The plane drops into the stygian night landscape of Viet Nam, and the Lieutenant tells herself: You have sold your soul for Irony.

The thought is faintly depressing. It is also, in itself, somewhat ironic--because now, in her twenty-first year, the Lieutenant is reading Nietzsche, and has pretty much decided that she doesn’t own a soul.

A bump. The plane races over uneven runway, wing baffles screaming. She closes her paperback copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and leans back. Her eyes are glazed behind smudged glasses. She has the ghost of a headache; her armpits are sour, her hair rank; her mouth tastes like she has been sucking an old sneaker. She looks out the window, looks for landmarks-—forests, mountains, rivers--and sees nothing but darkness. Not even runway lights.

"Well, Toto," the Lieutenant says under her breath, "we’re not in Kansas anymore."

The guy next to her, a big and noncommunicative Private First Class, a stranger to whom she’s been welded from armrest to shoulder for the past twenty-four hours, opens his eyes and gapes at her. "Huh?"

"We’re here," she says.

"Huh? Where?"

She nods toward her dark window. "Paradise."

"Oh, fuck," he says.

The engines shudder, whine, shut down.

Silence.

She and the Private First Class pull themselves to their feet and push into the aisle, out and down the stairs, onto hot tarmac smelling of jet fuel and bug spray. Human cargo, unloading. Soldiers, US assorted, olive-drab. Date of Delivery: May 19, 1969.

After eight months in the Army—-twenty, if she counts her last year in nursing school, a commitment not unlike an engagement or trial run—-the Lieutenant is not surprised to find that they have arrived only to wait. Waiting is a military specialty. At Fort Sam Houston, Texas, she learned to wait in line for supplies, meals, inspections, transportation, immunizations, medical attention, the latrine. She even waited in line once to slice a hole in the trachea of a goat. It had been a hands-on demonstration of the life-saving emergency procedure called a cricothyroidotomy, and there had been six nurses to one animal. Their operations had been successful, but the goat had died because it couldn’t breathe through a windpipe perforated like a piccolo.

In the sweaty darkness, they wait together beneath the airplane’s metal breast. The Lieutenant would like to open the overnight case she's carrying so she could eat a bit of toothpaste to kill the sneaker taste. But that would take space and energy, and she has neither. So she stands silent with the others, gripping the handle of the case, rubbing at a mosquito bite on her thigh.

After minutes or hours, a fleet of old school buses, painted olive-drab, lit by parking lights alone, grind up to the edge of the human puddle. One by one, the soldiers dribble into them. The Lieutenant and her neighbors pack into one of the last, filling it completely.

The Lieutenant shoves her overnight case onto a rack above her head and drops into a seat. It is, mercifully, next to the window. The window, unmercifully, is stuck at half-mast. She tries to pull it down, but only manages to tear off a fingernail. She gives up, pushes her nose close to the pane and sucks at the unmoving, petroleum-flavored air.

The Lieutenant has always been a little claustrophobic. As the temperature in the already hot bus rises, so does her level of anxiety. The bus driver turns the engine off, then the parking lights, and she sits in the dark, surrounded by men and alone.

The itch starts in her mosquito-bitten left thigh and moves up her trunk to her left armpit; it tickles up her neck and into her scalp. The bus doesn't move.

Profound darkness buries the runway and the buses. Someone says they can't turn on the lights because it would draw enemy fire. Millions of tiny spiders step smartly across the Lieutenant's flesh.

She scratches surreptitiously, then openly. Still, they dance, jigging about, jigger, chigger--she slaps at her thigh, trying not to jostle the large Spec 3 beside her. He has dozed off, his face turned toward her, his breath fetid. She rakes her fingers through her hair and digs at her scalp. Her crotch squirms with hundreds, thousands, millions of multi-legged beasties. She shifts her buttocks, tightens the muscles, loosens them. The bottoms of her feet crawl, the backs of her knees sweat.

There is no air. There are too many noses, mouths, lungs, breathing in, breathing out; there is the sharp breath of the large Spec 3; there is no new, fresh air.

NO AIR.

The Lieutenant's heart raps madly at her ribs; she stifles a groan. Her panic turns desperately sexual; she wants to touch and rub at herself to calm her body. She wants to stand up; she wants to walk. To RUN--out, off the tarmac, away.

But she is trapped between the metal bus wall with its useless half-agape window and the large Spec 3, who is now snoring softly. Trapped in this wheeled sardine-can, on this airless oven runway; trapped by the smells of strangers and the jigging million-legged creatures and the blacker shadows beyond and the strangeness and the threat of dying young and stupid with the flicker of a headlight.

