Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 19
The letter found her in February of 1968, forwarded twice before it finally caught up with her circuit, Efraín’s handwriting on the envelope careful and slightly unfamiliar after so many months without seeing it.
He wrote in Spanish, as he always had, and the English translation she built for herself in her head as she read felt clumsy compared to what the words actually held. He wrote about the apartment, about Yolanda’s cough finally clearing after a bad winter, about a shooting range in the Valley that had asked after her, unprompted, wanting to know if the Cortez girl was coming back to defend her title. He wrote, near the end, in a hand that pressed harder into the paper than the rest of the letter, that he had seen the news from a place called Khe Sanh and had not slept well since, though he trusted she would tell him if there were something he needed to worry about beyond what any father worried about with a daughter at war.
You do not have to tell me everything he wrote. I only ask that you come home to tell me the rest of it, whatever it is, when this is finished.
She read the letter twice, folded it into the inside pocket of her jacket rather than her duffel, and carried it with her, unopened again, for the better part of the week that followed, through work that left her too exhausted most nights to do more than touch the outside of the envelope before sleep took her.
~ ☆ ~
Quảng Trị in February of 1968 was a city still absorbing the aftershock of Tet, whole districts scarred, and the refugee crisis the offensive had left behind was worse than anything Marisol had encountered even at her busiest nights on the trauma floor at County General. Her preventive medicine circuit, meant for firebases and vaccination lines, had been quietly redirected for the better part of two weeks to a relief compound on the city’s edge where thousands of displaced families had gathered in tents and lean-tos with nowhere else to go, and it was there, working alongside a thin and overwhelmed staff of Vietnamese nurses and two exhausted Army medics, that she first understood the human shape of what she’d eventually be sent to fix with a rifle rather than a needle.
Children came through her line malnourished in ways that had nothing to do with the war’s fighting and everything to do with supplies that should have reached them and hadn’t. She treated a boy of perhaps six for dehydration so severe his skin had lost its elasticity entirely, his mother explaining through a translator that the rice ration promised to their section of the camp had simply never arrived that month, or the month before, though the trucks had been seen leaving the district warehouse full. She treated infected wounds that should have been closed with proper dressing and antibiotics weeks earlier, wounds that festered instead because the medical supplies meant for this camp kept vanishing somewhere between the warehouse and the tents.
“It happens every rotation,” a Vietnamese nurse named Co Tuyet told her quietly, on a break between patients, the two of them sharing water in the shade of a tent flap. “The trucks come. The trucks leave the warehouse full. What arrives here is always less than what left. Always less.” She said it without heat, the flat resignation of someone who’d stopped expecting anger to change anything. “Everyone knows whose pocket the difference goes into. No one here has the power to do anything about it.”
Marisol didn’t say what she already suspected, and by the time Whitcomb’s briefing arrived four days later confirming exactly the name Co Tuyet hadn’t dared to say aloud, the corruption Whitcomb described in the flat, bureaucratic language of an intelligence report had already stopped being an abstraction to her. It had a face. It had the boy with skin that wouldn’t spring back when she pinched it, and it had a woman explaining a missing rice ration with the exhausted patience of someone who had simply run out of any other response to give.
~ ☆ ~
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