The chopper convulsed and Ahn twisted away from me and dove through the door, the end of his crutch peg leg disappearing last. I grabbed for him-he couldn't jump with just one leg like that, surely -but the headphones tugged on my ears. I ripped them off and turned to set them behind me and saw Tony turn and rise in his seat, his mouth forming a scream: "Jump!,, From overhead came a horrible grinding and the floor fell out from under me as a blade sheered through the front windshield, metal, controls, and all, and through Tony, vertically, spraying me with his blood and burning me with its speed as it brushed past me and cut into the floor.
I didn't have to jump. The floor was somewhere to my right and down a foot or so and the chopper in a roll. I tumbled through the open door, scraping against the raw edges of the new holes in the red cross on the chopper's belly and dropping past the remaining prop, still swinging like some berserker's sword blade as it sliced the air and grass where my body had been just before.
The ground smacked up with a bone-jarring thud, and for a moment I was caught between the hard ground and a flattening wind as the chopper crashed past me, mowing a path through the elephant grass before exploding with a roar of flame and shrapnel that made the ground buck up under me again. The stench of hot grease, hot metal, and gasoline and the stomach-churning stink of burning flesh boiled into my eyes and nostrils, so I started choking and crying at the same time. One of the chopper blades poked out of the flames like the handle of a saucepan from a campfire.
I don't know how long I gasped and coughed and watched the billowing black smoke from watering eyes before the full impact of what was happening hit me in a shock wave harder than the blast of the crash.
All at once I took it in, along with the smoke, along with the heat of the flames, along with the rain: this was not me overdramatizing, this was not a movie, a joke, a stunt, or a nightmare. Tony was not going to come walking from the flames. What I had seen before I fell meant that he had died before the chopper caught fire. It's hard to scream when you're gasping for breath and gagging on the air, but a scream swelled up inside me and started to force its way out my open mouth. Maybe it was because that's what women always do in the movies, but I had to cry Tony's name, had to keen for him A bony arm slammed between my teeth.
"Em dil co," Ahn pleaded, his voice a low hiss. His all too familiar tears were coursing down his cheeks again, and the sight of his frightened face jerked me back to my own responsibilities, which were to the living, Ahn and me. Tony would be really pissed if he knew I blew the chance he gave us by screeching our position to whoever had fired on us, or got roasted in the Vietnamese equivalent of a prairie fire while paying noisy homage to his memory.
Ahn already had his arms around my neck and I hoisted him up, piggyback, and ran for the trees. Every time my foot hit the ground I thought about land mines and unexploded bombs and trip wires. Every yard closer to the trees I wondered who was in them, if we were already in the cross hairs of a sniper's rifle or were running into a Vietcong ambush.
Part Two: The jungle
I tried to think what to do, where to go. In the States I would lwalt calmly by the wreck to be rescued. Here I might not want to meet the fire department, if it did come. Quang Ngai had to be around here somewhere-maybe a few miles, maybe more-but I didn't even know my directions here. And I couldn't remember what the hell it was the sun did, except that at noon it was in the middle of the sky and at night it disappeared, if it bothered to appear during the day at all, during monsoon season. VC would be all over the jungle, probably, but they'd see us even quicker in the high grass, if they hadn't already. I was glad Ahn had kept me from screaming. No need to announce that all of the occupants of our chopper hadn't perished.
Thinking about that put me in a funk again and I stopped, a little inside the forest, and stared off into space, my mind floating for a while. I wished I could float my body right after it and float away.
When I looked down, Ahn was looking up at me anxiously, and also somewhat speculatively. I frowned down at him. He was probably calculating how much an Army nurse captive would bring him from the VC.
The Army had warned all of us girls that we absolutely mustn't allow ourselves to be captured-in case any of us had been considering doing so for kicks, I guess. The propaganda value would be too great, they said.
They would waste too many lives trying to get us back, they said. And, oh yes, the enemy would do terrible things to us. No doubt. I shivered and backed off a pace from Ahn, whose face suddenly broke into one of his monkeyish mugs as he began to cry in earnest.
I pulled him to me and smothered his sobs against my fatigue shirt, as much for both our safety as his comfort. Poor kid. He'd already learned that his own parents weren't omnipotent enough to prevent their deaths and his injuries. just when I'd made him feel safe and cared for, my grand plan to protect "my" patient had landed us both in this godawful mess, had cost Tony and Lightfoot their lives. I wanted to comfort Ahn but I started crying too.
We couldn't stumble through the jungle crying. We'd get blown up or caught for sure. Besides, I didn't want to get too far from the chopper wreck. Maybe it would draw some of our guys to see what happened. And I had the vague idea that maybe, after the smoke had cleared and things had cooled down, I'd find something in the wreckage that would help us.
All I had with me besides Ahn was my poncho and my ditty bag, still tied around my belt loop, where I hung it when I didn't want to risk leaving it behind but wanted to keep my hands free.
I dug into it and pulled out a bag of M&M's, tilted Ahn's head back, and popped one in his mouth. "There, babysan, numbah one, eh?"
He wouldn't be comforted but chewed and cried at the same time.
"Look, honey, I couldn't agree with you more, but we have to do something."
The obvious answer was directly overhead, in the branches of the trees, which I figured, despite my conviction that everything in this jungle was out to kill me, would be the best possible cover. After all, hundreds of VC snipers couldn't be wrong, could they?
I pointed up to Ahn and gave him a boost. He shook his head and pointed to his makeshift prosthesis. I cut the bandage away with my scissors, and immediately realized I should have unwound the gauze and tape instead and saved what I could. God alone knew what we were going to need before we were-before whatever was going to happen to us happened.
With the bandage gone, I gave him a boost and he grabbed on to the lower limb and swung up on it like the monkey he resembled when he cried.
There was plenty of vegetation to use for foot and handholds and I was not many years removed from my treeclimbing days on the elm in my parents' yard, so I scrambled up after him and urged him to a higher branch.
We settled in like a pair of geese trying to roost where the hawks would least expect to see us. I fed Ahn another couple of M&M's and started to put them back without having any myself, since I was going to go on a diet. Then I remembered where I was and popped two, hewing them mechanically, looking out toward the red and black of the monsoon-drenched blaze. Though the area right around the chopper was still burning pretty hot, the elephant grass had charred out a fair distance from the wreck and died out, so at least we wouldn't be fried in our sleep.
Ahn had snuggled into a crook of a branch and fallen asleep. My bulk wasn't so'easily accommodated. At least we were out of the rain, though we were both soaked from the grass. I thought of Tony, and of what we should have been doing right now-and I thought about all the things I would have done for him before, all those little things he liked so much, if only I had known. But who would have thought such a chickenshit would turn hero on me like that? My mind was racing too much to sleep, I was too scared, too relieved to be alive, too worried, too bewildered, too aggrieved. My nerves were jumping along the back of my neck, down my spine. Or was that bugs? There were certainly enough of those in the tree, though by and large the rain kept them from being too fierce as long as it lasted.