Two Mothers — Linda Cardillo

Mel Ames isn't someone who believes in fate. In fact, she isn't sure she believes in anything—except her own wits, her powers of observation and her pen.After covering antiwar demonstrations and political stories as an undergraduate at Columbia University, she talks her way into an assignment as a stringer for Newsweek and boards a plane bound for Saigon.She keeps her hair short and her shirts loose. In her right pocket she stows her notepad and a ballpoint pen; in the left, a pack of Marlboros that she empties every day. She also keeps a low profile, as much as she can as a young woman in an Asian war zone. People trust her: bar girls in the noisy clubs that line the teeming alleys of the city; shopkeepers; Navy lieutenants running river operations in the Delta; and South Vietnamese army officers who talk to her over a beer and a cigarette.She sees the war through their eyes, takes her notes back to the room she rents above a tea shop and types her stories.By 1975, Vietnam is under her skin. Her pulse beats to the singsong rhythm of its language. But in the mounting panic and confusion of impending loss as Saigon is about to fall, Mel knows it is time to go.But she also knows that she has one more story to write—a story that will change not only the lives of the hundreds of children in Vietnamese orphanages who need to be rescued, but her own life as well.