The Viet Cong schoolhouse is a spacious building of handmade yellow bricks and looks like a sunny resort villa in a Tahitian paradise.  The roof is red tile.  There's a small courtyard off to one side where French colonial officials used to sit and drink fancy drinks and tell jokes beneath canvas canopies.
    Today the courtyard is full of laughing children taking their places on reed sleeping mats, which they unroll in perfectly aligned rows along the clean-swept classroom area.  The classroom area faces a wall covered by purple bougainvillea and is shaded by a coconut palm.
    Kieu Chi Song and I are laying bricks.  Song is the Viet Cong schoolteacher for the village of Hoa Binh, a Viet Cong village somewhere west of Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border.  Song and I got up at dawn to repair a big bite that an artillery shell took out of the low whitewashed wall that encloses the courtyard.
    Enemy cannons at the Rockpile and Camp Carroll crank out fire missions twenty-four hours a day.  Three or four times each week big shells pass over our village on their way to hit Viet Cong positions pinpointed by forward observers, Bird Dog spotter planes or Force Recon inserts.  One shell in a hundred is a dud.  One shell in fifty is a short round.  Sometimes short rounds kill Vietnamese civilians in the occupied zones.  Sometimes short rounds fall on enemy positions and kill American Marines.  This short round took a bit out of our wall.
    Song stands on the other side of the wall and mixes cement as I life another broken brick.  The brick is heavy and red inside and still cold from the night.  It has been broken before and has been repainted many times.
    After spreading a layer of cement, Song puts down her wooden trowel and helps me position the brick.  Song is careful not to get any cement on her dress.  She is wearing a black silk Ao Dai which she has hand-swen with big yellow chrysanthemums.  Song has coal-black eyes, high cheekbones, dark eyelashes, perfect white teeth, and shiny black hair.  Her hair hangs down her back all the way to her waist.
    Song looks at me and smiles.  "Bao Chi, my brother, you mend this wall without revolutionary enthusiasm."
    I shrug.  "Bad night."
    "Bao Chi, I think that you miss your home village of Alabama very much."
    I pick up another brick.  "Yes," I say.  You cannot tell a beautiful woman that the reason you can't sleep is because you sometimes still get the Hershey squirts, even though you've been a prisoner of war for over a year and have consumed more than your share of Viet Cong chow.  "Sometimes I can't sleep.  I sit up all night down by the river and I think about my family."
    "Will you fight again with the Black Rifles?"
    I pat the brick down until it settles.  "I can't fight against the people.  Not again."  I lie.  "This village is my home now."
    Song smiles.  "Will you be the giant student today?"
    I say, "Yes, my sister."
    I hop over the wall and Song and I join the students in the courtyard.  The children are all in their proper places on their mats, talking and playing.  As Song and I come out of the schoolhouse with armloads of books, the kids stop horsing around and giggling and sit up straight and silent like little soldiers.
    Song and Le Thi, her teacher's pet, pass out the books while I go back into the schoolhouse to get the notebooks and pencils hidden in the wall.  High on the wall hangs a framed photograph of Ho Chi Minh and a flag.  The flag is half red and half blue, with a big yellow star in the center.
    As I distribute notebooks and pencils to the students one little girl stares at me with terror in her eyes and starts crying.  The little girl runs to Song for protection.  Song hugs the little girl, dries her tears, kisses her.
    This little girl is new to the school, another refugee from the occupied zones.  The mothers of Viet Nam tell their children, "Be good or the Black Rifles will get you."  The Black Rifles--the Marines, long-nosed white foreigners--like me.
    After Song has comforted the girl and talked softly to her the little girl squats down, but watches me, sad-eyed and silent.  I'd make a funny face at her and try to make her laugh, but I don't want to scare her.
    Song says to the class in English:  "This man is our friend.  Do you remember?  His name is Bao Chi.  Why is he here?  Does anyone know the answer?"
    A boy raises his hand.  He is all smiles, the class clown.  His head is clean-shaven except for a small topknot of hair.  In his raised hand he's holding a small aluminum airplane, a MIG with red stars on its wings.
    Song says, "Yes, Tran."
    Tran speaks not to Song but turns and plays his act to the class.  "Bao Chi orders us speaking big Amercan states English."  He grins, his own best audience.
    Song nods, smiling.  "Bao Chi helps us speak good English."
    Song raises her hand and the whole class repeats back in unison:  "Bao Chi helps us speak good English."
    Song says, "In our country of golden-skinned people live twenty million Vietnamese.  Ten percent have been killed fighting for freedom.  Two million of our families and neighbors are dead.  In the U.S. live two hundred million Americans.  If ten percent of the American people are killed by the brave fighters of the liberation forces, how many Americans will die?"
    A little girl with pigtails raises her hand.  The little girl has chubby cheeks and is missing two of her baby teeth.
    Song says, "Yes, Le Thi.  Do you know the answer?"
    Le Thi blushes.  "Twenty million Americans will die," she says.  Then in Vietnamese:  "I am proud of our people."
    Song says, "Thank you, Le Thi.  Now, in a battle the gallant Front fighters defeated the American imperialists and their mercenary puppet armymen.  Eight hundred enemies were killed.  One-fourth of the killed enemies were mercenary puppet armymen and the others were American imperialists.  How many American imperialists were killed in the battle?"
    One hand goes up.
    Song says, "Le Thi."
    Le Thi says, "Six hundred imperialists were killed."
    Song laughs.  "You are very good today, Le Thi."
    Le Thi giggles.  Blushing, she says, "Yes, I am."
 

    After class Song changes clothes and we lead the class to the rice fields.  We all pitch in to help with the harvest.
    We cut rice under the hot hammers of the sun all day, every man, woman, and child in the village.
    At the end of the long day of cutting rice stalks, Song and I run barefoot along the paddy dike, playing tag.  It is important that we get home before twilight so that the paths can be used by the spirits of the ancestors in their daily stroll through the village.
    We run past a water buffalo wallowing in a pool of mud.  The water bo is really enjoying himself.
    We hear the sound of the pounding of rice.  We see a woman bathing a baby in a well water bucket.  As we pass by, a little boy pisses from a thatch doorway into a mudhole.
    The sun is a smudge of orange behind the treeline as the people of the village come in from the fields.  The men and women who fish the river are pulling their boats out of the water.  Between the boats, black nets are slung on the sand.
    The riverbank is lined with tall coconut palms and clumps of bamboo and a few jackfruit trees and flame trees.  Palm fronds, nudge by the wind, scrape together softly.
    The older women are down in the river, knee-deep in the brown water, slapping laundry on the partly submerged washing rock and rinsing in the swift current.
    Life in the Liberated Zone:  In the center of the village a dozen little black pigs grunt and paw at the roots of a giant banana tree.  The only machine in the village is wedged up against the trunk of  the banana tree:  the rusted hulk of an old French armored car.
    There is no electricity in the village, no billboards, no plumbing, no telephone poles, no restaurants, no ice, no ice cream, no television, no freeways, no pickup trucks, no frozen pizza.
    The hooches of the village blend into the brown and green landscape so naturally that they seem to have grown right up out of the soil like large square plants.
    When I first came to the village over a year ago I said to myself:  These are not reservation Indians.  These Viet Cong people are not Asian mutants like the Vietnamese I saw as a Marine, not those sad, pathetic people with a cloned culture and no self-respect, greedy and corrupt, ragged shameless beggars and whores--Tijuana Mexicans.  These Viet Cong people are an entirely different race.  They are proud, gentle, fearless, ruthless, and painfully polite.
    When I woke up that first day I expected a bucktoothed Jap officer wearing bifocals with lenses thicker than Coke bottle glass, a samurai sword in one hand and a bouquet of burning bamboo shoots in the other.  But nobody jammed bamboo shoots under my fingernails.
    As Song explained, "We do not torture.  We criticize."
    Centuries of starvation-level poverty and endless war have not made the Vietnamese bitter or without mercy.  Their culture is old and was here before the war.
    A year ago I looked out of the window of the Woodcutter's hooch and saw a troop of little kids with bamboo guns trying to shoot down a toy bamboo airplane hanging from a tree limb.
    "Bat ong my!  Bat ong my!" the kids were chanting:  "They've caught an American!"
    Of course, back then, I could only speak pidgin Vietnamese, so I figured that they were saying something like, "Burn the infidel!"
    When Song pushed me back on the sleeping mat and wiped my sweaty face with a damp cloth I blurted out, "Bao Chi, Bao Chi, Bao Chi!"  And I added:  "I'm not John Wayne, I just eat the cookies!"
    The Marine Corps sent me to Viet Nam as a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent.  The was before I pissed off a lifer Major in Hue City and got myself shitcanned to the grunts.  Correspondents wore Bao Chi patches on our jungle utility jackets and we always said that if we were ever captured we would yell "Bao Chi"--newspaper reporter.  Then the NVA gooks would think we were bigshot civillian news reporters from New York City and wouldn't shoot us in the back of the head.
    Of course, the Woodcutter knew who I was, because it was the Woodcutter who found me unconscious by the riverbank a mile from the village and carried me home on his back one cold black night, over a year ago.
    Nobody knows how I came to be by the riverbank.
 

    For over a year the Woodcutter has been studying me.  For over a year the Viet Cong have been trying to convert me to their cause.  For over a year I've been pretending that I am being converted.
    For the first few months, I'm told, I was a catatonic, a big white zombie.  I could walk, but I couldn't talk.  They made me wear leg irons.  I came out of it while rumping rice to distribute to North Vietnamese soldiers coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  The personnel for our rice run resupply detail were mostly children.  The children were all wearing thick flak vests made from woven bamboo.  The Phantoms came in, laying snake eyes and nape, and I saw kids dying.
    I saved a lot of kids that day, with crude tourniquets and Boy Scout first aid.
    One of the kids was Johnny Be Cool, the Woodcutter's adopted son.
    After that, the Woodcutter removed my legs irons.  He appeared before the village council and argued that if I ever tried to escape from the village he gave his word to track me down and bring me back.  For my own good, actually.  In the jungle, without food or weapons, I'd die.
    The Woodcutter was on target and firing for effect.  I'll never escape from Hoa Binh until the Viet Cong trust me enough to allow me to go on a combat mission.  Until then, I must wait patiently and pretend to be a genuine defector or they will ship my scrawny ass nonstop to a broom closet in the Hanoi Hilton.  If I've learned anything from these people, it is the power of patience.  Escape will take time because my conversion must appear gradual and sincere.
    There are no fools in this village.
 

    The walls of the Woodcutter's hooch are woven mats held in place by vertical bamboo slats.  The roof is thatched with split-leaf palm fronds.  The floor is beaten earth.
    As Song and I enter the Woodcutter's hooch the sky is purple behind black mountains.  Macaws the color of rainbows are having noisy debates in the shadows.  The air is sweet with night orchids and with the wet soil odors of tropical jungle.
    While Song washes her hands in an earthenware jug I step out back to a pile of chopped firewood stacked as high as my chin.
    I crook my arm and load up, careful not to disturb the Woodcutter's two special pieces of firewood.  Both pieces of firewood look ordinary enough but have been hollowed out.  Inside one is a Swedish-K submachien gun.  But no shells.  I haven't been able to find the Woodcutter's hiding place for the ammo.  In the second piece of special firewood is an old Playboy magazine, wrapped in plastic.
    As I unload the firewood by the hearth, Song is pouring rice from a cloth sack into a black kettle over the fireplace.
    While the rice boils, Song makes tea.  I watch her.  I watch her every day.  Watching Song make tea makes me feel peaceful.
    In a battered China teapot with a wire handle, the tea boils.
    Song and I huddle together in the pale yellow light of a kerosene lantern.  Song reads aloud to me from a crumbling paperback book stenciled FREEDOM HILL USO LIBRARY.  The book is The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.  Song reads slowly, carefully.  When she makes a mistake in pronouncing a word I stop her and say the word.  She repeats the word back to me until she has it right, then goes on reading.
    Song is a few years older than I am and is very smart.  She is a graduate of the University of Hue and of the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where tigers are displayed in iron cages like the Woodcutter when he was a prisoner of the French.  She was ordered to go to school in Paris by Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region, a great Viet Cong hero.  Her expenses at the Sorbonne were paid by the National Liberation Front.
    When I first came to the village, Song's English was okay, and her accent was French.  Now her English is better, but her accent is pure Alabama white trash.
    Song learned pidgin English while working as a hooch maid at the Marine base at Phu Bai.  During the day she washed laundry.  At night she was a joy-woman and got gang-banged in the bunker by horny teenaged killers.  She also was a serving officer in the Viet Cong intelligence unit.  As the punchline to an old Marine joke goes, the woman was holding down three jobs.
    The Vietnamese culture and Communist doctrine are so strict that the people in this village make the Puritans look like party animals.  There is a proverb:  Chastity is worth one thousand gold coins.  Everyone in the village knows that the Deputy Commander of the village Self-Defense Militia worked as a whore to defend her people, and to every person in the village Song is a virgin.
    Song motions for me to drink my tea.  I nod, but do not drink.  I wait for her to invite me a second time.  She motions again.  This time I pick up my cup and drink.  Song smiles, pleased that, finally, I am acquiring some manners.
    This is my favorite part of the day.  Song sits next to me, combing her shimmering black hair with her only possession of value--her mother's ivory comb.  "I am so proud of the school, Bao Chi Anh, Bao Chi, my brother.  Whan I was a child our school was in the forests high in the mountains.  We were soldiers.  We did not even have books."
    "It must make you happy to be a teacher instead of a soldier," I say.  "Soldiers destroy, teachers build."
    Song looks at me, surprised.  "But I am a soldier at the school, Bao Chi.  The sword is my child.  The gun is my husband.  I will never release the gun until we drive away the invaders and save the people, if it takes all my life.  The puppets in Saigon want to put us into barbed-wire cities and make us into beggars.  We choose to walk through the gates of blood, to fight with the resistance.  We fight to stay on the land where we can work and be free and have dignity.  I will fight forever for the dignity of my people."
    Song picks up the paperback Hemingway book.  "Until Gia Phong, liberation, the children must be made strong with books, strong and beautiful like tigers in the jungle.  Future generations must be given large wings with which to fly into the future."
    Song looks up at me with tears glittering in her dark eyelashes.  "Bao Chi, I am so sorry that the war has killed your family by taking them away from you."
    I don't know what to say.
    "My first memory," Song says, "is of my mother smiling at me and then leaning her rifle against a coconut tree.  Uncle says that my mother would nurse me in the dark before going off to ambush French soldiers.  One night they killed her."
    Song reaches out and takes my hand.  "When I was eight years old the steel crows came.  The ground bounced up and down and then my father and my little brother Chanh were killed.  I am so proud of my family."
    Song looks into my eyes, holding on to my hand with a fierce intensity.  She says, "We stand on oppostie banks of the river, our tears mingling, Bao Chi, my brother, but you must never think that you are alone.  We are your family now."  She smiles through her tears.  "In hell, people starve because their hands are chained to six-foot chopsticks, too long to bring rice to their mouths.  Heaven is the same, only there people feed each other."
    When I first came to Hoa Binh, I called Song "Fish Breath."  She called me "Vat luy," which means "Angry Fortress."
    I kiss Song's forehead quickly and turn away.  "Thank you," I say.  Then I say in Vietnamese:  "You've saved my life here, Song.  I was a dying man when I came here.  The spirit hardens in war, and the body is nothing without courage.  You've been very patient with me."
    Song's voice is lighter when she says, "Then you will leave the bad road you are on, my brother?"
    I say, "Yes, my sister."
    Song kisses me on the cheek, stands up, and goes across the room to her sleeping mat.  She sits down, removes an oil-cloth from her tiny antique typewriter, rolls in a gray sheet of paper.  She types in French, writing her Viet Cong war novel, which she calls Days without Sunlight, Nights without Fire.
    I watch her in silence.  After a few minutes she stops typing and smiles at me.  "Someday, Bao Chi, our hearts will burst into flame and we will become strong and beautiful like tigers in the jungle.  Then, together, we will beat the big drums of propaganda.  We will shake the brass and steel of the White House."
 

    Johnny Be Cool comes in, carrying his shoeshine kit, and he is in a bad mood.  Johnny Be Cool is about ten years old, lean, tall for his age, a half-breed black kid with the walk, talk, and bearing of a deposed prince.
    Johnny Be Cool does not greet us, but goes directly to his corner of the hooch and lies down on his sleeping mat.  In a one-room hooch privacy is at a premium, so Song and I do not question Johnny Be Cool.  Song types her novel and I watch her work.
    There's a clunk out back in the woodpile.  We know that it's only the Woodcutter unstrapping his harness from his back and dropping what sounds like half a ton of cut wood.
    We line up in the center of the room, me, Song, and Johnny Be Cool.
    The Woodcutter comes in and we bow.
    Siletnly, the Woodcutter bows.  Then he leans his ax, his rifle, and his bamboo walking stick against the fireplace, sits down, and waits for his supper.  The Woodcutter is a funny little old man with a black turban on his head, a white wisp of beard, a twinkle in his eye, and a stainless steel backbone.
 

    "Ong an com chua?" asks the Woodcutter as he does every day--"Have you eaten yet?"
    "No, Honorable Uncle," says Song, as she says every day.  "Of course not."
    Johnny Be Cool is first to the table.  Food is his answer to every problem in life.
    The Woodcutter and I sit down at the Western-style table of polished bamboo, on bamboo benches.
    Song dishes out boiled rice and big red shrimp.  She gives me the teapot and I pour hot green tea into bamboo cups.
    After Song sits down, the Woodcutter bows his head and says, "Cach mang muon Nam"--"Long live the revolution."
    Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I say in unison:  "Cach mang muon Nam."
    We wait until the Woodcutter picks up his chopsticks, brings his bowl up close to his mouth, and starts to eat.  Only then do Song and Johnny Be Cool pick up their chopsticks.  I pick up my white plastic spoon.
    The Woodcutter stops chewing, then says, right on cue, "The rice is burned again, niece."
    As she does every day, Song says solemnly, "I'm sorry, Uncle.  The spirit of the kitchen must be angry."
    The Woodcutter grunt and resumes eating.  "Yes, that must be what it is."
    Song giggles, leans over, hugs the Woodcutter, and kisses him, saying, "Misfortune hones us into jade."
    The Woodcutter says to me in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, did you perform your work at the harvest today with revolutionary enthusiasm?"  The Woodcutter speaks English well enough, but has always refused to speak a single word of English to me.
    I speak basic Vietnamese now, so I reply in English:  "I am trying to improve my revolutionary enthusiasm, most honored sir."
    The Woodcutter grunts, says to Johnny Be Cool, "How much did you earn today?"
    Johnny Be Cool looks at his food.  He's an orphan that the Woodcutter press-ganged into the family by force.  He's a shoeshine boy for the Green Berets who operate high in the mountains and he's a Viet Cong spy.  He can't sign his name--Song has had no luck at all trying to get him to go to school--but he knows the latest black-market rates down the last dong, frac, and dollar.
    On his head Johnny Be Cool wears a torn and faded Marine Corps utility cover with a black eagle, globe, and anchor stenciled on the front.  He does not look Vietnamese.  The only thing Vietnamese about Johnny Be Cool is his language.  All day long he forces American soldiers to submit to shoeshines and questions every black Marine he can find, telling them that his father's name is Lance Corporal John Henry, a steel drivin' man, and asking them if they know how to find his father's village of Chicago.
    Johnny Be Cool says to the Woodcutter in English:  "Be cool, man.  Be loose."
    Song says softly, "Newy Bac Viet?"--"Are you Vietnamese?"
    Johnny Be Cool shrugs, nods, keeps his eyes on his half-eaten rice.  He swats away a black blowfly.  Very often children ask Johnny Be Cool why he, a black foreigner, speaks Vietnamese.  "Hey, don't sweat it, mama.  Be cool.  Be cool.  What it is."
    I say, "Want to play baseball after dinner?"
    Johnny Be Cool shrugs.  "Later for that.  Cut me some slack, Jack.  Let's chow down.  Be cool."
    After the meal the Woodcutter puts a pinch of black opium from Laos into the bowl of his long bamboo water pipe.  He rotates the opium over a candle flame until it is a big black bubble.  Soon he is puffing away happily, making sucking sounds with the pipe and then exhaling sweet acrid smoke.
    Song says to the Woodcutter, "Venerable Uncle, how was your day?"
    Without hesitation the Woodcutter begins to complain in detail about how he is forced to climb higher and higher into the Dong Tri Mountains to find trees that are not so full of shrapnel that they ruin his ax.
    Every day, the Woodcutter says, another whole forest dies from the smoke sprayed by American pirate planes.  The smoke kills every tree, every vien.  Birds fall out of the trees and cover the ground.  Fish in the mountain streams float belly up.  The future of the profession of woodcutting is very uncertain.
    As Song and I clear the table, Song slips Johnny Be Cool some strips of sugar cane and hugs him.  He goes outside to feed his water buffalo.
 

    The Woodcutter and I set up the Ping-Pong table and play a few fast games by kerosene light.
    As we play, the Woodcutter chain-smokes Salems and tells me, once again, about La Sale guerre--the "dirty war" against the French--about the mountain fighters who never ate in a clean hut in their whole lives, about his landlord who taxed the people even for leaves collected in the forest, about how as a young man he was press-ganged into the Viet Minh.
    More and more, the Woodcutter seems to be living in the past; his mind is always back in the old days when he was young and hungry and hunted by the French.  "Against the great wealth and firepower of the French we had only our convictions."
    When the Americans first came to Hoa Binh the Woodcutter was seventy years old and had never been more than fifty miles from the village.  The first time a helicopter landed in the village the people thought it was a big metal bird.  They gathered around the chopper and patted it and tried to feed it yams.
    But the Woodcutter was afraid of the strange invader and fired a crossbow at it.  For this crime, puppet troops bruned the village of Hoa Binh to the ground and the Woodcutter was locked up in prison for six years.
    In prison, the Woodcutter heard the word "Communism" for the first time.  His puppet jailors talked about Communism so much that, by the time of his release, he was thoroughly converted.
    The Woodcutter says, remembering:  "Even in prison we were more free than our jailers."
 

    It's the Woodcutter's outstanding war record that has kept me in this village and out of the Hanoi Hilton.  It was a very hot day a little over a year ago when the village council, presided over by the Woodcutter as First Notable, met to decide my fate.
    Ba Can Bo, the lady Front cadre, a stern by-the-book lifer, demanded that I be sent--in chains--straight to Hanoi.  She was seconded by Battle Mouth, her pompous junior cadre.  Battle Mouth called me a Binh Van and a "long-nosed surrenderer" and some other things I didn't understand.  He said I should be shot on the spot.  Then he drew his revolver, put the barrel against my neck, and volunteered to do the job himself.
    The Woodcutter laughed and called Battle Mouth a "red-tape soldier." and a "revolutionary-come- lately" and the village elders laughed.
    I stood on front of a long canopy-shaded table, facing the village elders, while Ba Can Bo aimed a finger at my head and proclaimed her authority over my bandaged carcass in the name of the National Liberation Front.  She said a lot of stuff about running dog imperialists and said I was one.  I couldn't speak much Vietnamese back then, so I probably missed a lot of Ba Can Bo's material.  It was easy to see that the village elders were buying her case against me.
    As Ba Can Bo continued to rant and rave, the Woodcutter interrupted her by pounding the tabletop with his old Viet Minh hero of the Revolution medal, which looked like a frontier marshal's badge.  Ba Can Bo tried to go on with her patriotic speech, but the Woodcutter persisted.  The Woodcutter pounded his medal hard on the table like a judge's gavel and when Ba Can Bo tried talking louder he pounded harder.
    The Woodcutter insisted that I was his prisoner, his own persoanl prisoner, and he promised the village elders that he would be responsible for me.  "To win many battles," he said, "we must see into the hearts of our enemy.  Why do the Americans fight?  The Amercians are a mystery to us.  They are phantoms without faces.  This Black Rifle, this Marine, has secrets that I would know."
    When Ba Can Bo objected, the Woodcutter cut her short by saying, not quite shouting, "Phep vua thua le lang."  Then, suddenly, the Woodcutter repeated, fiercely, like John Brown at Harper's Ferry or like Moses throwing down the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the ancient Vietnamese proverb, "Phep vua thua le lang"--"The laws of the emperor stop at the village gate!"
 

    The Woodcutter and I play cutthroat Ping-Pong.  He slashes at the flying white ball and tries to drive it into my brain.  I hack at the incoming ball clumsily, always off balance, always on the defensive.
    Once, a long time ago, I jokingly suggested that I might try to escape.  The Woodcutter just about did himself an injury, he was laughing so hard.  The Woodcutter stands less than five feet tall.  His shoulders are slightly hunched from time and a life of hard labor.  His chest is bony and his legs are scarred and sturdy.  His graying hair is receding from a high, broad forehead.  Piercing black eyes are set in deep over high cheekbones.  The Woodcutter's face is a shrewd and open face with a wispy white chin beard, and his laughter shows strong white teeth.
    The Woodcutter loves to tell war stories about his exploits against the French, but the one gung ho sea story that the Woodcutter never tells is about how he won his medal and became a Hero of the Revolution.
    One hot day, back about the time I was busy being born, a big green French armored car attacked the village.  The armored car was destroying the rice crop and was killing the people.
    The village Self-Defense Militia had two Chinese mortar shells, but no mortar.  And there were no grenades, because the people had not yet learned how to make grenades.
    The Woodcutter filled a gourd with kerosene from lamps, and added a strip of oilcloth to make the gourd into a primitive Molotov cocktail.
    As the Woodcutter attacked, pausing to dip the oilcloth into a cooking fire, the armored car was moving past the giant banana tree and was maching-gunning everything that moved.  The French gunners were astounded to see a man in a loincloth charging across the village common, gourd in hand.  They fired.  The Woodcutter was hit.  Once.  Twice.  Again.  And then a fourth time.
    The French gunners stared in disbelief at this supernatural being.  He threw the gourd.  They tried to abandon their vehicle.  But the gourd exploded and the French soldiers died in fire, screaming.
    Now the villagers called the Woodcutter Bac Kien--"Uncle Fire Ant."  The Woodcutter was the fire ant that bit the French so painfully that the French were forced to take their foot off of the village.
    The big iron war machine that was killed by a barefoot peasant still sits under the giant banana tree, rusty brown now and with a full crew of lizards.
 

