the brush.  A human figure crumpled as he fell out of the foliage.  The enemy soldier groaned and rolled onto his back.  His eyes glazed over and stared into the heavens above him.

            The M60 machine gunner behind me yelled and I fell to the ground.  Crouching over my prone body, my buddy sprayed the area with about thirty seconds of noise.  Quiet returned when his ammo belt gave out.  Smoke curled from the heated barrel.  No sound existed except the ringing in my ears and the burble of the river water nearby.  

            Cautiously I approached the shredded brush.  I stepped over my kill, the two other bodies freshly dispatched by the machine gunner and found the other soldiers lying in various poses by the water’s edge.                                    

             “Looks we got ‘em all,” I yelled back to the rest of the squad.

My buddies scrambled to fulfill that centuries old tradition of every war: Plunder.  Before I knew it, all of the officer’s pistols had been taken.  One sniper rifle had been found.  Great souvenirs.  “Nuts.  I’m left with hats and smelly hammocks,” I complained.

            The Sergeant growled, “Search the bodies for any military intelligence.  Leave the other stuff alone.”

            I walked back to the man I killed.  I felt no remorse.  This human game is simply a matter of who is fastest.  On my cigarette lighter I inscribed a quote that described the way I felt: “The only thing I that I feel when I kill is the recoil of my M16.”  Sorry Charlie.  You dead.  Me alive.                            

             “What you’ve got in your pockets.”  I rolled the body around, uncaring of the lost humanity of the individual.

            I rifled my way through his small pack and pockets.  Nothing of value surfaced.  “You must be cannon fodder like me,” I mused.  “Hope the pay was worth it.”  I went to the breast pocket of his uniform and pulled out a small 2 by 3 inch color photo.  Curious.  Squatting Vietnam style, I examined it.  A beautiful Vietnamese girl stared back.  A small shy smile played on her face.  The setting behind her looked to be a park or something.  Trees.  A fountain.  Turning over the photo I saw a date: Jan 69.  It was now March of 1969.  This poor sap walked for three months from the north only to die quickly.  The writing was in Vietnamese, so I did not even know her name.  

            I squatted next to the body for a couple of minutes.  This was the first photo I had found on a soldier.  I looked at the soldiers face.  Death takes away any humanity the body possessed while alive.  The body simply becomes meat at this point.  Yet when I found the soldier, he had his left hand clutching this pocket.  Absent mindedly I reached to my left breast pocket where the photo of my wife lay protected inside a metal plated Bible.  “What were your last thoughts Dink?”  No Hollywood smile on his face.  No brightness to his death.  No heroic last lines.  Just one moment alive, walking along with his friends and within three seconds death and destruction overtook this small group.  “Were you joking about this lady just before we saw you?”  No answer.  His face frozen in death.  Eyes fixed and dilated.  Mouth gaping open.  Blood congealing in the open bullet holes in his chest and abdomen.  Flies began to swarm over the body in the heat.

            “Let’s get out of here.  Back to the LZ,” the Sergeants growl brought me out of my thoughts.  I quickly put the photo in my pocket, took point and hustled back to the LZ, a ten-minute ride back to the base for lunch.  “We did our work for today.”

            I had to serve another six months in country before I could ride the big bird back to the world.  My duty to country completed and I could forget this place.  As a draftee, I contracted to do this job for one year.  I only had to stay alive for 365 days.  I did not care about the VC or NVA.  They were moving targets that could fire back and take my life.  I wanted to live, so they had to die.

            From time to time I was drawn back to the photo.  I did not turn it into the MPs with the rest of the papers we found.  No big deal.  They would not care about a girl picture since there was no nudity.  Occasionally I would take the photo out at night and stare at it.  This photo started a train of thought that was dangerous for a soldier: you cannot humanize the enemy.  The enemy are the evil ones.  We are the good guys in white hats.  The enemy invaded the South.  We are the South’s protectors.  The enemy committed atrocities, thus each of them were condemned to die.  I was one of several million executioners.  Who cares which individual dies or how. 

