Afterburn

Prologue: Takhli Air Force Base, Thailand May 1972

He slept on earth but woke in the sky, he remembered years in order to forget seconds, he lived so that others might die.

In his cement-block quarters an air conditioner chunked night to dawn. The Thai housegirls disappeared when he stirred. At the pre-flight briefing he listened as the frag order-the incomplete target list direct from Saigon or Pentagon Far East-was announced. Then marched stiff-legged to the cockpit of the F-4. Later, beer and darts in the officers' club. And repeat. Bolt breakfast, get the weather report, brief the mission, figure the day's ordnance, run the pre-flight instrument check, line the birds up, boom off the ground, dash in across the jungle, clouds piled against the mountains-hard to ignore the beauty-deliver the load, dash out. Shower, write up the flight, do it again the next day. Count your missions. No sleep, but the food was excellent. He and the other pilots built a dirt basketball court near the airfield, and at the age of thirty-one, he could still get his palm above the rim. All the pilots were good guys and most were real bastards, too. They argued about everything. Nixon. Football teams. How to eat a monkey. The deep structure of the CIA. Hunting rifles. Conflicting theories regarding the locus of the female orgasm. Techniques for inducing same. Then back to it.

The squadrons competed to see how many missions they could score. The targets ranged from railway depots south of Hanoi, bridges, truck camps, and factories to North Vietnamese troop positions, surface-to-air missile sites, and even empty hilltops needing to be flattened for use as helicopter landing zones. On R amp;R he flew to Saigon, riding in from Tan Son Nhut Airfield along Duong Tu Do, the blue Air Force bus fitted with wire mesh instead of windows, the better to make grenades bounce away. A city of boulevards and streetlamps. Battered French-made sedans, motorbikes flitting through traffic. Always the air was hot, seeping, boys tugging his arm. The best place to drink was the roof of the Rex Hotel. Everywhere Vietnamese stood selling black-market cigarettes, radios, and chocolate. Everywhere U.S. servicemen were walking, standing, talking with prostitutes in miniskirts. It was ten dollars and yes he thought about it. Little smiling girls you put your cock into. What a monster he was-or might someday be.

He went to other places, too-Bangkok or Hong Kong to shop. Toys for the children, a watch for Ellie, get a suit made. He wandered the neon streets removed twice from himself-first from America, second from the war. A day later, he was back to the game. There was some paperwork, since he was in a supervisory position, but against the adrenaline moments of flying, it was routine, time passing, tick-tick goes the red trigger on the stick. He felt clean. He knew why he was there. He knew the score. Daily intelligence reports. Troop movements, pontoon bridges being repaired. Rail lines, Chinese-made trucks. Bombing winds, altimeter settings. You lived by a code, you maintained your duties, you knew who you were. And then the plane itself-you had to be clean to fly the machine.

He missed Ellie, missed her under him, going hard into her, riding her breath, but that was all there waiting for him when he returned. A man lets go of that when he's on the verge of something else, something bigger. A woman, skin, the bed-these were limited sensations, all edges known. Nothing on earth compared to flying combat, for its proximity to death and heaven enlarged him. It was a great and terrifying secret that no one who hadn't experienced it could understand-in all of America, only several thousand men. And of those, only a few hundred were operational now, he one of them.

He couldn't tell Ellie. Not really. He kept her letters in a neat stack in his drawer. When he didn't care to write, he talked into a tape recorder, just rambled along. Kiss Julia and Ben for me. Go ahead and sign the mortgage, sweetie. What was a mortgage compared to a Soviet-built MiG-21 fighter? He'd made captain early, he could do five hundred sit-ups without stopping, he'd counted cards at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, he could still screw three times in one night, he owned eight hundred shares of IBM and had danced the tango with Ellie at their wedding reception. He'd rolled a Jaguar doing ninety while stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California and walked off his concussion, he'd dropped an F-86 on a runway in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He was tested and proven and scared. He was in his prime and he knew it. Ninety-seven missions, three confirmed MiG kills, dozens of trucks, trains, and artillery pieces. How many dead Vietcong, how many dead North Vietnamese regulars? He knew the number, more or less. It was just a number. He told no one, and no one asked.

Of course, he was angry, too. You always were when they were fucking with the technical parameters of your survival. Ellie didn't understand, and if he explained it to her on paper, he'd be flying freighters to Guam. The bureaucracy appalled him, desktop generals promoted in the somnolent 1950s sitting in the puzzle palaces making war policy. The forms and reports, the smudging of statistics. The war protesters putting pressure on him, directly, though they didn't know it. He formulated air strikes and suggested them to his superiors, many of whom had the Pentagon in one ear the whole day. But Washington used the Air Force against North Vietnam only like a cattle prod-trying to get a reaction without causing excessive damage, without doing what it had the power to do: crush North Vietnamese industry and supply lines. At times, the squads weren't even allowed to attack. A North Vietnamese cargo plane carrying war materiel was off-limits. North Vietnamese airfields were off-limits. He'd lost three men to MiG fighters parked on fields he regularly flew over. And all flying targets had to be sight-checked, as if the MiGs did not have air-to-air missiles, as if the American planes, the most advanced fighting machines ever built, did not have radar. It was fucking political. Some guys dropped ordnance anyway, claimed a rack malfunction. The Pentagon didn't appreciate the variables-the weather, the changing SAM sites, the uncertainty of MiG resistance. And the MiGs had a distinct initial advantage over the American planes. Smaller and not laden with ordnance, they turned much tighter circles than American jets, and could achieve the dominant six o'clock position-the position in which you would get banged up the ass by a Chinese missile. Hanoi had the most ornate local airspace defense system on the globe: hundreds of computer-linked SAM sites that could throw up a canopy of protection. On the city's outskirts 100-millimeter gun emplacements waved ten-thousand-foot whips of steel. The thought of it made him twist at night, made him feel he was digesting his own innards. He could get shot down. He could go from flesh to flame.

