Ubo

6

DANIEL HAD BEEN forced to endure many trips into the minds of soldiers during combat. It had become a constant theme in his compulsory role-playing, so apparently it was a primary area of interest in the roaches’ studies, but at least in Daniel’s case the results were mixed. It was almost always a frenetic and fragmented experience, frequently brief, as he was jerked out of these scenarios for a variety of reasons including bodily trauma and death. He wondered if the roaches had been unable to get a stable read of these personalities because of the volatile nature of most combat experiences. The stray thoughts he caught were like unstable bombs threatening to blow up in his face.

Fighting the enemies of freedom to spread democracy throughout the world.

“Why do they hate us?” It always shocked Daniel to discover that Americans were hated. “Is that what brought the towers down?”

A pre-emptive strike. A fight to remain dominant.

“Sergeant Taylor?” Voices like insect scrapes across the brain, painful and annoying at a low level, but he was trained to ignore such tiny, irritating voices. He was glad they didn’t use his first name. Perhaps “Sergeant” had become his new first name. He doubted he would ever use his given name again.

Of course Taylor wasn’t his name, either. He’d been misidentified. His face must really be messed up. He’d become the unknown soldier. How much of the rest of him was left?

“What do you think he thinks about?”

“Nothing. How could he? He doesn’t move; he barely breathes. Look at his eyes. They don’t blink.”

“Has anyone on the staff seen him close his eyes? Does he sleep?”

“Look at his eyes, so dry. They should put more drops in them. How could a man stay sane without sleep?”

So they weren’t doctors or nurses. Maybe they were orderlies, or maybe cleaning people. Good, he was sick of doctors and nurses. He’d rather talk to the regular guys cleaning up piss and blood. If he could talk.

“I hear he used to talk.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t answer any of their questions. He only talked about what he wanted to talk about. And then one day he just stopped talking.”

Black clouds of smoke drifting with veins of blue. He dropped like a burning cinder, the jungle shooting up around him. Dark wings covered him. Sharp legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his thoughts. The smell of phosphorous so strong it pinched the nostrils. The smell of napalm and the smell of human flesh burning. The evil stench of insect bodies massed for an attack.

AND SUDDENLY DANIEL was out of that soldier, and into another grunt back in Vietnam. Pinkville, up against the border. He skipped through their heads like a stone thrown by a boy across a dark and deceptively still pond. My Lai. Charlie Company. 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.

He’d heard that Captain Medina’d said nothing would be left alive in the village. That wasn’t a direct order, but leave it to Lieutenant Calley to try to make it happen. Calley was Medina’s bitch, and nothing he could do would please him, but he kept on trying. They all should’ve just walked away, pretended they didn’t hear him that day. Some of them did, and some of them would feel okay about it either way, but for the rest of his life he would wonder if he could have, should have done something.

The film of it was embedded in his head: all those people begging and screaming, and Calley firing into that ditch, and the emotions so high his eyes were burning, the sky in his private film burning, those dying breaths turning into dark plumes of smoke. He had to admit, he used to call them gooks, but not after that. Never after that.

It was your duty, basically, to go to war. He’d even believed in the Domino Theory. But God knows, not that.

SERGEANT TAYLOR WRINKLED his nose, even though he didn’t have a nose anymore. The smell of burning shit. That was his first smell of Vietnam—out where there wasn’t any plumbing they collected all the human shit in barrels, soaked it in fuel oil and set it on fire. Guys had to stir the barrels to make sure it all burned. Always a bad smell, a bad taste. Pale, bloodless faces. Dark, yellowish, insect-like heads. The salt taste of blood in the mouth. The need to bite, to chew, to rip, to tear tender skin. The need to smash like some rampaging god. To ignite mayhem. Sergeant Taylor used to talk often about the lies of Vietnam. There was little else to do.

Taylor loved the way Alex smiled. He was a good boy. Blond hair, skinny, and eighteen years old. Basketball player, playing now for God and country. He didn’t pay much attention to what Taylor said, or at least he didn’t act like he did. Still, he was a good boy. But hell, the kid didn’t know what they were going to ask him to do. None of them did. Hell, the whole damn country had no idea what it was trying to face.

“Now the way I parse it out,” Taylor continued, “is that you first got your big lies. Everybody knows what the big lies are, whether they think of them as lies or not. You know, son, lies about whether we can win or not, or whether we belong here in the first place. The lies that got us into this mess. Then there’s the medium sized lies, don’t you see, like The Body Count Lie, or the Stupid Math Lie, as I like to call it.”