    The Woodcutter gets tired of humiliating me at Ping-Pong and has retold all of his favorite parables and proverbs and tiger jokes--The tiger is more honest than man, because a tiger wears his stripes on the outside, the United States is a paper tiger powered by gasoline.  Americans are ferocious tigers but they are helpless against determination, America is on the back of a tiger and is afraid to dismount, in the United States they have killed all of the tigers and the rabbits are in charge.
    I go outside to find Johnny Be Cool.
    Johnny Be Cool is in the water buffalo's bunker, feeding his prive possession.  He's constatnly washing the bo, feeding it, pampering it.
    By village standards Johnny Be Cool is a man of means.  He bought the water bo with his own money, earned as a shoeshine boy while on his spying missions, and he rents out the lumbering monster to farmers who are too poor to own a buffalo.  Johnny Be Cool saves every piaster.  Someday he will take a trip to America to find his father, John Henry, that steel drivin' man.
    Johnny Be Cool watches the water buffalo eat.  As the bo crunches his food lazily, Johnny Be Cool offers me a strip of sugar cane.
    Johnny Be Cool and I sit together in the moonlight, sucking noisily on our sugar cane.  Johnny Be Cool encourages the water buffalo to continue eating by taking out a small bamboo flute and playing a tune, close to the water bo's ear.
    The only other sound is the soft, rhythmic tapping of Song's typewriter.
 

    At dawn the next morning, Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I join everyone in the village for the harvest in the rice fields.
    When I was a kid in Alabama I could drag a nine-foot gunnysack from dawn to dusk, picking cotton to earn a little extra money to throw away on suckers' games at the county fair.
    The first thing you learn about harvesting rice, if you have ever picked cotton, is that the pain hits you in exactly the same spot in the small of your back.  After ten hours in the sun my revolutionary enthusiasm is not what it should be.  I've gone soft since I gave up farming and started fighting in a war.
    It does feel good to get my hands into some dirt, even if it is mud.
    I kick some water at a duck as it paddles by and I think about the truth in Uncle Ho's slogan, "Rice fields are battlefields."  Nobody ever said that back in Alabama, but somebody should have said it, because we had the same war, grow to eat, eat to live.
    In this world without supermarkets farmers are Asian Minuteman, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other, and rice is life itself, god's gemstone, and hunger in the rice fields is a military defeat.  Each planting season is a new campaign in the war that never ends, the war of water, weather, and soil, the life-and-death struggle some men wage against stump roots.
    The Woodcutter grunts his disapproval of my harvesting technique, steps in close behind me, grabs my wrist roughly.  He demonstrates the proper way to hold the Luoi hai, a rice sickle with a curving blade, and how to grasp a rice-heavy bunch of stalks, how to slice the bunch at the base under the water, quickly, but smooth and sure so that none of the dull gold rice kernels shake loose.  A grain of rice is a drop of blood.
    Trying to look like I'm squared away, I cut a few more bunches, wading knee-deep in muddy water, rice-stalk stubble pricking my naked feet.
    The Woodcutter watches me closely, then says, "Someday, Bao Chi, you will hear the rice growing.  Someday.  Maybe."  With a critical grunt, he climbs up onto the paddy dike and walks away.
    Rice sickles flash up and down, glinting in the sun.  It's like being inside a vast machine that hums and crunches.  Each harvester piles cut stalks into a crooked arm.  When the bunch is big enough it is tied with twine and stacked on the foot-worn paddy dike, where they are picked up by the village children and carried to thrashers who beat the rice stalks by hand to remove the grains.  The grains are rolled to remove the husks and then tossed into the air on flat rattan baskets until the thin husks are blown away by the wind.
    The people of Hoa Binh, peasants up to their knees in paddy muck, work in the yellow furnace of the sun all day, dawn to dusk, and they talk, and laugh.  Sometimes they sing.  Men, women, and children work in harmony with Xa, the land, because the pull of the land is strong.  Back in the World, farmers are becoming almost as rare as cowboys and Americans no longer respect the land or people who work the land.  In Hoa Binh the ancient bond of centuries, soil, and farmers is still strong.
 

    A courier kid runs along the paddy dike, a little boy in a faded yellow T-shirt that says ELVIS THE KING.  He hands a tiny envelope to the Woodcutter.
    The Woodcutter thanks the young courier, opens the envelope, nods approval, scribbles a brief reply on the back of the envelope with a ballpoint pen, then hands the little envelope back to the boy.
    The boy salutes, double-times back down the paddy dike.
    The courier kids come to the Woodcutter like that all day, every hour or so.
    Three or four times each day artillery shells crash though the air over our heads and chug away to hit some target in the mountains.  Except for the odd short round, we ingore the shells.
    Several times each day we hear the sounds of approaching helicopters.  We ingore the helicopters as long as they don't come in groups and don't come in too close or too fast.  Nothing freezes teh blood faster than the black shadows of these airborned machines.  If we run, we're VC, and they shoot us.  If we stand still, we are well-disciplined VC, so they shoot us anyway.
    But if it's an attack and the helicopters are going to land they come lick locusts.  If a single chopper landed here alone, the people of the village would not try to feed it yams.
    A hundred angry villagers would hang as dead weight from the slender rotor blades until the rotor blades were twisted, bent, and broken.  They would hack through the fragile aluminum fuselage with wooden hoes and rakes.  The door gunner would be slashed without mercy by a flailing wall of rice knvies and machetes.  With bare hands the people of the village would rip apart the smashes Plexiglas bubble and then the pilot's helmet would be pounded and stabbed and battered with stones and farm implements until the dark green sun visor over the pilot's face turned black with blood.
 

    At noon we eat lunch from wicker baskets brought out from the village by pretty teenaged girls, the Phuong twins, White Rose and Yellow Rose.
    Eating the fist and rice, I think about how my dad and I, after a long morning of plowing with a mean mule, used to eat lunches of cornbread, mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches, poke salad in a brown paper sack, and well water in Mason jars.
    As the Woodcutter drinks pickle juice from a gourd dipper like the gourd dippers we used on the farm when I was a boy, the Woodcutter's hands are like my father's hands, callused and scarred, but hands that can feel the life in good soil and the solid strength in a block of wood.
    One of the Phuong twins gives me a plugged coconut.  Her smile revelas dimples that would melt an asbestos brick.  Both of the Phuong twins have round, happy faces, with flawless complexions, black hair braided into pigtails, and hair-trigger giggles.  Today they're both wearing black pajama trousers and matching pink shirts.
    I lift the coconut between raw, blistered hands.  I drink the delicious cocnut milk in long swallows, chugging the cool, sweet liquid.
    The Phuong twins move down the paddy dike and give coconuts to the Nguyen brothers, Mot, Hai, and Ba.  There are a lot of blushes and giggles from the Phuong twins and a lot of good-natured catcalls from the villagers.  The village matchmakers have been working overtime to solve this critical problem in mathematics:  how to divide three Nguyen brothers into two Phuong twins.
    I wipe sweat from my face with somebody's Liberation Front bandana.  I climb up into the paddy dike and lie down.  My back is throbbing with pain.  I concentrate.  I ignore the pain.  On Parris Island, during Marine Corps recruit training, Gunny Gerheim, our Senior Drill Instructor, taught us that pain is only an illusion and exists only in the mind.
    Concentrating, I can hear Sergeant Gerheim's booming voice:  "Fall into the squad bay, herd.  Gent inside!  Get inside!  You pinheaded no-brained foreskin-chewing pogey bait maggots, you are lower than worm life!  All right, ladies, right shoulder locker box.  Do it now!  And repeat after me:  'We're a bunch of girls, and we can't march.'"
    I miss Parris Island.  Parris Island was a picnic.
 

    As I sit up and swallow my last bite of fish and squash, a muffled drone on the horizon turns into a Bird Dog spotter plane.  A small olive-drab Cessna sputters in slow motion above the rice fields, unarmed, just one for a little noontime VR--Visual Reconnaissance.
    Loudspeakers on the plane play Buddhist funeral music wile a Kit Carson Scout who has Chieu Hoi'd reads invitations to surrender and itemizes the many bennies available for Viet Cong troopers who defect over to the American side of the bamboo curtain.
    The villagers wave at the plane in a friendly way, and they jokes:  "Ban May Bay giac My"--"We must shoot down all of the American pirate planes."  Everybody laughs, waving harder.
    I wave too, and I hunch down beneath my white conical rice-paper hat as I squat on the paddy dike.
    Johnny Be Cool stands on the back of his water buffalo, waving.
    Today, instead of buzzing along harmlessly until it's out of sight, the Bird Dog swings around and makes another pass, coming in unusually low, rocking its wings to wave at the villagers, who wave back and cheer, and laugh, because everybody knows that the Phuong twins, the pretty girls who brought us lunch, are at this moment in a camoflaged postition in the treeline, taking care of business.
    The Phuong twins track the Bird Dog through the sights of a 12.7-milimeter antiaircraft gun until it is out of sight.
    The day returns to its usual back-breaking routine until late in the afternoon, when someone finds an unexploded shell.  There is some minor excitement as Commander Be Dan arrives with four Chien Si, Front fighters from the village Self-Defense Milita.
    The Chien Si are skinny teenaged boys wearing dark green shorts, short-sleeved khaki shirts, and rubber sandals cut from truck tires.  The fighters are armed with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their backs.
    Commander Be Dan and the Woodcutter have a brief but noisy debate concerning the risk of removing the shell.  It could be cut opne and the explosives inside used to make boody traps and hand grenades.
    Commander Be Dan is short and stocky, like a Korean Marine.  He's missing his left hand at the wrist.  His hand was blown off when Commander Be Dan was a sapper in the Dac Cong, the Viet Cong Special Forces.  He's a former heavy-hitter demoted to the minor leagues.  As the Woodcutter chatters on and on and flings his arms, Commander Be Dan is silent.  Commander Be Dan never says very much; he's sort of a Viet Cong Gary Cooper.
    During planting season three villagers were killed and seven injured when their plows and hoes struck unexploded bombs and shells.  Even the soil that gives us life is full of death sown by the enemy.
    Commander Be Dan convinces the Woodcutter that this particular shell is too dangerous to remove intact.  The shell is blown in place, quickly, so that the harvest can continue.
    We work on.  More hours of hard, back-breaking labor.  The grain is in head and ready to fall, so harvest days do not end until twilight.
    Tonight is village meeting night.  As we leave our partly harvest crop and walk back to the village we look forward to an entertainment.
    Song and I kick aside the stubby white ghosts that are chickens pecking rice kernels off the paddy dike.  Somewhere a water bo bellows mournfully, lonely for his girlfriend.  Somewhere laughing children run, trying to catch firelfies.
    Walking with Song, I inhale the life-giving odors of earth, sun, sweat, and animals.  My back is stiff and numb, but my body feels hot and strong with the good tired feeling that comes at the end of a day of hard work, when you feel like you're earned your supper and have earned your right to a good night's sleep, because you're free, and honest, and you don't owe anybody a damned thing.
 

    After the evening meal, still tired from our day in the fields but enjoying the relief from the tropical heat, the entire village assembles on the village common, facing the giant banana tree.
    Sitting on top of the rusting wrekc of the French armored car is Bo Doi Bac Si, a North Vietnamese Army medic.  This is a relief for everyone.  It means that we are not going to have to suffer through another reading from Mao's Little Red Book by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre.
    Bo Doi Bac Si is an ernest young man, serious about his duties, yet friendly and good-natured.  He is wearing a clean khaki uniform with trousers and spit-shined black leather boots.  Red collar tabs bearing a single silver star on a yellow stripe identify him as a Corporal.  Attached to the front of his small khaki-colored pith helmet is a red metal star.
    A pet monkey sits on Bo Doi Bas Si's shoulder, playing with the Coporal's ear.  Bo Doi Bac Si found the monkey on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  The monkey was dying and he nursed it back to health.  He calls the monkey Trang--"Victory."
    The Corporal, along with his superior, Master Sergeant Xuan, are stationed in Hoa Binh as liasisons between the Front fighters and North Vietnamese Army units that march like army ants down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and draw supplies of rice from the village of Hoa Binh.
    The commanding officer of the NVA liaison detachment, Lieutenant Minh, a very popular man, was killed last month during a B-52 attack a few miles from the village.  During the attack, Lieutenant Mihn jumped into a shell-hole fish pond for cover and was bitten by a deadly bamboo viper.
    The title of Bo Doi Bac Si's talk is "Ho Chi Minh's Armies March by Night."
    Bo Doi Bac Si opens a small pocket diary.  The pages of the diary are stained.  The cover is faded and torn.  He turns the pages of the diary for a moment, then looks at the audience.  He has happy eyes and an easy grin. He is the Audie Murphy of the NVA.  When he speaks, his voice is touched with emotion:  "We began our historic journey with a cheer, "Nam Tien!"--"Let's march South!"
    As Bo Doi Bac Si speaks, Song whispers a translation into my ear.  She knows that my understanding of Vietnamese is sketchy and that Bo Doi Bac Si's northern speech is too fast and too heavily accented for me to understand clearly.
    Before Bo Doi Bac Si can exploit the momentum of his dramatic beginning, Trang, his pet monkey, stops eating peanuts from the shell and suddenly grabs the Coporal's pith helmet and pulls it from the Corporal's head, revealing a closely cropped shock of ink-black hair.
    Holding the pith helmet with both hands, Trang puts the helmet onto his own head.  We all laugh, of course, but we struggle to be polite while the Corporal lunges at teh little brown monkey in a vain attempt to recover his headgear.  Some of us laugh as the chattering monkey and the pith helmet disappear over the back end of the armored car.  We can hear Trang screeching as he runs away.
    We are quiet and respectful as Bo Doi Bac Si continues:  "Before I joined the People's Army I worked as a petrol station attendant just outside of Hanoi.  My father is a bricklayer and my mother works part-time as a volunteer nurse."
    "On the day I left home I told my mother and father to think of me as dead, and not to be sad for me, but happy.
    "In my training battalion were comrade soldiers from all over Viet Nam.  We were issued uniforms, boots, pith helmets, a mosquito net, a knapsack, a rice bowl and a pair of chopsticks, and a war surplus Russian Army belt with an enameled red star on the buckle.  With so many fine things we felt like very rich men.
    "We were given many pieces of paper to write on, and we complained that we were eager to fight the puppet armymen of the Saigon gangsters and wanted to win many battles agains the American imperialist aggressors, not waste time writing our names and birthdates and natal villages on endless pieces of paper.
    "Our training was hard, six days a week, and our instructors were very strict.  We marched in formations, ran up hills, ran down hills, crawled under barbed wire, thew hand grenades, bayoneted wicker men, and learned how to clean and fire our rifles effectively.
    "I was assigned to a school and trained to doctor wounded comrade soldiers in battle.
    "The day our training ended we were the happiest and proudest men on earth, with a strong fighting spirit.  We felt that it was a great honor to have been selected to defend our beautiful country and our way of life.
    "We rode to Tchepone on a train.  Most of my comrades had never ridden on a train and we were frightened.  But soon we were laughing and joking, happy that our training was over, and looking forward to a great adventure and to great victories in defense of our southern brothers, who were gallantly and steadfastly resisting the cruel domination of foreign criminals.  From our train windows we could see happy children standing on thebacks of their water buffaloes, waving to us.  We were their protection.  We were the sons of their people, the armymen of the people, and we all understood deep down inside that our responsibilities to our people were great.
    "We got off the train and climbed into big gray-green Russian trucks.  The trucks had low-lamp shuttered headlights.  We rode in the trucks day and night for two days.  When we got off the trucks we were in a big camp with thousands and thousand of Bo Doi--comrade soldiers--just like us.  We had never seen so many soldiers.
    "Our commanders ordered us to take off our uniforms and put on black pajama outfits.  We were instructed to say, if captured, that we were not Bo Doi, government soldiers from the North, but Chien Si, guerrilla fighters of the South from the National Liberation Front.  We were not told where we were going.  We did not ask.
    "Each fighter was issued two grenades, one hundred bullets, a poncho, a small shovel, an assault rifle, and eight pounds of rice, which we carried inside a hammoch lined with wax paper and slung across our chests.
    "We cut twigs from tree braches and tied them to our pith helmets and equipment with string.  Each fighter was assigned a heavy load of military supplies to carry on his back.  I was given a knapsack containing six 61-millimeter mortar bombs.
    "The night before we stared South we had a feast, spicing our rive with mushrooms and chopped fish.  We even drank a few beers we'd smuggled into camp.  We listened to a puppet radio station, careful not to be caught by the cadres, who were afraid we might be brainwashed by the propaganda of the Siagon gangster regime.  If we were caught, our cadres would criticize us.
    "My comrades and I all bought pocket diaries for recording our historic march and for writing poetry during the long march South to almost certain death.  We knew that our descendans would treasure our diaries after we were killed in battle.  We had no thought but that we would fight on until we were killed.  We were committed to the cause of the salvation of the nation, which is very sacred.
    "We carved walking sticks and inscribed them with out motto:  'Live great, die gloriously.'
    "We walked for what seemed like thousands of kilometers.  We saw Bo Doi battalions singing as they marched.  We sang too.  Up mountains, down mountains, along paths barely visible, along paved roads, through jungles that were wet, green and gloomy.
    "Crossing rivers and streams was the hardest part of traveling in the jungle.  Our feet were always wet and diseased.  Every cut became infeced.  Leeches were our constant compaions.
    "Everywhere the Dan Cong Labor Brigades were working to repair the Strategic Trail, which was sometimes called the Truong Son Route.  Pirate planes bombed the trail every day, sometimes near, sometimes far away.  But nothing slowed the flow of the camel bikes--Chinese bicycles loaded with up to one thousand kilos of military supplies.
    "We ate at food stations, hot rice boiled in big black iron pots.  We saw hospitals, vast supply depots, and antiaircraft cannons.  Thousands of workers and fighters lived all along the Strategic Trail to assist the river of People's Army battalions marching South.  Food was stored in bomb craters covered with canvas.
    "Casualties due to dysentery were increasing.  In the second week, two fighters were killed by the bombs.  Heat casualties were becoming more common--we left them behind in the underground hospitals.  Some of them caught up with us later, but some died.
    "I tended wounds, gave out medicine, and checked everyone's feet regularly to prevent jungle rot.
    "Half of our battalion had malaria.  I remember walking all day with such a high fever that while my body moved forward my mind was unconscious.
    "By the third week we were seeing heavily bombed jungle and burned and blackened rain forests.  Lake-bomb craters were everywhere and we saw scary places where every tree and every plant and every living thing had withered and died.
    "In the fifth week, American pirate planes dropped fire from the sky and many fighters were burned alive.  The air was pulled out of our lungs by the fire and I fainted.  When I woke up, the trees were charred, smoking stubs, and I had burns on my arms and face and my hands.
    "After two days of burying the dead, we collected out equipment and continued our march.  We walked through a beautiful forest.  Upon hundreds of trees were carved thousands and thousands of names of fighters who had gone before us.  After we got over the strangeness of the sight we carved our own names into trees.  We were tired, but we wanted to inspire our brothers who would follow in our steps after we were sleeping honorably with our ancestors.  That day my platoon sergeant stepped into a gopher hole and broke his leg.
    "In the sixth week we were being bombed every day, sometimes more than once a day.  We were so tired, we almost welcomed the bomb attacks as rest breaks.  The monsoon rains began to fall and we were homesick.  By this time almost every man in the battalion had malaria to some degree, and many comrade soldiers had to be left behind.  We were losing men every day now, to malaira, dysentery, enemy bombs, and injuries.  Two fighters died from snake bites.  The tigers were eating our dead.  We couldn't sleep because our eyes were swollen with mosquito bites.  At night we could hear comrade soldiers crying.
    "There were no more food stations.  We ate wild fruits, nuts and berries, even roots.  Sometimes our commanders allowed us to fish with hand grenades.  Fires were forbidden, so we ate the fish raw.
    "Now our food was being brought to us in small quantities by Front fighters from villages like Hoa Binh.  Without this food, harvested by the people and carried on the backs of women and children through enemy lines, my comrades and I would have starved.
    "Hundreds of rickety bamboo bridges spanning hundreds of foul-smelling streams began to blur into one long green and black dream.  Now there was nothing to break the monotomy of the jungle except grave mounds and skeletons by the trail.  We marched only by night.  During the day we slept deep in the earth in cool, damp tunnels and listened to the constant droning of bombs, cannons, and the flying war machines.
    "In the seventh week we slogged through a swamp, coughing with pneumonia, sick with fever.  We stumbled through a dirty gray mist, our legs black with leeches, mud sucking at our swollen and blistered feet.  We saw a big complex of tree houses in the swamp, abandoned by some strange race of forgotten people.
    "Our food was reduced to a handful of rice a day.
    "When we finally emerged from the swamp we saw our first Truc Thang--our first helicopter.  Every fighter was camouflaged with fresh leaves and twigs.  We dropped to the ground while the horrible metal dragon sat in the sky directly above us.  There was a very loud noise and a big wind.  Guns fired and a comrade was killed where he lay.  We were afraid, but no one moved.  We waited for the order to return fire, but it never came.  After a while the big machine flew away.
    "In our eighth week we were met by Chien Si cadres.  The cadres were southerners and had strange accents.  They gave us the traditional welcoming greeting for comrade soldiers arriving in teh South, a drink from a coconut.  Then they led us to a carefully concealed network of tunnels and underground bunkers.
    "Underground, in the vast complex of tunnels, we cheered.  We were safe.  We had survived.  And, having survived, we would be able to contribute to the struggle against the enemies of the people.  We asked for no greater honor.  Of the two hundred fighters in our unit only eighty made it to the South.  We, the survivors, greeted our southern brothers with enthusiasm.
    "We were issued rations, and even some salt.  Now, our journey over, we began to feel depressed.  We had time to miss the comrades who had been killed or left behind.  We missed our homes and our families.
    "I had infected cuts all over my legs and hands.  My black pajama outfit was rotting and hung in rags on my body.  The climate in the South was depressingly hot.
    "The earth-shaking advance of the Liberation Army was reduced to a crawl.
    "But our cadre inspired us.  He told us about how the first platoon of the People's Army was formed by General Giap.  At eighten, General Giap was locked up in a French prison.  His wife was also imprisoned, and was tortured to death.
    "General Giap is only five feet tall and weighs less than one hundred pounds.  But in December 1944, at age twenty-nine, he led the first platoon of the People's Army, thirty-four men and women, armed only with swords and muskets, against the French.
    "The French captured General Giap's sister and cut off her head with a guillotine.  General Giap and Uncle Ho lived in the high mountains for twenty years, sweating in the hot jungle, sometimes with nothing to eat but snakes and roots, but enduring without complaint, because they never doubted for a moment that the people would be victorious.
    "Our cadre led us in a cheer to Uncle Ho and General Giap.  Then he told us that the People's Army will advance aggressively.  When we are attacked, the enemy will meet our strong defense and our strong fighting spirit.  We will never falter in our duties, because the people have given us their sacred trust, and Comrade-General Giap and Uncle Ho are depending upon us to carry out our duties cleverly.
    "When we left the North we were dead men and dead men have no fear.  When our cadre asked us to tell him what our duty was, we stood up.  Ragged, sick, starving, the fighters of my unit stood tall and proud, and cheered with hoarse voices, and replied in chorus:  'Born in the North to die in the South, it is the duty of our generations to die for our country.'"
    The voice so full of pride and sadness stops speaking.  Bo Doi Bac Si gazes silently at the pages of his diary, remembering.
    The people of Hoa Binh sit in respectful silence, thinking about the sacrifices and struggles of the heroic soldiers who march daily down the Strategic Trail, young soldiers of the people who are marching this very minute not ten miles away, steadfast comrades who depend upon Hoa Binh for food or they will die as surely as if hit by an American bomb.
    Ba Can Bo stands up and makes an announcement.  "Tomorrow we will complete the Better Water for the Village Project.  Rice fields are battlefields and the people are the strongest weapon."
 

    At dawn Song and I take our hoes and walk down to the river to take part in Ba Can Bo's Better Water for the Village Project.
    We meet the Broom-Maker on the path to the river.  She detours across the village common to intercept us.  The Broom-Maker never misses an oppurtunity to make me feel welcome in the village.
    The Broom-Maker is maybe a couple of thousand years old.  She walks hunched over, a blue and white shawl over her shoulders.  Her teeth are black, her gums dark red.  The Broom-Maker has a serious drug-abuse problem in the area of betel-nut consumption.  She is always chomping away on a cud about two-thirds the size of a tennis ball.  Like a sapper probing for a land mine, the Broom-Maker pokes each foot of ground in her path with a dragon's-head walking stick carved out of teak and brought to a high polish by time.
    Her bearing is a full-fledged dress parade strut and her hurried pace is the badge of her many important duties.  According to Song, all of the Broom-Maker's five sons were killed in the war against the French, and three of her grandsons have died fighting the Marines at Khe Sanh.  The Broom-Maker is chairman of the Soldiers' Foster Mother Organization and holds the important office of village midwife, the only person allowed to cut the umbilical cords of newborn babies and bury them in local soil.  Her husband was killed at Dien Bien Phu and her brother was once in prison with Ho Chi Minh.  The Broom-Maker is the most powerful woman in Hoa Binh.
    As soon as the Broom-Maker is within spitting range she fires off a flying bomb of red betel-nut juice in my general direction and follows it up with the word Phalang!--"white foreigner."
    The Broom-Maker sniffs at Song and says, "Truong Thi My"--Miss America.
    As the Broom-Maker marches by like Napolean at the head of his army she lashes out with the only English sentence she knows:  "Get out of Viet Nam, Long Nose, or I will kill your ass."
    "Yes, ma'am. Chao Ba."  I say, very loud, because I know that she is deaf in one ear from a B-52 attack.  I tip my rice paper hat.  "You have a real nice day, now, you hear?"
    Song does not wish to be impolite, but she has a hard time keeping a straight face as the Broom-Maker shakes her dragon's-head walking stick at me menacingly and repeats, "Get out of Viet Nam, Long Nose, or I will kill your ass."
 