But you weren't supposed to dwell on it-might make you tentative, weak. Yet how could he not? He'd flown over Hao Lo Prison in Hanoi, the Hanoi Hilton. The compound was laid out in a diamond, and much was known about what went on inside. Built by the French, Hao Lo served as North Vietnam's main prison and as headquarters for the country's penitentiary system. It occupied nearly a city block. The massive sixteen-foot walls were topped by thousands of shards of broken champagne bottles. Three strands of barbed wire, the top one electrified. No American flier had ever successfully escaped the Hanoi Hilton. Nonetheless, word about the inside had filtered out through CIA operatives working in Hanoi, via the ingeniously coded letters of airmen to their wives that the North Vietnamese sporadically allowed, and from the few "reeducated" prisoners Hanoi had released. He preferred to think about the American pilot who had appeared on Japanese television, which the U.S. monitored. The pilot, clean-shaven, dressed in fresh pajamas, had been forced to say he and other POWs were being well fed, supplied with cigarettes, and attended to by doctors. This the pilot did with odd pauses: When the intelligence people first looked at the films, they wondered if he had been drugged. In fact, the pilot hadn't been-he was just concentrating. The advisers realized he was flashing a message in Morse code with his eyelids: torture. Some CIA men had shown the film during a briefing on Hao Lo. In the prison, the Americans lived in one of four areas: Camp Unity, Las Vegas, Heartbreak, or New Guy Village. The rooms had names: the Meathook Room, the Knobby Room (the walls were studded with knobs of acoustical plaster to absorb screams), Rawhide, the Quiz Room, Calcutta. The North Vietnamese were effective torturers, having been so effectively tortured by the French.

It was also known that American POWs communicated with two codes: the standard POW mute code, which utilized hand signals, and the "AFLQV" auditory code, first developed by American POWs in Korea, much faster to learn than Morse, and worth practicing for an hour each week, which he did-in case he might need it. Each letter headed a line of five letters in a twenty-five-letter square:

A B C D E

F G H I J

L M N O P

Q R S T U

V W X Y Z

The letter K was dropped and replaced with the letter C. The first signal identified the row: Two quick taps, for example, meant the F row. The second signal identified the column. A tap, tap, tap… tap, tap meant M. The pause was longer between letters. A 3, 2–1, 1–3, 3 sequence spelled MAN. By this time shortcuts and adaptations for visual use had evolved, including scratching, coughing, spitting-anything to keep the North Vietnamese guessing. Anything to pretend to hope.

He tried not to think about it. But being a POW was a chilling prospect. The North Vietnamese had signed the 1949 Geneva Convention treaty but refused to apply its prisoner-of-war edicts to captured American pilots on the basis that the pilots were war "criminals" rather than prisoners. The treaty had expressly prohibited measures of reprisal against prisoners, instead seeking to ensure their physical and psychological well-being. But in the post-Hitler fervor the treaty had limited the rights of war criminals, who were defined as persons who had committed War Crimes ("… wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military action

…"); or Crimes against Humanity ("… murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against any civilian population…"). The North Vietnamese had seized upon this definition as part of their overall worldwide propaganda campaign. By parading American airmen as heinous mass murderers, they not only stimulated political pressure in the international community but justified incarceration, interrogation, indoctrination, starvation, and torture.

Thus his superstitions. He was known to the flight mechanics as a detail freak, checking the F-4's electrical and hydraulic systems before flying. The pilots under his command in the squadron preferred flying with him. He'd lost only five men. Yet the best of pilots were shot down, and not necessarily when probability dictated they might be. On his last visit home, eight months earlier, he had impulsively tucked one of Ben's wooden Lincoln Logs into his jacket. Now it went with him on every flight. And before each mission, during the briefing of weather conditions, refueling patterns, primary approach, decoy flight patterns, probable SAM locations, and priority targets, he fingered this little notched cylinder of wood, rubbing it with his thumb. Cloud formations, time-fuel checkpoints. Visualize the mission, anticipate contingency. The men depended on him. If they had doubts, they could ask and sometimes he would change the plan just so they would feel they had a stake in it. You had to do that, keep getting behind their eyes into their heads. You looked for less interest in the plane's condition, decreased appetite, increased drinking, more wife-talk. If they got lax, if they started fucking the Thai housegirls, men got killed. He had to watch for that, he had to watch for everything.

The frag order that morning specified a well-known target, its weirdness part of the natural voodoo of the war. The Paul Doumer Bridge, a gargantuan structure named after the French statesman, crossed the Red River south of Hanoi, a vital link in the North Vietnamese supply line. Its steel-and-concrete foundations had resisted thousands of tons of bombs; mission after mission of fighter bombers had attacked the bridge yet barely scorched its roadbed. The Air Force, in its infinite bureaucratic frustration, had tried to B-52 it, even dropped floatable explosives upriver and detonated them when they drifted beneath the bridge spans. None of the schemes was successful. The bridge was damaged but never destroyed. And now, reported the frag order, the bridge was covered with bamboo scaffolding, and a repair barge was tied to a pylon. Air recon had spotted the barge; his job was to sink it.

He rose at 0500, ate, briefed the flight, his jocks scribbling numbers on their knee-board cards, then walked to the pilots' locker room. There, as always, he removed his wedding band, watch, and wallet, items of no use to him in flight and potentially useful to North Vietnamese captors. He stepped into his flight suit, then into a G suit, an inflatable girdle that covered his stomach and legs. This hooked to a line in the cockpit that was fed with engine compression bleed-off air. When the F-4 accelerated past 2.5 G's, sections of the suit swelled, increasing pressure on his legs and belly, keeping blood from pooling in the bottom of his body, a dangerous effect that caused blackout. Over the G suit he put on a torso harness, which he would snap into the plane's seat-it kept him from being buffeted around the cockpit when the plane was inverted. Then he pulled on the twenty-pound survival vest, jammed with maps, code books, water bottles, emergency transmitter, two hundred and fifty feet of rappelling line, flares, knives, ammunition, a saw, foodstuffs, a compass, fishing gear, a pound of rice, gold coins, first-aid pack, matches, shark repellent, whistle, signal mirror, sewing kit, water purification tablets, and morphine. Last, he strapped a. 38 pistol to his calf.

He walked out toward the flight line at a slight cant from the weight of the survival vest, carrying his helmet. His gear clinked and rattled. Blinking in the low sunlight to the east, coffee on his tongue. The smell of JP-4 jet fuel. He had showered earlier, but only now did his consciousness wake and assume the form of a fifty-eight-thousand-pound fighter jet. Only now did he slip on the deep-green aviator sunglasses that reflected a curvilinear airfield where men wheeled bombs toward a row of jets, the backdrop lush forest, blue sky.

