I sat there, thinking about Dawson, Andolotti, Smitty, Johnson, Markowitz, Garcia, Beatty, Landon, and Muller, and finally about the sniper.
After I made my report, the Air Force carpet-bombed the area of my patrol for a week. The day the bombing ended, we sent three two-man antisniper teams into the area. I wanted to go back, but Colonel Hayes vetoed that. Just as well, since only one team made it back.
We kept people out of the area for a few weeks, then sent in an infantry company of two hundred men to locate and recover the bodies of the eight guys left behind, and also, of course, to look for the lady with the gun. They never found the bodies; maybe the bombs and artillery obliterated them. As for the lady, she, too, seemed to have vanished.
I went home and put the whole thing out of my mind. Or tried to.
I stayed in touch with a lot of the Lurp guys who were still in ’Nam when I left, and they’d write once in a while and answer the questions I always asked in my letters: Did you find her? Did she get anyone else?
The answer was always “No” and “No.”
She seemed to have disappeared or gotten killed in subsequent bombings or artillery strikes, or just simply quit while she was ahead. Among the guys who knew the story, she became a legend, and her disappearance only added to her almost mythical stature.
To this day, I have no idea what motivated her, what secret game she was playing, or why. I speculated that probably she’d had family killed by the Americans, or maybe she’d been raped by GIs, or maybe she was just doing her duty to her country, as we did ours.
I still have the brass cartridge I’d picked up on the riverbank, and now and then I take it out of my desk drawer and look at it.
I didn’t want to obsess on this, but as the years passed, I began to believe that she was still alive and that I’d meet up with her someday, someplace, though I didn’t know how or where.
I knew for certain I’d recognize her face, which I could still see clearly, and I knew she would recognize me-the guy she let get away, to tell her story. Now the story is told, and if we do ever meet, only one of us will walk away alive.