    Ba Can Bo's Better Water for the Village Project is so important that even the critically vital rice harvest will be delayed until after lunch.
    Almost every man, woman, and child in the village has brought a digging tool.  We stand in two rows six feet apart, facing each other.  The lines of workers start at the rice paddies and stretch through the jungle to the river.  Little kids cling to their mothers' legs.  Babies are slung on their mothers' backs.  Children over the age of'six hold hoes, shovels, and pickaxes.
    In a gesture of cruel teasing Song and I take places in a row on opposite sides of the Broom-Maker.  She scowls.  Facing us in the other row are Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si.
    Walking very erect between the rows, inspecting, Ba Can Bo, the lady cadre, the National Liberation Front's political liaison with the village of Hoa Binh, looks very stern and unpleasant.  She is about forty-five years old, an old maid married to her job.  She is tall for a Vietnamese.  She prefers khaki trousers to shorts and wears her graying hair in a tight bun without decorative clips or ribbons.  Over her shoulder hangs a blue dispatch pouch, her badge of office.  On the pocket of her immaculate green shirt hangs a Ho Chi Minh of red enamel and gold.
    I ask Song why everyone is so respectful to such a sour old lifer, a red-tape soldier.
    Song says, "Each comrade gives what he has to give, Bao Chi.  Our last cadre was a young man with a happy spirit.  He was a very good man, very energetic.  He told jokes, was popular with everyone.  He was a good cadre.  Ba Can Bo is not a warm woman, but she is a good cadre.  A smile is not a brain, and a friendly handshake does not chop wood for the fire."
    Ba Can Bo orders us to watch carefully for buried bombs.  Then she blows a whistle and we dig.  Ba Can Bo picks up a shovel and joins in.
    In six hours we cut a canal one hundred yards long, four feet wide, and four feet deep.  We stop digging a few yards from the river.
    We eat lunch.  Song has packed a picnic basket for three.  Johnny Be Cool has been assigned to guard duty, so Song invites her best friend to join us.
    We sit on the riverbank under the shade of a flame tree with Duong Ngoc Mai.  Song tells me about her friend.  Mai is eight months pregnant.  She's a Fighter-Widow.  Her husband was killed six months ago by the Den Sung Truongs, the Black Rifles -- the American Marines.  He was the village potter.  Mai is a staff sergeant in a Viet Cong Main Force battalion, and is home on a medical furlough.  For her brave deeds in battle, Mai's name has been inscribed on the roll of honor of the Dung Si Quoc My--the "heroic American killers."
    Mai, the Fighter-Widow, her belly big under her black pajama blouse, talks to Song but refuses to say a single word to me. She stares at me without expression, no hatred, no recognition that I exist at all.
    Swatting recklessly at the sudden attack of a dragonfly causes me to choke on my pickle juice.  The dragonfly is fearlessly aggressive, but a flurry of karate chops cutting the air discourages it.  Chromed in blue metal, the dragonfly buzzes away, powered by a tiny engine.
 

    After lunch we build a fieldstone foundation for mounting the paddle wheel.  Thirty people grunt and sweat and lift the big wooden wheel up and muscle it into position.
    Johnny Be Cool comes in off guard duty and watches while the paddle wheel is hammered into place.
    Between the paddle wheel and the river a crew of workers digs out the final few yards of earth, allowing river water to flow into the new irrigation ditch.
    Commander Be Dan lifts Johnny Be Cool up onto the bicycle seat attached to the paddle wheel.  The wheel is powered by bicycle pedals.  Johnny Be Cool waits until Ba Can Bo gives the signal, then peddles as hard and as fast as he can.
    Straining, then moving, then faster and faster, the heavy wheel turns, pushing the water forward.  The broad wooden blades lift river water a bit at a time and deposit it over the paddy dike and into the next paddy.
    The people cheer: "HO!  HO!  HO!"
    Ba Can Bo leads us in a patriotic song:

      We are peasants in soldier's clothing
      Waging a struggle for farmers oppressed a thousand years
      Our suffering is the suffering of the people.

    After an unusually hard day of setting up the water wheel and then going on with the harvest, we enjoy coming together after the evening meal to watch the initiation of three apprentice Viet Cong into the ranks of armed fighters.
    When I was with the Marines there was a persistent myth, a story often told by some guy who'd heard it sworn to--no shit--by some other guy, about Marines finding dead Viet Cong children, chained to machine guns.  The point of the story was how desperately short of recruits the enemy was, how unwilling to fight, how cruel.
    Now I am the the Woodcutter's experiment, his theory that victory requires knowledge of the enemy, along with an unflinching acceptance of any unendurable truths. The Viet Cong see us more clearly than we see ourselves, but we can't see them at all.
    As a Marine it took me two years in the field to stop underestimating the Viet Cong.  It was just like learning about sex--everything anybody had ever told me about the subject was bullshit.  I picked up the real facts on the streets.
    As a Combat Correspondent I was part of the vast gray machine that does not dispense clean information.  The American weakness is that we try to rule the world with public relations, then end up believing our own con jobs.  We are adrift in a mythical ship which no longer touches land.
    Americans can't fight the Viet Cong because the Viet Cong are too real, too close to the earth, and through American eyes what is real can only be a shadow without substance.
    Sitting with Song up front, next to the Phuong twins, suddenly I feel in control.  I feel that I know who I am and I know what I'm doing.  I am not a statistic.  Here we are not helpless, faceless masses.  There are no masses in a Viet Cong village.  In our village we are not victims to forces beyond our control.  We have large wings with which to fly into the future.
    Commander Be Dan appears, followed by Mot, Hai, and Ba, the Nguyen brothers.
    The Phuong twins are beaming, because the Phuong twins and the Nguyen brothers are all desperately and passionately in love, despite the fact that there's one too many Nguyen brothers and the perhaps more interesting fact that none of the Nguyen brothers can tell the Phuong twins apart.
    The Nguyen brothers are fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years old.  Mot is loud, a whiner and a jerk.  Hai is the quiet, studious type.  Ba is the biggest, oldest, and strongest, a good-natured mindless jock.
    In front of the assembled villagers Commander Be Dan inducts the Nguyen brothers into the Liberation Army.  The brothers try to look serious, but they're too proud not to preen.  They alternate between horseplay, giggling and pinching, and attempts to maintain a military hearing.
    The Broom-Maker presents each brother with a red armband made from red stripes torn from Saigon puppet flags.  The brothers bow and put on the armbands.
    The Woodcutter reminds the new fighters that a lost rifle is harder to replace than the man who lost it.  He tells them the old story about the Front fighter who lost his rifle during a difficult river crossing.  Out of shame the fighter asked to be placed in the front ranks of his unit's next attack, where he died gloriously.
    "Tomorrow," says the Woodcutter, "you will go on a combat mission far from the village.  You will fight the Long-Nose Elephants.  Fight bravely, with fierce determination.  I beg you to carry out your duties cleverly."
    The recruits brace themselves rigidly to attention as Commander Be Dan presents each new fighter with an AK-47 assault rifle and a web belt hung with canvas pouches heavy with banana clips full of bullets.
    Commander Be Dan repeats a Viet Cong slogan: "Brass legs.  Iron shoulders.  Shoot straight."
    While the Nguyen brothers examine their new weapons, the people of Hoa Binh cheer: "HO!  HO!  HO!"
    The Phuong twins are the first to congratulate the newly eligible bachelors.
 

    As the festivities continue, Song and I double-time to our hooch, along the way surprising young lovers cuddling in the shadows.  Light from a growing bonfire flickers across smiling faces and casts friendly giants and patterns of movement across the deck and onto palm tree trunks.
    Outside of our hooch the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan are having a nasty argument.
    "No," says Commander Be Dan.  "I do not trust the American, the surrenderer.  He is a Black Rifle.  He is an enemy of the people."
    "I must criticize you!" savs the Woodcutter.  "Cmmander Be Dan, I must criticize you!"
    Commander Be Dan walks away.
    The Woodcutter follows close behind.  His voice reaches a higher pitch and his gestures become more enthusiastic.
    Minutes later, as Song is helping me into my bulky costume, the Woodcutter enters the hooch and calmly announces that Commander Be Dan has agreed to take me along on a combat mission, a particularly important operation ordered by Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region.  The Woodcutter presents me with Cowboy's old peace-buttoned Stetson--lost the night the Phantom Blooper captured me--and a bull horn.  I am to carry the bull horn and make propaganda.
    I bow.  I say, "Thank you, most honored sir."  And I'm thinking, This is it. This is what I've been waiting for. Under fire, there is confusion.  In the confusion, I can escape.
    By the time Song and I return to the bonfire, Ba Can Bo is finishing up one of her painfully boring speeches against the "foreign imperialist aggressors" and her punch line is Da Dao Quoc My, a slogan that means "Down with the lackey clique!  Long live the glorious resistance!"
    The villagers respond with a polite cheer, "HO!  HO!  HO!"
    When they see me in my costume, they start laughing.
    Ba Can Bo, annoyed at being upstaged, throws me a look with criticism in it, then sits down on a log.
 

    I'm wearing a rice-paper costume Song has painted gray.  I'm a B-52 bomber.  On my grav paper wings U.S. is painted in overly large letters.
    I am surrounded by the children of the village.  The children are all wearing little conical paper hats and are armed with toy guns carved from bamboo.
    I circle around the common between the rusting hulk of the French armored car and the audience of villagers, making menacing dives at the children, who giggle and shoot at me with their bamboo rifles.  I make loud boom-boom-boom noises.  A few of the kids grab their stomachs and fall down dead,  exaggerating and prolonging their death agonies.
    The remaining kids shoot at me faster.  I cough a few times, make a few more sloppy dives.  Finally I come in for a big crash, falling down flat on the ground.
    The kids suddenly decide that they are crashing too and everybody piles on top of me.  Even the dead kids come back to life and crash onto the pile, howling and squealing as though in pain.
 

    An hour before dawn we file out past the village defense perimeter, invigorated by the cold morning air.
    A little after first light we meet up with twenty fighters from  the Viet Cong Regional Forces, peasant boys and girls in broad-brimmed floppy bush hats, hand grenades in net bags, rubber balls full of water, mismatched web gear, and ragged civilian clothes.  Slung on their backs, hammocks full of rice which we call "elephant's intestines."
    The fighters from the Hoa Binh Self-Defense Militia include Deputy Commander Song, Master Sergeant Xuan, Bo Doi Bac Si, the Nguyen brothers, the Phuong twins, Battle Mouth, and me, the Phantom Blooper.  Together we are almost a section, which is what the French called a platoon.  With Commander Be Dan in charge.
    Our little army looks pretty hodgepodge and put together with spit and baling wire, and we're armed only with rifles and grenades, but our fighting spirit is high and our determination strong, and we're ready to travel fast and light.
    I'm wearing black pajamas that are way too small for me, plus my cowboy hat, and a gift that Song insisted upon tying across my chest after our hasty breakfast:  a red silk sash, to match the red armbands worn by the attacking force.
    The sash is of a color which can only be called "screaming red," with a gold-stitched border and a row of gold stars down the center.  Pogues in downtown Da Nang will be able to see me.
    I'm armed with an olive-drab megaphone.  My assignment as the Phantom Blooper is to beat the big drums of propaganda and do a head trip on the enemy, the Elephants, the United States Army.  My assignment as a United States Marine is to escape.
    Humping along Indian-file with the Chien Si I feel like a target, like back at Khe Sanh when I painted that bull's-eye on my helmet.  Not only am I wearing a red sash two shades below neon, but I am six feet three inches tall.  Over half of the Viet Cong are under five feet tall.  I'm about as inconspicuous as a water buffalo trying to pass himself off as a baby duck.
    Battle Mouth stumbles up and down the line of march, looking lost and confused, stopping fighters and asking them what he's supposed to do.  He's loaded down with homemade hand grenades, a borrowed AK-47, a machete, a small-caliber revolver, a B-40 rocket launcher, and half a dozen rockets.
    When Song sees Battle Mouth, the super-fighter, she laughs.  Then she says to the three Nguyen brothers, who are also on their first combat mission, "Don't fall behind.  The tigers will eat you."  And she laughs again.
    Commander Be Dan, however, is all business.  He frowns at Deputy Commander Song for not maintaining noise discipline.  He waves his hand and says, "Tien!"--"Forward."
    We hump into a jungle full of loud and gaudy birds.  No talking on the trail; not because we're afraid of being heard, but so that we can hear approaching aircraft.
    I wave goodbye to Johnny Be Cool, the trail-watcher, squatting on a tree branch fifty feet up, a grenade in his hand.  He waves back but does not smile.  Johnny Be Cool is always serious about his responsibilities when be is standing guard.
 

    The Front fighter ahead of me in the line of march is wearing red and white tennis shoes. A red ball on the tennis shoes say U.S. KEDS.  The fighter is humping a Chinese field radio.  For twelve hours I watch the radioman's tennis shoes and the bouncing red ball.
    The radioman is as skinny as a bean pole.  He eats snacks constantly as we hump.
    We hump, and we hump some more.  We hump, swatting big black flies and flailing with rifle butts at clouds of mosquitoes too thick to see through.  We stagger up rocky trails into a landscape of brutally stark hypnotic beauty that is teeming with life.  Purple valleys.  Brown mountains like the backs of dinosaurs.  Birds the color of fire.  Snakes with heads like semiprecious stones.   In our rubber sandals we climb outcroppings of black volcanic rock.  We descend on a trail beneath black cliffs.  We stumble down into riverbottom land that reveals new shades of green so fast that we are swallowed up by a rainbow of greens.
    Our point man is a girl about fifteen years old.  Lifting a rifle almost as big as she is over her head, she calls a halt.  Commander Be Dan moves up the line of march to investigate.  The radioman in the Keds sticks close to the Commander, so I go too.
    The girl on point is excited.  She aims a finger at the deck.  Commander Be Dan squats down, examines the trail, then nods his approval.  It is a good omen for our mission:  tiger tracks on the trail.
 

    We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead.  Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves.  The black trees are hung with limp wind-blown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells.
    Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves.  The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood.
    In the poisonous folds of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants.  We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach.  The bullfrogs scurry for cover with clumsy and desperately frantic movements horrible to see, finally sinking into oozing slime inhabited by shadows that are alive and best never seen by human eyes.
    Total light-and-noise discipline forbids our shooting the deformed animals out of kindness.
    Night comes but we do not make camp.  We march on.  The order is repeated down the trail from fighter to fighter by hand signal:  une nuit blanche--"White Night."   We will march all night without stopping and without sleep.
    The night march turns into a real ball-breakiiig hump.  Every step of the way the jungle grabs at us as though alive.  The rocks attack us. My feet are numb and I got rock-bites all over my legs.  I'm bleeding.  We're all bleeding.  But I'm the only one who's straining to keep up.  It's easy to see that the Viet Cong cut their baby teeth on ball-breaking humps.
    I lean into it and take it one step at a time.  One step at a time.  I can almost hear Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, my Senior Drill Instructor back on Parris island.  "Private Joker," he says, rapping me on my chrome dome helmet liner with a bamboo swagger stick, after I have had the bad manners to faint on a
three-mile run with full gear and a backpack full of rocks in one-hundred-degree heat.  "You little maggot!  You will put forth effort!  You better show me something, sweet pea.  You better start shitting me some Tiffany cuff links."
 

    We hump.  The sun comes up.  We hump some more.  The radioman looks back at me constantly to see how I'm keeping up. And Commander Be Dan, who is on the move constantly up and down the line of march, checks me out each time he goes by, like a doctor looking over a patient in a terminal ward.  But be doesn't say anvthing.
    I'm insulted by all this attention.  What am I, a candy ass?  Some kind of New Guy?  I want to say, "Hey--I'm a United States Marine, people.  I will hump until my leg falls off.  No sweat.  Marines know how to hop."
    Every time we pass anything that looks like it might possibly be food, the radioman eats it.  Bananas, coconuts, berries, green leafy plants, orchids, even honey ants, down they go.  The Viet Cong radioman is defoliating the jungle by eating it.
    We hump.
    We have to go far away from Hoa Binh to fight, because the Woodctitter has a deal with General Fang Cat, the province chief, not to attack anything within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility.  In exchange, the General reports that there is no Viet Cong activity in our area and that Hoa Binh is a leper colony.
    We're going to team up with a battalion-size force and attack an enemy fortress twenty miles south of Khe Sanh.
    We see two old men cutting down a banana tree.  They wave.
    In a bombed-out clearing the order comes back to pick up the pace.  "Tien!  Tien!"
    We enter a smelly black-water swamp.  The water is neck-deep and teeming with slithering invisible nameless things and leeches like big black garden slugs.  We wade through slime, rifles held high, our sandaled feet straining for traction on an underwater bridge that can't be seen from the air.  Some of the fighters giggle from the tickling on our legs as fish nibble at our scabs.
    Then we're pushing through blue-green elephant grass ten feet high and as sharp as swords.  The deck is a damp, spongy layer of decaving leaves.  Creepers and vines grab at our legs and feet as though alive.
    We move through the black jungle as silent as ghosts.  We don't fight against the jungle the way foreigners do.  The jungle is alive and the jungle never dies.  The jungle is the one thing you can't beat, and the fighters know it.
    To the Americans the jungle is a real and permanent enemy.  The jungle is undisciplined.  The jungle does not respond to subpoenas.  The jungle definitely is not going along with the program.
    The jungle grows and eats and fucks and dies and just goes on and on and on, getting bigger and meaner.  The jungle is always hungry, always ready to meet new people and make new friends.  The jungle is cruel, but fair.
    To a place older than the dinosaurs come puny Americans wagging their fingers like sternlibrarians telling library patrons to keep quiet.  Naughty jungle, say the white foreigners, and the jungle welcomes them in with big yellow flowers and funny brown monkeys.
    When night comes, the jungle sucks their brains out, boils them alive, pulls out their hearts and eats them whole, then swallows up their pale pink bodies, because the jungle eats raw meat and shits dry bones and the bones fall apart and flesh scraps rot and the jungle stands like a black wall while the jungle eats more raw meat and shits out more dry bones and a billion insects are chewing and chewing until the jungle sounds like an eating machine bigger than the world and the green cannibal engine's moving parts are all lubricated by warm red blood and the jungle just goes on and on forever and it never stops feeding.
 

    White Night.  When we feel safe we light little perfume bottles full of kerosene.  The perfume bottles have been fitted with wicks held in place by shell casings.  As we move down the trail the golden dots are like a string of fireflies flying in formation.
    A shadow on the trail!  The order comes back: danger, halt.
    "Dong Lai," says Commander Be Dan on his way up to the point to investigate.
    After a infinite or so Commander Be Dan gives us permission to bunch up.  We move toward the bad smell.
    In the faint flickering light of our tiny lamps we can see the great head of a tiger, still fierce, still beautiful, with teeth as sharp as the point of a bayonet and thicker than a man's thumb.  The eyes are gone.  The orange-and-black-striped fur is charred and burned.  The huge claws are dug deep into the earth.  The powerful jaws are locked in a final tree-shaking roar of defiance.
    We all crowd in for a quick look.
    Even in death there is something royal about all eight-hundred-pound Bengal tiger.  We can all see the tiger, awesome in his final moments, roaring, pouncing, clawing at the fire that falls from the sky, strong and beautiful in a burning jungle.  We see the tiger, wet with fire, fighting fearlessly against a power it could never understand.  Then the great beast shrivels to ash under a splash of napalm while jellied gasoline drips from tree branches like hot jam.
    As we stare in respectful silence at the napalmed tiger, Commander Be Dan reaches down, grabs one of the big smooth ivory fangs, gives it a hard tug, says, "A good omen," and then moves out.
    Without a word or a sound, each of the Chien Si touches the tiger's tooth in turn, then moves on.
    I touch it too.
 

    At dawn we take a break on the strangely silent site of the abandoned Marine Corps Combat Base at Khe Sanh.
    The scary, ghost-guarded mound of red dirt has already been plowed and the Word is that it's to become a coffee-bean plantation.
    The section will rest until noon before moving on, because  we know that when the day is hottest, Americans in the field break for chow.
    Not much is left of my old hometown.  What the Marines left behind as junk, refugees have hauled off as building materials or to sell on the black market: scraps of lumber, rusty truck parts, torn plastic sheeting, brass shell casings, scraps of rotting canvas, steel planking from the airfield.  Our trash is their treasure, and the army ants have stripped the hill clean.
    I sit down on some crumbling sandbags where I estimate Black John Wayne's bunker used to be.  It's hard to be sure.  In the year since the Woodcutter captured me, the jungle has come back like thick hair sprouting all over a bald man's head.  I should feel at home here, but I don't.
    Commander Be Dan squats near me, not for a neighborly visit but to keep an eye on me.  Being back on my old stomping grounds might revive my bad road habits as a running dog lackey of the imperialists.
    The Viet Cong soldiers laugh, eat chow, and tell tall tales, sea stories, about their many heroic exploits against the Black Rifles who held Khe Sanh.  When the lies of the New Guys get too big, the older Chien Si tell the New Guys about fighting the French as Viet Minh, the Viet Cong "Old Corps," back when war was really tough.
    Commander Be Dan's radioman sits next to me.  I've already assumed that Commander Be Dan has ordered the radioman to stand guai-d over me and waste me if I so much as blink an eye.
    The radioiman puts out his hand, touches his chest with his other hand.  "Ha Ngoc," he says shyly, politely avoiding looking me directly in the eye.  Then: "I have never met an American bandit.
    I shake Ha Ngoc's hand.  "Bao Chi," I say.
    "Bao Chi Chien Si My?"
    I nod.  "Yes," I say in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, the American who fights for the Front."
    Ha Ngoc smiles.  "American," he says, pointing at his tennis shoes.  "American."  Then he says, "You know, Bao Chi, America must be supernaturally rich because Americans shoot very many bullets."
    Ha Ngoc digs into his shirt pocket and pulls out a pack of Ruby Queen cigarettes.  "Truoc La?" he says, offering me the pack.  I shake mv head as he lights up the bitter black tobacco.
    "Lien So," he says, showing me his wristwatch.  Russian.  I nod.  Ha Ngoc pulls the wooden plug from a length of bamboo shoot he has fashioned into a canteen.  He offers me a drink of green tea.  Only after I decline does he take a drink himself.
    Then Ha Ngoe fumbles around inside his muddy knapsack and produces two mangoes.  He offers me one.
    "Cam on."  I say, "Thank you."  I accept a mango.  I take a bite.
    Ha Ngoc smiles.  He pulls a black ballpoint pen from his knapsack and shows it to me like it's a family heirloom.  On the pen is Chinese writing in gold characters.  I look the pen over like it's a valuable antique and nod my approval.  "Good," I say, but Ha Ngoc just looks at me without expression, not satisfied with my reaction.  So I say, "This is the finest specimen of a Chinese ballpoint pen I have ever seen in my entire life."  And Ha Ngoc beams, a rich man whose wealth has been confirmed by the highest source.
    We eat tangy mangoes.  "I don't hate Americans," Ha Ngoc says.  "I only kill them because they have killed so many of my friends."
    I nod.  I say, "There it is."
    Commander Be Dan is having a cigarette too.  Using a page torn from his pocket diary, he's rolling his own, like my grandfather used to do.
    Ha Ngoc produces a greasy paperback book from his knapsack.  The title of the book is How to Win Friends and Influence People, in French.  There's a photograph of Dale Carnegie on the back.  The book has lost its spine and the loose pages are bound together by a black rubber band.
    Ha Ngoc shuffles through the book to a dog-eared page, then suddenly decides to tell Commander Be Dan a Viet Cong joke.  I try to follow, but my Vietnamese is not up to the test.  Something about how many Comrade Lizards have been killed by the latest American shellings, as the enemy cannons make war on the trees.  It seems that Comrade Lizard is quite a hero of the revolution because it costs the Americans so many valuable bombs to kill him.  So even with their supernatural supply of big shells the Americans will never win, because in Viet Nam even the lizards fight back with a strong spirit.
    Ha Ngoc laughs at his own joke, but Commander Be Dan ignores Ha Ngoc.  The Commander is examining his right leg, burning off leeches with his cigarette and then massaging the triangular bites.
    Ha Ngoc, thinking perhaps that he has overlooked an important chapter, goes back to reading his book.
    At noon, when the hot sun is vibrating in the sky like a brass gong, we saddle up.  Ha Ngoc struggles into his radio harness.  I give him a hand lifting the heavy radio and help him adjust the straps.
    Down the hill the Chien Si are laughing uproariously at Battle Mouth's latest antics.  Battle Mouth, with his pack on his back, is sitting on the ground, struggling to get up, but without success.  Someone has tied Battle Mouth's pack straps to a root.
 

    "Tien," says Commander Be Dan, and we move out.
    Ha Ngoc teases me.  "Now, Bao Chi, don't you be an Elephant."  An Elephant is an Army grunt in the field, so named for the way in which American columns glide through the jungle undetected.  I laugh.
    After a few hours the horizon of palm fronds opens up and we emerge from the jungle onto a paved road.  We file past an old French kilometer marker, a stubby white tooth of cement with fading red numbers.
    A mile down the road we come to a pattern of bomb craters.  Only a few of the bombs have hit the road, which is one of the great network of paved roads, cart trails, and jungle paths known to the Viet Cong as the Strategic Trail and to the Americans as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  The craters in the road have already been repaired by the road menders, because this is hard-core VC country.
    We pass a deserted banana plantation.  The moaning wind that lives inside the big house sounds like the voices of the vines have climbed inch by inch up all the walls.  The windows are black holes.  The porch that goes all the way around the house has only a few planks remaining that have not been broken.  In one of the empty windows sits a baby monkey.  The baby monkey watches us with intense interest, his eyes too big for his head, his face almost human.
    On the outskirts of a large village we see a work crew of hundreds of men, women, and children, a Dan Cong Worker Brigade.
    We see a huge blue-gray Molotova Russian army truck being refueled with gasoline which has been stored in old wine bottles.
    The Dan Cong are repairing the road.  The men drag boulders down out of the hills with ropes, levers, and brute force.  The women pound on the boulders with sledgehammers, splitting each stone into chunks.  Children with hammers pound the chunks of stone into smaller pieces.  This back-breaking process is known as how to make gravel in Viet Nam.
    Building the Strategic Trail and keeping it open in spite of the greatest aerial bombardment in history is an incredible ball-busting monster victory against all odds that is exactly the kind of miracle American pioneers once performed in another time, another place, when there was a wild frontier and only the grunts had the nerve to go there, before the Wild West became tame enough to become infested by pogues, pencil-pushers, and schoolmarms, who came out on the railroad, and stayed, and spread, like the plague.
    Commander Be Dan holds up his hand.
    Halt.  The Commander barks out an order and the Chien Si form into a column of twos.  I fall in beside Ha Ngoc.
    "Tien!" says the Commander, and we march into the village in formation, standing tall, lean and mean, like Parris Island recruits marching down the grinder on graduation day.
    "Compatriots!" says Commander Be Dan to the workers, proudly.  "We are the liberation forces!"
    The cheers of the workers along the road bring out Self-Defense Militia sentries, followed by the village elders.
    The section halts at the Commander's order.  We snap to attention, ignoring the heat, insects, and the hot asphalt under our rubber sandals.
    Commander Be Dan is greeted by the village elders and a Viet Cong officer under the big bamboo star over the village gate.  The elders are a fireteam of dignified and ancient men, bowing and smiling.  The Viet Cong officer is about eightenn years old.
    Commander Be Dan bows to each man, salutes the local Chien Si commander, then shakes hands all around.
    There is some polite conversation, ending with the local commander's proud declaration to Commander Be Dan, "Comrade Major, we have forced the Americans to eat soup with a fork!"  This must be the punch line to a joke, because everyone laughs.
    Executing a perfect about-face, Commander Be Dan gives us the order to fall out.
 