His plane was being serviced by the maintenance crew. He walked around the needle nose, the short wings, the slab of the tail. Slowly, looking. It was cool to the touch. He knew the plane's surfaces better than he remembered the faces of his children, the dents and patches and hydraulic fluid leaks, the zinc chromate smears where the plane had taken damage. The F-4 Phantom, so perfect on the drawing board, was in war a dinged, banged-up, pocked, underserviced, paint-peeling, galvanic-corroded workhorse that nonetheless performed remarkably. He climbed the ladder and lowered himself into the cockpit, trying to avoid flipping any panel switches. He wriggled into the seatback, parachute pack, and headrest. The cockpit smelled of burnt wiring. The air inside was over one hundred degrees, a slow roast. He attached the four quick-release fittings to the torso harness and buckled the leg-restraint straps across his shins; in an ejection, the straps protected his legs from striking the front canopy-and thereby being amputated. He plugged in the G suit and pulled on his helmet and then fitted the oxygen mask to his face. The start cart next to the plane whined, and he flipped the electrical power switch to external. The cockpit came alive. Gauge needles shivered, amber warning lights blinked on, the radio crackled awake. He checked the frequencies and killed a fly trapped in the forward section of the canopy. The heat gathered beneath his helmet. A world away, Ellie was washing up the dishes after dinner, the children letting the screen door slam as they ran outside with their ice-cream cones. Always he kept track of their parallel days. Ellie tying Ben's sneaker, Ellie on the telephone listening to her mother's complaints, Ellie in her sunglasses at the supermarket, Ellie reading to Julia, Ellie finding a gray hair, pulling at it angrily. Ellie dutiful, Ellie strong. Was this what they were? She living at the air base, he a technician in a tin can? A soldier-actor in a drama staged by politicians? All that was unanswerable. He preferred to think of his wife as he had seen her on his last leave-a glass of wine on the arm of her reading chair, an oversized volume of Renaissance paintings in her lap, the heavy bodies in torment and longing and ecstasy. Her hair fallen down. He imagined that she looked at the paintings and drank off the wine and then later struggled in the sheets, her fingers pressed against herself. He hoped she did that. He hoped to God she only did that-and would not be bitter at his absence. If she was bitter, perhaps later he could bear it with some kind of grace, since he was the cause of it. But maybe I am fooling myself, he thought, maybe she is happy without me, or mostly happy. You thought you knew but you never did. The children tired her each day, and she was alone with them. Alone now, presumably. Yet Ellie never showed doubt that he would return. Did she worry secretly, or was her faith in his survival absolute?

By now his electronic warfare officer had climbed in the rear seat. They could not see each other but communicated by live mike. He fired up the left engine, moving the throttle forward and watching the rpm and exhaust gas temperature gauges rise. When the left engine reached idle, he started the right one and switched to internal electrical power. The ground crew pulled away the support vehicles beneath the plane. He reached up and chunked the canopy shut. Signaling back and forth with the ground crew, he tested the speed brakes, flaps, and ailerons. The crewman gave him the thumbs-up. The sun had climbed over the tree line on the horizon, burning off moisture, leveling a hard slant of heat across the streaked expanse of the airfield. His wingman was ready now, too.

"Two up."

"Three ready."

He taxied briskly along the runway. At the head of the runway a serviceman ducked under the fuselage and activated the bomb racks and missiles.

"Blue one ready for takeoff," he told the tower.

"Blue one cleared."

He signaled his wingman and pressed the throttle, running the engine up from idle to one hundred percent power-10,200 rpm. The airspeed indicator needle jumped to fifty knots, and then he moved the throttles outward and forward to the afterburner stop. Maximum power, jet fuel exploding in the exhaust nozzle. Give me everything, he prayed, let's fuck the sky. The plane jolted forward, the runway flashed past. The wheels thudded over the line of cement-football field lengths shooting beneath him-and then the nose gear quieted, lifted, and the plane arced skyward. He pulled the flaps up and again the plane lurched forward, the airspeed needle climbing past three hundred knots. The pneumatic system whistled as the plane groaned and banged and shuddered its way up to speed, the two immense engines feeding a roaring, cylindrical inferno that pressed the seat against his back. Beneath him, above him, around him, air rushed over the fuselage. Ground fell away. One thousand feet, two thousand, three thousand feet. In the sky.

The four planes joined in a combat spread and vectored north, cruising at forty thousand feet, wingtips ten feet apart. He was so near his wingman he could see the rivets and scratches on the canopy frame, the stenciled emergency markings beneath it. The flight passed into an encompassing cloud rack-four airborne sharks in pale depthlessness. The radio gargled layers and layers of garbage sound: other Air Force radio conversations, the mocking and occasionally confusing interruption of Hanoi women broadcasters (false coordinates, insults, sexual taunts-all in a sneering, provocative voice), and the screeching static of North Vietnamese ground technicians trying to jam the frequencies. The noises tore through one another, became louder and softer, choppy, windy, punctuated by blasts of music and faraway unintelligible voices.

The clouds cleared, and seven miles below stretched a landscape of flooded rice paddies, shattered mirrors of the sky, fed by a river that wound lazily like the ever-switching tail of a cat. Above them stretched a ceiling of cirrostratus.

"Blue lead," came the ground air controller, "this is Red Crown. Bandits at two-four-oh degrees, thirty-two miles."

"Roger," he said into the helmet mike. "Blue flight, make a ten-degree turn south, let them chase us."

"Blue lead, Blue two. SAMs at forty degrees, five miles."

"Right." The North Vietnamese were throwing up resistance to drive them south, make them waste fuel.

"Blue lead, this is Red Crown. Three SAMs up ahead."

"Bandits must be in contact with the ground."

"You have an altitude on SAM, two?"

"Eighteen thousand."

Setting up a SAM envelope, chasing them into it. The SAM detonation settings would be varied to explode over a wide range.

"Blue lead, MiGs seven o'clock, eight miles."

"Roger."

"I've got three up ahead, Blue lead."

"Blue lead, make a hard turn north. You have SAM coming at you five thousand feet and closing." He pulled on the stick and the jet veered to the north. He saw a flight of MiGs above and behind him. The SAMs were exploding harmlessly a mile back.

"Bandits high." The flight came out of its turn. He had to decide whether to press on toward the bridge, still fifty miles away, or engage the MiGs, which hovered behind them like black mosquitoes with red wing stripes. They were close to air-to-air range.

"Blue lead, I've got four SAM launches."

He could see the SAMs, white telephone poles rising in a long curve directly in front of him.

"MiGs closing."

"Blue lead, you have two MiGs on your-"

He saw them coming, and also saw a SAM rising up in front of him. The North Vietnamese ground technicians knew their exact altitude by now, had reprogrammed the SAMs' detonation height. A direct hit could turn a plane into a million pieces of burnt metal, pattering like rain into the forest. He climbed, and the SAM exploded four hundred feet beneath him.

The MiGs were close. "Blue lead, you have-"

"I see them!"

The closer MiG fired. He went into a hard dive. The heat-seeking missile followed him. The G's were staggering. He tightened his leg muscles to force the blood back to his brain. He grunted. It was coming-a roaring, weaving, smoke-trailing dart that altered its course every time he did. His peripheral vision went black, he couldn't see. The airframe would buckle at 7.33 G's. He flew by feel, the plane vibrating. The missile had to be within fifty yards now. He cut sharply out of the dive, breathed once, twice. The missile had sailed past. His vision came back, he looked for his wingman. But as he completed his turn, the radio cried, "SAM! SAM! — " and a roar of light enveloped the right side of the jet.