He stared at the boy, who now grinned in embarrassment. Taylor figured the kid was scared to death that some brown bar or the C.O. might walk by. He really shouldn’t do this to the boy, he supposed. Damn them all, though. They spend all their time teaching kids in school about being heroic, about being noble and giving your life to something bigger than yourself. They don’t teach you about the nights and what to do when you’re ass-deep in the dark. These people here in Nam, they’ve lived in the dark for a long, long time. They know it’s got teeth and a belly it needs to fill. They know you have to grow teeth, too, if you’re going to survive it. You have to embrace it and become the goddamned God of Mayhem. The number of dead don’t matter, except the bodies are just something more you can feed it. What the hell does a body count mean out here anyway?

“You know about the body count, don’t you, soldier? Haven’t you counted no bodies yet? For shame. You know, twenty here. Sixteen back there—oops—one of them’s ours from that not-so-friendly fire so better make that fifteen. Twenty-five over there, but that count includes two cows, three civilians, and a fence post. Out here we use that new Stupid Math. Forty-two in the next county, but then them were all civilians. Now, you got to be careful not to miss the bodies left in the ditches, stacked on the trails like bags of dirty laundry, the bodies in the house, the bodies hanging from the trees, the body fertilizer, the body mayonnaise. How many arms or how many legs or—here’s a tough one for you—how many pounds of loose gut equal one body on the C.O.’s body count report?”

Alex wasn’t smiling anymore. Sergeant Taylor could dearly appreciate that. Wasn’t a damn thing to smile about.

“But, now, it’s the little bitty lies that’ve always interested me, the people lies. Like the lie that said you wouldn’t be afraid when you got over here, that you’d be some kind of frigging freedom fighter, or that they’ll all be treating you like a fucking hero when you get home. You listen to Sergeant Taylor, boy. Ain’t going to happen. Ain’t no way. Like the lie that says you’ll go back in one piece. Like the lie that says you’re a wholesome, all American boy and you’re going to stay that way. The lie that says you ain’t going to turn into a fucking monster over here.”

“Now, wait a minute, Sarge. Pretty personal, aren’t you?”

“It’s a damn personal war, son.”

“I don’t intend to change.”

“Now I am relieved.”

“So, if you hate it so much, why are you here? You already had your tour, you went back for a while, so why’d you sign on for another one?”

Taylor just stared at him. Insect legs scratched along the back of his brain, trying to find the right words for him to say. “My business, son,” he finally said. “Go check your gear. Moving out soon.” The boy strode off with a little swagger. Probably thinking he’d finally caught his old Sarge on something. Maybe he had.

LIEUTENANT CALLEY WASN’T the only one trotting after the Captain like a little puppy dog. They would have followed Medina anywhere. He gave them those cards, the Ace of Spades, because they were “death dealers,” okay? They were supposed to drop those on every gook they killed.

Still, Calley was the worst, always trying to please Medina, and it only made the Captain call the lieutenant a little shit, and that’s how he treated him.

If Bill Webber hadn’t been killed, maybe things would have been different. He was the first, and that started the dying, and then they went through that mine field. They had one soldier split right up the middle. The villagers could have said something, warned them. That changed the rules—destroying villages became the standard.

It wouldn’t have been wise for the villagers to point out the mines, though. Folks like that, they stayed alive by keeping their mouths shut. It was a bad situation for everybody concerned.

The company set up a perimeter around the village. Those villagers never saw it coming. The older ones had told the younger ones that the Americans were different—they brought candy bars. Not that the Vietnamese didn’t resent being occupied, but the Americans could be trusted.

The real problem, though, was there was bad intel. Medina had been told the Cong’s 48th Infantry was holed up there around the village. There weren’t supposed to be any civilians. And when the companyfound civilians, Medina wouldn’t adjust his thinking. It was going to be all out war.

FOR A LONG time Taylor believed he signed up again because of the way people had treated him back home in the bars, at parties, whenever they found out what he was and where he’d been. But there was more to it than that, and those motherfuckers back home probably saw that part of it written all over his sweating face.

“You’re in the service?” His old friends had told him it was a bad idea to wear the uniform, but he hadn’t listened. It pissed him off when people said crap like that.

“Yeah. Be out for good soon, I reckon.”

“Nam?” The man’s tone made Taylor uneasy. The girlfriend just sat there, staring past the man’s shoulder, pale lips pouted and eyes blazing.