    The sun is low in the sky, so everyone relaxes.  Twilight is safe time because the daylight air raids are over and it's still too early for the night raids.  We are escorted through the village to a huge bonfire, where the women of hte village have prepared a feast.  Village trail watchers must have reported that we were on the way well in advance of our arrival.
    The familiar murmur of activity and the smells of food, farm animals, and cook fires remind us of our village and we feel a little homesick.  But not for long, because we are made welcome.
    As usual, I am the star.  In show business at last!  Everyone is curious about the Chien Si My, the American Front fighter.  Some people speak to me in French.  Others ask me if I am Lien So--"Russian."  But most of the villagers are eager to try out an English words they know on me, either to show off or to test the accuracy of their pronunciations.
    I am becoming more famous than Jesse James.  Little kids follow me around in mobs.  They are happy and healthy kids, not at all like the sad and dirty little savages in the occupied zones.  Instead of yelling, "You give me one cigarette!  You give me one cigarette!" they ask politely, "May o day?"--"Where do you live?"
    The children all love me, but from the adults I get mixed reviews.  One woman glares at me with hatred.  As I walk by, the woman snatches off her sandals and throws them against a wall.
    A mangy dog lopes by, yapping at a yellow butterfly.
    All of the kids want to touch my nose.  As soon as I sit down they crowd in to touch my nose.  Each time a kid touches my nose he goes into a spasm of hysterical laughter, as though my nose is absolutely the funniest thing any of the kids have ever seen.
    We are fed in style on fragrant roast pigs and yams, with optional side order of elephant steaks, monkey stew, and dog meat cold cuts, all cooked over a bonfire fueld by coconut shells.
    Little girls, bashful with strangers, give us flowers, then giggle and hide their faces with their hands.  The men and women who were working on the road when we arrived pat us on the back.  These are the people Mao talks about in that Little Red Book that Ba Can Bo is always reading to us back in Hoa Binh, hte people who are like an ocean in which the Front guerrillas swim while the enemy drowns.  The VC Nation.
    Beneath an obelisk of concrete topped with red metal stars, four teenaged girls with matching blue guitars sing "A Hard Day's Night" in Vietnamese.  They are not good musicians, but they are very energetic.  They get confused and forget the lyrics.  They hit sour notes on the guitars.  When they make a mistake they blush and laugh it off and the audience laughs with them.
    The village elders and the local Chien Si commander have got Commander Be Dan in a huddle, all of them squatting in a semicircle on the village common.  With bullets they draw maps in the dirt.  Each person of influence lobbies for an enemy position to be attacked.
    I drink rice wine.  I drink a lot of rice wine.  I drink rice wine flat on my back on some gunnysacks full of unhusked rice, surrounded by twenty of the village children, who have adopted me and my nose.
    As I fall asleep the mountains grumble and metal talks to the earth.
 

    We sleep late the next day and leave the village at twilight.  From now on we'll be marching only by night because we are leaving the Liberated Zone.
    The village is deserted.  The Dan Cong have been out on the road since dawn, making big rocks into little rocks.
    The village elders wave goodbye.  "Trang," they say--"Victory."  And they say, "Gia Phong"--"Liberation."
    We march down a dirt road that has been camouflaged from air recon by planting saplings into holes every few yards, saplings that are dug up and replanted every time the road is used by trucks.
    After we turn off the road and enter a treeline we cut green leafy twigs and tie them to our clothing, knapsacks, and weapons.  Ha Ngoc the radioman and I laugh as we carefully decorate each other with fresh greenery until we both look like shrubbery with legs.
    We come out of the treeline and walk along a riverback.  We load onto a ferry barge to cross the river.  The ferry barge is constructed of heavy timbers, hand-hewn and bolted together.  The weathered wood is bleached white above the waterline.  Two giant ropes hold the barge in place as a man poles it across.
    The barge man has a muscular chest and muscular arms and legs.  He's wearing faded Levi's cutoffs and has tied an olive-drab T-shirt around his forehead.  He's blind.
    All the way across the river the blind barge man stares at me with hatred.  His unseeing eyes have pupils as white as opals.  "I smell a foreigner," he says, and suddenly picks up a machete and hacks at the air around him.
    Song speaks to the blind barge man sternly and he reluctantly hands over the machete.
    "Gia Phong, Dong Chi," says the blind barge man as we file off his barge.  "Liberation, comrades."
    "Gia Phong," we all say.
    As the blind barge man poles away from the riverbank he calls out to us, "Kill the American!"
 

    We hump.  We're back in the lowlands now.  We maintain total noise discipline and communicate only with hand signals.
    Master Sergeant Xuan finds boot tracks, large and deep, the tracks of Americans, not puppet armymen.  We can see the imprints of their rifle butts where they sat to rest.  Master Sergeant Xuan digs up trash from their tin-skinned food with a fixed bayonet.  If their C-rations are only half-eaten it means that the enemy fighters plan to return to their base by the end of the day.  Master Sergeant Xuan shows Commander Be Dan some of the empty C-ration cans.  The cans are still moist inside and have been scraped clean.
    The Commander puts a finger on his nose to signal "long-noses" and turns so that the section can see his signal, then looks at Master Sergeant Xuan.  The Master Sergeant nods.
    As the signal is repeated down the trail, Battle Mouth says in a big whisper: "I will tear off their warmongering capitalistic arms and legs.  I will defecate into their water holes.  I will eat their faces with my teeth.  I will-"
    Commander Be Dan grabs Battle Mouth by the throat.  "Battle Mouth, do not speak or I will shoot you myself."
    Battle Mouth pouts, but quietly.
    We hump another hundred yards.  In the distance, artillery crumps.  Nearby and closing, the whack-whack of choppers.
    Commander Be Dan first signals for the section to pick up the pace, but by the time we're all running flat out he suddenly raises his hand--stop--and then lowers it to the ground.  We crash down onto our bellies and crawl to cover.
    Ha Ngoc the radioman sniffs the air, looks back at me, points to his nose, then pinches his nose and frowns, saying silently, "I smell Americans."
    While Commander Be Dan reads the terrain and signals fighters into defensive positions, Ha Ngoc punches my arm, then points to starboard.  I can't see anything, but Ha Ngoc points again.
    We listen for the whir of insects that tells us that we're safe, but the insects are ominously silent.  A jungle full of noisy birds is silent.
    Ha Ngoc makes a fist and walks his fist along the ground to say, "The Elephants are coming."  The fighters call Army troopers "Elephants" because they make so much noise and carry so much equipment.
    Raising myself up on painfully bruised elbows, I hear a faint rhythmic chomping sound.  The sounds get louder and louder and more distinct until it is clearly the whack of a machete.
    Ha Ngoc and I burrow deeper into the dirt.
    Heavy boots crunch into dry scraps of rotten bamboo.  Voices drift in on the wind, heavy voices, deep voices that talk slowly.
    A helmet covered with camouflage canvas emerges an inch at a time from a wall of jungle that is a hundred shades of green.  Half of a sweaty face appears, eyes looking up for snipers and down for booby traps and antipersonnel mines.  Then a bulky sun-faded flak jacket.  Then the black barrel of an M-16.
    The point man is a Marine snuffy, breaking trail with a machete.
    I'm not sure I can hack this shit.  These are not Elephants,  they're Black Rifles--Marines.  What am I supposed to do, shoot them or buy them a beer?  And if I try to cross over from our lines to their lines, will my ass be blown off by the Viet Cong, or by the Marines, or both?  My plan has always been simple escape and evade, not suicide.  Now may be the time to make my move, but I sure as shit better do it by the numbers and not screw it up.
    The point man is a skuzzy field Marine with a spare set of black socks full of C-ration cans slung around his neck.  He carries his M-16 pointing down the trail and his finger is on the trigger.  The drag, the deuce point, is breaking bush.  I can see glistening drops of sweat flying from the drag's arm as he chops through green bamboo stalks with a machete.  Next comes the squad leader, followed by his radioman.
    The squad leader is talking into a radio handset which has been taped inside a clear plastic bag.  He tosses the handset back to his radioman, then raises his hand, fingers spread wide:  stop.  The radioman talks into the handset.  The whip antenna wagging above his field radio makes him a beautiful target.
    I feel like standing up and yelling at them, "Keep your interval, people.  Keep your interval or you will draw fire."
    It's high noon and hot.  The jungle is green fire.  Marines are setting in for chow.  Slack time, smoke 'em if you got 'em.  It's a Marine rifle company, probably scouting an LZ--the blat-blat-blat of massed helicopters echoes along the horizon.  It's harvest time; a battalion must be planning to nail some VC rice caches.
    The fighters wait.  We don't move.  We are so close to the Marines we can see the salt-ring stains under the armpits of their jungle utilities, evidence of months of nonstop sweating.  The plodding workhorses of the infantry are loaded down with heavy gear.  We can hear the clink and rustle of their web gear as they groan and drop their packs.
    A grunt sits down on his helmet and lights up a C-ration cigarette.  Enjoying the relief from the hated weight of the helmet, he rubs the dark red line indented into his forehead by the band inside the helmet liner.  He breaks out a green plastic canteen from the rack of four slung on the back of his brass-grommeted web belt.
    Somebody's Funny Gunny appears, spooning a bite of C-rations into his mouth.  The Gunny swats away a mosquito with a white plastic spoon and breaks out a small plastic squeeze bottle of bug juice, insect repellent, from a black band of inner-tube rubber around his helmet.  He's a typical grizzled bleary-eyed twenty-year Gunny with a beer belly, not too bright, prematurely cantankerous, hard as a tank hull.  "Bradfield, you shitbird.  Get your head out of your ass and crack out your E-tool.  Or is sitting on your ass what they taught you down in Dago in the Hollywood Marines?"
    The Gunny turns away and addresses the lead platoon:  "Okay, people, all I want to see is assholes and elbows.  Home is where you dig it.  Make them titty-deep, people, most ricky-tick.  "
    Private Bradfield grunts, field-strips his cigarette, drops off his sweat-soaked flak jacket, then, like a farmer, proceeds to till the soil with his entrenching tool so that he can plant himself in a temporary grave.  He hits the deck with the E-tool, hard, looking at the Gunny.  He wipes the sweat from his face with an OD towel bung around his neck and says, "God damn every son of a bitch in the world who ain't here."
 

    Commander Be Dan gives the order and we crawl, slowly, inch by inch, for maybe fifty yards.  We are beginning to think we have safely broken contact with the Marines when a single shot punches a hole into the hot day.  One of our scouts has fired a signal shot.  The shot is answered by automatic rifle fire.
    For some reason we'll never know, somebody issued a movement order and the Marines saddled up.  There is only one marching order for Marines:  he who hesitates will be left behind.
    Having stumbled into us by accident, now the Marines close in for the kill; movement to contact, better known as killer instinct.  The rifle company throws out an angry crackle of recon-by-fire.
    Nothing is as scary as that silence between breaths after you hear shooting and you don't know if it's going to hit you or not.
    The fighters feel better when Commander Be Dan says, "Ban!"  The section opens fire.  It's better to have something to do, then you don't have time to think too much.
    "Di di mau!" is the order--"Move and move fast."
    We are not going to "grab the enemy by the belt."  If we were going to fight we would move in closer to the enemy so that the Marines can't use supporting arms against us, land-based artillery, naval artillery, and Tac-Air close air support.
    I'm watching for a chance to make a break for it.  A firefight is not the best time to be showing yourself to an advancing force, but maybe I'm too big to be mistaken for a Charlie.  Or maybe the grunts will shoot me first and measure me later.
    Suddenly the section breaks cover and we fall back toward the heavy jungle, firing as we go.
    M-60 machine-gun bullets bite deep into the trunks of trees and whine as they ricochet off boulders.  Explosions rock the earth and shrapnel snaps harmlessly through layered green leaves.
    From nowhere appears a big black grunt with an M-60 machine gun, double-timing toward us, grasping the bipod legs, his hand in an asbestos glove, firing from the hip, playing John Wayne, some gungy brass-balls son of a bitch, a natural born eye-shooter and apprentice widow-maker, hard-charging toward a Bronze Star by way of a Purple Heart.
    I reach for a weapon but all I've got is a megaphone.  It's a reflex action.  I feel silly.  Before I can return fire with the megaphone or Chieu Hoi or think of a way to cool out this black Marine gunner who's as big as a tank and who can chop up brass faster than a spider monkey jacking off, the big black gunner goes down, sinking in slow motion behind a golden sparkle of ejecting shell casings.
    Ha Ngoc, the radioman, pulls me to my feet while Commander Be Dan lays down covering fire.
    A hot spasm of pain running up my right side is my first hint that I've been hit.  I look down.  I've seen a lot of gunshot wounds.  I'm standing up, I'm moving, and I haven't bled to death yet.  As I'm helped along by Ha Ngoc I diagnose it as a T&T wound in the right thigh, through and through, no bones hit, no major arteries cut.  Now I've got a golden oportunity to prove that sea story bullshit about how one-legged Marines know how to hop.
    I look back and I can see a Corpsman cutting off the black gunner's pants with a K-bar.  The Corpsman, ignoring the firefight in progress all around him, stands up and calls for a dustoff, an immediate medevac.  The Corpsman is wearing two .38-caliber revolvers in tied-down holsters, like a Wild West gunfighter.
    As we move away, we can hear the Black Rifles calling out to one another: "Throw a few rounds in there!"  "Where are those fucking gunships?"  "Check fire!  Check fire!"  "Have you got movement?" "Recon that treeline!"
    Ha Ngoc is little, but incredibly strong.  He helps me stumble toward a treeline as bullets hiss over our heads like pieces of hot air.
    A bullet hits Ha Ngoc in the back of the head and comes out of his face.  He looks at me, surprised, his face only inches from my own.  There is an ugly wet cavity between his nose and his cheekbone.  Ha Ngoc breathes his last breath into my face and falls dead at my feet.
 

    Looking back, I see a Marine Corps Captain, a squared-away honcho of the lean and the mean.  Officers wear no rank insignia in the field, but his age and bearing, his neatly trimmed mustache, his hair high and tight, mark him as a captain.
    He's carrying a pump shotgun.  Across his chest is a belt studded with all-brass service rounds for the shotgun.
    The Captain is wearing yellow pigskin shooting gloves, a starched-and-blocked tiger-stripe utility cover, a black leather shoulder holster with a .45-caliber automatic pistol, and aviator sunglasses.  A wristwatch hangs from the top buttonhole of his jungle utilities jacket.  He is pumping his arm up and down like a piston.  "Go.  Go.  Go."
    The Captain has never seen a white Viet Cong.  He looks at me and he doesn't know what to do, shoot me or buy me a beer.  The rule under Grunt Law is shoot first and forget about asking the questions.  I give the Captain a thumbs-up and he looks at me like Moses looking at the burning bush.
    While the Captain hesitates, Commander Be Dan fires.
    The Captain goes down, hit in the legs.
    The Marines are advancing on line, shooting everything that moves.
    I turn away and run like a big-assed bird, clumsy, limping, but ignoring the pain, thinking only that I either find cover most ricky-tick or my health record is going to be turned into a fuck story.  A treeline used to mean danger; now it means safety.
    In the treeline Commander Be Dan is waiting for me.  As I stare at the silent jungle, seeing nothing, Commander Be Dan and the Chien Si materialize as though by magic.  I never had a chance to escape.  I was somebody's favorite sight picture every step of the way.
    Commander Be Dan orders me to lie down on a hammock.  Fighters lift me up and carry me, and we move fast, deep into the jungle where everything is black and green or green and black.  We ignore the thumping shells and the thuds of bombs and the mechanical buzzing of gunships as the Black Rifles in their helpless impotence and fury drop tons of iron onto Comrade Lizard.
    So much for my best chance to escape.
 

    The section humps half a day, climbing higher and higher into the Dong Tri Mountains, up cart trails that are steep and rugged, until we are so far away from the war that it seems impossible that the war ever existed.  Up here the silence is awesome, like in a church, and is broken only by the gentle warble of jungle streams; no matter where you are in the rain forest, the soft murmur of rushing water is always heard.  The sound of the water is soothing.
    The whole rest of the world seems like a dream.  It's spooky here but it's beautiful, and the shooting war is nothing more than a bad memory we have left behind in some bad place in a valley far below.
    I wonder why we don't throw away our guns and file claims to homestead and stay up here forever.  Let them fight like fools in the lowlands.  We'll stay up here and be mountain men.
    But the peace is a false peace and the silence is only another form of military camouflage. Bo Doi scouts greet us on the trail.  The Bo Doi guide us past sentries, antiaircraft guns, artillery pieces, and bunker complexes manned by rifle companies of elite North Vietnamese troops.
    The Bo Doi open a tree trunk, revealing a tunnel entrance so ingeniously concealed that you could sit down next to it and never see it.  We step into the tree and climb down into the tunnel.  As usual, I'm a problem, because my shoulders are too big to fit through the frequent trapdoors connecting the various tunnels.  When I get stuck, the fighters ahead of me pull and the fighters behind me push.  I feel like a fat lady trying to get down into a submarine.
    Down under the ground the tunnels expand until they are big enough to drive a truck through.  We hump into a tunnel complex that is vast and well equipped, a city of people buried in a mountain.
    As we go deeper, the tunnels become cleaner and more squared away.  The cave walls are no longer damp and spider-webbed.  We are no longer attacked by black clouds of screeching bats.  We see green canvas tents pitched in perfect alignment, mounds of wooden crates neatly stacked, electric lights running on generators, a hospital with clean white sheets and staffed by white-gowned doctors and nurses.
    It's Victor Charlie's Big PX.
 

    We are assigned a bivouac next to a printing press.  The fighters sling their hammocks on hitching posts conveniently provided.
    We try to sleep.  The printing press goes ka-chunk ka-chunk all night--if it is night--and never stops.
    When I wake up there are a dozen Bo Doi troopers standing over me, staring at me.  I am The Thing that just arrived from outer space aboard a UFO.
    The Bo Doi are in full uniform and look like schoolboys.  As I sit up they giggle, embarrassed, and hurry away.
    Someone has removed the battle dressing from my thigh and has replaced it with a clean white hospital bandage.
    Commander Be Dan squats down next to me and hands me some tin-skinned food.  The food is a Chinese version of C-rations.  We cut open the cans with Commander Be Dan's homemade knife.
    The food is mostly vegetables and noodles, with mystery meat, and smells like dead fish.  I'm trying to decide how to decline gracefully when Commander Be Dan spits out a mouthful of food and throws a half-eaten can of beans into a trash pit.  I'm stunned to hear him say in English:  "Chinese food is shit."
    After chow, I walk over and watch the printing press cough out freshly printed sheets of pulpy yellow paper.
    The printing press is very old, a heavy block of steel and chipped black enamel, manufactured back when things were made to last forever. Every mechanical part in the press is badly worn, yet clean and well oiled. Obviously the printing press is well cared for or it would not work at all.  It's like the old John Deere tractor we had on the farm back in Alabama.  My dad would always say, "It's held together with spit and baling wire.  Don't look at it the wrong way or it will fall apart."
    The printer comes over and greets me with a smile.  He is a fat little man with a jolly Buddha-face, wearing an ink-splattered white shirt.  He tells me in English how proud he is of his press, how it was smuggled out of Saigon and transported in hundreds of pieces by hundreds of people and then reassembled one piece at a time in the tunnel.
    After asking me if I would like to have some tea, the printer says, "Do you know Jane Fonda?"  He hands me a big piece of type as heavy as shrapnel.  He smells of ink and has ink under his fingernails.  "She's an American too."
    "No.  Sorry," I say.  The printer looks disappointed.
    "Do you know the writings of Mister Mark Twain?"
    "Sure.  I've read a few of his books."
    The printer nods, satisfied.  As I examine the strangely accented letter on the piece of type, the printer takes out a pocket notebook and a fountain pen and says, "Chien Si My, why do your armymen go ten thousand miles from home to live a helluva life and to die on this land?  This country is not yours.  We do no harm to your homeland.  Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?"
    I don't know what to say.
    The printer continues:  "You cannot defeat us.  You do not even know who we are.  You cannot even see us.  Your country lives inside a dream and tries to kill anything outside of the dream, but we live in the real world, so you cannot kill us.  We have fought for twenty years and we will fight on until weare victorious, until we have freedom. Just as your forefathers did two hundred years ago.  Uncle Ho began the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence by quoting the American Declaration of Independence:  'All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'  American armymen no longer fight to protect their liberty but to steal ours.  Chien Si My, how did your great and heroic country lose its greatness and allow itself to be taken over by gangsters?"
    The printer is watching me closely as he speaks, pen poised, as though he expects me to reveal the secrets of the universe in twenty-five words or less.  Suddenly I realize that I am being interviewed for a Front newspaper.
    "Khoung Biet," I say-"I don't know."
    The printer nods, disappointed, but easily convinced that I really don't know.
    The printer looks at his wristwatch.  He says, "You know, some of the big shots here want to send you to prison in Hanoi.  But you have a powerful friend in the Front, Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region."  He looks at his wristwatch again.  "Come with me, please."
    The printer says to Commander Be Dan, "Comrade Major, may I please speak with you?" and the Commander joins us. We walk past strange humming machines, manned by workers, chugging away, smelling of Cosmoline and oil, factories under the earth.
    We pass a huge tent.  Inside, seated at a long narrow table, are fifty or sixty North Vietnamese Army officers in short-sleeved khaki uniforms, red collar tab rank insignia heavy with brass stars.  The officers are eating, drinking tea, playing cards, dropping sugar cubes into their coffee, telling jokes, telling lies, laughing, smoking pipes and cigars, reading newspapers.
    We see a religious shrine ten feet high, a brass Buddha.
    We enter a large chamber filled with a couple of hundred Bo Doi snuffies squatting on a floor of beaten earth covered by palm fronds.  The Bo Doi are all nineteen years old, healthy and strong, with regulation haircuts and clean khaki shirts and shorts.  They are so squared-away, they must have junk-on-the-junk inspections five times a day, or maybe it's junk-on-the-hammock.
    Many of the Bo Doi are writing in small pocket diaries.  Others are eating snacks, sleeping, writing letters, reading letters from home, or telling sea stories to their comrades and passing around photographs of pretty girls they claim are their girlfriends.
    At the far end of the chamber is a small movie screen.
    The printer, Commander Be Dan, and I squat and wait.  After a few minutes the electric lights are lowered and a film projector switches on.  The projector hums, rattles noisily, wheezes, snorts, and threatens to explode.  Finally light appears on the screen and we see an old Charlie Chaplin film with French subtitles.
    We watch the flickering, jerky black-and-white images on the screen.  The Bo Doi laugh and cheer.  "Charlot!  Charlot!"  They laugh, slapping their stomachs and thighs.
    Charlie Chaplin flickers across the crude rice-paper screen, looking sad.  He's up in the Yukon someplace, looking for gold, but not finding any.  So he makes a federal case out of eating his shoe.
    The Bo Doi laugh so hard that there are tears in their eyes.  "Charlot!  Charlot!"
    After the movie Commander Be Dan and I thank the printer for taking us to the movie.  We say goodbye to the printer, bowing, then shaking hands.
    Commander Be Dan and I walk back to our area and fall into our hammocks.  Before we go to sleep Commander Be Dan says to me in English: "I liked that movie."
 