            After successful combat patrols I would pull out my wife’s picture to look at in the evenings. We married twenty days before I left for war, a breathtaking twenty-day honeymoon.  No responsibilities.  Just fun.  I missed her.  I loved her.  I wanted to go home and spend the rest of my life with her.  I would not visit the prostitutes, for sex and love are sacred, tied together. 

            I pulled out the other picture, holding them side by side.  I addressed the dead NVA.  “Was this your wife or girlfriend, maybe your sister?  Were you married to her?  Did you miss her like I do my wife?  Who is this lady?  Why did you grab for her with your last conscious thought?  Commies aren’t religious.  Did you offer a prayer for her before you stopped being able to think?”

            “Hell, if the roles were reversed and I was the one dead, would you keep Rachel’s photo?  Would you even have the heart to care?  Would you just use her picture as a joke to make fun of having killed her husband?”  I threw his photo back into the locker.  “You lost.”

            But I wondered.  My wife would cry if I were sent home in a flag draped box.  Her grief would be great, inconsolable for a while.  Looking at the woman, “Do you even know he’s dead?  How long will you wait before you realize he’s not coming home?  He’ll just be one of your nations thousands of MIAs in this lousy war: will you cry?   For how long?”

            Over the remaining months I made more patrols, killed more men.  But I did not look for any more photographs.  One was enough for me.  My heart remained hard for I had to kill.  Viciously, any way that would bring more death and destruction to the enemy to demoralize them.  We tied their bodies to trees to keep their spirits from going to their heaven.  We tacked the Ace of Spades on their foreheads.  To cause more death we would booby trap their bodies with grenades.  When their friends came to get them �" Surprise!   I did not care about the individual soldier.  I could not care.  For a soft heart would lead to my hesitation at the wrong moment and I would die.

            I decided that this woman was the soldier’s wife.  She looked young, as much as I could tell.  Asians all look alike to me; it is hard to tell just how old they are.  “What was your last night at home like?  I remember mine.  Lovemaking lost its thrill.  Making love for what could be the last time becomes only a duty.”  My questions to his ghost continued.  “On your way south when you lay exhausted at night, did you take out this picture and think of her.  Did you miss her soft body, her small breasts, her tender kisses?  Did you make a lovers promise with her to look at the same moon at the same time to pretend you were close again?  Did you reminisce about your time together, your wedding, the wedding night?”

            DEROS: Date of Expected Return from Over Seas.  “I’m going home guys.  Lov ya but color me gone.”  One not so swift plane ride and I was back in the arms of my wife.  I survived.  I lived.  Only the memories continued.

 

            Soldiers never forget war.  Daily something would bring up a thought, a memory, a flashback.  Most nights bizarre dreams would remind me of my terror in combat, the horror of oceans of deep red blood, the enemy charging through the darkness of the night.  Over the months and years the nightmares decreased, but could storm back vividly, instantly like an ambush. 

            As my children grew to grade school age, they would look at our wedding photos, “Mommy, who is that guy standing next to you in a uniform?”  Laughing we would explain that it was ME.  Younger.  Skinnier.  Stronger.  “Daddy what did you do when you were in the Army?”  One time my Junior High daughter came home and asked, “Daddy did you fight in the only war that America ever lost?”  Yeah.  That was me.

            Fifteen years post Vietnam I was feeling sorry for myself so I gathered up all of my military memorabilia and built a wall hanging of the medals, patches and other minor stuff.  I took all of the photographs and set them in an album, by topic and interest.  My photos were nothing special, just the usual countryside scenes, helicopters, water buffalos, children running around without pants, dirty and poor.  No pictures of dead bodies, for there is no glory in killing.  At the end of the album I placed the woman’s picture.  I had not thought of her in a long time.  “How are you doing lady?  Have you remarried?  Do you have children?  Did you ever learn of your husband’s death?” 

            Once my other daughter, now in high school, asked me, “Dad?  Have you ever thought about this woman in the picture?  Our country is still at war in different places.  Will my future husband have to go off and fight someplace?  Will he carry my picture like this soldier did?”

            “I don’t know what the future holds, punkin.  I pray that the man you marry never goes to war.  I wouldn’t want you to have to wait fearfully like your mother did.”

            Silently my daughter stared at the picture.  “But what about her,” she asked.  “I know that soldiers kill each other in war, so I don’t hold that against you.  But if this were mom, I would not exist.”

