Captain Miniver added, “Thank you for staying. There are men back home because of it.”
“Toast! Toast!” someone yelled.
Ryan Dardis, the new surgeon they called Hollywood because of his good looks, stepped forward with a bottle of gin. “We know how much you love your gin, McGrath. What we wanted to make sure is that you know how much we dig you, too. Even though you can’t dance for shit, and your dancing makes your singing look good.” He held up a bottle of gin and there was a roar of approval.
Someone cranked up the music. Behind her, the doors banged open.
Frankie felt herself being picked up, spun around.
“Sorry I’m late, babe.” Rye grinned, tilted back his black Seawolves cap. “Traffic was a bitch.”
The music changed to “Born to Be Wild,” and people started pushing chairs aside.
Frankie grabbed Rye’s hand and pulled him onto the makeshift dance floor.
“You sure you want to dance with me in public?” he teased.
“I’m the one with two left feet,” she said, smiling up at him.
Sometime later, Margie found them on the dance floor and hip-bumped Frankie. Her face was flushed and dewy from dancing. “I’m going to bunk with Helen tonight,” she said breathlessly. “Or maybe with Jeff. He’s looking better every second.”
“Thanks, Margie,” Frankie said.
Rye took Frankie by the hand and led her out of the party, which was in such full, chaotic swing that no one noticed them leave. They hadn’t seen each other in almost a month.
“I really needed this,” Frankie said, leaning against him as they walked through the compound.
He put an arm around her. “I’ve missed you, too. Another orphanage was bombed last week. St. Anne’s in Saigon.”
Frankie nodded. “I heard rumors of something bad up near My Lai, too,” she said.
“There are a lot of bad stories coming through.”
Outside her hooch, she turned to him, looked up into his eyes, saw his sadness; it was the same look she had seen in her own eyes. The last thing she wanted to talk about was the war. “Love me,” she whispered, pressing up onto her toes.
The kiss was everything: coming home, taking flight, a dream for tomorrow.
When he drew back, she saw something in his eyes that frightened her. Then he said, “I’m afraid I’ll love you till I die, Frankie.”
Love.
How long had she wanted to hear that word from him? It felt like forever, because time in Vietnam moved in strange ways—sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow. “I love you, too, Rye.”
It wasn’t until hours later, when they lay pressed together on her narrow cot, exhausted by lovemaking, that Frankie realized what he’d said and how he’d said it—I’m afraid I’ll love you till I die—and the promise planted a small and terrible seed in her heart.
I’m afraid.
Till I die.
They were the wrong words for wartime, a gauntlet thrown to an uncaring God.
She wanted to have the moment to do over, to make him say I love you in a different way.
Eighteen
On her last day in-country, March 14, 1969, Frankie woke up well before dawn, listening to Margie’s quiet snores.
She turned on the light beside her bed, reached past the hot plate, picked up the photograph of her and Finley at Disneyland, and stared down at it, thinking of their youth.
Hey, Fin. I’m going home.
She’d joined the Army to find her brother and found herself instead; in war, she’d found out who she really was and who she wanted to be, and as tired as she was of all the death and destruction, she was also more than a little afraid to go home. What would life look like stateside?
She got out of her cot and pulled her footlocker out from underneath. Lifting the lid, she stared down at the belongings she’d be sending home: mementos she’d been given by soldiers, a leather-and-bead bracelet, a small gold elephant charm “for luck,” some silk she’d bought in Saigon, a Kelly clamp and some rubber tubing, the gifts for her friends and family, and her treasured Vietnam photographs, both those she’d taken and others she’d been given, like the one of her and Barb and Ethel, dancing in shorts and T-shirts at the O Club, the one Barb had left her of the three of them standing together, one of Jamie giving her a bright smile and a thumbs-up in front of a deuce and a half, and another of her and Rye. There were at least a dozen photographs of her with soldiers who’d come through her OR. The lucky ones for whom she’d waved goodbye and posed for a picture.