    Master Sergeant Xuan wakes us up.  We pick up our gear and hump out of the main tunnel complex and down long dark tunnels that get smaller and smaller until, crawling on our hands and knees, we emerge from darkness into blinding sunlight.
         We march down again, toward the lowlands.
         Climbing down rocky mountain trails is some real number-ten-thousand humping, the worst.  The whole process of walking down a steep incline is clumsy and strains all the wrong muscles.  Our backpacks shift back and forth and throw us off balance.  My bandaged leg hurts until it goes numb and I have to look at it to see where it is to check my footing.  Every few hours a fighter falls, tumbling headlong down the trail, but the worst injury is a broken arm.
    At a waterfall Commander Be Dan calls a halt and we eat a meal of glutinous rice and tomatoes.
    Speaking over the roar of the waterfall, Commander Be Dan informs us that we will reach our destination by twilight and will be going into battle tonight.  We're instructed to take a break for a couple of hours so we'll be fresh for the battle.
    Without taking off our sweaty clothes we walk barefoot on slimy moss-covered rocks and into the green water.  The fighters dive in.  I sit down on a submerged rock and rub my leg.
    Song stands on a stone ledge under the waterfall.  The water is a monster shower, a collapsing column of wet silver dissolving into sparkling white foam as it hits a jungle pool.  Song plays a game to see how long she can stand up under the weight of the falling water before it knocks her into the pool.  Then she climbs out of the water and tries again.  Soon the fighters are all competing in the game and are yelling and laughing like children.
    I lie back on a submerged rock.  Only my face is out of the water.  The sun is warm on my face.  I close my eyes and relax.  The soothing roar of the waterfall makes me sleepy.
    After our bodies are clean we sit in the sun in our wet clothes.  We watch as Commander Be Dan builds a sand castle on a rock.  A flat rock is a VC desk.  The sand castle is a "U.S. Combat Fortress."  The Commander uses stones and twigs to mark key positions, the mine fields, the heavy machine guns, the strongest bunkers.
    The target, explains the Commander, is a Special Forces compound being used as a base of operations by a secret unit of Nungs--Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese origin, mercenaries who fight under CIA control.  The Nungs have been attacking Montagnard villages while disguised as North Vietnamese Army troops.  This is a CIA propaganda ploy to induce the Montagnards to join the fight against the liberation forces.  Our mission is to destroy the compound.
    Commander Be Dan tells each fighter precisely what his or her personal responsibility will be during the battle.
    My assignment is to talk to the compound defenders to keep them awake all night before the attack.  I will not be in the assault forces because I have not earned the right to carry a weapon, because I am too tall and would confuse the fighters, and because I have a minor wound on my leg.  I will remain with Master Sergeant Xuan's rear-guard force, which will cover the withdrawal of the assault troops.
    Truong Si Xuan gives me a look that says he is disgusted to be saddled with me, a freak American surrenderer, excess baggage, some kind of silly publicity stunt, a fucking tourist.
    Master Sergeant Xuan is a thin man, all bones, muscles, and sinew.  He is about seventy years old but looks like he could run up mountainsides all day with a water buffalo on his back and spend the night breaking bricks with his head.  He's a tough motherfucker from way back, with ugly shrapnel scars all over his face.  He always gives orders to his troops in a threatening tone, as though he'll kill you on the spot if you even hesitate.
    After detailing the battle orders, Commander Be Dan invites everyone to make comments or criticisms.  We rehash the plan for an hour or so, until every fighter is in agreement with what is to be done, and how.  I point out that the Americans string barbed wire to funnel attack troops into mine fields.  The fighters nod their approval of my information, but, as usual, they already know about that.  Some changes are made in the plan, based on comments from the fighters.  Now that the attack plan is set, discipline will be strictly enforced.
    "HOAN HO!" we say--"Hurrah.  Let's go!"
    As the section saddles up I slip off into the bushes, looking for a place to pee.  I do a quick about-face when I see Nguyen Hai, one of the Nguyen brothers, sitting with his back against the base of a tree, eyes closed, mouth open.  One of the Phuong twins is with him.  Her head is in his lap and is bobbing up and down.
    Thinking about the advantages of a coed war, I hurry back to the section, giggling like a teenaged kid--which I am.
 

    We hump down and down, and then we're in a haunted mangrove swamp.  Set close together and rooted in smelly water stand hundreds and hundreds of scaly, pale green tree trunks.  The smelly water is like sewage mixed with vegetable scraps and inhabited by poisonous snakes.
    We are very careful in the swamp because the craters from B-52 lake-bombs are invisible under the waist-deep water.  A fighter humping a full load of gear can suddenly sink twenty feet.
    As we leave the swamp we see smoke.  Black smoke.  Too much smoke for cooking fires.  We see red fire on the horizon.
    We double-time.
    Within minutes we hear small-arms fire, scattered, unopposed.  Then we hear screams.
    Commander Be Dan recons the ville with his field glasses, sends Master Sergeant Xuan to the left with one squad and Song to the right with another, with orders to attack when they hear firing.  I stick asshole-to-elbow with Master Sergeant Xuan.
    As the section converges upon the Montagnard village we see maybe fifty men in khaki shirts and shorts, wearing small brown pith helmets and North Vietnamese rank insignia, their uniforms and weapons camouflaged with fresh leaves and twigs.
    Nungs, disguised as North Vietnamese Army soldiers, are burning the village, killing the men, raping the women.
    We come in fast and open fire at the Commander's order:  "Ban!"
    The Montagnard huts sit on short stilts.  The Yards wear loincloths.  The men are scrawny and have bony chests.  The women are bare-breasted and sickly.  The children have bloated bellies due to malnutrition.
    In normal times, there is no love lost between the Montagnards and the Vietnamese.
    We spread out.  Move and fire.  Fire and move.  We give the impression of a much larger force than we are, barely thirty fighters, no match for fifty Nung mercenaries.
    The new widows are running from dead body to dead body.  When each of them finds the right dead body, she wails in agony.  Then they all are wailing in agony, and the wails join together into a horrible song.
    We follow the retreating Nungs, pressing them, never giving them time to think about turning around and making a stand.  As we charge through the village we yell, "XUNG
  PHONG!". . . "Comrades, advance!"  And we say, "We are the Liberation Army!"
    We see an old woman, squatting on top of a table, moaning, holding her stomach--somebody's gutshot grandmother.  Bo Doi Bac Si drops back to help her.
    The Nungs are tough sons of bitches.  They drop a man back every twenty yards.  Each man dropped fights until our point men kill him, which takes time.
    I try to stay close to Master Sergeant Xuan, as ordered, but my leg has started bleeding again and I lag a few yards behind.
    A Nung sniper fires at us from the branches of a tree.  Master Sergeant Xuan orders me to stay put, then tries to flank the Nung, exposing himself to draw fire.  The Nung fires.  Somebody fires back.  The Nung falls out of the tree like a sack of dirty laundry.
    Commander Be Dan waves us forward.  As we advance, Master Sergeant Xuan pauses and kicks the dying Nung sniper in the balls.  The Nung groans, looks up at us without fear or pain.  When he sees me, he's confused.  Master Sergeant Xuan ends the Nung's confusion with a burst of AK.
    We chase the Nungs until we come to flat open ground that has been bulldozed and defoliated, leaving the Special Forces compound a clear field of fire.
    A single howitzer inside the compound starts banging out rounds.  We fade back into the jungle as a shell bursts harmlessly in the treetops.
    We all know that the Phantom fighter-bombers have been called and are already in the air and will be coming in on bomb runs within twenty minutes.
    The Nguyen brothers appear, proudly escorting two bound Nungs they have taken prisoner.  The Nguyen brothers are still New Guys.
    "Good!" says Commander Be Dan.  He waves the Nguyen brothers back.  Master Sergeant Xuan steps forward and butt-strokes each Nung prisoner to the ground, then fires a bullet through each of their heads.
    Commander Be Dan looks at his wristwatch, then at his map.  We follow him to a new position and wait for night.  We can hear the Phantom fighter-bombers booming overhead and we can hear the bombs.  With our ears and with our feet and with our bones we can hear bombs hitting the edge of the jungle.
    We wait for night.
 

    The night is our friend.
    For hours, repeating the same speech a hundred times, I talk into an olive-drab battery-powered bullhorn.  I read word for word from a script written for me by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre:
    "Come, brothers,  I say.  "You are fighting on the wrong side.  Turn the guns around.
    "This country is not yours.
    "We do no harm to your homeland.
    "Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?
    "Do not join with the Saigon lackeys in using armed forces to suppress the just struggle of the South Vietnamese people for freedom and independence.
    "Armymen!  You are sons of the great American people who have a freedom-loving tradition.  By your barbarous acts, inflicted upon patriots in their own land in the name of deceptive contentions, you besmear the honor of the U.S.A.
    "Refuse to obey all orders to carry out mopping up operations to kill the Vietnamese people, to destroy their crops, burn their houses.
    "Say 'No!' to the White House gangsters.  You are fighting on the wrong side.  Honor the memory of your ancestors. join us in our struggle for justice.  Turn the guns around . . . "
 

    Commander Be Dan meets with a Chien Si officer.  They bow, salute, and shake hands.  The officer is smoking a cigar.
    The jungle is full of Chien Si fighters now, hundreds of them.
    Hoarse, I join Master Sergeant Xuan's rear-guard unit.  I imitate my comrades-in-arms by tying black comm wire around my ankles so that if we are forced to go into combat and I am wounded I can be dragged to safety.  Or to a burial.  The Chien Si fear that if they are not buried in Xa--in their home ground near their ancestors--their souls will be doomed to wander for all eternity, forever alone.
    The assault troops check their weapons and move to their attack positions.  The Nguyen brothers tie their rifles to their web belts with long pieces of string so that if they are wounded they won't lose their weapons.
    For the first time I look at an American compound with the eyes of an attacker.  The Special Forces compound is not very big, just another sandbagged dot on some Army general's grid map.  But it does look mean.  Nothing human could ever survive its firepower: long-range artillery on call, air strikes on call, mortar shells, howitzer shells from tube-sighted 105s,  .50-caliber machine guns, antipersonnel mines, Claymore mines, thirty yards of leg-ripping barbed wire secured by engineer's stakes and festooned with trip flares, and a thick wall of sandbags which will be illuminated by a golden string of muzzle flashes from automatic rifles.
    But so far the compound has been silent.  No one awake except a few drowsy sentries I've bored with my political speech.
    As silent as ghosts, the sappers go in, calm and professional, their minds focused to a burning point, their naked bodies covered with grease and smeared with charcoal.  Each sapper has spent his final hours alone, deep in the jungle, building his own coffin and writing his name on his coffin with mud.  A hundred yards from the wire the sappers lie down and then crawl forward on their bellies, into the black barbs of the concertina wire, armed only with wire cutters.
    Close behind, the second wave of sappers drag bangalore torpedoes into position.  A third wave waits in the shadows with satchel charges strapped to their backs.
    While the sappers are cutting the wire, illumination shells from a mortars section inside the compound burst overhead, lighting up the battlefield, just a routine periodic illumination.
    The light from the flares catches the second wave of sappers in the open and half of them are cut down as sentries in the compound open fire.  The surviving sappers run into the wire, shove bamboo bangalore torpedoes up into the wire as far as they can, then, lying next to them, detonate them.
    While the Nungs inside the compound watch the sappers blow themselves up in the wire, the third wave attacks.  The sappers who are not killed fall down and pretend to be dead.  Under fire, they wait.
    Someone gives an order, "Sung coi!"--"Mortars."
    The assault troops advance aggressively.  Each fighter carries one mortar shell and drops it into a mortar tube as he passes.  All along the edge of the jungle, mortar tubes tonk, and the first wave of assault troops charges forward.
    By the time the mortar shells dropped into the tubes by the first wave of assault troops arch in and bang somewhere inside the compound, the enemy mortar crews inside the compound are already dropping shell after shell into their own mortar tubes--thump-thump-thump--illumination rounds shot out, followed by H. E.--high explosives.
    "DAI LIEN!"--"Machine guns!"  The jungle sparkles with green tracers, going out.
    Our first mortar shells fall short and kill our own troops.  The range on the mortar tubes is adjusted.
    The compound perimeter opens up with everything in the world that shoots.  Muzzle flashes wink like fireflies.  The Chien Si human wave attack advances, not returning fire.
    An enemy grenade bursts ten yards from where I lie with Master Sergeant Xuan's reserve force.  We do not return fire.
    "XUNG PHONG!" is the order, and the second wave of assault troops echoes back in unison: "XUNG PHONG!  XUNG PHONG!  XUNG PHONG!"--"Assault!  Assault!  Assault!"
    The Liberation Army attacks, a fearless horde of shadows.
    Moments after the first wave of assault troops has been shot to pieces the second wave hits the wire.
    The sappers with satchel charges now rise up as one man, pull fuses, and fling heavy canvas blocks of TNT into the perimeter bunkers.  A few of the sappers are shot down before they can throw, but all of them are shot down after they throw.
    As the satchel charges lift the bunkers up in slow motion, spilling sand in sheets as sandbags  burst and sandbag walls are blown apart, the second wave is coming through the wire, walking on bloody stepping-stones that are the backs of dead comrade-soldiers.
    Our mortars do not lift their fire until our assault troops are being wounded by our own shrapnel.
    The third wave advances into the gray cloud of smoke boiling across the compound.  All we can see now are the blue and orange flashes of RPGs--rocket-propelled grenades.
    Inside the compound the fight is a noisy toe-to-toe show-down of hot-blooded man-killing.  It is over very quickly.  One minute they're overrunning the wire, the next minute they are grenading the bunkers.
    Someone blows a whistle and the Liberation Army pulls out without hesitation, leaving the Special Forces compound blown up and on fire, leaving the Nungs and the Green Beanies and their spook bosses overrun and fucked up totally.
    The rear-guard reserve under Master Sergeant Xuan holds its position while hundreds of fighters of the Liberation Army flow past in the returning darkness.  Wounded fighters limp along on crude, freshly cut crutches.  Friends haul dead comrades away by the wire loops on their ankles.
    Life in the shit is a rush, but you come down hard.  After thirty minutes in a firefight you feel like you've pulled a double shift at the coal mine.  Everybody's ass is dragging.
 

    In the safety of the jungle the fighters call out the names of their units to one another in the darkness, and the attack force breaks up and reassembles into small local units for the march home.
    The rear-guard unit waits for an attack from the compound, or the arrival of a reaction force from another command.  But the only movement inside the compound is a lone figure, stumbling around blindly, calling for help in that unknown language sometimes invented by dying men.
    Our scouts report that a reaction force is ten minutes away.  Moments later, an avalanche of bombs and shells hits the fields of fire from the direction of our attack, while we in the rear-guard withdraw in the opposite direction.
    In the jungle I see Song squatting beside the trail, trying to bandage her hand.  Battle Mouth is with her, but is of no help; he appears to be in shock.
    I squat down and look at Song's hand.  A piece of shrapnel is embedded in the loose flesh between thumb and forefinger.  The shrapnel is a shark's tooth of steel, black and silver, and the wound is oozing red blood.
    I search until I find Bo Doi Bac Si.
    Bo Doi Bac Si sponges the wound clean, then clamps down on the piece of shrapnel with shiny little pliers.  Song grits her teeth and whimpers.  I hold her wounded hand steady and Bo Doi Bac Si pulls out the jagged chunk of metal.  Bo Doi Bac Si bandages the hand quickly and hurries off to help the other wounded, handing me a tiny blue and white tube of ointment "for her cuts."
    I wash Song's legs and feet with water from my canteen.
    I wipe the deep cuts clean with her black and white checkered Front bandanna.  I massage greasy yellow ointment into deep ugly gouges left by barbed wire.
    As I bandage Song's legs and feet with captured battle dressings, four American prisoners are led past us on their way to the Hanoi Hilton.  Their hands are bound behind their backs with wire and they are roped together neck to neck.  The prisoners stumble and collide.  They see me.  They stare back at me in stunned disbelief as they are led away.  The first two prisoners are Special Forces officers.  The last two are both over forty, wearing new jungle utilities with no markings or insignia, both of them too pale and too beefy to be lifer light colonels.  I've seen men like this before: spooks.  Errand boys playing God.  They look at me like they've seen a ghost.
    I help Song to her feet and we listen.  When we bear calls of "Hoa Binh!" we rejoin Commander Be Dan and the Hoa Binh fighters.
 

    Our casualties have been light.  One of the Nguyen brothers, Nguyen Ba, is dead, his body blown to bits, vaporized.   Another of the Nguyen brothers, Nguyen Mot, is unconscious in a hammock being carried by the Phuong twins.  His right arm is off at the elbow and the stump has been neatly bandaged.  The third Nguyen brother, Nguyen Hai, walks beside the hammock and holds his brother's hand.
    After a lot of loud and forceful persuasion I finally motivate Battle Mouth to move down the trail.  Battle Mouth is a zombie with a near-terminal case of the thousand-yard stare.
    Commander Be Dan and I lift Song onto a hammock and carry her.
    As dawn comes up on the outside world, we fade away, deep into the triple-canopy jungle, where it is night, where it is always night.
 

    Deep in the steaming wet darkness of the rain forest we emerge from a shadow-shrouded path onto a riverbank.  In the river's foul-smelling water, bullfrogs croak-croak and plop, unseen.
    Through the ground mist moves a phantom giant, an artillery piece being hauled away on the back of an elephant.
    We hear voices and the sounds of men digging in the earth.
    It begins to rain.  The raindrops thump the black earth and big jungle plants brush against our hands and faces.  The jungle plants are wet and shiny in the moonlight and movement makes them look like living things.  Through holes in the triple canopy we glimpse a dirty lemon moon.  We can see clouds and a black metal sky.
    We trudge past an ancient, crumbling pagoda, Buddhist temple ruins built by men who kicked the living shit out of Kublai Khan and his Golden Hordes.  In the darkness the pagoda is bone white.  The broken walls are being swallowed up by creeping jungle vines.  Inside the pagoda, in a bed of red roofing tiles, sits a bronze Buddha, green with age and corroded, fat-bellied and smiling.
    A stairway of stone leads down from the pagoda into the river.  Tired soldiers of the Liberation Army, bare-chested and bony-kneed, like muddy skeletons, squat on the cracked stone steps, black string tied to their thumbs, fishing.
    Down along the riverbank men and women are laughing.  Lanterns bounce as hungry Front fighters, spearing giant bullfrogs, splash and fall.
    Walking-wounded fighters bow and offer us frog soup orbarbecued frogs' legs, hot and fragrant in bamboo bowls.  Smiling, flashing gold teeth, they dangle living bullfrogs in front of our faces.  The bullfrogs are pale green; their legs have been tied together with black string and they are as big as cannonballs.
    We bow and say "thank you" to our comrade brothers and sisters, but march on, thinking only about how eager we are to be back in our home village where we can stand in our own fields.
    Beyond the pagoda fifty teenaged farmers, strong young men and women, are hard at work, chopping soggy clods of cold mud out of the jungle floor with hoes, then planting the red seeds of the future into rich black soil without saying goodbye.
    Feeling the weight of the darkness, we follow Commander Be Dan, ignoring sore muscles and pain and the thoughts of our dead and wounded, and ignoring our need to sleep.  We are bones clothed in shadows and we are going home.
    Behind us in the steaming night rain a tired and hungry people are burying their dead in graves by the river.
 

    Heading home from the attack on the Special Forces compound, we walk for a week, sleeping during the day, too tired to talk, until we come to the river crossing where we met the blind barge man.  The ferry barge has been burned and sunk, a block of charcoal like a five-ton bar of black soap dissolving in the water.
    We search the riverbank for a safe crossing, without luck.
    We see the rotting carcass of a water buffalo in a mud hole.  The black mass smells horrible and is alive with maggots and flies.
    We hide in tunnels until noon, the safest part of the day.  Nguyen Mot is dying, we think, and Song is half out of her head with fever.  Song objects to a daylight crossing.  Commander Be Dan decides to risk a daylight crossing, which surprises everyone.
     Master Sergeant Xuan returns from scouting and leads us to a pontoon bridge.  We crawl through reeds and watch Arvin puppet troops on the opposite bank of the river.  The puppet troops are laying shiny new barbed wire.  The barbed wire has shiny sharp teeth.  The Arvin snuffies are not working very hard.  One Arvin holds an engineer stake in place while another pounds on it listlessly with a sledgehammer.
    The bridge security sentries are relaxing in hammocks, protected from the hot sun by canvas slung on clothesline like miniature Arab tents.  Four Arvins are on the bridge, throwing a bright orange Frisbee and giggling at bad catches, drafted peasant boys who can't read and who don't know which end of a gun the bullets come out of, all four of them talking nonstop.
    They haven't got any heavy guns in yet, no M-60, no mortar tubes, and they can't set Claymore mines until they've finished stringing wire.  Nobody looks like an officer.  There are no American advisers.
    "BAN!" says the Commander, and the fighters open fire.
    At the sound of firing, Song gets up off the hammock we've been carrying her in and picks up her pea-green Swedish K submachine gun.  She resists my attempts to make her lie back down so violently that I don't try to stop her.
    The Frisbee players are all cut down.  The wire stringers are hit and the wounded start screaming.
    Master Sergeant Xuan fires an RPG at the tarpaulin and it is blown apart.
    There is no return fire.
    The Commander calls out to the puppet troops across the river, "BUONG SUN XUONG!"--"Brothers, lay down your guns!"
    But the surviving Arvins are already too far away to hear him. The puppet troops don't lay down their weapons, they throw them down and run like hell.  Arvins know how to run, especially if it's at night and they're on guard duty. Big Sale Today: Arvin Rifles!--never fired and only dropped once.
    The only sound is the whining of one of the Frisbee players, shot in the stomach, as he tries to pull the pin on a hand grenade.
    Commander Be Dan gives us a hand signal: Tien!  Mao!
    We run across the pontoon bridge, a span of perforated steel planking American military engineers put together from a kit.
    Song shoots the wounded Frisbee player in the face.  The round takes off the top of his head.
    On the other side of the river we turn left and run past the stacked coils of barbed wire and two dead Arvins.  Enemy weapons are picked up.  We run along the riverbank and head for a treeline.
    Master Sergeant Xuan and I drop back as rear guards, even though we still have not taken any fire from the puppet troops and don't expect to.
    The Phuong twins move fast, carrying Nguyen Mot on a hammock, protected by Nguyen Hai.  Bo Doi Bac Si and Battle Mouth help Song, who is straggling.
    Commander Be Dan says, "Mao!  Mao!  Truc Thang!"--"Hurry, helicopters!"  He drops back to protect the unit.
 

    We are fifty yards from the treeline when a Huey gunship zooms in upon us with an ear-numbing roar.  The Huey is olive drab, round and awkward-looking, but fast, a big mechanical dragonfly with men inside, floating in the air, spitting fire.
    Master Sergeant Xuan aims an RPG at the gunship but is hit before he can fire.
    Commander Be Dan returns fire while I double-time back to help Master Sergeant Xuan.
    The Huey swings around and makes another gun-run, fires a cluster of pod rockets.  As the rockets slant in on us we open our mouths to ease the pressure our eardrums may suffer from the shock waves of concussion.
    I crawl to Master Sergeant Xuan.  Half of his face has been blown off.  He tries to speak, but he can't make his mouth move.  I try to pull the RPG from his hands, but he won't let go. I put my foot against his chest and push.  Finally Sergeant Master Xuan lets go of his weapon, but only because he is dead.
    As the chopper swings around for another pass, Bo Doi Bac Si appears, firing his folding-stock M-1 carbine.
    I pick up the RPG launcher--I'm going to need it.
    I run to Commander Be Dan.  He has been shot in the neck and one of his ears has been blown off.  His AK-47 assault rifle has been hit.  One round has torn open the rust-brown metal of the banana clip, exposing a row of bullets like sharp golden teeth.
    The Commander looks up at me, trying to read his medical condition in my eyes.  He reaches up to touch the bloody shreds on the side of his head where his ear used to be, and groans.
    The gunbird comes in low, machine gunning us with electronically timed three-second bursts.  The chopper pilot is high on war.  He's already patting himself on the back for a job well done.  The chopper hovers over us, a bloated green vulture, a swooping, chattering, metal carrion bird, rotor blades hacking like motorized machetes.
    Flat on my back, playing dead, I see bloodred circles stenciled with black widow spiders.  I can see the pilot's face before he drops his sun visor and squeezes his thumb on the red firing button on the toggle switch.  The pilot is an up-and-coming young executive in the biggest corporation the world has ever seen, and through his gunsights people on the ground are not human beings at all but are only As running toward his report card.
    Bo Doi Bac Si runs, drawing fire.
    The Huey takes the bait, rolls slightly to starboard.
    Commander Be Dan picks up the B-40, fires the rocket, then collapses.  The RPG swooshes from the end of the launcher like a tiny space ship and the door gunner inside the chopper sees it coming a fraction of a second before it hits the gunship.
    The fuel cell explodes.  Rockets and ammunition cook off and secondary explosions rip the chopper apart.
    The gunship comes straight down.  It just drops, fire falling out of the sky trailing black smoke.  The Huey splatters across the deck as an ugly smear of torn metal and burning gasoline, rotor blade bent, fuselage split open.  The men inside burn in their machine.
    The Phuong twins have come back to fight.  They put the commander, who is unconscious, onto a hammock, sling their rifles over their backs, and lift him up.
    "Tien!" I say, and we all head for the treeline.
    Two more choppers are coming in fast, half a mile away.
    Bo Doi Bac Si drops back to cover us until we are safely within the treeline.
    I think about making a run for it, but where would I go?  A chopper is down.  The angry choppers coming in are going to kill anybody on the ground on sight at five hundred yards.
    We're all deep inside a tunnel when the gunships rumble over the treeline.  The gunships buzz in tight circles while door gunners pour bullets down hot and heavy, firing without a target, trying to shoot down the jungle itself.  We listen to the choppers making themselves crazy and firing up pods full of rockets for a long time.
    We sit in the tunnel until night comes, listening to ourselves breathe.  The air is so thin that one of the Phuong twins faints and has to be revived.  This tunnel is not used regularly anymore and the drainage sumps are clogged and overflowing.  We're trapped in a black hole in the ground and we are wet and miserable.
    When it's night we crawl out of the stinking pit and stand up, breathing deeply and coughing, mud-people in the moonlight.
    I walk point.  The Phuong twins carry Nguyen Mot.  Nguyen Hai and Bo Doi Bac Si carry Song.  Commander Be Dan insists on walking, so I give him Battle Mouth to lean on.
    Limping forward, I wave my hand.  "Tien, Dong Chi"--"Forward, comrade sisters," I say to the tired, pretty Phuong twins.
    And then I lead the fighters back to the village.
 

