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After the flight from Travis to Hickam, the nurses deplaned to stretch their legs and breathe the island air. Ruth felt like she’d been flying for days, but they still had eighteen hours left to go. She’d been told Honolulu would smell like flowers, but all she could smell was jet fuel.

“Don’t you wish we had time to see the beaches?” said one.

“Even just one beach,” said another.

There were four of them—nurses—traveling to Vietnam as a group.

Once in Saigon, they’d split up and head to their individual assignments.

But for the flight over, they bunched together, even Ruth.

Her opinion on the beaches was not solicited, a fact she noted with resignation.

They’d quickly pegged her as the quiet one.

Nice enough, but not much to say. It was her own fault.

She’d held back too much in the initial womanly give-and-take.

Hadn’t revealed anything intimate enough to let them in.

Her dad was a pilot and her mom was in real estate, she said when asked about her parents. She didn’t mention her dad’s separate apartment or her mom’s investment—business and otherwise—in Frank Bridlemile.

Yes, she supposed it was interesting that her mother had a career (could Frank Bridlemile himself be considered a career?), but it wasn’t as if she spent all day at an office, and besides, her grandmother lived with them, so, no, Ruth had never felt neglected.

“Oh, how sweet,” cooed one of the other nurses, and Ruth decided not to try to explain Adele.

No, she didn’t have any brothers and sisters.

“There’s just me, I’m afraid.” This was easier than explaining Ivy’s disappearance.

She supposed the marathon flight time from Travis to Tan Son Nhut was good practice for all the introductions and small talk she’d have to make once she reached her base.

She didn’t yet know precisely where she was going.

Two of the nurses on board were Navy and already had their assignments.

“Ruth and I will find out in country ,” Kimberly, who was Army, like Ruth, told the Navy nurses.

Kimberly was fond of the phrase “in country” and deployed it at every opportunity.

Ruth tried to catch the eyes of the Navy nurses the third time Kimberly said it, but they didn’t seem to mind.

They were discussing why they had each signed up.

“For me,” said one of the Navy nurses, “it was all those protesters. I can’t stand how dirty and raggedy they look.

Why they imagine anyone wants to listen to their opinions when they look like that, I’m sure I don’t know.

” Ruth nearly broke her silence to suggest that, wardrobe aside, the protesters had a point, but the other Navy nurse spoke first.

“My brothers were both over there. One of them’s home now. The other has two months left. It just doesn’t seem fair that I wouldn’t go and do my part too.”

“My dad was a soldier,” said Kimberly. The rest of them nodded.

Their fathers had all fought in the war.

“He was there when they emptied out the camps. The things they saw. Well, when he got back, he planted a flagpole in the front yard, and every day we kids were responsible for running up the flag, and every night we had to take it down, fold it proper, make sure it never touched the ground, you know?” The rest of them nodded.

They knew. “So I just thought, easy to be a patriot in my safe little hometown, but a real patriot would go where the fighting is. Even if I can’t fight myself. I can be there for the soldiers.”

Ruth wished her own motivations were as selfless. Trying to one-up an adventurous sister you hadn’t seen in years wouldn’t cut it. She murmured something about just wanting to do her part, but the other women had already moved on to new subjects.

Kimberly made a retching sound in the back of her throat as they descended the metal staircase to the tarmac.

It took Ruth considerable effort not to do the same.

After their long hours trapped inside the stale plane, the sopping heat of Saigon felt like the worst summer day in Enid, times ten.

Then there was the smell. A seemingly impossible mix of jet fuel, burning trash, and overripe vegetation.

Neither she nor Kimberly discussed it. They’d be traveling to Long Binh together.

If Kimberly made it. She looked close to passing out.

Ruth forced herself to take a few deep breaths.

It was like swimming in a cold lake: you had to just dive in.

Other women, harder women, filed past in the opposite direction, tugging at the collars of their dress uniforms. Ruth guessed they were headed home.

Stateside, as Kimberly would say. None of them spared Ruth and Kimberly a glance, let alone a greeting.

Kimberly’s shoulders sagged. Ruth took her elbow.

“They’re just tired,” she said. “We’re going to be fine.

” Kimberly, her lips leached to gray, barely nodded.