“Yeah.”

“How many did you kill?” And there it was. They always asked that first thing, or after they’d beaten around the bush awhile. Nobody had told Taylor it’d be like that when he got home.

Taylor tried a smile, but it felt too much like the kind of smile you made sometimes back in Nam. You’d have been up for days, strung out on the fighting and running just on fatigue and adrenalin, and there’d be some little hurt kid you’re trying to make feel better, so you try to smile, and it’s only after you’ve been making that smile awhile that you realize the muscles in half your face aren’t working anymore; they’re frozen solid. “Hey, why don’t you let me buy you and your girl a drink?” he finally said.

The man almost smiled himself. Then the girlfriend leaned over and with her lips barely moving she said, “So how did it feel, murdering women and babies?”

Taylor had a wife, two kids, a small dog and a couple of cats back home. He’d never lost his temper with any of them. He’d get angry sometimes, and feel pressured, and sometimes they’d box him in. But he never hit any of them, never even thought to. Sometimes he felt he could have been a lot more than he was, if he hadn’t gotten married. And that pissed him off some. But he didn’t hit anybody for it. He’d get a little agitated, a belly ache sometimes. He went out back sometimes and chopped a month’s worth of firewood, or broke every bottle he could find in the trash. But he never hit anybody.

On that first trip home he found he couldn’t understand people, not even his family. He had no idea what they were talking about half the time, or why.

It was fucking unbelievable back home. It didn’t look anything like what he remembered, or like any of the pictures the wife sent him or he saw in magazines. Somebody had faked it all up, and trying to figure out why they did it made him scared, and dangerous-feeling.

Insects became rampant and joyful, dancing up and down inside his skull.

Most people didn’t want to talk about the war. They acted like you had bad breath or were crazy when you tried to talk to them about it.

And something else peculiar. The people walking around in one piece. There’d been so many ways to lose a piece of you in Nam—satchel charges, punji sticks, grenades, booby traps, swing limbs, little spring-detonated bombs in old C ration cans, Bouncing Betty mines made to cut you in half at the groin. Regular bullets would do as well, zipping by you like supersonic bees. When he got back he expected half the young guys to be missing something. There should have been amputees everywhere. But he hardly ever saw any; where’d they put them all? It made him damned mad—he used to wonder if they had them all down in the cellars or something.

CHARLIE COMPANY OPENED fire on the people running around in the village, because they’d been promised all those folk would be VC. VC only.

Once the first civilians were killed…

There was nothing more to be done. Charlie Company was shooting them all. It became unstoppable. They were angry, they were frustrated, and they’d been told this was the enemy.

Bodies began to accumulate, women and kids. Someone thought they saw Medina himself kick a woman to death, but they couldn’t be sure.

TAYLOR TOOK THE second tour because he had changed. He wasn’t used to the old way of doing things. In Nam there were only a few ways to get high, to get the adrenalin pumping, to satisfy your spirit. You shot, you killed, you ran for your life, you had cheap sex with the slants or you did dope. You had to get used to dead men’s eyes staring right through you, or the awesome sight of a guy’s guts hanging outside him, maybe draped up on his chest. You could actually touch his insides, do things to them. It was all hard to understand.

He wasn’t a racist when he went in. And in the beginning, the way the others talked about the Vietnamese, it made him damn uncomfortable. But if you don’t want a young guy to be a racist, don’t put him in a situation where people of another color are always shooting at him trying to kill him. It takes a super amount of will power not to become a racist in that kind of situation. And if you want young men to think independently and question orders and to be good moral decision makers, again, don’t put a gun to their heads. Don’t put them in a war. Human beings, they just want to live. That shit’s imperative.

His first few days in country they’d had him handling body bags and making counts. And playing with the VC bodies. Sometimes a grunt that had been there awhile would decide to initiate a new guy. After a number of months, though, Taylor felt like he’d been there years already.

Taylor got to break in a new guy. A lot like Alex. Sweet boy, shy, good-natured kid. Taylor took the kid out to a rocky outcropping overlooking the Saigon River. They’d had heavy action the past week, and they’d piled the VC bodies up around these rocks. A couple of dozen, maybe more.

“Shoot a couple.”

“What?” The boy stared at Taylor as if he’d told him to kill his own mother. “You’re kidding.”

“Shoot up two of the bodies. That’s an order, soldier.”