    A week after the victory of the Nung combat fortress, life in the village of Hoa Binh is back to normal except that now I am not treated as a prisoner of war but as a trusted Viet Cong soldier.  I'm halfway home.
    I'm working in the rice fields with the people when Song comes running to get me.  I'm wiping the sweat from my face with a black-and-white checkered Front fighter's bandanna, which was awarded to me formally by Ba Can Bo in front of the whole village.
    My next step to freedom:  earn a weapon.
    "Follow me," Song says. "Di di Mau"--"Go fast."
    Confused, I drop my rice sickle and bundle of rice stalks onto the paddy dike.  I follow Song, double-timing.
    The rice threshers raking mounds of unhusked paddy in the village common freeze when they hear the sounds of approaching helicopters.
    Song and I hide in a tunnel under General Fang Cat's "office."
    General Fang Cat is a Nguy, a "puppet soldier" in the Arvins, the army without a country, a Vichy zip with a sense of humor.  His "office" is the fieldstone foundation of what was once the finest hooch in the village.  The hooch was blown up by the General's cannons.  General Fang Cat never negotiates a business deal until he has made certain that everyone understands his terms.
    Song crawls deeper into the tunnel and brings back an AK-47 assault rifle.  She chambers a round.
    We wait.
    Once a month General Fang Cat visits to pick up his Tien ca phe--his "coffee money."  In America we would call it grease, a bribe.
    Hoa Binh lies within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility.  Marines cannot enter the General's TAOR without his permission.  In his monthly Hamlet Evaluation Reports, General Fang Cat lists Hoa Binh as a leper colony and the area around the village as one hundred percent pacified.  His reports look good on paper and make a lot of other people look good, so everybody is happy.
    While we wait in the tunnel, Song tells me about the old province chief, Colonel Chu, who announced his visits to the village by dropping captured Chien Si fighters out of his helicopter--alive.
    One day Colonel Chu's puppet soldiers took ten men from the village, bound them, and laid them in a row in the road.  Colonel Chu drove a truck toward them as they struggled frantically against their bonds.  He ran over them, smashing all of their heads.
    Colonel Chu and his soldiers routinely raped the women of the village and any who resisted were sent away to rot in tiger cages as Tran Cong--"Communist sympathizers."
    Front agents in Quang Tri booby-trapped Colonel Chu's private toilet with a dud howitzer shell.
    Colonel Chu flushed himself right out of being a problem.
    General Fang Cat is not an evil or sadistic man, only greedy, corrupt, ambitious, and realistic.  His worst flaw is that he is constantly plotting coups against the Saigon government.  If he were arrested during a coup, his replacement would be poorer than the General, more hungry.  The General is "full."  He has been successfully corrupt and powerful for so long that his greed has lost its edge.
    We hear the crunch of boots in broken roofing tile.  We see an Arvin snuffy, then another.  General Fang Cat's Arvin bodyguards pull their M-16s around by the barrels, butts dragging in the dirt.
    Song takes aim at the puppet armymen.
    "What are you doing here?" I say.
    Song says, "Security."
    "So what am I doing here?" I say.
    Song says, "Uncle does not trust Dai Tuong Fang Cat.  And Commander Be Dan does not trust you. You might defect.  Maybe the Black Rifles pay the puppets beaucoup money for you."
    We watch.  As General Fang Cat struts onto the ruined foundation, Song sights him in.
    Dai Tuong Fang Cat greets the Woodcutter with a smile.  He obviously likes to smile because it gives him a chance to show off his gold eyeteeth.
    "Chao ong, Dai Tuong Fang Cat," says the Woodcutter, bowing.
    "Kinh Chao ong," says General Fang Cat, bowing.  "Greetings, honored sir."
    General Fang Cat is tall and slender and wearing a starched tiger-striped fatigue uniform, with a shoeboxful of medals, badges, and insignia on his chest.  He's wearing cowboy holsters with a matched set of jade-handled chrome-plated .38-caliber revolvers.
    The General and the Woodcutter sit in bamboo chairs in the center of the leveled foundation.  The Woodcutter gives the General a small red envelope.  The General nods, smiles.
    General Fang Cat complains that he needs more money.  The Americans have begun to question his battle reports.  Battle reports are required to conceal his losses due to desertion.
    A lot of General Fang Cat's troops buy their way out of the Army with forged medical discharges.  Of course, all of these soldiers are still listed on the rolls so that General Fang Cat can continue to collect their pay and their rations.
    The three million piasters the General owes for the office of province chief has to be paid, plus the one million piasters he owes for his general's stars.  The Woodcutter is an honorable man, says the General, and will understand the necessity to pay one's debts.  Without additional money he's not sure how long he can go on generating the large volume of paperwork required to keep the village of Hoa Binh safely out of the war.
    Because of his desperate need for money, the General is now forced to desperate measures, which include selling ammunition, C-rations, and even medical supplies to his own troops.  The General points out that he does not allow his troops to rape the village women.  His men do not steal chickens or pigs.  And none of the young men of the village have been press-ganged into the Army.
    The General no longer feels the need to blow up Hoa Binh with his cannons to win medals.  He has lost interest in medals and has stopped buying them.  Now all he wants is to save enough money to take his family to Paris, drink vintage wine, and have French servants for the rest of his life.
    General Fang Cat's philosophy is live and let live, as long as he gets his end of the deal in cash.
    The Woodcutter listens politely, then says, "One hundred American dollars.  And we will not fight in your region."
    The General says, "Five hundred."
    "One hundred."
    "Five hundred and your village is safe."
    "One hundred," says the Woodcutter, "and you may defecate successfully.  "
    General Fang Cat laughs.  "Yes, Colonel Chu, my old commander.  What a leech he was.  He died rich."
    The Woodcutter nods.  "Yet even the poorest peasant may defecate successfully without the fear that he is sitting on angry explosives.  "
    General Fang Cat thinks about it, nodding.  He slaps his hands together.  "One hundred," he says.  "For now."
    The Woodcutter raises his hand and the Phuong twins bring a pot of green tea and two bamboo cups.
    As they drink tea, General Fang Cat explains to the Woodcutter that he understands the Woodcutter's position regarding the underaged half-white girls being forced to work as whores in the village of Khe Sanh.  Families with half-white girls who resist are denounced under the CIA's Phoenix Program and
"eliminated."  The General wants only for the Woodcutter to understand clearly that the General has no control over the Americans and is in no way involved in or responsible for this crime against the people.
    The Woodcutter listens closely, then nods.  "You will not be harmed.  We have had word from the forests.  We know that you are not involved.  A decision has been made in the forests and this problem will soon be resolved."
    General Fang Cat relaxes, sips his tea.
    The two men drink tea in silence.
    "It is a bad thing," says the General, "when the Long Noses make whores of our children."
    The Woodcutter says, "Yes."
    "The Americans," says General Fang Cat, and puts down his teacup.
    "Yes," says the Woodcutter, not looking at the General.  "The Americans."
 

    An hour after General Fang Cat's chopper has faded into the purple horizon the Woodcutter and I are fishing, hauling black nets from the river.
    A short round comes in, bam.
    The fireball explodes into long streamers, a spider of thick white smoke as big as a house.  Hissing splinters of phosphorus sputter through the air trailing white plumes.
    It's a short round of Willy Peter--white phosphorus.  The stink of white phosphorus is distinctive and not easy to forget.
    A burning child comes running.  Her clothes have been burned from her body.  Her face is all open mouth and animal eyes.  It is Le Thi, Song's star pupil and teacber's pet.  The little girl claws at her burning flesh, digging for fire with her fingers.  Her attempts to brush the Willy Peter off only spreads it and ignites it.
    By the time we get to her she is holding her arms away from her body, afraid to touch herself.  She's screaming non-stop.  Her face is twisted into something ugly by the pain.  Her body heat ignites the splinters of white phosphorus and the air feeds it.  The splinters burn through flesh, sizzling until they hit bone.
    The Woodcutter and I grab Le Thi as she tries to slap paddy water onto her wounds.  She fights us.  The Woodcutter tries to hold her down, but she is a wildcat.  I punch her in the side of the head with the meaty side of my fist, just enough to knock her unconscious.
    The Woodcutter lifts Le Thi and lays her down gently on the paddy dike.
    We work quickly, covering each smoldering wound in her flesh with black paddy mud.  The mud cuts off the oxygen and the Willy Peter stops burning.
    It's all over, just that fast.  I feel sick.
    The trail watchers have seen the white smoke from the shell and the village gong is bonging out an alarm.
    As we walk down the paddy dike, with Le Thi in my arms, we are met by the whole village.  A woman squats on the paddy dike and wails in agony and continues to wail and the sound of it is physically painful.
    Bo Doi Bac Si pushes forward with his medical kit.
    But Le Thi is dead.  There is nothing anyone can do.
    Later that day, the village prepares for a funeral.
    They lay Le Thi in a quach, a child's coffin of fresh yellow pinewood.
    The Woodcutter does not attend the funeral.  As Song and I leave the hooch, the Woodcutter says curtly that Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region, has ordered him on an important mission and will I go with him and fight, yes or no.
    "I will fight, Uncle."
    The Woodcutter nods.  He focuses all of his attention on a toy rifle he is carving from a scrap of bamboo.  He does not look up.
    Song and I go to the hooch of Le Thi's family.  After a simple ceremony at the altar of the ancestors the funeral procession moves to the family burial plot in the village cemetery.
    We bury Le Thi in the cold black ground and we say goodbye.
    Le Thi's mother tries to climb down into the grave and has to be restrained.
    After the funeral, when the villagers have returned to the village, Song stands by the grave, very straight, like a soldier standing at attention, and cries, without making a sound, her whole face covered by her hands.
 

    A week after we bury Le Thi the whole village comes together once again, only this time for a happier occasion, the long-awaited wedding between the Phuong twins and the two surviving Nguyen brothers.
    I don't want to go to the wedding, but Song nags me into submission.  Maybe she thinks that if I see a wedding I might want to be in one of my own.
    Song and I stroll through the cool night air to the hooch of the Nguyen family.  We hear soft laughter and happy people talking.
    Inside the hooch, candles flicker in the main room and music fills the air.
    We are greeted by the elder Nguyen, a dignified little old man who bows and welcomes us to his home.  We return the bow and Song gives him a red envelope containing a small amount of money.  Song thanks him for inviting us.
    We sit.  We eat pork, vegetables, fruit, rice wine, and sweet cakes.  We drink green tea.  Everything smells good and tastes better.
    The party lasts all night.  Some of us fall asleep.  Some take naps and wake up to rejoin the party with renewed energy.
    We are greeted at dawn by the Nguyen brothers, Mot and Hai.  One sleeve of Mot's traditional high-collared blue silk tunic has been pinned neatly over the stub of the arm he lost at the victorious battle for the Nung combat fortress, where his brother Ba was killed.
    When the elder Nguyen gives us the signal we begin the procession to the home of the Phuong twins.
    Everyone is dressed to kill.  The parade up the paddy dike is bizarrely festive when contrasted with our usual drab clothing.  My Sunday suit is hanging in my closet in my room back in Alabama.  But my black pajama outfit is enhanced considerably by the red silk sash Song made for me.
    At the Phuong house the best men present the father of the brides with gifts of rice wine and a chocolate-brown teakwood tray filled with areca nuts and betel leaves.
    We are invited inside.
    The tray is placed as an offering at the altar of the ancestors.  Red candles are lit and prayers for the ancestors are recited.
    The Nguyen brothers bow to the ancestral altar, and to the elder Phuong, who bows and grins and seems a little soft in the head, and then they bow to the mother of the brides, who is very happy, maybe even happier than the brides themselves.
    Then the Nguyen brothers and their best men go to meet the Phuong twins.
    The guests drink tea and chat until the brides and grooms return to the main room together, beaming with happiness.
    All of the guests join in the procession back to the groom's house.
    Back at the Nguyen hooch the brides and grooms bow to the altar that honors the spirit of the soil, of Xa, the land, which is alive.  They hold burning joss sticks and ask for permission to enter the house.
    The brides and grooms spend a long time bowing to each and every one of their relatives.  It reminds me of Decoration Day back in Alabama, when all of your cousins and aunts and uncles that you don't know are trying to introduce themselves to you all at the same time.  As Old Ma, my grandmother, would say, these people got so many kin it would take a team of Philadelphia lawyers to untangle the roots of their family trees.
    On the way home I am careful not to be caught up into any of Song's comments about how wonderful married life must be. She's shy, but I know that she's secretly crazy about me.  Maybe when I escape I can take her with me.  If not, I can always send for her later.
    When Song and I get married back in the World, she will want to buy color televisions and ruby rings and washing machines.  She'll get her hair fixed at a fancy beauty parlor twice a week and will get fat and will lie around in bed all day, watching soap operas on TV, eating bon-bons and yelling at the maids, like in a horror movie.
 

    After the wedding I go back to our hooch.  Song goes to visit her best friend, the pregnant Fighter-Widow.
    I'm squatting on my reed sleeping mat, using my rice sickle to cut myself a new pair of B.F. Goodrich sandals.  I'm hacking away at a chunk of truck tire Johnny Be Cool found on the wreck of a six-by that hit a land mine out on the road.
    Without warning I am knocked over by concussion shock waves and a black comet hits the earth.
    The sky is falling and the whole world is blowing up.  I feel like a New Guy at Khe Sanh under his first bad incoming.  Except that I have experienced this kind of incoming before.  Nobody makes artillery shells big enough to make the earth bounce.  It's an arc-light, a B-52 attack.
    Lake-bombs fall five miles from Boeing Stratofortress strategic bombers that fly too high to be heard, three planes to a flight, carrying 60 tons of high-explosive bombs.  American bombers are making toothpicks of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, vaporizing teak trees as tall as New York skyscrapers and as old as Jesus Christ.  The bomb run will leave a swath of cratered badlands a mile long.  As great blocks of sound are cracked by power, the impacting of the bombs overlaps into rolling thunder, not simply a sound but a hard wall of noise moving across the face of the earth like an iron glacier, a sonic roar that can tear out a man's eardrums at one thousand meters.
    I yell, "MAY BAY GIAC MY!"--"American pirate planes!"
    I run for the family bunker.  But Johnny Be Cool is trying to pull his water bo into the water bo's bunker.  I stop to help, knowing that Johnny Be Cool is too stubborn to go into the family bunker until his water bo is safe.
    The water bo is stubborn too, a lumbering giant with a look of being unbelievably stupid, just like a cow back in Alabama if the cows were built like dinosaurs.  Johnny Be Cool pulls on the bo's brass nose ring while I kick the gray-black monster in the ass.
    We grunt and groan.
    Acres of virgin forests are flying on the horizon.
    Finally I do a quick comparison of weights and dimensions and grab hold of Johnny Be Cool.  I pick him up and carry him, kicking and screaming, to the family bunker.
    Song is waiting for us outside our family bunker.  She says, "Come, Bao Chi, my brother. My friend is having her baby and she wants you to be here."
    Inside our family bunker the Fighter-Widow is in labor.  The bunker smells of alcohol and is lit by four kerosene lamps.  A camouflage parachute has been hung on the ceiling of the small chamber.  The Fighter-Widow is lying on her back on a straw-filled mattress.
    The Fighter-Widow groans, in pain, and there's blood.  She looks like someone who has been gutshot.  Bo Doi Bac Si is delivering the baby, assisted by the Broom-Maker.
    The Fighter-Widow sees me.  In the worst throes of her labor pains she glares at me, fiercely, glowing with pride.  She's telling me with her black eyes that she has survived the cruelty of the Black Rifles, who shove electric light bulbs into the vaginas of Vietnamese women and break them so that the women cannot give birth to Viet Cong babies.  She groans again, swallows a scream.  She's sweating.  The baby is coming out.
    The Fighter-Widow watches me with intensity as she fills the rocking tunnel with the joy in her eyes.  As bombs weighing a ton each jolt dust from the roof of the bunker, the Fighter-Widow grunts her Viet Cong baby into the world an inch at a time, still staring at me, fighting me with her belly, gripping in one white-knuckled hand a small white plaster bust of Ho Chi Minh.  In her other hand she holds the toy bamboo rifle carved by the Woodcutter.
    Johnny Be Cool wipes the Fighter-Widow's face with a damp cloth, then squeezes a few drops of water from the cloth onto her lips.
    Song squats next to her friend, trying to comfort her.  Song is trembling.  She rocks back and forth to ride out the pounding of the B-52 bombs.  Her black pajama trousers are stained--Song has wet her pants.
    I say, touching Song's shoulder, "Coso khong?"--"Are you afraid?"  Song looks up at me, smiles, nods.
    The Black Rifles shot the Fighter-Widow's husband, so she took his place in the ranks.  Giving birth to this baby means that she has replaced the dead Front fighter two for one.  And it's a tribal event; the child is the future of the village.
    With a fierce grunt of ecstasy the Fighter-Widow fires her Chien Si baby at me like a greasy pink mortar shell.
    The baby takes one breath and then starts crying.  Song says, "It's a boy!"
    Song lifts the fat, bald, oily-red Communist baby, but the Fighter-Widow turns her face away, afraid to look at the baby, afraid because of the smoke American pirate planes spray into the treetops to kill the jungle.  Vietnamese mothers fear the two-heads-no-arms babies.  Some two-heads-no-arms babies have flippers instead of arms, or two bodies attached to one head, or sometimes they are born with their hearts outside their bodies.  Sometimes other things happen, things implied by looks and grimaces, things so hideous that no one is willing to describe them.
    The baby bellows out a hearty squall, and everyone is relieved.  Song lays the baby on the mother's breast and speaks to the mother softly.  The Fighter-Widow unbuttons her black blouse, pulls it aside, and gives her heavy breast to the baby.  The hungry baby suckles mother's milk from the dark brown nipple.  As the mother nurses her baby she sings a little song into the baby's ear.
      Silence falls across the village.
      Now that the bombing has ended, Commander Be Dan arrives with fighters to carry the Fighter-Widow back to her own hooch.
    Before they carry her out, the Fighter-Widow offers the toy bamboo rifle to the baby.  A tiny hand grips the white wood.  The baby swings the toy rifle back and forth, then puts it into his mouth.
    Commander Be Dan grunts his approval and the Front fighters laugh and cheer.
    The Fighter-Widow laughs.  She holds the baby up so that everyone can see.  "B-Nam Hai," she says, naming the baby.
    Song takes the baby as the Front fighters lift the mother onto a hammock.  Song kisses the baby and says, "B-Nam Hai."
    "B-Nam Hai," echo the fighters, laughing as they carry the VC widow out into the sunlight.
    Outside, Bo Doi Bac Si calls me over and I help him treat some of the village trail watchers who have stumbled in from the edge of the strike zone, ears and noses bleeding, some even bleeding from their eyes.
    Then I head back toward the hooch, knowing that Song will be there, working on my disguise for my new mission, and knowing that she will insist that I try it on for her for her approval.
    "B-Nam Hai," I say to myself as I walk back to the hooch alone.  B-Nam Hai--"B-52."
 

    I march into the village of Khe Sanh in the late afternoon wearing Song's clever disguise.  Commander Be Dan and the Woodcutter are with me.  The Nguyen brothers and the Phuong twins, the newlyweds, are traveling with us, but at a distance.
    I am thrown a few sloppy salutes by half a squad of Army pukes who are drunk, laughing, loaded with money, and out for a skivvy run to Beaver Cleaver's popular steam-and-cream in the part of the village of Khe Sanh that we call Sin City.
    Enjoying my new status as an officer, I crank off a crisp salute.
    Suddenly four black Marine grunts stumble out of a gook shop and into our path, four big bruisers.  Surely somewhere in this world there must be some small-or at least regular-size-black guys, but you never see any of them in the Marine Corps.
    For a few moments we intermingle with the black grunts.  I turn my face away, afraid I might be recognized, and then we'll all be playing gunfight at the O.K. Corral for real.  I'm sure that I can actually hear the vibrating tension in Commander Be Dan's trigger finger.
    But all the black leathernecks see is an Army Captain, with shiny chrome railroad tracks on his collar lapels.  All they see is some silly pogue brass in a clean set of stateside utilities, with black leather combat boots--spit-shined--and a .45-caliber automatic pistol in a black leather shoulder holster.  There is a clip in the pistol, but they can't see that there are no bullets in the clip--Commander Be Dan sort of insisted.
    I am an Army Captain, escorting a Viet Cong suspect, a harmless-looking old papa-san with his hands tied behind his back.  I'm being assisted by an Arvin Ranger Lieutenant.  The Lieutenant is armed with an old Thompson submachine gun and is missing a hand.
    The black grunts do not bother to salute me, the shitbirds.  I feel like writing their asses up on charges for their lack of military courtesy.
    The black grunts carry their M-16s slung over their shoulders, but locked and loaded.  They carefully scan the face of every civilian.  They look for the glint of an AK-47 in any unfriendly eye.
 

    Our guide, a Front liaison agent, appears, a smiling teenaged girl in green shorts, no shoes, and a ragged old khaki shirt with tarnished eagles on the collar lapels--the rank insignia of a full bull, a Marine colonel.  The girl's right knee is a deformed mass laced in red with crude surgical scars.  She does not greet us, does not even approach us.  She ignores us.  She limps along at a brisk pace, ten yards ahead of us, carrying a big bundle of dirty laundry balanced on her head.
    The village of Khe Sanh has swollen in size since my last skivvy run.  It's a circus of chattering cyclo drivers, three-wheeled Lambrettas, street beggars, and children of all ages.
    Pathetic refugees squat inside shelters constructed from stolen plywood, stolen cardboard, and stolen canvas.  But there are not as many American troops on deck as there were in the good old bad old days.  Since Khe Sanh Combat Base was abandoned, the only American personnel in this Tactical Area of Responsibility are from smaller garrisons at landing zones and firebases.
    We follow the liaison agent through the village black market. Here ambitious capitalists who talk fast and travel light hawk stolen military equipment and PX stock off muddy ponchos spread on the ground: C-rations, Kodak Instamatic cameras, Coco-Puffs breakfast cereal, and expensive Hong Kong watches that wholesale for two dollars a dozen.
    Two Arvin sergeants from the loot-now, fight-later army are haggling with an old mama-san over the price of a brass statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy which has been cast from a melted-down howitzer shell casing.  The old mama-san referees the fight by punching at both men with little bony fists, talking nonstop and threatening deadly violence.  She's a real tough old broad.
    An old man wearing an Australian bush hat steps into my path.  He flashes toothless gums and laughs like a crazy man.  There are ugly scars all over his neck.  The crazy man swats a fly from his face and goes on laughing, a weird, gurgling laugh.  He is the world's easiest audience, easy to please, but all the time he's glaring at me in the special way the villagers of Hoa Binh glared at me for the first year of my captivity, with that same combination of fear, fascination, and deadly intent, as though I'm not a human being at all, but some exotic venomous snake.
    The crazy man holds out a small glass Buddha and flashes three fingers; thirty piasters.  He makes ugly noises deep in his throat as though he's trying to talk.
    The laughing crazy man is shoved aside rudely by a strangely seductive, strikingly sexy teenaged girl wearing a black eye patch.  The girl has a slender body but comically oversized breasts.  Her bosoms are vast and bloated, protruding ahead of her like the prows of black battleships.  She is dressed all in black and has a black shawl over her head.
    Behind the beautiful girl, silent and unnoticed, a little boy barely old enough to walk clings to the girl's black pajama trousers leg with a tiny fist, while she tugs him around, seeming not to notice that he is there.
    The girl talks nonstop in pidgin English.  "You.  You.  Boom-boom picture you?  You buy.  You.  You buy.  You buy now, okay?"  And then she pulls a dirty picture book out of her bra.  "You buy now."  She flips the pages in front of my face.  The photographs in the book substantiate in no uncertain terms the eternal undying love between women and biker gangs, women and women, and women and Danish farm animals.
    I shake my head and wave her off, arrogantly, an officer, a Roman centurion dismissing the rabble in the provinces.  My dream girl has turned out to be just another flat-chested hustler with a brassiere stuffed full of Tijuana Bibles.  The story of my life.  "Di di, mau len," I say--"Go away."
 

    Our guide with the laundry on her head pauses in front of Beaver Cleaver's steam-and-cream, just for an instant, then moves on, not looking back.
    In broad daylight, when I'm not half drunk on hot beer, the steam-and-cream is a real sleazy dump, although garishly gaudy and colorful when contrasted to the refugee shelters surrounding it.  The steam-and-cream is an ugly palace of plywood scavenged from military packing cases.  The plywood has been covered with a multicolored layer of rusting beer cans which have been pounded flat and then tacked on, overlapping, like scales on a fish.
    On the outside of the steam-and-cream is a large fading sign that says in block letters:  CAR WASHED & GET SCREWED.  Inside the steam-and-cream are hot rocks and water in gourd dippers and twelve-year-old girls who suck you off.
    It was inside this building that I saw Mr. Greenjeans catch Beaver Cleaver red-handed with Viet Cong agents, swapping a truckload of hand grenades for a knapsack full of raw heroin.
    This steam-and-cream is the most famous and most popular boom-boom parlor in Eye-Corps because it features only round-eyed whores, none over the age of fifteen.
    As we walk past, one girl striking poses in front of the steam-and-cream calls out to me, "Hey, Captain, I think I love you.  You got girlfriend Viet Nam?"  She's a sexy black girl with a Vietnamese accent, wearing pink hot pants and high heels.  Her yellow tank top is thin enough to leave nothing to the imagination.  Her lips are too red with too much lipstick.  "Ten dolla you.  Number one fuckee.
    "My name Peggy Sue.  I love you too much.  Sucky-sucky number one."  Her voice is so snotty with contempt that you feel like slapping her face.  "You pay now.  No freebies today."
    Some Navy Seabees surround Peggy Sue.  The leader of the Seabees is a Chief Petty Officer with SUPERGRUNT written across the back of his flak jacket.  Supergrunt yanks out a fat stack of MPCs--military payment certificates.  The small paper bills are the colors and size of Monopoly money.
    "Pussy," says Supergrunt.  "I love it." And the Seabees laugh.
    Peggy Sue, the black teenybopper whore, falls out of love with me with a heartbreaking lack of finesse.  "Short-time?" she says to Supergrunt.  "You pay now.  I love you too much."  Peggy Sue latches onto Supergrunt's arm and drags him inside.
    The other Seabees pair off with other girls.  One of the Seabees says, "Hey, baby-san, you souvenir me one boom-boom?"
    Baby-san giggles.  "You cheap Charlie."
    Somebody says, "You know, not counting gook whores, I'm a virgin!"
 

