Dancing on a Serpent

It’s 1966 on Clark Air Base (CAB) in the Philippine Islands, where wedding rings languish in underwear drawers, the Viet Nam war rages less than an hour away, and black flies feed on a body in the teachers’ BOQ housing. Teachers usually die of old age, but on CAB death is accelerated by forces the Department of Defense never factored in when, every August, they delivered thousands of young civilian women to teach on American military bases from Goose Bay, Labrador, to Luzon, Philippines. Out of those thousands, seven single women find that, as forewarned by a drunken colonel, living on an airbase in Southeast Asia is equivalent to ＂dancing on a serpent.＂