Chapter 17

Khe Sanh in the fall of 1967 was not yet the name it would become. The siege that would fill newspapers and newsreels was still months away, but the hills around the combat base had already developed a habit that fall of testing the wire — probes some nights, harassing mortar fire on others, never quite building into the full assault everyone on the base seemed to sense was still being rehearsed rather than launched. Marisol’s rotation brought her through on an ordinary two-day medical circuit, vaccinations and sanitation checks for a garrison that had seen too little of either in the preceding month, and she arrived on a gray Tuesday morning with no reason to expect the visit would run longer than planned.

The first probe came that same night, small and almost exploratory — a handful of sappers testing a stretch of wire on the eastern perimeter, driven off within twenty minutes by a reaction squad that treated the whole thing with the weary irritation of men who’d done this dance before and expected to do it again soon. Marisol spent the aftermath treating a corporal’s shrapnel wound to the forearm, minor enough that she had him stitched and resting within the hour, and went to sleep that night assuming the next morning’s convoy would collect her on schedule and carry her back toward An Hoa.

The convoy never came. Radio traffic that morning carried word of a firefight along the road that made the route impassable for anything smaller than a full relief column, and Marisol found herself, by midmorning, no longer a visitor running a circuit but simply another set of hands the base needed to keep, at least until the road cleared.