The plane jolted, the fire panel lit up.

Get altitude! The fire was in the bombing electronics panel. He hit the armament release button, cleaning off the plane by sixteen thousand pounds. The bomb racks dropped earthward.

"Blue lead, you're on fire. Wing damage visible."

The plane lurched, and he pulled on the stick to get control. If the wing twisted back violently, the plane would start spinning, and that would be the end. But if he ejected here and made it to the ground alive, he'd be checking into the Hanoi Hilton. The hits didn't seem close to the fuel lines, so lighting the afterburner was not a bad bet. On the other hand, the faster speed would increase the stress on the damaged wing. He'd take the chance.

"Blue flight," he said, "engage burner, switch to emergency procedure. I'm going to try to haul out as far as I can. Two, get RESCAP on the radio, tell them what's happening."

He switched to the intercom to talk with his backseater. "Larry, I'll ride this, get us a better ditch spot."

"I'm with you."

He lit the burner. The plane jammed forward. Yes, he thought, blast me out of here, burn me home. The shimmering torch appeared in the tail of the plane next to him. Here we go. Then three red lights blinked on. The hydraulics were losing pressure, leaks in the primary and redundant systems. Without them, he couldn't maneuver the plane. He was flying an unguided plane at a thousand knots an hour, a roaring perversion.

"Blue flight. Hydraulics gone. Check ground position. I'll be punching out." The jungle rushed beneath him. He felt for the ejection ring between his thighs, so placed because in a falling plane the increased G-forces made it impossible for a pilot to raise his arms.

"Blue lead. RESCAP notified."

"Get ready, Larry." The main panel went dead. Primary electrical system out. Perhaps he'd passed over into the DMZ. The stick froze in his hands. The fire was moving internally through the fuselage. Was South Vietnam below? If so, he had a chance. He couldn't recognize the mountain formations. Estimated speed Mach 1.1 and slowing. Six seconds a mile. The ground below blurred by.

"Blue lead, Blue lead, your wing is breaking up. Get out." He felt the plane go sloppy. Slowing. Hold. Just hold. South past the DMZ. Every six seconds… they were losing speed, don't spin, don't spin, he counted one, two, three, four… you had to duck during ejection, design fault, tall men sometimes decapitated… eight

… don't flail on ejection, easy to break arms… nine-

"Charlie, get the fuck-"

He blew the canopy. Then ejected-into a wall of wind he hit at four hundred knots, driving his heart into his spine, jamming his shoulders against the seatback, compressing his trachea, the air burning over the exposed skin at his wrist and neck, spinning him heels over head. The roar, the silence. His blood could not catch up with his spinning body, his guts were in his mouth. Still moving a hundred knots. His ejection seat dropped off, and the parachute riffled noisily above him. Straps tightened around his chest and thighs, he took quick breaths in the thin air, felt his heart catching up. Okay, okay. A mile away the Phantom dropped in a violent spin, a long plume behind it. He looked around for his backseater, who had ejected simultaneously. Where's the chute? he wondered. C'mon. He looked between his feet and saw a flailing, helmeted figure below him, still strapped to the ejection seat, falling like a stone. Negative chute on Larry. Jesus.

He'd be in the air another thirty seconds. He turned his beeper off to conserve the battery, give the North Vietnamese a harder time tracking him, if they were around. A low haze hung over the forest, which rose toward him, a green floor. He maneuvered his parachute toward a knoll that looked as if it had recently taken some fire; perhaps RESCAP knew the terrain. In a few minutes Blue flight would hook up with the KC-135 refueling tankers that circled in a racetrack oval in a safe area, then would return to establish radio contact. A-1 Skyraiders and a RESCAP AC-47 would come in for flak suppression, if there was any, while a chopper would drop straight down on the knoll to pick him up. Sometimes it worked, other times went wrong. A pilot's beeper failed, the sky got dark, chopper failure, navigation error, heavy ground fire.

The wind ripped at his parachute lines. Under his feet the trees became distinct. No fire. He tensed and relaxed his calves, awaiting the shock of the ground. The knoll came up quickly now, and he picked out a place to hide the parachute. Then, toward the west, the sun glimmering off their rifles, he saw a Vietcong patrol cutting through ground vegetation. They didn't want just him, they wanted to position themselves for a flak trap on the rescue attempt. Rescue pilots were taught to troll for fire to expose ground forces. But the VC were capable of unholy restraint, willing to use a dead pilot's beeper to draw a rescue attempt and then wait out a cautionary rocket attack by the Americans. Now one of the VC watched him with binoculars and told the others which direction to go.

He landed, rolled, stood up. He tore off his helmet but couldn't remove the cumbersome G suit without staying in the open for a minute, too dangerous to do. He stepped out of his parachute and ran to the edge of the knoll, pulling the chute with him. He found a low place covered with vines and wriggled inside, then sat sweating in the leaves and insect hum. He checked his flight watch, took the safety off his pistol. Either the patrol had encountered difficulty hacking through the underbrush or it was waiting for the rescue effort. He spied a blackened crater ten yards away. Probably caused by a stray rocket or mortar round and better cover in a firefight-better, anyway, than vines and leaves. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees over blackened roots, rolled into the hole.

It contained a charred corpse, eyes burnt out, face cooked tight over the skull. Judging by the sandals, VC. Hey, buddy, he thought, fuck you. The air was hot. So quiet. It seemed he could just stand up and wait. He checked his watch again. Larry. Larry's wife. The arrival of the Air Force sedan outside the base housing, the two officers easing slowly from the car-the wives knew what that meant. Ellie would whisper, "Oh no." Then he saw the Phantoms high up in the sky. He turned on his beeper. They would establish a circling pattern at about six thousand feet and direct the slower craft to the knoll. The RESCAP prop plane came grinding over the jungle, an ugly, blunt-nosed piece of machinery. It would establish a tight orbit at about two thousand feet and be the middle tier of the rescue operation.

A low rumble over the earth, choppers. He'd have to show himself. At that moment the RESCAP gunship started to circle, continuously firing its 20-millimeter cannons. He put his head against the burnt soil and counted to thirty. The two airmobile choppers, big green insects, rose above the edge of the forest. Took a certain kind of guts to fly air rescue. The door gunners sat behind their miniguns. He pulled on his helmet, jumped out of the hole, and ran to the middle of the clearing. One of the choppers dropped over the trees and lifted its nose, readying to land.

