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."
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