The boy took up his M16, paused, and then fired a burst into one of the dead VC. All the shots in one area. The flesh and the cloth popped, smoked. There was a bad smell. Then, without pause, he did the same to the corpse lying next to it. When he finished he stood with his weapon down, shoulders slightly slumped, staring at Taylor.

“Now see if you can make a few of them dance.”

“Sarge, this is crazy.”

“Crazy is for civilians, son. I’ve got my reasons. Commence firing.”

The boy turned and began riddling the pile of bodies with bullets. As bodies slipped and fell from the top he was able to get their legs and arms jumping with the force of his fire until it looked as if the whole stack of dead men were seizuring uncontrollably.

“Not bad, kid. You’ve got a good feel for the weapon. Now pull out your K bar.” The boy hesitated. “Pull it out!” He showed Taylor his knife. “Okay… bring me back a finger.”

“Sarge!”

“You heard me. Take your time, son. But do it.”

It took the boy awhile to get over to the bodies, but he finally did. He then spent the next twenty minutes hacking away with his knife. Taylor hadn’t figured it would take him that long, so the boy must not have been using his full strength. And every few minutes he’d choke up a little. Taylor was too far away from him to really see how much. But the boy finally returned, his hands and knife covered with blood.

“Mission accomplished, I see. Now clean off your knife, son. I’ll bag this for you. Someday you might ask me for it.”

When the boy was ready Taylor helped him throw the bodies into the river, occasionally tossing him a light one so that he’d get used to the smell of a dead body falling all over you. Boat crews didn’t like them doing that kind of shit—the bodies fouled the props. But Taylor didn’t have to answer to them.

“Did it fine, soldier. Real fine. Maybe later we’ll get you a trophy photo, you holding a gook up by the hair maybe, and cutting his throat so’s he’ll smile real wide for the camera.” Taylor chuckled.

Daniel could feel roach heads watching him from the edge of the jungle.

Taylor hadn’t meant the chuckle—it was for the boy. And at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe it was necessary. It was all fake—the swagger, the attitude. The things Taylor was saying, they sickened him. But maybe it would help keep the boy alive later on. Taylor knew that war ran best on that kind of cruelty. Young boys came over to Nam with that young cruelty in them, the cruelty that made them set cats on fire and such shit, and the war brought it back out. Not all of the boys, certainly, maybe just a few, but there were times over there when those few set the tone. In Nam an American soldier had the possibility of becoming a god. He could skin a man alive maybe. He could become a “double veteran”—rape some Vietnamese woman, then kill her, then stomp what was left into the ground if he had a mind to. The thing was, the ones that were inclined to that kind of cruelty, they could get away with crap like that.

You weren’t going to fall in love, you weren’t going to be seeing your new baby, or go out drinking with your friends. You couldn’t get any of that shit in Vietnam. The only way you were going to get your blood up was to kill some folk, mess up a few bodies.

CHARLIE COMPANY WAS pushing people to the center of the village. Some of the guys in Calley’s platoon were picking them up, hitting and kicking them, making them move.

One soldier walked away. Another pretended not to see Calley’s urgent gestures to get the gooks in line. The platoon moved with the symbolic deliberateness of dream. The ones who were waking up could not figure out what they should do. The ones who walked away figured they could be shot in the back for desertion. Calley, a few others, moved across the village like heroes of the fucking silver screen. It was hard not to be awed by them.

TAYLOR SAW THE boy live long enough to run over an old lady just because some asshole made a dare, fuck some villager’s wife in front of the gook then blow his head off, shoot a bunch of old men in a rice paddy for target practice. He was killed when a mine ate him from the chest down.

Taylor didn’t initiate Alex into the way of things in Nam, and he wouldn’t let anybody else do it, either. Maybe young Alex could stay basically unchanged. Who the hell knew for sure?

Taylor watched Alex get his gear together for the mission. Watched him for a long time. Taylor had been ready and raring for hours. But he’d made that a habit; he’d come to the point where he felt more at ease in combat than he did just waiting for things to happen. Alex was still pretty unsure of himself—you could tell by the way he was stumbling around with his gear. Taylor hoped there wouldn’t be any sudden noises; the boy was so jumpy he might kill somebody. But right now Taylor figured Alex could handle himself back home a lot better than he himself could.