    From inside the steam-and-cream steps the Funny Gunny, Beaver Cleaver's business partner.  He is fat and wears hornrimmed glasses with thick lenses.  The thick lenses make his eyes look too big.
    The Funny Gunny is eating fried chicken and laughing.  He looks happier than a pig in shit.  He gnaws on a chicken leg and grins and nods to each and every incoming customer.
    The Funny Gunny puts his arm around a white girl who looks like some pom-pom girl's younger sister.  The girl has a sweet baby face but hard, mascaraed eyes.  She is reading a comic book about the financial adventures of Donald Duck's Uncle Scrooge.  "Hey, baby," she says to me, not looking up from her comic book, "me Tracy. Me cherry girl. Me horny.  Me so horny.  I love you, G. I. No shit."
    Saluting me with a chicken leg, the Funny Gunny says, "Go ahead, sir."  He says with a southern accent, "Pork her eyes out.  She's clean.  A real round-eye!  They're spook kids.  Little CIA bastards.  We bring 'em in from all over Viet Nam.  They have to be twelve years old.  Younger'n that, can't use 'em; no tits.  Now, Tracy's thirteen and just startin' to get a nice little pair of tits on her.  And her pussy is as bald as a clam and tight as a vise."
    The Funny Gunny grins at me again, then shrugs as if to say that he's just a good ol' country-assed boy trying to make a hard dollar in a highly competitive business.
    The thirteen-year-old whore does not look at my face.  She grabs my arm and tries to pull me inside.  From the doorway I can see that the walls are still papered with Playboy centerfolds.
    From inside the steam-and-cream come sex sounds and laughter and smells of stale cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and sweat.
    As I pull my arm free and walk away from the girl she says in a sneering, hateful tone, "You cheap Charlie," then jerks aside her black halter top and flashes a bee-sting tit.  It's a reflex action, because she has already erased our entire romantic relationship from her mind.
    Tracy's goodbye flash brings a hoot and a holler from a squad of giggling pogues as they shove past me, hot on her trail.
    I rejoin the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan, who have been watching me with interest.
    As we walk away we can hear Supergrunt, the Seabee, giving an introductory lecture on the lore of whorehouses in Viet Nam: "These gook women are so small you have to screw them two at a time to get any satisfaction.  And, yes, the rumors you have heard are true, gook pussies do, in fact, slant sideways.  Half of these gook whores are serving officers in the Viet Cong.  The other half have got TB.  Just be sure you only fuck the ones that cough."
    We walk into the village and everyone is excessively polite to me, the American officer.  Everyone smiles.  But it's a fuck-you-I-hope-you-die smile.  If these people are whipped dogs, it's only on the outside.  They're all Chien Si, every man, woman, and child.  It's there in their faces, as plain as day.  It's funny I never saw it before.
 

    Our guide reappears.  We follow her.  She pauses at a hooch, then hurries away with her stage-prop laundry on her head, not looking back.
    The Woodcutter, my bound prisoner, orders us into the hooch.  Inside, I untwist the black comm wire from around the Woodcutter's wrists while silent women come in and serve us tea and rice cakes.
    I am introduced to the confused women as Bao Chi, the American Front fighter.
    Commander Be Dan changes out of his Arvin Ranger outfit and back into his black pajamas and hurries off on some urgent errand.
    The Woodcutter and I squat on the dirt floor, silently sipping our tea.
    Shadows come with the night.  The shadows move in and out of the small hooch.  There are so many of them; they must be waiting for their turns outside.  They come to talk to the Woodcutter.  Their voices are like the soft rippling of creek water.  The Woodcutter speaks to each applicant softly, politely, with endless patience, sometimes rubbing his wrists, sometimes pausing to eat a rice cake.
    A slender teenaged girl brings us red rice and fish.
    We eat.  The girl squats in front of me and stares.  As the famous Chien Si My, I am becoming just another jaded celebrity.  Everywhere I go, I have my fans.  But there's something very unusual about this girl.  She has a powerful presence.
    It's dark in the hooch, so I can only scan the girl with my night vision.  She is very beautiful.  Her hair is cut as short as a man's.  She is wearing a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and red rubber sandals.  In a shoulder holster the girl is packing a nickel-plated snub-nosed .38-caliber pistol.  Around her neck hangs a braided string necklace with a white jade Buddha and a gold chain strung with maybe fifty dogtags.
    The girl stares at me, silent, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.  She holds her head first this way, then that way, checking me out from every angle.  She must be some kind of groupie.  Boy, I hope so!
    An electric chill grips my stomach as I sense that the girl is blind.  She can't see me, but she knows a white foreigner when she smells one, like the blind barge man.  This beautiful woman is sitting here, calm and serene, thinking up extrapainful ways in which to torture me to death.
    The shadows move.  Someone lights a kerosene lantern.
    The new light scares a gecko.  The brown lizard doubletimes upside down along the thatched roof.
    The Woodcutter says, "Bao Chi, I wish to introduce you to Miss Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region.  We are here in obedience to her orders."
    Tiger Eye says, "I have heard of you, Bao Chi.  You are becoming a legend to my people."  Then Tiger Eye says to me in English: "Welcome to my country."
    I say, "Thank you, Comrade General."
    Tiger Eye leans forward.  In the lantern light I can see her face.  She is not a teenager.  She's probably in her early thirties; with Asians it's always hard to say for sure.
    The Comrade General pulls a black eyepatch over her face and onto her right eye.  She says, "You.  You.  Boom-boom picture you?  You buy.  You.  You buy."
    Her performance makes her laugh merrily.  She is the dream girl who sells dirty books out of her bra.  She says, "I am a very good actress, Bao Chi.  Oui?  Don't you think so?"  And she laughs again.
    I laugh too.
    I pull my dogtags up over my head and offer them to Tiger Eye in the polite way, with both hands.
    Tiger Eye pulls off her eyepatch and leans forward again into the light so that I can slip the beaded chain over her head.  I see something that makes me hesitate.
    Tiger Eye is not blind, but she has lost her right eye.  The eye socket now holds a marble as big as one of the Woodcutter's Ping-Pong balls.  When I was a kid we called these oversized marbles "jug rollers." And we called this type of marble, crystal clear except for a single slash of yellow in the center, a "cat's eye."
    Tiger Eye accepts my dogtags bashfully, smiling and blushing until I think she's going to cry.  She lifts a braided black string necklace from around her neck.  On the string hangs a small white jade figure of the Buddha.  She places the loop of string over my head.
    Then the Commander of the Western Region takes my right hand between her two hands and lifts the three hands between us.  We sit like that, saying nothing, facing each other across the kerosene lamp and a blackened brass teapot.
    The Woodcutter smokes his pipe.  He looks at us without expression and nods his approval.
 

    Midnight.  Now all of the horny soldiers and Marines have retreated behind their barbed wire and are hunkered down in their firebases and landing zones, safe behind sandbagged walls and Claymore mines and interlocking fields of fire.
    In the black-market section of the village people materialize out of the darkness, an army of ghosts in white paper hats.
    Tiger Eye raises her hand and the people fall silent.  The people stare at me and at my uniform with curiosity, fear and hatred until Tiger Eye explains who I am, Bao Chi, Chien Si My, a friend.
    Commander Be Dan and a squad of Chien Si push through the crowd, shoving along a middle-aged Marine Gunnery Sergeant.  The Funny Gunny is naked, gagged, his arms bound behind him over a bamboo pole.  He is breathing hard, sweating like a pig, whimpering.
    Nguyen Hai and Commander Be Dan take hold of the ends of the bamboo pole behind the Funny Gunny's arms and lift him up.  They lower him into a hole about three feet deep.
    Tiger Eye steps up to the hole and looks down at the Funny Gunny.  She greets him: "Monsieur le Sargent."  Then she says in English: "You owe a blood debt to the people."
    In Vietnamese Tiger Eye addresses the assembled villagers: "Someday the war will end.  The Americans will leave us in peace.  The American armymen will sail away from Viet Nam to descend like the plague upon some other small country, some weaker country, some country where the people are not strong fighters but can be bought and sold like farm animals.  The Americans may go to the moon, but they will never get past the determination of the Vietnamese people.  Our spirit is strong and the resistance makes us brothers and sisters.  American bombs can kill us as men and as women, but no invader can ever destroy us as a people as long as we diligently protect our children."
    The villagers crowd together in a semicircle, some holding up torches of rice straw dipped in pitch.
    The Phuong twins bring forward a fat Vietnamese man in a white shirt, white trousers, and white shoes.  Bound and blind-folded, the man is kicked to his knees by the Phuong twins.  The man is begging and crying.  When crying doesn't work, he spits and curses.  Somewhere in the crowd a woman is screaming and is struggling against villagers who are holding her back.  It's impossible to tell if the woman is screaming in anger at the man in white or in his defense.
    The Woodcutter steps forward.  He raises his arms up over his head, then down.  In the torchlight the curved hot silver of a scimitar flashes, lopping off the fat man's head.  The head rolls into a shadow.  The body slumps forward, legs spasming and kicking.  Blood pumps from the severed neck with great force and in great quantities.  The black pool of blood soaks into the sand.
    The Phuong twins grab the bamboo pole behind the Funny Gunny's arms and lift him up out of the hole.  They shove him roughly toward the edge of the clearing and tie him to a palm tree.  They pull out the bamboo pole and cut his hands free.
    A fireteam of twelve-year-old girls with hammers reports to the tree.  Two of the girls carry wooden water buckets.  They drop the water buckets upside down and step up onto them.  While the Funny Gunny struggles, screaming into the gag, his eyes big, the four girls nail his hands and his feet to the tree.
    Another girl walks forward.  The girl is tall and white.  She walks very slowly, slender and graceful and beautiful.  On her perfect face there are no Asian features.  She's a certified blue-eyed strawberry blonde with bedroom eyes, flared nostrils, and a pouting lower lip.  Her name is Teen Angel.  She is the star attraction at the Funny Gunny's steam-and-cream.
    Teen Angel is wearing rhinestoned blue jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a yellow tank top full of heavy round breasts.  The tank top proclaims RICH BITCH in glitter dust which sparkles in the flickering light of the torches.  Around her neck hangs a long string of pink plastic pearls.
    The Funny Gunny looks at Teen Angel.  He is bleary-eyed, crying, and confused.  He looks at Teen Angel as though glimpsing a goddess in a dream.  Then he looks past Teen Angel and sees me, searches my eyes, scans my face and my Army Captain's uniform.
    Teen Angel reaches out and touches the Funny Gunny's cheek, pulls down his gag, leans in so close that he can smell the cheap perfume on her breasts, so close that her hot breath fogs up his thick glasses.  She kisses him on the mouth with her perfect lips, pressing her perfect body hard against him.
    The surprise on the Funny Gunny's face turns to horror.  He struggles, screams, whines, moans, coughs, groans, then screams again.
     But it's too late.
    Teen Angel turns and displays to her audience of villagers a bloody knife in a bloody hand.  In her other hand is her trophy, a bloody mass of pink flesh.
    She shows it to the Funny Gunny.  The Funny Gunny's eyes are trying to explode out of their sockets as she shows it to him.  He tries to scream, he tries really hard to scream, but he can't make a sound.
    The girls standing on the water buckets go to work.  One pinches the Funny Gunny's nose while the other chokes him.  Eventually he is forced to open his mouth.  Teen Angel stuffs the Funny Gunny's bloody cock and balls into his mouth.  The girls on the wooden buckets get a grip on his head and continue to choke him while Teen Angel sews his lips together with heavy black thread.
     When the sewing is done, Teen Angel pulls from her blue jeans pocket what appears to be a highly polished rifle-shell casing.  She twists out a bright red lipstick.  "Phuong Huoang," she says as she paints a thick layer of red onto the Funny Gunny's crudely sewn lips.  "Phoenix Program."
    "You Phoenix," she says, aiming the lipstick at the Funny Gunny.  It is strange to hear someone with an American face speaking English with such a thick Vietnamese accent.  "You Phoenix," she says again, bitterly.  Then, looking into his eyes, her face close enough to be kissed, she says, "You Phoenix . . . I Phoenix you!"
    There is a deep silence, like after a battle.
    The villagers melt away into the darkness.
    Somebody throws a torch into the steam-and-cream and the plywood whorehouse erupts into a palace of fire.
    The Funny Gunny's sweaty face looks at me with the same expression I once saw on the face of a dying girl sniper during the battle for Hue City.  The Funny Gunny is suffering.  His eyes plead for mercy.
    I pull the heavy pistol from my shoulder holster and I aim it at the Funny Gunny.  He could hang on the palm tree for days, screaming, while the birds and the ants work on his eyes and maggots crawl in and out of his groin wound.
    In the red glow of the burning whorehouse his eyes beg me to shoot him.  I aim the pistol at his face.  The Funny Gunny has no way of knowing that the pistol is empty.  I dry fire it at him and he jumps.  As I turn away, he looks confused.
    Be advised, mercy is not what I do best.
    The Woodcutter puts his hand on my shoulder, a signal that Commander Be Dan, the Nguyen brothers, and the Phuong twins are moving out.  So we walk away from a place where one dying Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant hangs nailed to a tree and mutilated, his lips painted as red as a whore's.
    We walk away fast, as silent as ghosts.  Without hesitation we walk hard up against a solid black wall of jungle and the black wall of jungle opens up for us and takes us in.
 

    Back in Hoa Binh, a week after the mutilation death of the Funny Gunny, I hear Song and Commander Be Dan making love.  I'm down in the secret tunnel under our hooch.  I've been studying an old clay model of Khe Sanh Combat Base.  Black flags mark American positions.  The model pinpoints every treeline, every bunker, the ammo dump, the command post, and the precise locations of wire, Claymores, land mines, guns, howitzers, quad 50s, and M-60s.  I lived at Khe Sanh for a year and never knew this much detailed information about the base.
    The Woodcutter and Johnny Be Cool have taken an ox cart loaded with firewood to sell at the market in a neighboring village.  It's getting dark.  They should he back by now.
    I hear the sounds of someone in pain.  I peek out through a crack in the trapdoor, cautiously.  When you live in Viet Nam you never know who might be paying you a surprise visit.
    In the yellow light of a kerosene lantern I can see the joy on Song's face as she looks up at Commander Be Dan.
    "Em," he says softly.  "My darling."
    Song stands up, embraces him, kisses him.  "An Tho," she says.  "My lover."  And, "Ma cherie."
    They undress each other, slowly, gently.
    Song's body is very beautiful.  From my peeping Tom's perch in the tunnel my eyes are more than half open.  She has a chrysanthemum in her hair.  Her breasts are small, but perfect, the nipples erect and almost black.  The only flaws on her body are scars on her legs from working in the paddies and barbed wire cuts and the three toes missing from her left foot from when she was tortured by the National Police.
    Commander Be Dan's body is ugly, pocked with bullet and shrapnel wounds and laced with scars from barbed-wire cuts.
    Song sinks down to her knees and takes Commander Be Dan into her mouth.
    After a few moments they lie down on a reed sleeping mat and make love.  Between muted groans and long moans of pleasure they talk to each other in whispers.  The tempo increases and their lovemaking becomes urgent and almost violent, like a rape, and then they are fucking, rutting joyfully like strong healthy animals, every muscle straining, sweaty, and beautiful.
    They rest, kissing and caressing.
    Then Commander Be Dan sits up.  A turn of his head puts light where it reveals his missing ear, the ear he lost in the fight with the Huey gunship on the march back from the victorious battle at the Nung combat fortress.  Naked in the soft yellow light of the lantern, Commander Be Dan breaks down his AK-47 assault rifle.  With grunt skill and a precision born only from practice, he manipulates a toothbrush, oily rags, and a bore brush attached to a thin metal rod, using the smooth pink stump of his severed wrist just like it's a giant finger.  Commander Be Dan cleans the AK-47 assault rifle that is his constant companion and the centerpiece of his life.
    I remember Leonard Pratt, who fell in love with his rifle on Parris Island.
    Song sits up behind the Commander, reaches around playfully to fondle his thick penis, rubs her breasts into his back.  He slaps her hand away and grunts.  Song pouts, punches him in the back with her small fist.  Finally, giving up, she reaches around for his web gear and an oily rag.
    While Commander Be Dan runs a cleaning rod through the bore of his rifle, Song unloads the curved banana clips inside the canvas pouches hung on an army surplus Russian belt.  On the dull silver buckle of the belt is a red star.
    In the gold light Song is a Polynesian princess; her long black hair is blacker than the black night outside the hooch.  The bullets in her small hands gleam and glint like pieces of antique gold being offered to a god.  With the oily rag Song wipes each bullet clean, carefully, almost lovingly, then snaps
 it back into a banana clip.
    I know it's wrong, but it feels necessary to watch Song and Commander Be Dan in their intimacy.  I'm learning clean information vital for me to know.  It's hypnotizing to stare point-blank at the depth and breadth of your own stupidity.
    I watch them, so close I can smell their sweat, afraid that my breathing might give me away.
    Commander Be Dan snaps his weapon together, by the numbers, fast, not missing a beat.  He's an enemy of my government, but I think he's good people, a real pro, a raggedy-assed rice-propelled Asian grunt.  Sometimes the respect between men who fight against death from opposite sides of the wire can become bigger than flags.  To kill a man as dedicated as Commander Be Dan would require another man of equal dedication.  And dedicated men are so rare that Commander Be Dan is practically assured of immortality.
    Commander Be Dan nods approval as he dry-fires his rifle.
    He puts out his good hand.  Song leans forward, kisses his hand, then souvenirs him one fully loaded banana clip heavy with thirty golden bullets with which to fight the Black Rifles.
    The Commander accepts the banana clip without comment and snaps it into place, then jacks a round into the chamber.  He leans the loaded rifle within easy reach against the wall of the hooch.
    I close the trapdoor and sit in the darkness.
    I can hear them together.  They make love again, this time almost in silence.  Song's orgasm is like a groan of pain, and for several minutes afterward she sobs, while the Commander whispers, his voice almost trembling, "Em . . . Em . . ."
 

    I sit in the tunnel for an hour, until Song and the Commander are sleeping peacefully.
    When I peek out of the trapdoor the moonlight coming in through unshuttered and glassless windows is bright enough for me to see that in their sleep they are holding hands.
    I crawl down the black tunnel for twenty yards, feeling my way in total darkness.
    I walk down along the riverbank.  The river flows black and gold in the moonlight.  I listen to the crickets having a creaking contest.  As I walk, frogs plop into the water.  The night air is moist and clean, sweet with the perfume of the night lotus.
    I sit in the sand in the dark, near the washing rock, dreaming about the Alabama in my mind, dreaming of escape.  If only I didn't have this bad leg . . .
    I think, as I fall asleep, that I should steal a weapon and some food and double-time into the jungle like a big-assed bird, with Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, my old Drill Instructor, as my only companion on the long road home.  Gunny Gerheim would walk beside me, reminding me: "All you got to do, prive, is take one step.  Just one step. Just one step at a time.  Anybody can take one step, Private joker.  Even you."
    I've got arrowheads in my dreams again tonight.  When I was a boy I hiked the rolling red-clay hills of Alabama, picking up arrowheads made of flint, obsidian lances, gray stone axes.  Sometimes I'd find baked clay beads and broken pieces of pottery.
    The crowing of a rooster wakes me.  It is not dawn.  The Woodcutter's little red and gold rooster has been fooled again by a false impersonation of dawn.  Illumination rounds popped on the horizon, and the rooster decided that it was his cue to cut loose.  It's strange, but Communist roosters don't crow any different from the American kind.  For a long second I thought I was back in the World, back in Hometown, U.S.A.
    The moon is red.  The moon is burning up in flames behind a black cloud.  Silhouettes of coconut palms are sharply defined against the red sky as masses of swaying black blades.
    The frogs crank up their volume another notch.  A dog runs along the riverbank, barking at the movement of the river.  The dog is black and white, half ghost, half shadow.
    I think about my father, always working, always making a crop, but never making a dollar ahead of next month's feed bill, happy just to be alive and healthy and with honest work to do.
    I think about my mother.  Whenever I think of my mother she's always wearing one of those flour-sack dresses she wore when I was a boy, and she's always cooking supper or putting up preserves.
    I think about how much I miss my baby sister, Stringbean, whose idea of joy in life is to put salted peanuts into her RC Cola and watch it fizz.
    I think about Old Ma, my grandmother, who is always full of energy and good humor.  Right now she's probably out fishing in the Black Warrior River, her faded khaki trousers rolled up over her bony brown knees, wading back and forth with a bamboo fishing pole, red worms wiggling in her shirt pockets.  I can see her hooking a yellow catfish, fighting it, then pulling it from the water.  I can see the fat catfish flopping on the end of her line, white-bellied, glistening wet in the sun.
    Small-arms fire crackles, far away, and is answered by thumping shells and slow-motion blips of neon.  Enemy artillery is going in.  Metal projectiles tear open the sky and collide with the stars and bounce off the moon.  A hundred-pound  artillery shell floats and sighs and slams into some rocky ridge where dumb grunts hunker down, cold and wet, in some grubby little bunker in some unimportant sector of some half-forgotten firebase.
    The grunts eat cold C's with bandaged hands while humming rock-and-roll songs.  To the artillery shells exploding all around them, they say, "Shot at and missed, shit on and hit."   And when Puff the Magic Dragon comes, bringing forty thousand rounds of happiness, and rains red death onto their enemies, the grunts nod to one another knowingly, satisfied, and they say, "Spooky understands."
    Sometimes I have nightmares.  I see Daddy D.A. and Thunder and Donlon and Animal Mother, and all of the others, all of the strong young faces.  I see all of my friends, dead, lying facedown in the mud on some dismal LZ.
    Red bullets dance on the horizon, and I can hear the dark music of violent death, all beat, no rhythm.
    I strain my mind until my head hurts.  I try to catalog the objects in my room in Alabama.  I try to recite the titles and authors of all of my books.
    Walking in the Alabama in my mind, I see forests and streams.  I see freshly plowed cotton fields full of Yankee cannonballs and Cherokee bones, and I think about every arrowhead I ever found, the shape, the color, and what the day was like when I found it.
    I remember hunting arrowheads in our neigbbor's freshly plowed cornfield after a rain.  I found a perfect Indian arrowhead of blue flint lying inches away from a Confederate musket ball.
    On our own farm I found only enemy bullets.  We plowed up so much Federal ordnance in our fields that Old Ma used Yankee Minie balls for sinkers when she went fishing for catfish.
    I sit, staring out over the black water of the river and as I listen to the flowing of the water the night goes on and on without end and I think about catfish and about how catfish have whiskers and look like Fu Manchu.
 

    Noon at the Luu Dan factory.  After a sleepless night on the riverbank I still feel stiff, I've got a cough, and my nose is running.
    The day is quiet and peaceful.  The air is clean and the sun is a gold coin.  I smell a fire and rice cooking.  I can hear children playing nearby, running in a ragged troop along the paddy dike, laughing, flying a long blue kite shaped like a dragon.
    Battle Mouth is playing with the village children.  For months after the victorious battle at the Nung combat fortress Battle Mouth was a catatonic zombie.  When he finally did snap out of it, his personality had improved and he was no longer an asshole.  He no longer wants to slaughter the jackals of imperialism for the glory of socialism.  All he wants to do now is be a little kid again.  And the little kids of Hoa Binh don't mind.  The kids love Battle Mouth because he likes to laugh and have fun and is big enough to give them piggyback rides.
    Most of the villagers are out working in the paddies.  The harvest is almost over.
    Under an open-air canopy of glossy green palm fronds and bamboo poles we sit, cross-legged on reed mats, our faces tiger-striped by wedges of sunlight.  We sing as we work, constructing military equipment out of American trash, making Luu Dan weapons for the People's Army.
    We sit in a row.  In front of each worker is a pile of components.  As each Luu Dan is passed from hand to hand along the human assembly line each person attaches a component from his pile.
    The boy to my right has a harelip and likes to smile.  He has the same cheerful, spaced-out expression on his face all the time, every day, like he's either retarded or eats opium with a spoon.  In front of the boy is a pile of red metal Coca-Cola cans gathered from American trash dumps by the children of the village.
    With a cold chisel the boy rakes a can from the pile.  He flips the can upright with the chisel, an impressive trick.  He presses the chisel hard onto the center of the bottom of the can and gives the chisel a precise tap with a square-headed hammer, punching a hole into the can.  Using the cold chisel like a big finger, he flips the punctured Coke can into my pile, claws another can from his pile, upends it with a practice motion, and his hammer falls again.
    The rhythm of the work is steady.  As we work we sing:

                On we go to liberate the South
                Smash the jails, sweep out the aggressors
                For independence and freedom
                Taking back our food and shelter
                Taking back the glory of spring. . . .

    I pick up a punctured Coke can.  I insert a bamboo handle that is about four inches long into the hole in the bottom of the can.  I toss the can to an impatient Johnny Be Cool, who is always one beat ahead of me in the rhythm of the production line.
    Johnny Be Cool's nimble fingers insert a coiled string into the hollow bamboo handle.  The string is attached to a pull ring of braided comm wire.  Before he hands the Luu Dan to the Broom-Maker, Johnny Be Cool slips a cap of hammered tin over the bottom of the bamboo handle.
    The Broom-Maker inserts a pair of wire cutters into the small drinking hole on the top of the can and cuts across the top, folding back two flaps of thin metal.
    Song takes the can from the Broom-Maker and inserts a short metal cylinder hacksawed from a length of plumbing pipe.  Inside the short piece of pipe is a simple spark-producing friction firing mechanism.  Song carefully ties the end of the string inside the bamboo handle to the firing mechanism.
    Behind Song is a scrawnv little old man with no teeth.  He is sitting on a defused American howitzer shell with a hacksaw in his hand.  He holds on to the shell with his legs while he hacksaws through it like a metal log.  After a minute or so he stops sawing and pours water from a plastic Pepsi bottle onto the shell.  When he starts sawing avain the wet shell slips free and the little old man grunts, wrestling with the shell until he loses his grip and falls to the ground like a rodeo rider.
    The assembly line laughs.
    Song says, "The bomb is alive!" and everybody laughs again.
    The bony little shell rider stalks his prey.  He hops back into the saddle.  In the high-pitched rasp and grind of his hacksaw metal dust flies. The tip of the shell falls off and the old man  has laid a big copper-jacketed egg. Only the egg has hatched and there are no bronze baby birds inside. Instead, the shell is full of old cheese, light tan on the outside, off-white on the inside.  The old man with no teeth quickly plunders the inside of the shell, digging out the TNT with a fish knife.
    Song cautiously stuffs the piece of plumbing pipe with the white waxy scrapings, then passes the can to a chubby twelve-year-old girl in a red T-shirt.  From a mound of materials scrounged by the smaller children of the village, the girl fills the Coke can with bits of glass, nails, scrap metal, truck engine parts, rusty shrapnel, paperclips, thumbtacks, and other sharp and deadly things.
    At the end of the assembly line a black cast-iron cooking pot full of hot pitch boils over a wood fire.  It smells like a hot road. Bubbles pop on the surface as it is stirred.  With a gourd dipper full of hot pitch, an old woman in a patched UCLA Bruins sweatshirt seals the top of the Coke can, then holds the can upside down and seals any open spaces in the hole around the bamboo handle.  She looks like a chamber of commerce volunteer dipping candy apples at the country fair.  She lays the finished homemade hand grenade on its side to cool.
    Just before lunch the hand grenades are picked up by children who carry them in small rattan baskets on a bed of straw, like Easter eggs.  The children hurry to distribute the Luu Dan weapons to Chien Si fighters in camouflaged defensive positions around the village.
    At noon, when the sun is without mercy, our lunch arrives on the back of a snorting black water buffalo led by an eight-year-old girl.  The girl guides the bulky monster, tugs him along, her fingers hooked over the heavy brass ring in the water bo's nose.  When the water bo hesitates or deviates, the midget buffalo handler gives the animal a sharp slap across the nose with the palm of her hand.
    As we distribute lunch bundles from two giant earthenware jugs slung on either side of the water buffalo, Battle Mouth comes up and greets me and smiles at me.  He likes me now, maybe because I'm the only other adult in the village who has time to play games with him and the kids.
    We pass out small wooden bowls and wait our turns as hot rice is ladled out with a tin cup.
    A shell hits the deck a mile from  the village.  We ignore it.   Just another short round.   Just some gungy cannon cockers playing that silly game they play.
    Dark gray puffs of smoke appear in a treeline two hundred yards to the east, followed by muffled explosions.  H&I fire--harassment and interdiction.  The Americans and their puppet armymen shoot shells at random into areas where troop movements have been reported by recon.  Another Long Nose crazy thing, of no consequence to anyone except as a source of dud shells with which to construct Luu Dan weapons and as an annoyance for Comrade Lizard.
    Shells fall.  Then more shells.

