Chapter 10

The heat hit her before anything else did, before the noise of the tarmac or the smell of jet fuel or the first sight of the country she’d spent months preparing to enter — a wall of wet heat that pressed against her the moment the aircraft door opened, thick enough to taste, nothing like the dry mountain air she’d grown up in and nothing like Texas either. Marisol stood at the top of the ramp for one brief moment, duffel over her shoulder, and let the heat settle into her the way she’d once let a stretch of wind settle into her before deciding what to do with it.

Da Nang Air Base sprawled below in every direction, more organized chaos than she’d expected — aircraft taxiing in staggered lines, forklifts moving pallets, a haze of dust and exhaust hanging low over everything despite the coastal wind. A young specialist met her at the bottom of the ramp with a clipboard and directed her toward a transport convoy bound inland, and it was in the back of that truck, jolting over a road that had clearly seen better decades, that the last of Fort Sam Houston’s air-conditioned unreality finally gave way to the thing itself.

An Hoa Combat Base sat in a bowl of lowland terrain west of Da Nang, ringed by hills that turned a deep, hazy green in the afternoon light and turned, according to everyone who’d been there longer than a week, into something considerably less picturesque after dark. The base supported operations into contested ground the Marines had nicknamed Arizona Territory, a name that struck Marisol as almost funny given how little it resembled the actual Arizona she’d once won a shooting match in, and the aid station she reported to sat near the perimeter, close enough to the wire that the first mortar attack of her tour, four days after she arrived, felt less like a rude introduction and more like a fact of the terrain she simply had to learn to read, the way she’d once learned to read wind devils rising off a dirt path.