From the other side of the clearing came a flash. A shadow movement in the green foliage. One of the door gunners lurched backward, clutching his neck. The chopper lifted up to suppress the ground fire. He retreated to the edge of the jungle. The choppers gained altitude, under steady fire from the Vietcong, then banked back toward the clearing, machine guns and pod rockets blasting. They raked the other side of the clearing. The RESCAP plane lifted up. A flight of A-1 Skyraiders dropped low in front of him and began to release a string of rockets. They came right at him, buzzed within forty yards on either side. The explosions caught up-thumping the air. He lay against the earth, his head buffeted by the shock waves. The Skyraiders lifted up, tipping their wings. Smoke rose from the jungle. Time to move. He couldn't believe the Vietcong had survived.

One chopper descended and the other circled the clearing at high speed, door gunner firing. He ran through the flattened elephant grass toward the first chopper as it hovered waist-high off the ground. The door gunner aimed the gun, then motioned him to duck. Rounds whipped over his head. He scrambled forward on hands and knees, thirty yards to go. Fire came from all directions, rounds ping-pocking the side of the chopper. He glanced back to see a Vietcong soldier step forward from the jungle with a rocket-powered grenade launcher on his shoulder. The chopper's gunner signaled to the pilot to lift up. Now he stood up to run the last fifteen yards. Something whistled by him and fire billowed out of the chopper, blowing the pilot door open, shattering the windscreen. He fell to his knees. The chopper blades slowed in a ball of flame and the whole rig sagged to the ground. Burning men leapt to the grass and flailed about. The heat pushed against him and he scrambled away from the fire. Then the chopper's gas tanks exploded and he was slapped to the ground, a burning wheel landing next to him.

He lay still. He waited.

Automatic rifle fire. The screaming of men. The shots slowed. Voices searching. He assumed a dead position. Two more shots, pop-pop. Voices closer. Kill me now. I'm sorry, Ellie. I thought I was going to be okay. I love you, Ben. I love you, Julia. Voices in the grass. Something grabbed his ankles and turned him over. Their eyes met. Then they were clubbing him with their rifles, he knew that.

Surfacing from a dark depth. Light refracted, sound diffused. He discovered his own existence. Then he felt the pain, something wrong with his back. He opened his eyes to see that he sat inside a low hootch on a wooden crate, hands bound tightly in front of him. His survival vest and gun were gone. His head felt cottony. A North Vietnamese officer stood studying a slim volume. An interpreter, a short man with a happy expression, watched. The officer looked up, then read a few sentences aloud and the interpreter translated: "You never return to United State, you must understand this now. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam fight for fifty year. It is nothing, we fight for independence two thousand year. Mongolian, Japanese, French, American, you see, it no matter. Your United State government do not understand, we see. So, for you no go back. Captain Charles Ravich, you war criminal. I say to you, if you cooperate with question, you may live with peace. If you say no, you receive some punishment. Maybe it hurt. Your forces give much death to our comrades. We are intelligent people. You do not know us. We are good people. We do not ask you to make this decision very fastly. We know you make ideological change to us. We know you trained to not do, to resist. I say to you, Charles Ravich, consider what your heart say, not what United State say. You understan?"

There was some discussion in Vietnamese.

"What kind of jet you fly?"

In a near-whisper he said his name, rank, and serial number.

"We have seen the tag on your neck, yes. I ask what jet?"

He repeated himself.

"The jet. Say it."

"No." He looked at the interpreter. If they thought he would cooperate, they had the wrong guy. "I will not."

"We will wait some time, Charles Ravich. You think. Maybe think where you are now." The officer left. The question of the plane was only a beginning. They knew it was an F-4.

"Now," the interpreter said. "You talk soon."

A soldier brought him water and a pasty, fibrous gruel-mashed rice and bamboo sprouts. The soldier motioned him to eat, which he did, hungrily, with his hands.

Then he felt clearer. He knew where he was. His job was to endure all physical and psychological torture until he lost either his mind or his life. Resist making propaganda statements. When no longer able to withhold information, he'd lie or divulge innocuous data. Hard to judge the sophistication level. Some of the North Vietnamese had studied in French educational systems, some were opportunists, others Communist zealots. Tell them your parents were Iowa pig farmers. Where was he? Just north of the DMZ? Eastern Laos? Somewhere a North Vietnamese officer could go about in uniform, but southern enough that the Vietcong served as soldiers. He hadn't watched his direction in the last minute. A few degrees on the compass might mean the difference between liberation and long-term incarceration. No way to know. Insist on food and medical treatment. The better care he received, the better he'd withstand punishment. The Air Force trained pilots not to crack but assumed they would. Every man had his breaking point. All information and training could be divided into three categories: Most important were systems and weaponry capabilities-the USSR and China could find that information useful in other parts of the world; somewhat important were specific mission and strategy information; and least important-and first to be divulged under torture-were training techniques and Air Force policy. If a pilot was captured and not immediately taken to Hanoi, then the longer he survived, the better the chance of rescue by American or ARVN forces.

After several hours the officer returned. He opened a slim file.

"Captain Charles Ravich, we start."

He lifted his eyes.

"You see we move you to big trail soon when repair. Soon. Now you must listen-"

"I am a prisoner of war and an American officer. I-"

"Charles Ravich, you criminal! You criminal of war. I explain to you. We will teach you before difficult question. Show criminal of war Charles Ravich first photograph."

The soldier brought in three small albums bound in black.

"The first photograph is boy who stand by railtrain track when your jets strike. You look at it." The officer stood over him and put his hand around his neck, forcing his face to within inches of the color photos, which were small and square. "These pictures are what your bombs do to my country, Charles Ravich. Little proof, they are little, little proof. You are accountable. Many dead. Too many. Look at next photograph, look… sixty-two-year-old woman. She make fixing her own house when your jet attack. You see, this is the napalm. She live four day and then die. Now, you know Western philosophy. Man sum of action. Man accountable. This is Western, you believe. I say to you, as one human being to another, why you do this to us, why put the bombs on our children? People of my country die. You say maybe this is normal way to treat criminal pilot. No. I try to be civilize with you, Charles Ravich. But I say to you I want to kill you fast. My people are farmers. Now I ask you-do you have a young son? Young daughter? Ah, your face change. Daughter. Now I ask you

… Next photograph! Do you make this of your responsibility? This! Or, next photograph, this? These your acts. You Western man, you individual responsibility. Why you make yourself a criminal?"

After the first album, they showed him two more. He recognized background structures. Depos. Bridges. Truck camps, railyards. He'd seen them. He'd bombed them.