    The Woodcutter appears in a nearby vegetable field.  He squints, shields his eyes from the sun with a callused hand.  He gives an order and immediately the men and women in the field drop their farm implements and lift bundles of black plastic sheeting from beneath the paddy water.  Inside the bundles of black plastic sheeting are weapons.
    In the village, somebody is banging a shell casing with a bayonet.
    At the grenade factory the women collect our uneaten bowls of rice and dump the rice back into the earthenware jugs.
    Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si dee-dee down the paddy dike.  The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan have a muted but animated conference that, this time, does not end in an angry confrontation.
    As we watch the gray puffs of smoke whump-crumping into the treeline we think about how sometimes the Arvin puppet soldiers like to crank off a few rounds of artillery for no particular reason except that they get nervous and the noise boosts their morale.
    But these shells are obviously not intended to hit anything, not even ghost battalions of Viet Cong, and are not marking rounds.  All of the shells are striking the same spot, in a tight group, not in a pattern.  A pattern kills, a tight group minimizes the danger of hitting innocent bystanders.
    General Fang Cat may be a corrupt public official, but he is an honest businessman.  General Fang Cat is firing his rusty old guns to fulfill his contract with the Woodcutter.  The incoming shells are a warning.
    Commander Be Dan, the Woodcutter, and Bo Doi Bac Si are all running down paddy dikes in different directions, and Song has disappeared.
    "Truc Thang!" yells the old man without teeth who hacksaws artillery shells.  "Truc Thang!  Truc Thang!"
    And he's right.  The sky is full of helicopters.  The killer locusts are coming, armed to the teeth, gunships and troop carriers, buzzing high in the sky, holding off, waiting for the artillery barrage to lift.  No doubt company commanders are screaming obscenities into radio handsets, asking what stupid son of a bitch opened fire ten minutes early and what stupid son of a bitch is continuing to fire ten minutes late.
    Everyone is running somewhere.  The village gong bongs with heavy resonance, announcing the attack.
    I don't move.  Johnny Be Cool waves goodbye, then charges off to take care of his water buffalo.  My leg is still stiff from the wound I got on the combat mission.  I can hump, but I'm awkward, slow, and clumsy when I run.  There's no cover crossing the paddies.  I don't want to be caught out in the open by the gunships.
    When General Fang Cat has decided that he has jumped the gun on his orders as much as he can safely explain away as merely the fortunes of war, the artillery lifts, and the sky is open for the gunships.
    Under the canopy of the Luu Dan factory I watch as American airplanes fill the sky.  There is the knifing of green wings and four Phantom fighter-bombers roll in for a bomb run across the village.
    Five-hundred-pound bombs drift down at an angle, black blobs with Xs on top.  Energy bells blossom and hang in the air for an instant, faintly visible, like heat coming up off a hot road.  Hooches, trees, and disassembled people float up into the sky.  Then, as though unrelated, a muffled thud, followed closely by a tremor in the ground.
    I pull up a reed sleeping mat in one corner of the Luu Dan factory and lift the trapdoor of a tunnel.  I climb down into the tunnel and the trapdoor drops back into place.
    I learned the locations of every tunnel in the village by playing an educational game with Johnny Be Cool, Battle Mouth, and the kids.  We walk through the village and I say "Boom" and the last kid into a tunnel loses the game.
 

    The first thing I learned about life in a Viet Cong tunnel was that Viet Cong tunnels were not constructed for tall people.  I crawl a few yards, then squat and push my back hard against the earth wall.  I can't see my hand in front of my face.  I can't breathe.  Mud has sucked my rubber sandals off and now is closing in cold and wet over my toes.  A spiderweb catches me in the face.  I spit.  Furry lumps splash in water.  I hear rats clawing for high ground.
    The wall against my back reverberates.  Moist soil falls down all over me.  I spit again.  I cough.  There is dirt in my eyes.  I press my ear against the cold tunnel wall and I can hear the battle, big thumps, rhythmic strings of impacting raindrops, and, as clear as any field radio, the rumble of tanks.
    And I think: They are going to blow the tunnel, they are going to blow the tunnel, I just know that they are going to blow it.  Some dumb grunt is standing up there popping a Willy Peter grenade.  The Willy Peter grenade is a light green canister with a yellow stripe.  I hear it. There, that's the spoon flying off.  The grunt is going to drop the Willy Peter grenade into the tunnel and fry me like Spam.  Then the tunnel rats will come down and be scared and amazed when they find me.
    I panic.  I hear more rats.  I think I hear boots topside.  I feel something slimy trying to crawl up my leg.  My test drive of a grave has inspired me with a sudden will to live.  I push, pull, heave, climb, and claw my way up out of the tunnel.
    Back out in the light, I rest on my stomach, pumping air, cold and wet, plastered with mud, dead leaves, and sweat.
    Somewhere a water buffalo bellows horrible death agonies.
    When I stand up, I see a world of shit coming down.
    In the rice paddy water the reflection of a prehistoric flying monster grows larger and larger at a fantastic rate until it turns into a Cobra gunship and roars in at one hundred miles per hour, shaking the canopy over the Luu Dan factory with a hot blast of wind and sand.  Miniguns are chopping away chug-chug-chug and the Cobra fires hissing rockets with long tails of smoke.  The rockets look like white snakes with heads of fire.
    The Broom-Maker runs past the Luu Dan factory, her clothes charred and smoking.  She runs steadily and with intense concentration, ignores me, ignores and is perhaps unaware of the fact that both of her hands have been blown off and blood is pumping out of the shredded flesh of her wrists.
    The Cobras swing around and roar in for another gun-run.  Bullets blast the hooches to pieces.  There is red fire on the thatched roofs and black smoke beyond the fire.
    I turn to face the tanks.
    The tanks are bulky mud-splattered monsters, attacking on line through the rice fields, crushing through the paddy dikes with no effort at all, grinding the rice into heavy crunching treads and destroying the crop, plowing deep into the paddies like bloated iron hogs grunting in the mud.
    Small-arms fire cranks up to full volume on the far side of the village, recon by fire, right on cue, and I know it's a ground attack.  The popping of AKs begins to mingle with the whack-whack of M-16s.
    Johnny Be Cool reappears, picks up an Easter basket full of red metal eggs from the end of the Luu Dan factory assembly line.
    A tank with CONG AU-GO-GO painted in big Day-Glo letters on the turret growls up and stops twenty yards away.  Painted on the tank hull is a squad of little yellow men in conical hats, neatly X'd out.
    Behind the tank, enemy infantry is coming in on line and in force.
    The grunts are wearing new jungle utilities, new canvas jungle boots, new web gear, new everything.  They are legs, line doggies, Army pukes.  It's as easy to tell Army grunts from field Marines as it is to tell a bag lady from a Paris model.
    From behind a burning waterwheel a squad of Army grunts charges my position at high port.  The squad sets up a perimeter protecting the tank while the Tank Commander gives them covering fire with the .50-caliber machine gun on top of the tank.
    "BAN! BAN!" yells Commander Be Dan, and suddenly I am no longer alone in my heroic one-man unarmed defense of the Luu Dan factory.
    Commander Be Dan yells in English: "Airborne armymen, airborne armymen, fuck you."
    As the Army grunts exchange fire with the village Self-Defense Militia I crawl out of the way of some bullets and take cover behind a dead water bo.
    The firefight gets hotter.  Johnny Be Cool takes a grenade from the Easter basket, pulls the tin cap from the end of the bamboo handle, hooks his thumb into the comm wire pull ring, and throws, as hard as he can.
    The grenade arcs out, string unraveling until it is taut and jerks a sparking pin from the grenade.  Friction ignites the firing mechanism.  After a couple of more seconds in flight the grenade explodes.
    Johnny Be Cool throws homemade hand grenades, one after the other, by the numbers.  About half of the grenades are duds.
    The noise level gets scary and black powder smoke floats across the battlefield like ground fog.  The stubby barrels of black M-16s spit sparks of gold fire as Johnny Be Cool throws hand grenades at the tank.
    I peek over the warm carcass of the dead water bo.  The tank looks undamaged.
    I see a grunt.  The grunt is trying to pull himself up by clawing at the steel treads of the tank, but he can't stand up.  He looks down, then screams at the sight of his thigh bones jammed into the earth like white stakes.
    Johnny Be Cool cocks his arm to throw his last grenade.
    Bullets tattooing the air over my head and rocking the water bo carcass tell me it's time to change my position.  As I stand up something hits me a glancing blow on the side of the head.  I fall backward.  The sky above me is filled with the black tumble of grenades.  I watch the lazy flight of the smooth green ovals.  Somebody is sowing hard noisy seeds of kiss-your-ass-goodbye.
    Concussion sucks all the blood out of my face while a stone elephant sits down onto my head and black noise embeds hundreds of fragments of steel wire into my living flesh.
    People are yelling at one another all around me.  I don't know what's going on.
    Somebody screams, "GUNS UP!"  Then: "MEDIC UP!"  Then: "PONCHO UP!"
 

    Two brown balloons are having an argument right above my face.  The argument is about some guy who is maybe dead or maybe not dead.  I think maybe it's me.
    They roll me onto a poncho and lift me up.  They carry me into the village while I bounce around like a rag doll and wonder if I'm alive.
    By the time we reach the village common, which is being used as a landing zone for the medevac choppers, I'm feeling better.  That is, I'm feeling alive enough to be in pain.  My face is throbbing like it has been string by yellow jacket wasps and I've got blood coming out of my nose and ears.
    The brown balloons drop me onto the deck next to a platoon of wounded grunts.
    Ten yards away, a big Sergeant, a white giant with a steel-gray crew cut and a bomb-shaped head, drags Johnny Be Cool kicking and screaming out of a drainage ditch by his ankles, and drops him on the deck.  Somebody gives Johnny Be Cool a vertical butt-stroke to the head with a shotgun.  Thirty yards away I can hear the crack of Johnny Be Cool's neck.
    The big Sergeant bends down and lifts Johnny Be Cool's body, with both hands, the way you might pick up a seabag, and carries it to the edge of the common and throws it down a well.
    Surrounded by chaos, I stand up.  Some bad poison washes through my body.  I stumble like a drunk, looking for a weapon.
    I find an enemy KIA and I take his weapon, an M-79 grenade launcher.  I stumble on, looking for a target.
    A Charlie-Charlie, a command chopper, blasts sand into a cloud that obscures the battle.  Flat round winnowing baskets fly through the air like bronze coins.  The chopper looms in the sky directly above me, hovering so close I can almost reach out and touch it, if I could lift my arms.  Squinting into the tornado of prop wash I see stenciled across the belly of the chopper: a white skull and YOU HAVE JUST BEEN KILLED COURTESY OF THE 107TH ARMORED CAVALRY--THE BUCKEYE BOYS--GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY.
    The Charlie-Charlie rolls away, a bird of prey looking for enemy gooks to kill, and I use all of my strength to lift the M-79 grenade launcher.
    I fire.  Bloop.  It is the first time in over a hundred years that a member of my family has fired upon federal troops.
    The blooper grenade blows off the chopper's tail rotor and the Charlie-Charlie drops, crashing down into a hooch.
    As the Charlie-Charlie goes down, I faint.
 

    The next thing I know, I'm crawling on my hands and knees, looking for another weapon.  The blooper holds only one round and I forgot to get any ammunition.
    I see an Arvin officer wringing the neck of the Woodcutter's little red and gold rooster.  The Arvin inserts the chicken's head under his belt.  As the Arvin walks away the dead chicken bounces against his thigh.
    Army snuffies who don't look old enough to ride a bicycle are on an important resource-denial mission.  They stand on line and piss on patched gunnysacks full of rice they have dragged out of tunnels with meat hooks.
    I see five Arvin puppet armymen hiding behind a booch.  The Arvins are putting battle dressings onto themselves so that they can be medevaced out of the fighting.
    Bo Doi Bac Si has been captured by Army grunts.  A red-faced potbellied Top Sergeant is hitting Bo Doi Bac Si upside his head.  Bo Doi Bac Si does not flinch, but glares back in defiance, holds his head high, and every time they ask him a question, he spits.  They hit him in the mouth.  He spits blood at them.
    I call out to Bo Doi Bac Si, but my words get lost somewhere in the air inside my chest.
    Arvin puppet troops wander casually through the horror circus like Huckleberry Finns playing hooky from school and looking for a place to fish.
 

    They've hanged Song.  With a strand of barbed wire they've hanged Song from the giant banana tree.  Her neck is broken.  Her tongue protrudes from her mouth, black and grotesque.
    Three baby-faced kids in olive-drab green stand on the hood of the old French armored car and poke at Song's bruised thighs with the barrels of their M-16s.  If not for the war these guys would still be standing outside some small-town pool hall saying, "Aw, my ass," to each other just loud enough to be overheard by passing high school girls.
    The baby-faced grunts laugh wildly as one of them takes out his shiny chrome Zippo lighter and sets fire to Song's pubic hair.  Her body twitches, her fingers flutter.  The kids laugh.  "She's got ghosts in her!"
    I should feel sad, but I don't.  I don't feel anything.  All I can think about is that I wish my face didn't hurt so much, and I think that if I'm going to die, why can't I just fucking die and be done with it.  Why do I have to do all of this bleeding and see this Mickey Mouse murder exhibition?
    I try to take one more step, just one more step.  But I don't.  I collapse.  I lie on my back on the ground and I wait for the great shadow to move across my face.
 

    A cheerful medic in a skuzzy boonie hat kneels down and whips out a morphine Syrette.  The medic slaps the crook of my arm to find a vein.  He tries to give me an injection of morphine.  But his hand is shaking so hard he can't get the needle in. I reach over and hold his arm steady while he gives me the shot.  I say, "Cancel the ambulance.  I think it's only a hard-on."
    The little medic laughs.
    As I start turning into white rubber, the medic puts Band-Aids on my wounds.  This strikes me as a little odd.
    Somebody says, "L-T, Mortar Magnet is playing medic again."  The voice shoves Mortar Magnet away from me and says, "Shit.  Get away from that man, head case."
    Another voice says, "Mortar Magnet, you are hereby transferred to the military police."
    "Yes, L-T.  "
    "Arrest yourself.  Get your crazy ass over to that little hooch and help rig that Chi-Com gear for demo."
    "Yes, L-T.  "
    A big black medic with an easy grin pats me on the shoulder and says, "Be cool, m'man.  You are safe and sound.  It been some cold shit being held prisoner by these Charlie Congs, but you with righteous American dudes now.  We here to help you.  We been humping all over this A-O looking for you.  Birds are inbound.  You be out of this ville on a dustoff quicker than a gook can shit rice."
    A voice says, "Move it, people."
    A skinhead Lieutenant leans down and looks at my face.  He's a pudgy little guy, another wild-eyed butter-bar bucking for tracks.  His hair is red and cut high and tight.  The Lieutenant says, "Is that him?"
    "Shit, L-T," says the black medic, "I guess it must be him!"
    Scattered small-arms fire erupts somewhere far away.  Commander Be Dan and the fighters must have hit a blocking force.
    I cough.  I spit up some vomit.  I look at it to make sure it's nothing worse than vomit.
    The Army Lieutenant's face comes down, a freckled white balloon blotting out the sun.  "Hang tough, trooper," he says.  "Don't sweat the small shit.  We'll get the gooks for you.  Payback is a motherfucker. Just don't you worry."  He pats my arm.  "You're what this is all about."
    I must be giving the Army Lieutenant a funny look because he savs, "Bird Dog overflight spotted you in a rice paddy.  One round-eye on the ground.  The Word came down.  Extract all friendly personnel.  Then kill everybody and let God sort them out."
    "Sir?"
    "Yes?"
    "I'm not a fucking soldier."
    The Lieutenant's face does not change expression.  "What?  What did you say?"
    "I'm not a fucking Army puke.  I'm a United States Marine.  Retired."  I clear my throat with a grunt.  "Davis, James T., Private E-1, serial number 2306777."  I take a deep breath and say in Vietnamese:  "Do Me Hoa Chanh."  Then in English: "I don't surrender.  Fuck you."
    A grunt walks by with a severed head tied by the hair to the barrel of his M-16.  It's one of the Phuong twins.
    The Lieutenant looks at me without changing his expression.  He says to the black medic, "Get him onto a dustoff, Doc.  "
    A radioman appears.  The radioman is wearing a big floppy straw hat.  He says, "L-T, you want gunships?  And the Sergeant Major wants you ASAP.  He says he's got a mutiny situation in Third Platoon."
    Still looking at me, the Lieutenant says, "Negative gunships.  Roger the Sergeant Major."  He suddenly turns away and shouts: "Police up that gear, trooper.  Corporal, where is that personnel damage assessment?  Get me a body count of these Oriental human beings.  And have some of your people check out those enemy structures, then blow them."
    The Lieutenant walks away, saying to somebody, "That's affirmative.  Put your ordnance over there."
    Soldiers are pulling muddy weapons and military equipment out of tunnels.  An angry grunt with a red face is furiously bayoneting a bamboo canteen, grunting with satisfaction after each vicious thrust.
 

    I'm lifted up and carried through a cloud of grape smoke and into a storm of stinging sand thrown up the prop wash of inbound medevac choppers.
    I'm put down with the wounded who are waiting to be onloaded.  The medics are slashing gear from the wounded with knives.  The medics cut off my black pajamas.  They leave me naked, but I'm allowed to keep my beat-up old Stetson.
    Being wounded makes us invisible.  The soldiers burning the village with torches of bamboo and straw look right through us like we're already ghosts.  You're no longer a part of what's going on.  You feel out of place.  You wonder what's going to happen to you.  Where are you going, you ask, and will it hurt?  You don't like sick people and you certainly don't want to be left behind with strangers.
    Medevac choppers set down, and hacking blades like motorized machetes blast pinpoints of shrapnel.  The choppers load the litter cases first: head wounds, VSIs--Very Seriously Injured--and Expectants.  A chopper lifts off and the down-draft from the blurred rotor blades catches blood pouring from the open belly door and prop wash splatters the litter bearers on the ground with pink mist.
    Some Army grunts stroll by like they're on their way to a picnic at the beach.  The soldiers laugh too loud and talk too loud.  Two of the soldiers have a grip on Bo Doi Bac Si's ankles.  They are dragging him away for the body count.  Somebody has nailed a unit insignia patch to his forehead.  A bonybrown puppy lopes along beside the body, nudging in to lick blood off of Bo Doi Bac Si's face.
    A friendly medic kneels down and spreads Xylocaine ointment over my face and hands.  The sun is in my eye, so I can't see him.  I say, "Thanks, pal."  After a few moments my face and hands get numb and go away for a little trip.
    I turn my head to starboard.  For ten yards, in perfectly aligned rank and file, in formation even in death, lumpy body bags full of soldiers wait with flawless patience.
    I roll to port toward the sound of muted moans.  Somebody has made a mistake.  The only medevac priority lower than a dead American is a gutshot Vietnamese woman.  Some New Guy medic who didn't know any better has brought the Fighter-Widow, the mother of B-Nam Hai, and has left her with the wounded on a bed of bloody battle dressings, thinking she'll be medevaced.
    B-Nam Hai is not to be seen, but a bawling baby who is only just learning to walk waddles up to the Fighter-Widow, plops down next to her, and holds the dying woman's hand.
    A skinny soldier with a freshly shaved bald head and with fat red and white battle dressings tied to both of his legs is shoving his right index finger in and out of an exit wound in the Fighter-Widow's stomach.  The Fighter-Widow whimpers and whines, but not loud.  There is the metallic odor of fresh blood.
    Somebody laughs.  A middle-aged man with eyebrows as black as raven's wings and a dimpled chin sits up.  The man has combed his black hair across his head in an attempt to hide his bald spot.  He looks like my high school football coach.  But he doesn't look wounded, and he's got all of his gear with him.
    The Coach says, "You retarded West Texas cracker son of a bitch.  Murphy, I'm glad they got you, boy.  I'm glad they did it to you.  Your body count is a standing joke.  I always said you couldn't walk point for shit."  The Coach burps and feels his chest.
    Murphy with the grayish-white bald head says, "Aw, leave me alone, Sarge.  I'm finger-fucking a gook."
    Someone laughs, but not the Coach.  The Coach is falling back, spitting blood.
    A passing medic dips down to the Coach for an instant and then walks on.  The medic jerks a thumb over his shoulder and says to the litter bearers, "Tag him and bag him."
    Somewhere someone screams, long and horrible, and you think: That could not possibly be a human being, and the litter bearers who are loading the wounded stand still and listen.  And you can see that one of the litter bearers, a short potbellied guy loaded down with ammunition bandoliers stuffed full of battle dressings, is wetting his pants but doesn't know it yet.   He listens to the scream and has a look on his face like a punji stake just pierced his foot.
    A Mexican guy with a big Zapata mustache and a red M marked on his forehead with a laundry pencil to show that he's had morphine, rocks back and forth while his chubby round face with its square white teeth tells everybody in Mexican his newly devised deadly program of revenge because the gooks have wasted all of his friends.  The medics have tied the Mexican up with rope.  Between his Spanish threats he chants, rocking back and forth against the rope, "Payback is a motherfucker.  Payback is a motherfucker."
 

    As they load me onto the cavernous belly of a vibrating machine I see soldiers hammering steel rods into the ground to find tunnels for the tunnel rats.  The tunnel rats are expert miners who dig for things that are where they do not belong.
    The sun is going down but somewhere they've dropped a Willy Peter grenade into a tunnel and the village is lit up by white and yellow flashes of secondary explosions.  The sympathetic detonations sound like a trainload of ammunition cooking off.
    Army medics lift a wounded man into the chopper and lay him down next to me, talking to him all the time to reassure him, touching him gently so that he won't feel alone, but you see the look in their eyes and the look in their eyes has already pronounced him dead.
    After the last of the medics have loaded the last of the body bags like very heavy laundry the medics hop off the cargo door and run into the hiss of the turbines, bent low to avoid the blurred rotor blades, turning their faces away from the sting of the prop wash.
    I'm floating in a morphine haze, zoned out, and the scene that I'm a part of is moving slower and slower and at any moment will freeze and stop.
    I lean back against the belly of the Chinook cargo helicopter, packed in tight among a full load of dead and wounded soldiers.  It's like being inside the belly of a green aluminum whale.  I cling to the red nylon webbing on the walls.
    The wind howls in through the open cargo door.  The wind must be freezing, but I feel warm.
    As I sink into a warm sleep an Army medic sitting facing me talks into a field radio handset.  He reads out the names and serial numbers of casualties.  Somewhere far away, in a nice quiet office, some candy-assed pogue is already turning the sticky red blood into clean white paperwork so that it can be filed and forgotten.
    The medic's voice is a flat monotone: "Ah, I say again, ah, be advised that's fourteen, I say again one four-Kilo India Alpha, and thirty-nine, that's three-niner, ah, say again, over.  Negative on your last interrogatory.  I say again, three-niner Whiskey India Alpha.  And one round-eyed P.O.W., that's Papa, Oscar, Whiskey, with multiple lacerations . . ."
    The singsong rhythm of the medic's voice is soothing as he continues, chewing gum as he talks, submitting his data, ending with: "Multiple gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen . . . traumatic amputation of right leg below the knee.  That's a rog on your last.  Negative further.  Out."
    On the other side of the darkness I walk into the Alabama in my mind.  I walk across a plowed, sun-baked cornfield after a rain, looking for Indian weapons made out of flint.
    Fwop, fwop, fwop, and we are leaving the earth behind and it's dark outside and on the other side of the darkness I'm dreaming and I'm not unhappy, because I know that what goes around comes around and what's coming down is already on the way.  The Nguyen brothers and the surviving Phuong twin and Ba Can Bo and the Woodcutter and Battle Mouth and Commander Be Dan and the people of Hoa Binh will march out of the jungle to fight again, because this is their land and we're on it.
    I float in warm sleep and memories, and I am happy to know that before dawn the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan will be back in the village, posting sentries, caring for the wounded, and burying the dead.  Now the dead can sleep, forever bonded to the living, in sacred soil made rich and fertile by the blood and the bones of their ancestors.
    The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan will take care of business.  Then, together, they will go looking for Song.
 

    The medevae chopper rumbles through the night air like a flying boxcar.  The wind feels good, cool and clean.  Above the pounding of the rotor blades we can hear small-arms fire, far below.
    We pass other choppers and somebody turns on a light.  In the rolling belly of the dustoff the wounded cling to one another in the dark, bathed in the faint red glow of collision-avoidance lights.
    Outbound from a cold LZ we look out of the open cargo door at the stars, killer children with bloody brown faces.  Our faces are coated with a film of sweat, dirt, and smoke.  We're all half-naked, our pants and boots cut off by the medics, big white emergency medical tags attached to our utility jackets, crude red Ms grease-penciled onto our foreheads.  We are a tired, raggedy-assed bunch of dying grunts wrapped in muddy ponchos and shot all to shit.
    We squint but do not flinch when cold wind blasts in bard through the open cargo door and whips our dirty compress bandages into our faces and fires cold drops of blood through the air like bullets.
    The chopper bits a downdraft and sudden suction from the slipstream pulls with power at the flopping white battle dressings and some of the bloody bandages are sucked out through the open cargo door and we leave a trail of little ghosts flying behind us in the sky.