Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11
The other nurses at An Hoa stopped noticing the rifle case within the first month, the way people stopped noticing most things about a place once the shape of it became ordinary. Marisol kept a sidearm on her hip the same as most of the men did, and when she rotated out to an exposed firebase or rode convoy along a road that had seen its share of ambushes, she brought the Winchester case with her without comment, propped against her gear in the truck bed like any other piece of equipment nobody thought twice about along with an M16A1 across her lap and extra nags in her bag
“You planning on shooting your way through a TB screening, Lieutenant?” a supply sergeant had asked her once, early on, nodding at the case as she loaded it alongside a crate of vaccine vials.
“Only the ones who complain about the needle.”
It became, within weeks, simply a known fact about her rather than a question anyone bothered to keep asking — Cortez carries a rifle, Cortez knows how to use it, nobody’s quite sure why a preventive medicine officer needs to, and nobody at An Hoa was inclined to look too closely at a competent woman minding her own business in a place where competence, wherever it came from, tended to get left alone. A nurse named Betsy Whorton, who bunked two cots down and had become, without either of them planning it, something close to a friend, summed it up best over coffee one morning.
“Everybody out here’s carrying something they don’t talk about,” Betsy said, watching Marisol clean the sidearm with the same unhurried care she gave a suture kit. “Yours just happens to have a scope on it.”
Marisol let the comment stand without correcting or confirming anything, which had become, by then, its own kind of fluency.
The introduction to Lan Nguyen came ten days after Whitcomb’s visit, arranged through channels Marisol never fully saw the workings of — a note in her mail slot instructing her to report to an address in Da Nang on her next rotation through the city for medical supply resupply, an errand ordinary enough that nobody at An Hoa questioned the trip.
The address turned out to be a modest two-story building near the edge of the old quarter, its ground floor doing business as a small relief and aid clinic, its actual purpose evident only in the careful way a young Vietnamese woman at the front desk assessed Marisol before waving her through to a back room without a word being exchanged in either direction.
Lan Nguyen was younger than Marisol expected, thirty-one according to the file Whitcomb had briefly shown her, though her stillness carried the weight of someone considerably older — seated behind a plain desk, hands folded, watching Marisol cross the room with an attention that felt less like scrutiny and more like a kind of patient cataloging, the way a woman might assess a length of cloth before deciding what to make of it.
“Lieutenant Cortez.” Lan’s English was careful, faintly accented, chosen with the deliberateness of someone who’d learned it as a tool rather than inherited it as a birthright. “Please. Sit.”
Marisol sat.
“I’m told you are the one they want to send after Gouyan.” Lan said the name the way a person says something they’ve turned over many times in private, familiar and unpleasant in equal measure.
“Whitcomb showed me a photograph. He told me almost nothing else. I don’t even know where the name comes from.”
“It isn’t hers, not originally. It’s borrowed.” Lan folded her hands on the desk, choosing her words the way a person chooses stones to cross a river. “Your own soldiers gave it to her, or gave it to the idea of her, before anyone was certain the idea had a face at all. There was a fierce, bloodthirsty female warrior among the Apache people in your country’s history — Gouyen, her name is written, though I imagine your soldiers heard it secondhand and spelled it however it sounded to them. Her husband was murdered by a rival chief, scalped, left for her to find. She didn’t rage. She didn’t strike back in anger, the way a story usually wants a widow to. She waited. She learned the rival’s camp, found her way into his own victory celebration disguised as nothing more than a woman among other women, drew him away from the fire, and killed him with his own knife and scalping him before riding his own horse home. Patience as the weapon. Not fury.”
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