Dusk. Insects swarmed around a lamp hanging from the thatched roof. The officer dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. The hours passed. His back stiffened. A soldier came into the hootch, talking quickly. Some kind of emergency. They tied a crusty, gasoline-fumed rag around his head. He heard a whisking sound, a broom over dirt. "Down!" the interpreter yelled, striking Charlie in the face. He sank to his knees and felt the earth. "In!" the interpreter cried. A foot caught him in the ribs, pushing him into a hole-the fuckers were going to kill him in a hole. He didn't know his children yet, he hadn't had enough time with them. He crawled forward and then suddenly down into a chute. Someone pushed him from behind and he heard the whisking sound again. Now his shoulders rubbed the tunnel wall. He stumbled forward on his hands and knees as a voice behind him cried, " Nanh len! " Hurry. Adjusting, using his hands to guide himself, he learned the width and height of the tunnel. Surprisingly regular. The earth beneath his hands and knees was cool, packed. No light. Someone shuffled behind him, urging him on with a rifle. They crawled a long time. His hands ached. The crawling made his back worse-something was cracked or chipped or broken in the lower vertebrae. Periodically he crossed flat pieces of wood, distance markers perhaps. He tried counting paces between markers but lost count as the tunnel dipped and turned. Once he heard the rush of water. Other times voices, near, far, singsong, echoing eerily, laughing, whispering, perhaps even the cry of a baby, followed by the windy static of a shortwave radio. The Vietcong mountain cities. He came to divergent tunnels, judging by echoes and an odd feeling of the air moving around him. The rifle muzzle touched him, indicating which way to go. The air was fresh, then putrid, foul. Underground burial pits. That would be like the Vietcong. Removing their dead to conceal losses. Or just rotting fish? The tunnel rose and curved, branched off, fell. Then he heard a rumbling so portentous it seemed to come from the very center of the earth. The walls of the tunnel shook. By instinct he threw himself flat. " Nanh len! " the soldier behind screamed, punching him. He scrambled to his knees and scurried forward, roots tearing at him, the tumbling roar approaching, wavelike, bearing down, rippling the earth, gaining. He bumped into a tunnel wall. The soldier poked at him to go right but grabbed his shoulder. He could hear the soldier breathing, mumbling to himself in Vietnamese, perhaps counting intervals, listening to the explosions above the earth. They were close. How far underground were the tunnels? Moisture content of earth… detonation height… He tried to recall how deep a five-hundred-pound bomb cratered the earth. The B-52s also used thousand-pounders… The rumbling seemed almost above them now. The soldier sang to himself in terror, awaiting some answer. He understood-one tunnel cut away from the bombing vector and the other led beneath it. The earth shook. He hunched on his hands and knees, paralyzed, seeing nothing but black, feeling the hot, dank air.

" Nanh len! " the soldier screamed, yanking him to the left. He pitched forward, the roar on top of him followed by a rush of heat. Then silence. The two men rested before moving on.

Light. Smell of burning kerosene. The rifle touched him if he hesitated. Voices speaking Vietnamese. Something-a stick? — jabbed him in the ribs. Laughter. His hands brushed burlap, grains of rice. The smell of oil, the sound of metal being filed. Then dark. The shuffling of his guard was all he could hear, save his own breathing. Sweating heavily, feeling the dirt work into his hands and hair and flight suit, he crawled on his knees for hours. A mask of filth covered his face. The bailout from the F-4 seemed days prior. Adjusting already, Ellie, I am adjusting already, too fast.

A hand grabbed his foot. The gun indicated he was to climb upward into the chewing drone of insects.

A soldier pulled off his blindfold. He was standing on a dark jungle path. They put a rope around his neck. His back felt hot and weak, but he showed no pain so that they could not use it against him. Now, a few hours after dawn, direct sunlight did not penetrate the thick canopy of vegetation. Lushness out of control. Everywhere, huge leaves dripped. He sucked in the dense, wet air. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed in humming, adhesive clouds. The men bound his arms behind him. It hurt immediately, enough to make him hate them. He could feel the sweat drip through his clothing, a rash creeping across his armpits and groin. He wanted to scratch himself, shake loose his arms. The rope cut into his wrists so deeply that in a matter of minutes his fingers were numb.

A group of soldiers came along the trail, walking nimbly, each dressed in a black pajamalike uniform and carrying an AK-47 rifle. With them, led by a rope around his neck, walked a B-52 pilot, judging from the flight suit. A foot taller than the soldiers. His face seemed vaguely familiar-perhaps they'd shared some training class years ago. B-52s were rarely shot down, but it wasn't impossible; the huge planes were easy targets at low altitude and maneuvered ponderously when under attack. A bloodied bandage circled the man's mouth and jaw. The flier could even have been from one of the planes bombing the previous night. He walked with uncertainty, dragging his feet, bobbling his head as if something in his neck were loose.

"That man needs medical care." He wondered if his captors spoke any English.

"You go," one of the soldiers said, pushing him along the path.

"I need bandages and water. If you untie my arms-"

The Vietcong soldier put his rifle to the ear of the wounded pilot and indicated that he would shoot the man.

After three hours the wounded pilot crumpled onto the path. The Vietcong yelled and kicked at him to get up.

"Get him some water," Charlie said.

The Vietcong cut some vines and constructed a crude litter. The pilot made a noise when they rolled him onto it.

The ropes had cut off all feeling in Charlie's hands. The pain began again around his elbows and worked up the arms and circled his shoulders and dug into his chest. He tried to move his fingers, get the blood going. Nothing. If the ropes were removed, it'd be hours before he could use his arms. Even worse was his thirst. In the humid air he had sweated away perhaps seven or eight pounds, none of it replaced. He had no piss in him. His throat was dry, his lips sore. Branches and vegetation brushed against him; a latticework of cuts and scratches bled lightly. Insects flitted against his face. For a time he concentrated on putting one foot before the other. One and two. One and two, just say that. Fucking football practice. One and two. The earth was black and wet. The trail looked heavily used. He was glad the soldiers hadn't taken his leather flight boots, which had steel shanks. He wondered how they could walk in their little black sneakers. He could hear the other American moaning, calling to people not there.

The trail descended for several miles until they approached a wide stream. Shiny black larvae by the thousands hung from branches, so thick the trees were covered by a moist slithering mass that brushed off on him and the others as they walked. He shook his shoulders yet the larvae stayed on, inching purposefully across his chest, probing his skin with their pincer mouths. The larvae landed on the Vietcong as well, but they seemed unconcerned. Across the dirty green water stretched a footbridge suspended by woven vines. The floor of the bridge, only two feet wide, was constructed of heavy steel links in strips of about fifteen feet, old tank treads. When they reached the other side of the stream and had gone up the bank onto drier ground, one of the soldiers broke open a shell casing and removed the gunpowder, which he sifted with some dry powder he also carried. He wrapped the mixture with a large green leaf and lit the leaf with a butane lighter marked with the insignia of the Miami Dolphins. AFL. Don Shula. Acrid smoke billowed. The soldier jabbered in Vietnamese and he understood. The soldier circled the men with the burning leaf, enveloping them in the smoke. The larvae fell off, and they moved on.