A tear rolls down her cheek. She brushes it away and slumps against the cracked cushion of the hard school bus seat, sweating, panting at the stale air. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, she can do.

And then, something lets go.

It is nothing orgasmic; it is, rather, an effortless glide into the great and pure peace of submission.

The Lieutenant blinks in surprise. Her muscles release; the spiders evaporate. The air stirs and shifts ever so slightly. Her heartbeat slows. She closes her eyes and breathes easily, gratefully. And realizes:

This is what it’s like to know that you are going to die, and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do.

Away beyond the darkness and the deeper shadows of the jungle, the very first light of dawn touches the underbelly of the sky. The bus grumbles to life and grinds slowly forward.

The green-painted Bluebird bus lurches up a narrow road crammed with jeeps, deuce-and-a-half trucks and three-wheeled lambrettas full of small, dark people. Their arms clutch chickens and children; their black eyes stare at the traffic around them, wary. Full of secrets. The Lieutenant thinks about how, two days ago, she was zipping down a highway in California in a friend’s Malibu, flying by Fords, Chevies, Oldsmobiles, Buicks. Now, this alien landscape. There are no cornfields, no soybeans, no placid cows chewing their cuds. Not a factory in sight; no little ranch-style clapboard houses. There is nothing here she knows.

Even the sunlight is new; it’s flat and frank and it hurts her eyes. Do newborn babies’ eyes ache like this? she wonders, rubbing beneath her glasses.

The newest thing about it is that it’s so old. It’s ancient. Obsolete, really--medieval. Supernatural. Here there be dragons. Monstrous beasts muscle through fields, with children perched like skinny little birds on their backs. The dirt is an orange-red that she has seen only in crayon boxes. It humps between the fields and dusts the road shoulder, where miniature old men and women in black pajamas and straw cone-shaped hats pad barefoot, carrying mountainous loads--bundles, buckets, small animals. They do not look up.

Nothing in the midwest is old. Nothing in the entire US is as old as this. The Lieutenant is fascinated; she’s almost glad that she swallowed the fat recruiting sergeant’s lie back in Chicago twenty months ago.

She hadn’t intended to join the Army, back then. She had, in fact, been no friend of the military establishment. She had worked for the McCarthy campaign—-had "Come Clean for Gene"--and given her heart to Bob Dylan. She had driven north to Chicago that weekend with her friend Dengan only because she had been bored.

Dengan had been the patriot, the Genuine salute-the-flag-my-country-right-or-wrong Article, the fellow nursing student who had felt in her heart the Army’s call to duty. Militarism was a Dengan family affliction: her daddy and her daddy’s daddy had served as Master Sergeants; her mom had been a WAC. Her little brother had been the only kid in Indiana who ever went to military school because he’d wanted to, rather than as an alternative to juvenile incarceration.

A truck full of soldiers passes the bus. The men catch sight of the Lieutenant through the window and elbow each other and wave. The Lieutenant ignores them.

It was while Dengan was filling out her pile of forms that the fat sergeant had begun to drop little nuggets of information on how joining the Army would benefit her. She had listened with half an ear to the litany: She could pull down a paycheck as a student, he said. She could buy good stuff cheap at any PX, receive a lieutenant’s commission upon passing the boards, live in security, travel the world—-

Hawaii, he said. Germany, Japan.

Suddenly she, who had never been outside the Midwest, could see these places, like pages from an exotic picture book. She caught her breath and realized that, in one short year, she absolutely had to leave home. Now, while she was young, before she got trapped and tied to the flat, black soil by entanglements and obligations. It was too late for everyone else in her big family--her parents, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins. But not for her. Not yet.

Hawaii, she thought. Germany. Japan.

But, of course, everybody knew you couldn’t trust the military. So she said, somewhat belligerently, Right—-and what about Viet Nam? I sure as hell don’t want to go to Viet Nam.

The sergeant told her that there was a waiting list a mile long of nurses volunteering for Viet Nam. Too many nurses; too few slots. They not only didn’t need her there; they didn’t want her there.

Through the jammed bus window, the Lieutenant sees a teenaged girl wobble down a dirt path on a bike. She wears a long white dress split to the waist on both sides to show her black trousers. Tied to her bike’s rear fender is a wire cage filled with live piglets.

She had known that she didn’t have to join the Army to see the world. In a year, with her nursing credentials, she could work almost anywhere.

No; to be absolutely honest, the idea of travel had merely piqued her interest. It was her love of irony that had sealed the deal.

She had always relished playing against type. She was the only child in her family who hadn’t grabbed her high school diploma and run straight to a factory job. She was the only Atheist in her Catholic nursing school. She was the only student nurse she knew who read Sartre.

