* * *
They put the tree up in their hooch and decorated the scrawny branches with anything they could find. Paper clips, strips of aluminum foil, empty Cration can lids, lengths of tubing, Kelly clamps. It stood in the corner in all its Charlie Brown glory. Barb made a tinfoil star for the top. Rye and Coyote sat on Frankie’s cot, watching the decorations accumulate. “White Christmas” played through the speakers of Barb’s transistor radio.
Frankie was on her knees in front of the tree, stringing a loop of paper clips from one branch to another, when Coyote said, “We need drinks.”
“Hot damn, flyboy, you’re right!” Barb said, and the two of them left the hooch.
Frankie heard the metal frame of her cot squeak as Rye got to his feet. She heard him coming closer, felt him standing behind her. Every cell in her body seemed attuned to his presence. Slowly, she stood up, but didn’t turn around. “Thanks for this,” she said. “It was crazy and stupid and dangerous … and lovely.”
“I didn’t want to think about you,” he said.
She turned to him at last.
Their gazes met, held.
She felt her breathing speed up. Lust, Barb had said. Was it that simple?
There was no reason to pretend she didn’t feel it. If she’d learned anything during her tour it was this: say what you meant while you could. “You’re engaged,” she said. “And I know it’s old-fashioned, but I can’t be the other woman. I couldn’t live with myself.”
“You do know we’re at war,” he said.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to try the we-could-die-tomorrow line on me.”
He stepped back. “You’re right. I’m wrong. Merry Christmas Eve, Frankie. I won’t bother you again.”
“You don’t need to go.”
“Yes, I do. You … do something to me.”
Long after he and Coyote had gone, while Barb and Frankie drank eggnog and listened to Christmas music and opened their gifts from home, the echo of those words remained.
You do something to me.
* * *
The Christmas cease-fire held, giving everyone at the Seventy-First time to enjoy a real holiday meal in the mess hall. Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, sausage stuffing, and sweet potato casserole. Pecan and pumpkin pies. Afterward, a group walked over to the Park, where Frankie had hung up a banner: BON VOYAGE, LT JOHNSON. WE WILL MISS YOUR SORRY ASS.
Barb’s send-off party.
Now Frankie and Barb sat in beach chairs tucked in close to the stand of banana trees. A party raged beside them; music blared. A sorry-looking tinsel tree, decorated with red bows, leaned brokenly against the tiki bar.
“I guess we’d better talk about it now, Frankie,” Barb said, handing Frankie a lighter.
Frankie lit her cigarette. “About you leaving? I’d rather not.”
“You’re the only thing I don’t want to leave behind.”
Frankie turned to her friend. In this light, Barb’s Afro looked like a dark halo. If you didn’t look in her eyes, you might think she was an ordinary twenty-five-year-old. Frankie couldn’t calculate all that her friendship with Barb had given her. Barb had shown Frankie glimpses of a world she’d not been exposed to or taught much about. Frankie had thought the passage of the Civil Rights Act was a triumphant end. Barb had shown her that it was a fragile beginning. She knew that Barb was scared for her brother, Will, and his Black Panther affiliation, but she was proud of it, too. She knew about fighting for things; even though she had a master’s degree in nursing, she’d had to fight to get sent to Vietnam, and then she’d had to fight again to get assigned to an evac hospital. Black officers were few and far between over here, but Barb had been determined that Black soldiers should see a Black nurse in the hospital.
Barb leaned back, sighed. She took a drag, exhaled smoke slowly. “I can’t take another tour,” she said at last.
“I know that. I just…”
“I’ll miss you, too, Frankie.”
* * *
The next morning, when Frankie woke, the first thing she saw was Barb’s empty cot. The posters above the bed—Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr.—had been removed; all that was left were tufts of paper on thumbtacks pushed into the wooden walls. Things ripped away, pieces left behind. A metaphor for life in Vietnam.
Frankie saw a folded-up note on the dresser beside her cot. She unfolded it slowly.
December 26, 1967
Dearest Frankie,
Call me a coward. I should have wakened you when my bird showed up, but you were actually sleeping, and we both know how rare that is over here. I didn’t want you to see me crying.