            I did not have an answer.  I just sat there staring at the photo with her.  What about the lady?  What about her? 

 

            Life continued for another twenty-five years.  Business success allowed me to retire earlier than most.  'Do anything I want' time stretched in front of me.

            “So what you gonna do Jack?  Sit in the sun?  Golf?  Fish?  Travel with Rachel?”  My co-workers and friends continued on with other questions and suggestions.  My retirement party was fun, mostly, too much slapping the back, false praises for my good work and shrewd business ability.  “Honey.  Let’s say our good-byes and go home,” I asked Rachel.  “They can continue without us.”  She smiled and nodded.

            In my den alone that night I wondered.  What will I do that’s important?  We Baby Boomers do not just retire.  We continue on to serve society in some way or other.  Alone with my thoughts I came back to the picture of the Vietnamese lady.  “You’re in your fifties or maybe sixty now.  What’s your life been like?  Do you have grandchildren?”  In the semidarkness of the night I relived that day thirty plus years ago.  I saw the face of her husband.  I heard the clatter of my M16.  I saw the leaves fall from the bush as the bullets tore into and through the sticks, into the chest of my enemy.  For the first time tears came to my eyes as I thought of all of the life he had missed.  He would never be a father, a grandfather.  He lost decades of love from a lovely woman.  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to his ghost.  “Sorry for the whole crappy mess that thrust us together on that morning.  I wish I’d met you for coffee somewhere, maybe we would’ve become friends.”  My guilt was minor.  I knew that he would have killed me if he could have, had he not already been wounded by the Cobra.  But still.  I felt sorry.

            That next year the woman in the picture would not leave my thoughts.  I spoke to my wife several times about this growing obsession with finding her, talking with her.  I did not need her forgiveness.  I just had to know how she made out.  Did she want to know how her husband died?  My Nam tour seemed incomplete without this knowledge.

            “Love.  I’ve heard you talk about her over the years,” Rachel gently said.  “I don’t know if I’d want a Vietnamese soldier to come to our house and talk about killing you.  But in a strange way, I’d want to know.  I’d want to know if you suffered.  Did they treat your body right?  Do they have any remorse about the war, the killing?  Would that soldier seem sorry about the pain that he caused me?  Would he share my loss, my tears?”

            “Go and find your lady.  Find out how she is doing.  Tell her what you feel now.”

 

            “Here’s your passport Mr. Martin.  You’re all set to go.  You got ninety days once you land there.  Vietnam likes Americans now, mostly they like our money.  I hear they trade on our guilt for the long war.  You going over to assuage your guilt?”  The young clerk joked.

            “I don’t feel guilty!  You little twerp.  I’m proud of my personal service to my country.  It was the politicians and war protestor cowards that screwed up the whole mess.”  A sneer accompanied my growl at the punk’s casual remarks.  “I’m just going back to see about some unfinished business.”  I snatched the passport from his young soft hands and turned to leave.

            “Mr. Martin.”  I turned back to face the clerk.

            “I didn’t mean anything by my comments.  Just talking.  Sorry if I upset you.  I hope that you’re able to bury whatever ghost you are chasing.”

            I nodded and left.

 

            “Look, this is all I have,” I told the interpreter. “Tell the Master Historian that I am simply trying to find this lady and talk to her.” 

            “He says that it is almost impossible to find just one lonely widow from the American Imperialist murders,” the interpreter smiled.  “It may take some time and effort to find this one out of several million war heroes.” 

            “Will an extra $100 help the search,” I said as I reached inside my wallet.  “Tell him I appreciate all that he is doing and I know how hard it is to deal with demanding Americans.  Here is $50 for your help as well.”

            Both men pocketed the money.  The Historian looked at the photo again.  He took a magnifying glass and examined the background, around the fountain.  He turned to the interpreter and spoke briefly.  “The Historian thanks you for your understanding of the importance of careful work.  He said that this fountain can be found in small village to the west.  You should be able to take the picture there and find the lady.