Intellectual snobism, the Lieutenant tells herself now, as she watches two young men walk along the roadside holding hands. She takes off her glasses, wipes her streaming forehead on her arm, and polishes the lenses with the damp skirt of her uniform. Pretty damned juvenile; pretty damned dumb. Was anybody ever as young and dumb as I was back then, at 19 going on 20?

Certainly, she was young. And she was naïve as hell. But how could she—-the only girl in a litter of boys who had, with the family doctor’s help, dodged the draft--the only member of her nursing school who had marched down the streets of South Bend carrying a banner against the Viet Nam War—-how could she resist the delicious irony of telling everyone who knew her that she had joined the Army?

And so she had called home immediately after her induction—-which consisted of filling out form after form in triplicate and subjecting herself to a physical exam whose sole purpose, from what she could tell, was to determine if she could breathe without a respirator. Her father had answered. He had been silent for a long moment after she told him what she had done—-such a long moment that she had, initially, thought they’d become disconnected.

Finally, he’d said, Well. I guess you know what you’re doing.

She re-settles her glasses on her nose as the bus bumps past a flooded field, where three old women, pantlegs rolled to their bony thighs, pull out spiky green plants by the handful. Or perhaps they’re inserting them; the Lieutenant can’t tell. At the edge of the water, another woman squats, pants off and facing the road, to take a pee.

So she and Dengan collected their pay for a year, graduated, passed their boards and reported to Fort Sam for Officers’ Basic. Where they were told on their first day of orientation-—by yet another fat sergeant, called up from some military Central Casting—-that there was no longer a waiting list a mile long for nurses who wanted to go to Viet Nam. All of you, he told them, will get there during your two-year hitch.

Holy shit! She had said.

Right On! Dengan had said.

The bus passes a tiny town; the Lieutenant sees a half-dozen stick-and-thatch houses and one stucco building with a huge sign depicting a nude woman drinking a cocktail. Venus Bar, the sign says.

Panicked by her lack of useful medical knowledge, she had signed up for the Operating Room course. It was a critically needed specialty, and therefore it wouldn’t add time to her sentence.

Upon graduation, she had gotten her orders for Viet Nam.

Dengan had been posted to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where she had immediately fallen in love with a fellow officer and gotten pregnant. She had married the man a month ago.

Pregnant nurses were not permitted to stay in the Army.

The Lieutenant leans her head on the jammed window and dozes off.

She is jolted awake when the bus wheezes to a halt before a row of long, low-slung white huts. She squints at the pragmatic structures, with their straight, American lines. A soldier standing next to the driver’s seat consults his clipboard and calls the Lieutenant by name.

Outside, in the hard sunlight, the clipboard soldier pulls the Lieutenant's duffel and suitcase from the belly of the bus and sets them at the roadside. He points her toward the foremost hut.

Inside, a young sergeant with a thin, dark mustache sits behind a desk, doodling in pen on the wide blotter. He looks up and stifles a yawn.

"Have a seat, Lieutenant."

She drops onto a metal folding chair.

The sergeant riffles through a sheaf of papers, pulls out a form, and glances down at it. "Says here, you’re a 3443."

It is her Military Occupational Specialty—-the Operating Room MOS. She nods.

"Looks like you’re going to Phu Bai. Twenty-second Surg." He winks at her meaningfully. "Phu Bai," he says, "is All Right."

Phu Bai is All Right.

She wonders what he means by that.

"That’s one of our Magic Inflatable Hospitals." He grins and hands her the form. "Won’t have to worry about getting bored up there, Lieutenant. But watch the toads in the latrine."

"Toads."

"Yeah. They got these toads up there, their skin oozes poison shit. Got a buddy up there, told me about it. Name of Scully. He’s a clerk, too."

She nods. "Scully."

"Get to know him, Lieutenant. Not to be immodest, but clerks are God in this man’s Army."

"Clerks."

The sergeant calls out, and a squat, muscle-bound Spec 4 materializes. The sergeant instructs him to show the Lieutenant to her Temporary Quarters.

She follows the Spec 4 outside, the sudden sun dazzling her eyes. The bus is gone, the dusty road empty except for her bags. There is no turning back. Her stomach contracts.

The Spec 4 tosses her duffel on his shoulder like a load of marshmallows and picks up her suitcase, and the Lieutenant trails after him like a sleepwalker.

The Temporary Quarters is a long, prefabricated white ranch-style hooch. Inside, it is a bare-bones dormitory, two long joined rooms lined with narrow cots. The Lieutenant is the only guest. The Spec 4 leads her through the first room and into the second, plunks her bags down next to the very last cot, gives her a silent and perfunctory two-fingered salute, and leaves.