They came upon an old elevated road. The guards hurried across this open space, looking left and right. Five feet to the other side, in the tall reedy grasses, sat the rusting hulk of a bulldozer cannibalized for parts. A remnant from the colonial period, when the French tried in vain to build a highway system. They had lost one hundred years in Vietnam, a century of sunsets.

An hour later, the men untied his hands but still kept the rope around his neck. His arms fell to his sides and flopped uselessly. It was hard to walk that way, and he waited for the feeling to come back. He noticed the trail got wider and flatter, with smaller paths leading off from the main one. Then, as if they had passed an invisible boundary, the trees became twisted and ripped apart, great banks of browned leaves hanging down, odd patches of light streaming through the canopy. The land fell in a valley and opened up.

Before him for hundreds of yards the ground lay blackened and cratered, as if the earth itself had collided with something, leaving a planetary skid mark. Charred tree trunks stood limbless, leafless, dead. Birds winged silently over the earth, and a gray-blue pall lingered in the low places, the smoke of what had been. Here and there, under clods of soil, protruded the remnants of a hootch, broken crockery, spilled rice, the wheel of a bicycle.

The soldiers yanked at the rope around his neck, urged him along. He lifted his eyes, understood why he hadn't seen any people. A creek ran through the bottom of the village. The muddy, disturbed banks were choked with corpses. The bodies lay tumbled and crushed and dismembered over one another, frozen pandemonium. Children, women, old men, stomachs bloated and streaked with rot, flies swarming over the portions above water, caught noisily in the wet black hair, buzzing on genitals, landing on toes, noses, knees. One and two. Farther down the stream lay five dead water buffalo. They looked healthy, well fed. Again, the flies. He knew the reason the villagers were all in one place. The B-52s had walked the bombs, flying slowly to create a thorough carpet effect. The big green lizards flew so high the village could not have been warned. The people had fled an approaching wave of fire and exploding earth, driving the water buffalo across the stream. The bombs had caught up.

A soldier prodded him with a rifle. They walked on.

The soldiers hiked until they reached a high spur of land. He was hungry, exhausted, but finally his hands were working. He figured the soldiers must be headed toward Laos, going nearly due west and toward the spine of mountains that marked the eastern border. They climbed higher along the spur as the light failed. He needed food and sleep. The night was clear; behind him, to the south and east, he saw a wide expanse, dark and undulating. The soldiers dropped the other pilot to the ground and camped. They ate cold sticky rice and took turns sleeping. He was made to sit near a ledge, his arms roped to a tree, his back grinding when he shifted. They gave him one cupful of rice.

Sometime during the night a huge soundless explosion bloomed to the south, maybe thirty miles away. Just a sudden ball of light, followed by lesser explosions, each eerily beautiful, rendered silent by the distance. In the morning he was not sure if he had dreamed them, or even slept.

He missed his children, their mouths and noses and eyes. Daddy, Daddy.

The next day they came to a village. He was dragged to a livestock pen with a galvanized trough of water. Three huge water buffalo stood to one side, hoof-deep in mud, switching their tails, the earth around them pocked by great flat turds. Using the same small book the first officer had used, an older Vietcong soldier tried to teach him the history of Vietnam through the millennia, fighting aggressors: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japanese Fascists, the French imperialists, and now the Americans. Each foreign country, the soldier said in an up-and-down voice, had some pretext for war-the conquest of spice routes, Catholicism, the French mission civilisatrice, the "protection of freedom"-and each time the Vietnamese (the Vietcong saw no difference between the North and South Vietnamese, only that one part was trying to free the other from the Americans and their "puppets") repelled these attempts. "We fight for ten, twenty, fifty year. Your government want war over quickly. No know Ho Chi Minh! We lose ten men for every one of you, we still win."

Reading set phrases, the man insisted that Charlie appear on Hanoi television and renounce the United States. A crowd gathered outside the pen, faces crowded to the slats. More questions. Approach altitudes, fuel requirements. Decoy formations of missions over Hanoi. He shook his head. The man sang on, getting angrier. The villagers outside the pen began to yell, and the men forced his head closer to the trough, where a scum of dead flies, manure, and buffalo hair floated.

"You say!"

He shook his head.

They shoved him deep into the trough. He counted to fifteen.

He was yanked out of the water. "Say! What formation!"

They forced him under again. He held his breath, a matter of concentration, conserve, relax, do not use oxygen… surely they would bring him up… his lungs burned… purple darkness crowded his mind… They pulled him up from the trough. His breath burst.

"Say!"

They gave him no chance to respond. This time his lungs began to burn almost immediately. He could feel water trickling between his lips, his knees sagged, his head was expanding…

They forced him underwater dozens of times, then suddenly stopped and dragged him to a small pit caged over with bamboo near the buffalo paddock. He could walk at a stoop. Here they left him alone, though some of the villagers approached the cage to stare. He forced his head against the bars on the high side of the pit, where he could see the village and surrounding area. In a marshy field below, young women winnowed rice by tossing it on flat baskets. Soldiers with machine guns over their shoulders stood idly by, talking, smoking small pipes. Farther up the hill, a group of villagers dug into the mountain with hand tools. The entrance to the shelter was reinforced with wooden beams laid across one another; women pushing wheelbarrows emerged from the hole. Other villagers poured rice into burlap bags, which they then sewed shut. The soldiers kept a watchful eye over all of this activity. Chickens strutted about the packed earth. An old man smoothed long lengths of green bamboo with a double-handled drawknife. The food-gathering and fortification activity may have meant the Vietcong feared American ground forces were closing in. They had positioned Soviet M-46 130-millimeter field guns on the perimeter of the village. Two Chinese trucks sat axle-deep in dry mud near the edge of the forest. Perhaps the village lay along a spur line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, within ten or fifteen miles of the Laos border, one way or the other. If American forces were near, and if the rough-cut jungle roads remained difficult, air recon would pick up the trucks.

A day later they took him out of the cage and sat him down in a hootch. The B-52 pilot was lying on a mat, breathing faintly, his exhalations not moving the flies about his mouth and eyes.

"You have to help that man."

The B-52 pilot was dragged outside into the sun.

Then they started on him again. The older man with the slim book.

"You say what is F-4 approach altitude."

He shook his head.

"What is approach speed? How much fuel fly from Ubon to Hanoi? You must say."

When he refused again, they tied his arms tighter behind his back, so tight his elbows touched. They bound his feet and connected a rope from his ankles to the ropes around his wrists. Then they tied another rope to his wrists and ran this up his back and around his Adam's apple. Any movement tightened one rope or another, causing him to feel the connections of bones and cartilage and muscle. Something in his back, he knew now, was broken.

He didn't say anything for the first hour. He was trying to think about it. He was trying to understand the pain so that he could find a way not to feel it. He believed that he was using his best thinking, but it was not working. When he tried to sleep, they poured hot water on his head. Not boiling but very hot. His thinking was no good now. The soldiers put a stick through the ropes and carried him back to his hole in the ground.

It rained. He licked the slats of his cage. Every minute that I live, I can live another. Soldiers stood next to the cage and laughed.

A day, a night, a day, a night, perhaps another day, followed by another night, or was that day a night previous, or was that night a day ago the same one from which he'd just awoken? He tried to count sunrises and sunsets, but his systems of remembrance collapsed into their own complexity, and he was left muttering a number, forgetting what it signified and why he cared. His limbs had stiffened so that he could not quite stand. Even after the ropes were removed, he couldn't bring his arms forward of his ribs. The ropes had rubbed through his flight suit into his skin. Each time the soldiers untied him, they hit him. The tied position became easier. He hated it but he also waited for it. His lips were crusted. He was caked with mud, not the silty brown mud of his youth (not the mud near the river where they played on the tire-swing, arcing high over the water, plunging into the dirty warm current, scrambling up the slick banks to the swing again), but lumpy ooze in which red worms twitched. The villagers trudged by in their conical hats, and the children no longer found him interesting. His shit went from soft to hard. The pain in his stomach started and he would follow it as it dropped through his bowels, and when the ropes came off, he would pray that he could shit the pain out. When he was dragged from his cage, they rinsed him with a bucket of water and put a wooden bowl near his face. Bamboo gruel, rice, dead flies. He was expected to eat it like a dog, and he did.

Some boys poked a stick into the body of the B-52 pilot and it exploded in gas and stink.

There was great hurry. There was no hurry. Night and then day. He knew that.

They broke his arms and he said yes, he flew a plane that dropped bombs.

They were keeping him alive, he did not know why. They made him eat. He remembered his children. A little girl and a little boy. He was glad they would never see him like this. They would grow up and never know their daddy, and if Ellie had any sense, she would marry again as soon as possible. She would know he wanted her to do that. Have more babies, sweetie, as soon as you can.

He said many things about many things and they gave him water and tried to write it down and he kept saying everything and perhaps this made sense to them. One day the complete three-dimensional diagram of the F-4's electrical system came into his head and then it left and he knew he had forgotten it forever.

They tried to wake him so that he could feel what they were doing.

One morning an American prop plane flew over, dropping loose bales of surrender leaflets. They pattered to the ground, several through the slats of his cage right in front of him. He'd seen translations of such leaflets. This one would have fit easily into his palm and showed a picture of a B-52, cargo doors open, a stream of bombs dropping from the plane's belly.

The village children gathered the pamphlets and burned them.

They moved him to a hootch. They took off his old ropes, but he did not change his position. They tied his arms together and the new rope to a pole. Shit softly bubbled out of his ass, a great relief to him.

He spent an entire day straightening his leg. When he finally looked at the leg, it was not straight, not even close.

One morning they laid a board across his shins and put three rice sacks filled with stones on it. By the afternoon he had told them Ellie had signed a mortgage for forty-seven thousand dollars and that his life insurance was thirty-five thousand. They were interested in such large sums and wrote them down. You very rich man. What else you own? He saw no benefit in withholding now. They were killing him, he knew. What else you own? Shares of IBM, he whispered, eight hundred shares. What is IBM? International Business Machines, a company. What is shares? That's a piece, a small piece of the company. How many pieces in all of company? they asked. I don't know. They whipped his back with the flat inner tube of a bicycle tire. Maybe ten million, he cried. This number was far too high for them to believe, and so they whipped him again.

He looked at his leg. He had no fat on his body anymore.

Shelling rocked the village, pounding the earth. It was night. Helicopters hovered in the distance, black gnats under the moon. At dawn a flight of F-105s zoomed at low altitude across the jungle, dragging a sonic boom behind them. Seconds after they passed, the sun boiled up from the earth. Skyraiders dropped in low. Antipersonnel bombs, clusters of smaller explosives. He had to be in Laos or South Vietnam. Soldiers ran back and forth in front of his hut. A woman hurried by with a small bloody bundle of arms and legs. He smiled. Commotion in the village. He heard chopper blades slapping the air, automatic-weapons fire. Between the slats of the hootch he could see soldiers running over the mud, some carrying rice bags. A jerky, spliced motion. He looked at his leather baseball glove, waiting to be picked. There was a little box on the left thumb with the words Owns This Genuine Rawlings Glove underneath. You were supposed to write your name in the box.

Now the Vietcong receded from the village into the jungle. He wriggled over the earth to the edge of the hootch, the rope pulling tight against his wrists behind him. Three Marines moved slowly from hootch to hootch. One would fire a few rounds into each, then go inside. Sometimes he came out clutching documents that he folded into a satchel. Most of the times he brought out a villager at gunpoint. After the men checked each hootch, one of the others burned it with a flamethrower, hosing fire from a shoulder cylinder through the air onto the thatched roof. The burning huts smudged the sky. The GIs found a teenage girl inside and pulled her out. She struggled.

"Baby-san suck-suck?" said one of the GIs.

"Me no give suck-suck." She spit in his face.

The soldier grabbed the girl's hair. "You fucking VC motherfucker baby-san, blow me!" She thrashed hatefully. He laughed and pushed her away.

After that, the soldiers stopped checking the hootches, just burned them quickly. He waited, wondering if the ball might get hit to him. Grounder, watch it all the way into your glove, Charlie-boy. They were not checking the hootches, and he was in one. The three men torched the hootch next to his. You have to want to be picked for the team. His arms were still roped to the pole. The soldiers' boots scuffed the earth outside. One of them machine-gunned the hootch.

Part of something that was part of his leg was blown off.

One of the GIs said, "You hear a noise?"

More shots. He curled into a ball. Something hot pierced his hand and passed between his legs. He screamed a hoarse whisper.

"It's a trap, man! Gas it."

His tongue lolled thickly in his mouth, his pants filling with blood. More gunfire cracked over him. Then silence. A shadow appeared at the opening to the hootch. A hand grabbed his dog tags. "Get the radio. We got a throttle-jock here. Fact, he just got shot." The hand slapped his cheek hard. A black face drew up to his, bloodshot eyes bright. "Boy, don't you fucking die on me now-someone else be doing the dying today."