 

            Arriving at the village I felt a sense of déjà vu.  The typical Vietnamese countryside assaulted my buried senses: a small village, a central building usually for schooling, surrounded by the ever present rice paddies.  Even the smell was the same.  After forty years only the main road had been black topped. 

            My new interpreter spoke to the village chief.  He explained my quest and wondered if the lady was still around.  “The village chief asks why you want to see this woman.  The war is a long time over.  What good would it serve to reawaken her grief?”

            “Please assure the chief that I mean no such harm or disrespect.  I have carried this picture for almost forty years.  In that time I have wondered what kind of man the soldier was and what his wife thought and felt.  If she does not want to see me, then I will leave without complaint.  I just want to talk to her.  Listen to what she would say.”

            After a brief exchange the interpreter continued, “The chief will go to the woman.  He will return and let us know what the lady decides.”  I watched as the old man walked down a dusty trail.  We sat in the shade of the trees for an hour or so before the Chief returned. “He says she will see us.  He will take us to her house.”

            I stood before a modest brick home.  An older version of the lady in the picture opened the door.  A few words with the interpreter and we were invited inside.  The interior seemed similar to any middle class American home minus the appliances.  We were invited to sit in the living room. 

            “What do you want to know?” she started the conversation.

“I don’t have any specific question other than to listen to what you think about the War, the loss of your husband.  Do you want to know my part in your loss?  When did you find out that he had died?  How has your life been since then?  If I am not being too personal, I would like to hear this story.”

            “You are the man that killed my husband?”

            I nodded yes.

            “Did he die quickly?”

            Another nod.

            “Did he die killing Americans or the ARVN?”

            “No.”  I briefly described my meeting her husband.

            “Would you consider my husband’s death a waste of life then?”

            “Yes and no.  Any soldier’s death is a waste of life.  Yet he died as a soldier, fighting for his country.  His death seemed tragic because he died shortly after arriving in the South.”

            She sat quietly for many moments.  “I did not learn of his death until two years had passed.  The rest of his Company found his squad.  They were sent to connect with the 66th NVA unit.  When they did not arrive, a search party was sent out looking for them.  They were found where they had fallen.  It took a long time for this information to work its way back to the North, to me. 

            “We who remained in the North, sending our husbands to do the work of honor, was our duty.  We did not expect to receive many letters or information from them.  Some of the women in our village had not heard from their husbands for ten years.  I would be patient and wait that long.

            “I had our son to take care of which kept me busy.  We are a poor family and I also had to work in the rice paddies.  When I received news of his death, I did not even cry right away.  He had been gone for so long that the closeness, the tenderness of love had been lost.  Only later, after a few weeks, did I remember his touch, his laughter, his love.  It was then that I cried. 

            “I do not hate you Americans any more than I already did.  I prayed that the killer of my husband would die horribly.  It seems that my prayers were not answered.  I am now glad that they were not. 

            “Life has to continue.  My husband was dead.  My son would never know him.  With so many men gone to war, I did not hope to ever find another husband.  So I pledged my life to help my country in my small way.  Raise rice.  Raise my son to be an honorable man.  I now have seven grandchildren.

            “Three years after the war ended with our victory, a man came to our village to be the school teacher.  He and I began to like each other.  We did not fall in love as I had when I was a young girl.  But we agreed to be man and wife, as we both needed comfort.  My husband is a veteran of the South.  He had had his fill of war and just wanted to now teach.  We have been happy for all of these years.”

 

            After forty years I relaxed as I listened to the end of her short story.  We would never be friends, but at least we are not bitter enemies.  Time slowly grinds down the sharp needles of acute grief and anger.   We both had adjusted to the nightmares of our war. 

            I stood and smiled.  I looked for a moment at this small lady.  She would no longer be just an image on paper.  The picture had become a woman.  There was reality behind the young smile of forty years ago.  I bowed as I thought this would be proper.  As I left their comfortable home, I laid the photograph on a small table. 

            The interpreter and I walked back to our car.  I looked to the sky and whispered, “Hey Ghost.  Do you know that your wife is all right?  I would want to know.”

 

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Author's Note

I found several photos of families on the bodies I searched. I've always wondered who these people were and what they thought of the Vietnam War. I occasionally wonder what happened to them over the years.

Any feedback is appreciated.