“Explosion blew the dog tags right off him. No name,” Barb said. “On Christmas Eve.”
“Someone will know him. His platoon is in Post-Op.”
“Yeah,” Barb said, carefully placing the soldier’s hand on his chest. She kept her hand atop his.
Frankie knew Barb was thinking of her brother, Will, who’d come home from Vietnam two years ago a different man. Angry. Radical. Bound for trouble.
Frankie found a white sheet and covered the dead soldier, whispering, “God bless and keep you, soldier.”
Barb didn’t look up. “The Stars and Stripes reported no American casualties yesterday. Seven men died in OR One alone.”
Frankie nodded.
Whatever doubt—or hope—she’d once held was gone now: the American government was lying about the war. There was no way to avoid that simple truth anymore. LBJ and his generals were lying to the American people, to reporters, to everyone. Maybe even to each other.
The betrayal was as shocking as the assassination of Kennedy had been, an upheaval of right and wrong. The America Frankie believed in, the shining Camelot of her youth, was gone, or lost. Or maybe it had always been a lie. All she knew was that they were here in this faraway country, soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines and volunteers, risking their lives, and their government could no longer be trusted to tell them the truth about why.
Men were still arriving in Vietnam by the thousands, and contrary to what the hippies and the protesters suggested, the majority of them were volunteers, believers in their country. How could the government—and, worse, how could the American people—not care about that?
Frankie and Barb walked past the morgue, where a pair of corpsmen were processing last night’s corpses.
Frankie was the first to hear the chopper. She turned and tented a hand over her eyes. “Damn.”
The sound of the rotors grew louder.
“Just one.”
They rushed to the helipad to help offload the wounded and saw a Huey gunship touch down.
Coyote sat in the left seat; he leaned toward Frankie, grinning. “Just the nurses we hoped to see on Christmas Eve,” he said. “Want to have some fun?”
“You don’t have to ask us twice.” Barb jumped up into the chopper, and Frankie followed.
Once inside, Frankie saw that Rye was in the right seat, wearing his comms helmet with RIOT written across the front. Mirrored aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He gave her a smile; she answered with a thumbs-up.
Coyote handed them headsets.
Frankie put her headset on and sat on the floor, next to the gunner positioned at the open door, and behind Rye. She let her legs dangle over the side as they took off.
They flew over the flat, treeless red swath of the evac hospital, and over the leafless, empty jungle, where dead orange leaves lay on the ground beside dying trees.
Up. Up. High into the mountains, where the world was impossibly green.
A few minutes later, Rye said into his mic, “There,” and the Huey descended sharply, lowered to about six feet above the ground. Hovered there. “Two minutes, Coyote. I don’t like being a target.”
Coyote grabbed a rifle and an ax and jumped to the ground. Weapon out, he ran for a stand of trees.
Frankie surveyed the open area. Charlie could be anywhere, hiding in the lush green jungle … they could have planted Bouncing Betties or punji stakes—sharpened sticks, stabbed deep in the ground and coated with human feces to assure both a deep wound and infection when stepped on.
“This is crazy,” Frankie said. “What’s he doing?”
Moments later （it felt like an eternity）， Coyote came back, carrying a straggly tree. He tossed it into the back of the chopper and climbed up into the left seat.
“All that for a tree?” Frankie yelled into her microphone. “You two are crazy.”
“A Christmas tree,” Coyote said, laughing as the helicopter spun and arced back up toward the clouds.
Twenty minutes later, they landed back at the Seventy-First.
Coyote turned and pulled off his helmet and smiled. “Riot and I figured you gals needed a Christmas tree.”
Barb laughed. Frankie thought it might be the truest laugh she’d ever heard from her friend.
“You Seawolves sure live up to your crazy-as-shit reputation, I gotta say,” Barb said. “I just hope you have a turkey to go along with it or my mama would whoop your ass for playing with a girl’s tender heart.”
Coyote grinned. “And a pecan pie, all the way from my mama’s kitchen in San Antonio.”