Ruth sussed out the ladies’ room so they could freshen up before they found their bus to Long Binh.

If Kimberly was going to throw up, Ruth didn’t want it to happen on the bus.

Not in this heat. But after Kimberly washed her face and combed her hair and brushed down her uniform, she looked brighter.

The airport swarmed with men in olive drab.

“Bus to Long Binh?” Ruth asked as she made her way through the crowd, one hand clutching Kimberly’s wrist, pulling her along.

Fingers pointed, Ruth followed, and at last they found themselves in front of a camouflage-painted bus with metal grilles screwed over its windows. “Long Binh?” she asked the driver.

“Hop on,” he said. “You two must be new.” Kimberly had perked up considerably, and now here was someone she could talk to.

While she chattered away to the driver, Ruth peered through the metal grille at the crowded, bustling city.

At long, beautiful avenues, stately colonial buildings, the stumps of trees that once shaded graceful streets.

Cut down for fuel, she learned later. She saw beggars and hawkers and children and bicycles and cars moving in all directions, like a flock of birds, somehow all merging and separating and merging again without mishap.

And then they were out of the city, the bus jolting down a rutted road.

Dense green jungle loomed in the distance, but for yards on either side of them, there was nothing but dirt.

“They naped it,” the driver said. “Keeps the VC back from the main arteries.” The road and jungle blurred to darkness as Ruth dropped into a doze.

At Long Binh, Kimberly nudged her awake.

They each smoothed their hair and reapplied their lipstick.

“Well, good luck,” said Kimberly.

“You too,” said Ruth.

Long Binh was packed dirt topped with regiments of identical prefab buildings.

A WAC led them to one of the Quonset huts, where another WAC gestured for them to take a seat.

She dealt with Kimberly first. “Quy Nhon,” said the WAC.

“You’ll like it. There’s a great beach nearby.

Ask for Sergeant Posen at the airfield. He’ll get you on a transport. ”

“Cu Chi,” she said to Ruth. No mention was made of Ruth liking it or of there being any beach. “You can take your bag and wait outside. They’re sending someone for you.”

She flattened her body into the insufficient strip of shade in front of the Quonset hut and waited.

Now, so close to her destination, she jittered with impatience and exhaustion.

She hadn’t slept on the plane, and her nap on the bus to Long Binh couldn’t have lasted more than twenty minutes.

She hoped she’d be assigned her quarters soon after she arrived.

“Picture spartan,” her mother had said, “and subtract from there.” She smiled to remember it—her mother hadn’t done much joking since she’d learned the truth about Ruth attending nursing school on the Army’s dime.

“We’ll pay them back,” her mother had said at the time. “Every cent. Because you can’t seriously intend to go over there. Frank knows people. Your father does too. It would only take a few phone calls.”

“Georgeanne,” said Grandma Adele. “Can’t you see she wants to go?”

“Only because she has no idea what that means. No earthly idea.”

“She watches the same news you and I do,” said Adele.

By the time Ruth left, her mother had come around.

“It’s very brave,” George had said as she kissed Ruth before the flight to Travis.

Ruth tried to summon some of that bravery now amid the utterly strange sights and sounds of the base.

She was hungry and tired. She was about to go back inside and ask the WAC how much longer until her ride arrived, when a jeep careened around the corner and braked in front of her.

She tossed her bag in the back and turned to greet the driver, a WAC in faded fatigues and mirrored sunglasses.

Ruth envied the fatigues. They looked so soft and much more comfortable than the skirt, blouse, pantyhose, and pumps she’d been wearing for close to two days now.

She was sweaty and itchy and dying to get out of her dress uniform.

The WAC removed her mirrored sunglasses, turned her head, and grinned. And Ruth burst into tears.

Looking back, she wished she’d responded with more nonchalance—with any nonchalance at all—to the first sight of her sister in four years. She wished it had played out this way:

She smiled back at Ivy, but only with her mouth, not her eyes, and said, “You owe me $12.82.”

And then Ivy said, “I’ll round it up to thirteen. Interest.”

And then they chuckled, and somehow, that was it. They moved past it. The mystery and the abandonment and the pain no longer mattered. They were together again, and just as thoroughly sisters as ever. Happy to be in each other’s company.

What really happened was this: