"It hurts a little, yes."

He gasped as he spoke and his breathing was labored; the dressing taped to the upper part of his bare chest was dark with dried blood, and he could move his right arm only with difficulty because of the stiffness. The bullet had pa.s.sed between his top two ribs just beneath the collarbone on his right side and penetrated the pleural cavity, but from the wound beneath his armpit he guessed it had pa.s.sed out of his body again. His right lung had collapsed, and after five days and nights he was becoming accustomed to the shortness of breath which went with having to manage on only one lung.

"Are you going to die?"

Joseph looked into the wide, wondering eyes; her ten-year-old face, unaware of its innocent, unformed beauty, was perfectly serious as she gazed at him, expectantly waiting for an answer. "No, I don't think so." He winced again as he raised himself on one elbow. "I'm going to get better sometime. And then maybe I'll take you and your Mamma away to a place where there isn't any war."

"Isn't any war?" The cherubic amber lace crinkled with incomprehension. Outside, the distant rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire was continuous; occasionally the deeper roar of 90-millimeter tank cannon and the crump of mortar sh.e.l.ls shook the earth and drowned out the lighter weapons, but the Sound of small arms fire rarely died away altogether. The four Communist battalions that had stormed into Hue in the early hours of January 31 had seized the Citadel, Gia Hoi and most of the suburbs along the southern bank of the River of Perfumes within an hour or two, encountering only light resistance. American Marines of the First Battalion Phu Bai had successfully fought their way through to the U.S. MACV compound opposite the Citadel within hours, hut all their attempts to move out and clear the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops from the other areas south of the river had been resisted every step of the way. On the other bank, the depleted remnants of the First ARVN Division who had not been on leave when the Communists struck were trying to counterattack too, but they were making no progress against the Communists who now held the palaces in the heart of the Citadel. The U.S. Marines had taken to advancing along the streets crouched behind tanks in World War II fashion, but even these tactics, so unfamiliar to troops who had become accustomed to the jungle and hill warfare of Vietnam, were proving ineffective, and gains of a few yards only were being made each day; accurate bazooka fire was taking its toll of the tanks, and the jungle-trained enemy was proving surprisingly adept at house-to-house fighting. Low cloud and drizzle had made provision of close tactical air support impossible, and the fight for Hue raging all around the sampan that was moored among a clutter of similar boat dwellings was already proving to be a costly battle of attrition for both sides.

"There's always been fighting in your country ever since you were born," said Joseph speaking very quietly. "But it's not like that everywhere. Children in other countries play games all day, go swimming and take picnics. Would you like to do that?"

She looked at him uncertainly, resting her delicate chin on two tiny fists, and didn't answer. Once or twice during the past five days he had seen her peering shyly round the edge of the hanging mat that divided the cocoa palm fiber cabin into two compartments. Normally she had left the boat with Tuyet and her younger brother Chuong in the early morning each day and returned with them in the early evening, but for once she seemed to have stayed behind in the rear compartment of the sampan, and he a.s.sumed she had climbed through while he slept.

"Are you really my mamma's father?" Her little face contorted again in consternation.

"Yes, I am."

"But you're an American. How can that be?"

"Perhaps I'll explain later." Joseph winced and closed his eyes again. The slightest effort tired him still, and he felt dizzy whenever he moved. Due to the shock of the wound and the loss of blood, he had spent most of the first five days sleeping fitfully, slipping back and forth from unconsciousness to a dazed state of wakefulness, hearing only dimly the noise of the battle outside. Sometimes he had wakened to find Tuyet kneeling beside him tending his injury, and he had guessed from the odor of the dressings that it had become infected. It took her half an hour each day to free the bandages and clean the wound, using pots of warm water boiled on a little spirit stove in the rear of the boat; but although her movements were always gentle and considerate, she had deliberately avoided his eyes, and her features had remained set always in a mask of indifference. Whenever he had tried to speak to her, she had motioned him to silence and refused to reply.

He had little recollection of how they had reached the sampan. He had stumbled somehow through the shanty district with her help and they had reached the river wharves without being detected. They had seen more North Vietnamese soldiers crossing the river in small boats, but then he had begun to feel faint and dizzy. They hid on the wharves for a while before taking to some kind of boat of their own, but then he had lost consciousness completely. He had come around to find her slapping his face in desperation, and with her help he had clambered onto the covered sampan. The first thing he remembered after that was waking to find her feeding him a thin rice gruel in the early light of morning.

"Won't your people find me here?" he had asked when he had become sufficiently clear-minded to realize they were in an occupied part of the city. "Aren't we still in danger?"

"The sampan has a safe conduct pa.s.s issued by the commander of the People's Liberation Armed Forces," she told him curtly. "It's well known that I've lived on the river ever since I came to 1-lue a year ago."

Joseph had watched her closely as she spoke, and despite the coldness of her manner he had sensed that she, too, was afraid that the boat might be searched.

"I'm very sorry, Tuyet," he had said softly. "I came here to warn you - not to put you in greater danger."

She had turned her back on him abruptly then, busying herself with the new dressing, and had made no acknowledgment of his apology.

When Joseph opened his eyes again, the little girl was still sitting silently beside him, watching him with mystified eyes. He glanced at his watch and discovered to his amazement that he had slept again for two hours. Through the worn fiber of the cabin roof he could see that it was growing dark outside, and there seemed for the first time to be a lull in the fighting.

"What is your name?" asked the girl impatiently, as though she had been waiting for all the two hours to put that question.

"Joseph Sherman."

She repeated an approximation of the name aloud several times in her little singsong Vietnamese voice. Then she stopped suddenly. "If you are my mamma's father, then you are also my grandpapa."

Her face was grave, as though she had been turning the awesome prospect over in her mind for some time, and Joseph felt tears start to his eyes. Unable to speak, he nodded and smiled tenderly at her.

She didn't return the smile but continued to stare at him, perplexed. "But how can that be - when you're an American?"

"It's difficult to explain." He continued to smile at her. "What's your name?"

She studied his face in silence for a long time, as though in doubt as to whether she should confide in him; then she drew an exasperated breath to indicate that she was yielding the information with reluctance. "My name is Trinh," she said firmly.

"That's a beautiful name - it means 'pure and virtuous,' doesn't it? I bet you're really a little angel in disguise."

She giggled suddenly, and her hand flew to her mouth, but she continued gazing at him, her eyes bright with merriment above her fingers; then she leaned forward and plucked at the hair growing on his forearm. "Why is it Americans have hair growing all over their bodies like monkeys?"

Her expression of innocent curiosity reminded Joseph with a sudden vividness of Lan at the age of ten in the garden of the governor general's palace, and he saw in a flash the inherited resemblance; feeling the lump in his throat grow, he beckoned to her to come closer to him, but at that moment the boat rocked from side to side under the weight of :somebody stepping aboard from the quay and the smile melted from her face. Before she could move, the matting was drawn aside and Tuyet appeared. Her face clouded on seeing them together, and she admonished Trinh in Vietnamese so rapid that .Joseph couldn't catch what she said. The startled girl immediately scrambled out of his compartment, and he heard Tuyet continuing to scold her behind the mat curtain.

When she brought his evening bowl of gruel and dried fish art hour later, Tuyet's face was dark with displeasure. She placed the food in front of him without speaking, then made to return to the rear of the sampan without inspecting the dressing on his wound. In the distance he heard the rattle of gunfire grow' in volume again as another battle began.

"Tuyet, please stay and talk for a minute," said Joseph quietly. "I'd like to know what's happening in the city."

"You imperialist troops and their puppet allies are trying to break the hold of the people - but they're not succeeding. The revolution in Hue is going to be victorious." She spoke with her back to him, but Joseph noticed there was not the same conviction in her words as previously and her shoulders seemed to sag.

"Tuyet, may I ask you where you go each day?"

"To help carry forward the revolution. There's much work to be done. In the occupied areas of the city our cadres have to walk the streets with megaphones calling on the corrupt officials of the Thieu government to give themselves up. We've set up many reeducation centers "I think your children grew lonely and frightened today when you left them here," he said, interrupting her deliberately. "You shouldn't scold Trinh for coming to talk to me."

She crawled back quickly along the sampan towards him, her eyes ablaze with anger. "Which is better? To go to work for the revolution as I am expected to do? Or stay away and have them come looking for me? And have them find you here?"

The lines of tension and fatigue in her face were clearly visible, and to his amazement he saw that she was on the verge of tears; in a blaze of realization he understood for the first time the weight of the dilemma with which she was struggling. "Tuyet, I'm sorry. I've been blind. I can see now how difficult "in making things. It's too dangerous for me to stay here - for you and your children." He eased himself painfully into a sitting position. "I think I'm strong enough now to leave the sampan. I'll try to make my way through the darkness tonight to the American lines around the MACV compound."

"You won't get more than a few yards! With a collapsed lung you'll be able to walk only very slowly. You're weak from loss of blood - you would be taken before you'd gone a hundred yards."

Joseph threw back the blanket covering his legs and pushed himself to his knees. "That would be better than being found here. With me gone, you and the children will be safe again."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the blanket to cover him once more then froze at the sudden sound of voices on the quay. They heard the piping voice of Trinh answering questions put to her in a guttural northern accent and the little girl's apprehension was evident from her replies.

"Who else lives on the sampan?"

'My mother, my brother, me and..

Trinh stopped suddenly and they heard her cry out. Joseph pressed his eye to a slit in the palm fiber cabin wall and saw three North Vietnamese regulars in khaki uniforms and jungle-leaf hats. One of the soldiers had caught Trinh roughly by the wrist and she looked frightened.

"And who else? Come on, tell us quickly!"

Joseph felt the sampan rock and then saw Tuyet scramble onto the quay and run to her daughter's side. She held a paper in her hand which she thrust under the nose of the soldier. "I'm Tuyet Luong. I'm a political cadre working with the People's Liberation Armed Forces. Here's my safe conduct pa.s.s for the sampan, signed by our commander."

The North Vietnamese soldier looked Tuyet slowly up and down, then turned towards his companions and snorted derisively. "We can't always trust the judgment of our southern sisters, can we, comrades?" Joseph saw the soldier look Tuyet up and down once more, his gaze openly lascivious this time; then he grinned at his companions. "I think I must search the sampan anyway to make sure, comrades, don't you agree?" He dropped Trinh's wrist, took Tuyet by the arm and stepped towards the stern of the sampan.

"Wait!" Tuyet hung back, forcing the soldier to stop. "My son's already asleep. He's ill with a fever and mustn't be wakened." Joseph, watching through the torn cabin wall, saw the face of the North Vietnamese grow angry. Then Tuyet forced an artificial smile to her lips and put a hand on his arm, gesturing towards the neighboring sampan that, like most of the others moored along the bank, was empty because its inhabitants had fled. "Perhaps you should search the next boat," she said in a cajoling voice. "I'll help you if you like - then I can send my daughter to bed too." She waved Trinh hurriedly back onto their own boat, then drew the soldier smilingly towards the next craft.

Joseph heard the little girl scuttle back into the cabin and settle down beside her brother, who was already asleep. Through the torn cabin wall he saw the other two North Vietnamese saunter away, laughing obscenely, and he lay down himself and pulled the blanket up over his chest. The battle downstream died away again as quickly as it had begun, and calm returned to the river once more. Joseph tried hard to close his ears, but he could not blot out the sounds coming from the adjoining sampan. He heard the North Vietnamese soldier grunting and breathing noisily and once he thought he heard Tuyet cry out. When an hour later she returned alone to their sampan, he heard her sobbing quietly on her mat for a long time before she fell asleep.

16.

The next morning Joseph woke late. Cold drizzle brought by the northeast monsoon was drifting down onto the embattled city from skies that seemed to press ever closer to the ground, and moisture was dripping steadily through the sampan's canopy onto his blanket. Before he was properly awake he found himself wondering vaguely why the previously distant rattle of gunfire seemed suddenly amplified, and it was some moments before he realized that the fighting was moving in the direction of his hiding place. As he lay there he strained his ears, hoping above the noise of the battle to hear voices or the sounds of movement in the curtained-off rear section of the sampan, but gradually it dawned on him that Tuyet and her children were no longer there. When he pushed himself up on one elbow to peer out through a slit in the cocoa palm fiber, the infected wound in his chest throbbed suddenly; he could feel the dressing was sticky with suppuration, and he began wondering how much longer he could hope to survive without proper treatment.

Through the slit he could see occasional puffs of white smoke from exploding rockets, and all along the waterfront, fires started by a heavy American artillery bombardment called in from eight miles outside the city the previous night were still smoldering and sending a pall of thick black smoke into the air. A corner tower of the Citadel was visible to him, its masonry shattered and scarred by American and South Vietnamese sh.e.l.ls but still the ten-foot- thick walls were affording protection to North Vietnamese snipers who fired sporadically from high windows and parapets.

It was with a start that Joseph realized that the drenched flag he could see hanging limp on its staff above the fortified main gate was the gold-starred red and blue standard of the National Liberation Front. Although Tuyet had told him that the Communists had controlled most of the city for a week from their command post in the throne room of the Nguyen emperors, this symbolic proof of America's inability to dislodge them, hoisted above the historic ramparts, still came as a shock. He could see that the Communist forces had blown up the French-built Clemenceau Bridge, causing its ma.s.sive steel arches to collapse into the river, but despite this obstacle he couldn't understand why the superior weight of American arms was not able to retake Hue quickly now that the enemy for the first time ever had done what Americans had always wanted - come out of their jungle and mountain hiding places to fight in the open.

As the day wore on, the pain in his chest grew more severe and he could only lie helplessly in the bottom of the dripping sampan, dozing during the lulls in the fighting. From time to time he caught a glimpse through the canopy of the distinctive palm-leaf helmets of the North Vietnamese troops; they seemed to be hurrying unheeding past the sampan, and he guessed they were retreating westward along the river in the face of the American advance. As the empty hours pa.s.sed, a Conviction grew in him that Tuyet had taken the children and fled. He considered trying the leave the sampan but decided it would be more dangerous to get caught in the cross fire between the two armies than to remain where he was. The whole of his body seemed to throb with the pain of the wound, making him feel sick and dizzy, and he wondered through the muzziness if he might be dying. He felt desperately tired, and as the feeling that Tuyet had gone forever strengthened, a mood of deep despondency settled in his mind, and he found he hardly cared what happened to him.

He fell asleep again as evening approached, and he imagined he was dreaming when he felt the boat rock and heard hushed whispers behind the mat curtain. The sounds of his daughter lighting the little stove and preparing a simple meal helped by the children seemed as real in his dream as they had done for seven nights past, but he continued dozing and only opened his eyes when Tuyet pulled the mat aside to bring in his usual dish of rice gruel and dried fish. After putting the bowl down in front of him, she retreated wordlessly, hut he reached out and caught her by the arm.

"Tuyet, I thought you weren't Corning back tonight." She turned her head towards him unprotesting, and he saw then that she was pale and trembling. "But I'm very glad you did because I wanted to thank you for last night. I had no right to expect that He choked on his words and his voice died away altogether; gently she pulled her wrist free of his grasp and sat back on her haunches, twisting her hands in her lap and staring fixedly at the floor. Outside there was a sudden exchange of fire much nearer than before.

"The fighting's coming closer, isn't it? Is that why you are worrying - because you are losing Hue?"

"I no longer care who wins and who loses!" She uttered her words with great vehemence, but although her expression was fierce her eyes brimmed with tears.

"Why, Tuyet?"

"I've grown tired of slaughter and bloodshed! Today I saw a hundred people murdered in cold blood. Some were shot in the head, others were battered to death with clubs and rifle b.u.t.ts." A shudder of horror shook her body at the memory. "Some of them were even buried alive."

Joseph stared at her aghast. "Who were these people? Who killed them?"

"My comrades." Her tone was suddenly bitter and contemptuous. "My comrades killed them because we were wrong."

"What do you mean?"

"We were wrong about the uprising. A great 'General Uprising' of all the people of South Vietnam was predicted. All over the South people should have swarmed onto the streets to welcome the triumphal entry of our forces - but they didn't; they've remained indifferent. So now the government leaders of Hue have been killed - along with a lot of minor functionaries."

There was a sudden loud explosion close to the sampan, and they both stopped and listened in alarm. The stutter of automatic rifle fire continued to grow louder, the low-pitched bark of the Russian-made AK-47 a.s.sault, rifles contrasting sharply with the higher trilling of the American M-16.

"My job here was to help compile lists of government officials, army officers, religious leaders, teachers - people like that. We were told they would be taken away for reeducation. But they were really death lists all the time. Today, because the leadership can see we're going to be pushed out of Hue, they've embarked on a ma.s.s campaign of cold-blooded a.s.sa.s.sination." She stopped, and 'her voice sank to a whisper. "The names of three thousand people are on those lists - and all of them are to be murdered!"

She fell silent for a minute or two, then she looked up at him again. "There were foreigners among them - some German and French priests and several Americans. There was a tall young one, fair-haired like you. They tied .his hands behind him, made him kneel beside a shallow grave, then shot him in the back of the neck. They buried him even before he had stopped moving."

Tears began trickling down her cheeks and she closed her eyes; she sat like this for a long time, her fingers flexing and unflexing convulsively in her lap, and at last Joseph leaned towards her. "Please let me take you all away to America, Tuyet," he pleaded. "You can put it all behind you there."

She shook her head quickly without opening her eyes. "It's impossible"

"Nothing is impossible, Tuyet, if you want it badly enough. If you believe in it enough, it can become possible. I want more than anything to take you away from Vietnam."

She shook her head again and a little sob escaped her lips." I've done many terrible things too." She opened her eyes to find him staring at her with an agonized expression her lower lip trembled but she fought to regain her control, "Yes, I threw the bombs in Saigon to kill my husband's torturers, if that is the rumor you've heard. And I would do it again! By killing him they robbed me of the only happiness I had known in my whole life! And the desire for revenge didn't leave me for a long time. I fought as a platoon leader of the Liberation Army in the delta for two years. I killed many times - Americans as well as government troops."

"I knew about that." Joseph spoke very quietly, and she gazed at him open-mouthed in astonishment.

"You knew all that - but still you wanted to come?"

Joseph nodded silently.

Her eyes widened as though she was horrified suddenly by everything she had been saying; then, with a little moan of anguish, she slipped her arms around his neck and bent towards him until her forehead rested against his bare chest. Sobbing wracked her body for several minutes and Joseph wept silently too, his arms tight about her. Outside along the devastated waterfront the battle advanced steadily towards them.

While he was holding her, Joseph saw the frightened faces of little Trinh and her brother, Chuong, peer anxiously around the edge of the curtain and reluctantly he disengaged himself. 'What will you do, Tuyet?" he asked softly. "This area will be in American hands within a few hours. Will you take a chance and stay with me? I'll get us all to America, I promise you." He glanced towards the frightened children and smiled. "All of us."

She drew back from him, clasping her arms tight around her own body as if to strengthen her resolve, and after a moment's pause she shook her head decisively. "I must stay here. Vietnam has been my only real mother and father. We'll all go to the North! My Uncle Kim has heard of me through my work for the Liberation Front." She shot a quick glance at Joseph. "He holds a high position in the Politburo of the Lao Dong, and he's a close confidant of Ho Chi Minh. He's offered to help me find a home near him in Hanoi."

She- turned away hurriedly to usher the children back into the rear section, and he heard her banging about and giving whispered instructions as they packed their meager belongings. After a few minutes Trinh clambered through into his part of the sampan again and hurried to his side. She looked at him for a moment with sad eyes, then reached out and touched the dressing on his wound delicately with one linger.

"I hope you get better," she whispered, suddenly shy. She took a deep breath as if she was about to say something more, but the sound of her mother's voice calling urgently from beyond the mat curtain brought a look of alarm to her round child's face. After a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure her mother wasn't watching, she bent towards him. "Thua, Ong ngoai con di," she whispered close to his ear; "I must go now, Grandpapa." She pressed her lips briefly against his bristly cheek, then scampered back t, her mother.

Joseph lay waiting miserably for Tuyet to come and take her leave, and only when he felt the boat rock twice did he realize she had chosen deliberately to avoid an anguished farewell. Sick at heart, he yelled her name at the top of his voice and scrambled to his knees. He crawled frantically through the empty rear section and out onto time flat stern. The noise of mortar and small arms fire had become deafening and she was fifty yards away, moving fast in a westward direction along the riverbank. Already an anonymous figure in the gathering gloom, her loose black trousers ballooned around her legs as she ran balancing the pole on her left shoulder. The panniers were heavily laden with the cooking stove arid all the other modest possessions from the sampan, amid the two children clung desperately to her hands and clothing, half walking, half running beside her through the awful din of the battle that filled the night.

Although his eyes never left them, neither Tuyet nor the boy looked back. Only Trinh turned her head once in his direction, and he waved his uninjured arm sadly in Farewell. The little girl raised her head to speak excitedly to her mother, pointing back towards him, but she stumbled in doing so and he saw Tuyet shake her angrily in admonition. Gradually the three frail figures were swallowed up in the misty half-darkness, and he sank slowly to his knees on the stern of the sampan, a cold knot of certainty that he would never see his daughter again tightening in the pit of his stomach.

A platoon of Marines advancing behind a rank found Joseph crouched on the sampan's stern half an hour later, He had crawled back into the interior to get his bloodstained shirt and he waved this slowly above to his head to dissuade them from bring on him. A black sergeant with the b.u.t.t of a dead cigar clenched between his teeth advanced from the darkness holding his M-16 unwaveringly on Joseph until he was certain he was not armed or hostile. Only then (lid he allow his astonishment to show.

"Jesus! You mean to say an American has been hiding out on one of these little f.u.c.kin' sampans for a whole week with that wound?" The sergeant laughed incredulously as he helped Joseph ash.o.r.e, then stepping down into the boat, he got down onto his hands and knees to inspect the interior. A moment later he was back on the bank, wrinkling his nose.

"Guess you're glad to get off that thing, Mister Sherman, ain't yuh? Kinda stinks in there, don't it?"

Joseph looked at the sergeant but didn't reply; there was enough light left for him to see for the first time that the sampan had been moored only a hundred yards or so from the spot where he had spent that first enchanted night with Lan on the River of Perfumes thirty-two years before.

17.

Captain Gary Sherman sat up in his dank, musty bunker at Firebase Birmingham and rubbed his eyes. Outside, twilight was falling over the flat coastal plains of Quang Ngai, three hundred miles north of Saigon. He had slept for half an hour hut was still gray-faced with fatigue; only three hours earlier he had led his under strength Bravo Company back to base from its third abortive "search-and-destroy" sweep of the week through the poor hamlets that lay scattered across the low-lying marshes of the province within sight of the sea. the mission had been routine; they had been out for two nights without once making contact with the Viet Cong, but mines and b.o.o.by traps had again whittle away another half-dozen of his men.

By the end of the operation, the fatigued survivors were watching the wounded being hauled out by medivac helicopters with envious expressions in their eyes, and he knew that some of the frightened young draftees he was trying so painstakingly to mold into an efficient fighting force would have gladly swapped places with them. Two had suffered minor shrapnel wounds, another had lost a foot, and a third had all the fingers blown off his left hand. Three of them, however, had been killed outright, and as always happened with mines, the bodies of the victims had been horribly mutilated, and their departure by helicopter wrapped in their own rain ponchos had left the other men dull- eyed and silent with shock.

It was the third time in a week that Bravo Company had been caught in a minefield, and in all some thirty men had been lost; seven had been killed and many of the others had suffered severed limbs and mutilations that would leave them crippled and disfigured for life. The casualty rate was higher than normal because the winding paths through the hamlets of the region, like those all over rural South Vietnam, had been sown and re-sown with mines more intensively than ever before in the wake of the Tet Offensive that had proved so costly for the Communist forces. Although pictures of the street fighting in the major cities had shocked America deeply, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese losses by the time they retreated had mounted to thirty thousand dead and wounded against American and South Vietnamese losses of about ten thousand. As a result, as soon as the offensive ended, the severely weakened Communist battalions had reverted to their familiar guerrilla strategy once more, dodging and feinting in the jungles and mountains and rarely engaging their enemy openly.

Anxious to press home their advantage, the United States military commanders in South Vietnam were gushing their own troops hard in pursuit, and for this reason Gary's repeated requests to have his demoralized company stood down from active duty had been refused. General Westmoreland, the American commander in South Vietnam, had asked for a ma.s.sive new commitment of troops from the United States to help holster this new drive, but the Tet Offensive had greatly strengthened antiwar sentiment in America, and President Johnson had turned down his request; as a consequence no replacements were arriving for the casualties in Bravo Company either, and for a minute or two after waking Gary lay motionless on the inflated mattress covering his wooden plank bed, reflecting wearily on his predicament. He could see no end to the terrible attrition of the men under his command, arid he couldn't think how he was going to lift the morale of the Bravo troops for yet another operation. He had barely been able to believe his ears when, after their return that afternoon, the colonel commanding the four- company Task Force Birmingham had announced that Bravo was being a.s.signed a blocking role in a dawn a.s.sault by the entire force on the village of Quang To. High grade intelligence indicated the presence in the village of a large contingent of the Viet Cong's 42nd Light Force Battalion, the crew-cut colonel had announced with a smug grin. "The SOBs are hiding out in those bricked-up houses and the tunnels underneath," he had told his officers. "I guess all our guys need a boost we've had too many frustrating weeks of noncontact. So you can go tell 'em tomorrow we're gonna give 'em a real chance to zap Victor Charlie's a.s.s!"

Looking at his watch, Gary saw there was still a half an hour to go before briefing time, and he dragged himself reluctantly to his feet and began to wash. As he splashed water on his sleepy face from a hand bowl, the sudden sound of hysterical giggling reached his ears from outside and he stopped and looked out through the doorway. Two of the draftees in his company, both steelworkers from Indiana, were staggering back to their billets from the direction of the base "boom-boom shop," a collection of' tumbledown shacks just off Highway One where peasant girls sold their favors under the beady-eyed gaze of an aged mamasan; they were pa.s.sing a marijuana joint hack and forth between them as they swayed along and one of them, a heavily built youth with fair hair, was tipping a can of American beer to his bps between giggles. Watching them go, Gary remembered that the last time he'd seen them in the field they had been helping lift one of the shattered bodies into a helicopter; they hadn't changed their clothes, and he could see that blood smears from some of the wounded had merged into the filth of their mud-spattered combat fatigues.

"Go get a fresh issue of clothing, you men," called Gary sharply. "I want everybody shaped up for my briefing in art hour's time."

The soldiers stopped giggling long enough to turn and raise their hands in a sloppy salute, but a he went back into the bunker, he heard their shrill laughter Start up again and they continued noisily on their way back to their billets. He stood thinking absently about the two stoned soldiers for a moment, then to take his mind off the briefing for the next day's operation, he pulled out an airmail pad and sat down to write a letter to his father.

"Dear Dad," he began, Don't mistake my lateness in replying to your letter from London as evidence of anything at all except that I'm usually too d.a.m.ned busy and too tired these days to get around to letter-writing. During the four months since the Tet panic died down, life here has been one long hectic round of "search-and-destroy" missions in which we do a h.e.l.l of a lot of searching and very little destroying. In return of course we get a steady debilitating toll of casualties from traps and mines. That may sound to you like "the mixture as before," but believe me, it's stronger medicine now than ever and just as unpleasant to swallow. Your letter arrived a week ago and I'm s.n.a.t.c.hing a few minutes between sorties to scribble a line in reply because I wanted to tell you how delighted I was when I read those first few lines about Mark getting out of his h.e.l.lhole in Hanoi soon.

Like you, don't give a d.a.m.n either which peace group goes to bring him home as long as he gets Out okay after all he's been through. I'm sure the personal letter you wrote to Ho Chi Minh helped a h.e.l.l of a lot although I wish you'd told me about it before - it might have helped me to behave more sensibly those last couple of times we met. Your other major revelation that you'd quietly married Miss Boyce-Lewis and decided to set up home in England also helped make me feel a little more ashamed of myself than I already did - which is saying something. Outside the Continental that night when I saw you together I was somewhat less than gracious and my conscience bothered me a h.e.l.l of a lot afterwards. It's a load off my mind to let you know that and I offer a clumsy apology along with my really heartfelt congratulations to you both .