She strips off her uniform, hangs it on a folding chair, and digs her fatigues out of her duffel. Time to dress like John Wayne. The clean pants and T-shirt feel cool for a moment against her gritty skin, then they warm and wilt, and stick to her body. "Fuck it," she says. She sets her glasses on the bedside table, drops onto the narrow cot and drifts immediately to sleep.

Minutes or hours later, the Lieutenant is jerked back from a dream of flying by a voice like a midnight alarm:

"EXCUSE ME."

Her eyes fly open. Something big and round is hanging over her, and she panics because she can’t bring it into focus.

"Oh, goodness--I'm sorry--Did I wake you? I'm so sorry. Goodness."

The Lieutenant gropes for her glasses, crams them on.

It is a face, female, freckled and peeling.

Slowly, the Lieutenant sits up. Her panic has shifted to hostility.

The woman behind the face is tall and raw-boned, in army uniform. She is five or six years older than the Lieutenant, and her flat soda-jerk hat bears polished double silver captain’s bars. Her smile is big and sheepish. "I hope I didn't wake you?" Ah hope, she says. Ah didn’t.

Her eyes are so wide, so earnest, so guileless, that the Lieutenant loses her anger. She sighs. "I was almost awake."

"Oh--thank HEAVENS!" The Captain lowers herself onto the cot across from the Lieutenant. She introduces herself as Captain Amy DuCharme from North Carolina. "I’m brand new here," she says. "They’re sending me up into the Central Highlands—-I’m going to be right near my husband. He’s a supply sergeant in the Cav." She blushes a deep lantern-red. "We just got married."

The Lieutenant nods. "I’m going to Phu--"

"I requested the posting specifically," Captain Amy DuCharme says. "In point of fact, I joined the Army specifically to be with Walter." Her raw, red face radiates New Love; her smile, her long white teeth, dazzle.

The Lieutenant nods, feeling slightly unreal.

"Do you know what they call us-all?"

The Lieutenant shakes her head. "Who—"

"Us new people here?" Captain Amy DuCharme lowers her voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper, although there is no one else to hear her. "They call us all FNGs." She blushes even redder; the Lieutenant is astounded that it’s possible.

"FN—"

"It means," the Captain glances around, "Eff-ing New Guys."

The Lieutenant ponders this.

"You know, I was kind of afraid to join up at first," the Captain says, "But then I thought, it’s the United States Army, right? I’ll be in a hospital, right? There’s all those men out there to protect us. You know," she leans closer, "There hasn’t been a woman died yet in this war."

The Lieutenant must look a bit dubious, because Captain Amy DuCharme puts her hand over her heart. "Honest. I heard it from a General."

The Lieutenant nods. This is not the time to talk about Waiting Lists a Mile Long.

The Captain removes her soda jerk hat and fans herself with it. "You know, it’s just so hot here, it’s just tuckered me out. I could just drop right here," she says, "but my cot’s down yonder." She grabs the Lieutenant and gives her a hug. "It’s been so nice talking to you. I’ll always remember you as the very first fellow nurse I met in Viet Nam."

The Lieutenant feels crushed and sticky, is glad when the Captain releases her.

"Wish me luck!" Captain Amy DuCharme winks.

"Good lu—"

"And you, have yourself the best of luck, too."

Captain Amy DuCharme marches off to the front room. The Lieutenant sighs, pulls her glasses off, falls back on her bed, and drifts back to sleep.

Minutes or hours pass, fitful with nightmares of running and falling. The claws of a mutating beast clutch at her shoulder, shake her; the Lieutenant squirms awake to face the muscle-bulked Spec 4 who led her here.

He releases her shoulder and speaks in a voice that is incongruously high and light: "Your ride to Phu Bai’s arrived, Ma’am."

He picks up her duffel and suitcase and lumbers out between the rows of cots.

The Lieutenant drags herself to the sink and splashes water on her face. She glances in the little mirror and notes that she has never looked this bad, not even the morning after her graduation bacchanal. She throws on her fatigue shirt and lugs her overnight case through the Temporary Quarters.

In the front room, she sees the newlywed Captain Amy DuCharme lying in the cot nearest to the door.

The Lieutenant halts at the cot, yawning, digging at her mosquito bite through her fatigue pants. She looks down.

Late afternoon sunlight sifts through the screen, over the Captain’s peaceful, peeled, freckled, sleeping face, over the thumb that is planted firmly in the Captain’s mouth. Clutched tight in her fingers, against her gently working lips, is something square, soft, and red.

The Lieutenant bends to take a closer look.

It is slightly smaller than a handkerchief, and its color sets it apart from the olive drab sheet at the Captain’s chin. It is a piece of fuzzy flannel edged with frayed satin; a corner from a tattered blanket.