'This man here is Colonel Robin Zacharias, US Air Force,' Maxwell went on, using a yard-long wooden pointer. 'You can see what the Vietnamese did to him just for looking at the asset that snapped the picture.' The pointer traced over to the camp guard about to strike the American from behind. 'Just for looking up.'
Eyes narrowed at that, all of them, Kelly saw. It was a quiet, determined kind of anger, highly disciplined, but that was the deadliest kind of all, Kelly thought, suppressing a smile that only he would have understood. And so it was for the young Marines in the audience. It wasn't a time for smiles. Each of the people in the room knew about the dangers. Each had survived a minimum of thirteen months of combat operations. Each had seen friends die in the most terrible and noisy way that the blackest of nightmares could create. But there was more to life than fear. Perhaps it was a quest. A sense of duty that few could articulate but which all of them felt. A vision of the world that men shared without actually seeing. Every man in the room had seen death in all its dreadful majesty, knowing that all life came to an end. But all knew there was more to life than the avoidance of death. Life had to have a purpose, and one such purpose was the service of others. While no man in the room would willingly give his life away, every one of them would run the risk, trusting to God or luck or fate in the knowledge that each of the others would do the same. The men in these pictures were unknown to the Marines, but they were comrades - more than friends - to whom loyalty was owed. And so they would risk their lives for them.
'I don't have to tell you how dangerous the mission is,' the Admiral concluded. 'The fact of the matter is, you know those dangers better than I do, but these people are Americans, and they have the right to expect us to come for them.'
'Fuckin' A, sir! ' a voice called from the floor, surprising the rest of the Marines.
Maxwell almost lost it then. It's alltrue, he told himself. It realty does matter. Mistakes and all, we're still what we are.
'Thank you, Dutch,' Marty Young said, walking to center stage. 'Okay, Marines, now you know. You volunteered to be here. You have to volunteer again to deploy. Some of you have families, sweethearts. We won't make you go. Some of you might have second thoughts,' he went on, examining the faces, and seeing the insult he had caused them, not by accident. 'You have today to think it over. Dismissed.'
The Marines got to their feet, to the accompaniment of the grating sound of chairs scraping on the tile floor, and when all were at attention, their voices boomed as one:
'RECON!'
It was clear to those who saw the faces. They could no more shrink from the mission than they could deny their manhood. There were smiles now. Most of the Marines traded remarks with their friends, and it wasn't glory they saw before their eyes. It was purpose, and perhaps the look to be seen in the eyes of the men whose lives they would redeem. We're Americans and we're here to take you home.
'Well, Mr Clark, your admiral makes a pretty good speech. I wish we recorded it.'
'You're old enough to know better. Guns. It's going to be a dicey one.'
Irvin smiled in a surprisingly playful way. 'Yeah, I know. But if you think ifs a crock, why the hell are you going in alone?'
'Somebody asked me to.' Kelly shook his head and went off to join the Admiral with a request of his own.
She made it all the way down the steps, holding on to the banister, her head still hurting, but not so badly this morning, following the smell of the coffee to the sound of conversation.
Sandy's face broke into a smile. 'Well, good morning!'
'Hi,' Doris said, still pale and weak, but she smiled back as she walked through the doorway, still holding on. 'I'm real hungry.'
'I hope you like eggs.' Sandy helped her to a chair and got her a glass of orange juice.
'I'll eat the shells,' Doris replied, showing her first sign of humor.
'You can start with these, and don't worry about the shells,' Sarah Rosen told her, shoveling the beginnings of a normal breakfast from the frying pan onto a plate.
She had turned the corner. Doris's movements were painfully slow, and her coordination was that of a small child, but the improvement from only twenty-four hours before was miraculous. Blood drawn the day before showed still more favorable signs. The massive doses of antibiotics had obliterated her infections, and the lingering signs of barbiturates were almost completely gone - the remnants were from the palliative doses Sarah had prescribed and injected, which would not be repeated. But the most encouraging sign of all was how she ate. Awkwardness and all, she unfolded her napkin and sat it in the lap of the terrycloth robe. She didn't shovel the food in. Instead she consumed her first real breakfast in months in as dignified a manner as her condition and hunger allowed. Doris was turning back into a person.
But they still didn't know anything about her except her name - Doris Brown. Sandy got a cup of coffee for herself and sat down at the table.
'Where are you from?' she asked in as innocent a voice as she could manage.
'Pittsburgh.' A place as distant to her house guest as the back end of the moon.
'Family?'
'Just my father. Mom died in '65, breast cancer,' Doris said slowly, then unconsciously felt inside her robe. For the first time she could remember, her breasts didn't hurt from Billy's attention. Sandy saw the movement and guessed what it meant.
'Nobody else?' the nurse asked evenly.
'My brother... Vietnam.'
Tm sorry, Doris.'
'It's okay -'
'Sandy's my name, remember?'
'I'm Sarah,' Dr Rosen added, replacing the empty plate with a full one.
'Thank you, Sarah.' This smile was somewhat wan, but Doris Brown was reacting to the world around her now, an event far more important than the casual observer might have guessed. Small steps, Sarah told herself. They don't have to be big steps. They just have to head in the right direction. Doctor and nurse shared a look.
There was nothing like it. It was too hard to explain to someone who hadn't been there and done it. She and Sandy had reached into the grave and pulled this girl back from grasping earth. Three more months, Sarah had estimated, maybe not that long, and her body would have been so weakened that the most trivial outside influence would have ended her life in a matter of hours. But not now. Now this girl would live, and the two medics shared without words the feeling that God must have known when He had breathed life into Adam. They had defeated Death, redeeming the gift that only God could give. For this reason both had entered their shared profession, and moments like this one pushed back the rage and sorrow and grief for those patients whom they couldn't save.
'Don't eat too fast, Doris. When you don't eat for a while, your stomach actually shrinks down some,' Sarah told her, returning to form as a medical doctor. There was no sense in warning her about problems and pain sure to develop in her gastrointestinal tract. Nothing would stop it, and getting nourishment into her superseded other considerations at the moment.
'Okay. I'm getting a little full.'
'Then relax a little. Tell us about your father.'
'I ran away,' Doris replied at once. 'Right after David... after the telegram, and Daddy... he had some trouble, and he blamed me.'
Raymond Brown was a foreman in the Number Three Basic Oxygen Furnace Shed of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and that was all he was, now. His house was on Dunleavy Street, halfway up one of the steep hills of his city, one of many detached frame dwellings built around the turn of the century, with wood clapboard siding that he had to paint every two or three years, depending on the severity of the winter winds that swept down the Monongahela Valley. He worked the night shift because his house was especially empty at night. Nevermore to hear the sounds of his wife, nevermore to take his son to Little League to play catch in the sloped sanctity of his tiny backyard, nevermore to worry about his daughter's dates on weekends.