Once back home you were asked to keep all that meanness you’d learned in the long Vietnam nights at arm’s length. Over here they made you feed it like some kind of junkyard dog—giving itjust enough to swell the hunger—because it kept you and your buddies alive. And that boot-black meanness kept you from going crazy from the things they expected you to do here. But there couldn’t be any spillover back home. And when you got mad at your kid or the dog was yelping too much or the wife was getting in the way without knowing it, you had to keep that meanness under control.

Taylor’d really tried those few months back home; he knew he had. But after you’ve been out in the jungle on patrol, and looked too long into the dark, you start seeing things. You start seeing what’s out there, and you’re ruined for things back home. Sergeant Taylor could feel the changes working on him inside, even now. Roach legs massaged his entrails until his breath tasted like jungle rot.

His squad was pretty far north, and due to go even farther. At the time Taylor had no idea he’d be spending his last days of the war there, deep inside the black heart of Vietnam, so far north it was understood to be okay to shoot anyone on sight, no questions asked. A blank check.

The squad had been assigned to watch an isolated ville. Intelligence had it that it was an important VC way station, or intelligence post, or something. Taylor was soon thinking they must have missed on this one; he’d seen nothing suspicious all the way there, cattle and birds, women and children, a few old men. He didn’t think it was the kind of job combat troops should be doing anyway. They must have been low on spy guys that week.

He would never be sure what it was exactly that happened about two klicks out from that village. He ran the film over and over in his head, but it was like large pieces of it had beencut. They were in thick vegetation, on a trail that looked seldom-travelled, and that fact bothered them all. First thing he would remember was seeing Alex’s face get real white, white as snow, and Alex’s eyes going crazy, looking down, and Taylor saw what Alex was looking at—half his body was blown away.

A lot of screaming, a lot of explosions. Dirt and jungle flying ever which way. Bodies down. Lots of bodies down. Taylor hearing somebody crying, then knowing it was himself crying, bending over all of those bloody pieces that used to be Alex. And thinking maybe this little ville might just be as important as M.I. thought.

CALLEY’S PLATOON HAD gathered a little fewer than 200 villagers. The soldiers herded them to the eastern side of the village near the drainage ditch.

Calley ordered the platoon to start shooting.

THE NEXT THING Taylor would remember would be being in this little dugout cave overlooking the village, then searching through the area where they blew up his buddies, then being back in the cave again. It was all mixed up for days, or maybe years. Goddamn, it could’ve been years.

Funny how you felt different when Americans were killed. It just didn’t seem natural when Americans were killed.

The rest of the squad was dead. Or so he thought. Two or three bodies were still missing but he had to figure they were hid in the jungle somewhere. They’d been separated. Taylor wasn’t sure how he’d survived. A couple of bloody face and scalp wounds, but they healed okay. He could feel the puffy scars. The squad had some heavy fire power with them—several pounds of C4 plastique, M 60 machine gun, and an M 79 grenade launcher. He made several trips to get all that up to the little cave he’d dug out of a thickly overgrown hill. And he had all the guys’ packs, M 16s and K bars. He should have pulled back once the squad was wiped out. But he hadn’t. He was going to take on the mission by himself, maybe even sit out the rest of the war watching that one sleepy little ville.

He watched that village for a very long time. He watched it through the night, when every shadow was a body. He watched it when the sun was overhead and the top of that hill must have been over a hundred degrees. He thought he had killed one, maybe a couple of gooks when they got too close, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t see any bodies. Maybe I ate them, he thought, and giggled to himself. He vaguely remembered someone shouting Chu Hoi! I surrender, but he mighthave been dreaming. He wasn’t sure if he dreamed at all. Roaches ran amok under his skin. Roach bristles pushed out through his skin, seeking air.

There was a young woman in the village, a beautiful woman with long black hair, almond yellow skin. Eyes seemed a little too red. Dark dress a little too oily. But beautiful. When she walked it was like rustling leaves, vermin crawling under old wallpaper. For a few hours every afternoon she went to a small garden patch at the side of the village, in full view of Taylor, as if she knew he was there. Sometimes a boy came with her. Black, shiny hair. Too-bright eyes. Too-brilliant teeth. Taylor wondered if she had told the boy where he was hiding. The thought scared him. If the boy came too close Taylor was going to have to slit his throat with one of the K bars. See if that wiped the smile away. He wouldn’t want to do it, but it would be self-defense.

If he slept, Taylor dreamed of beehive rounds coming in, blowing human bodies to pieces. It made the officers happy, though; it was an old joke that you could get more grunts into one of those trucks if they had all been taken apart first.

But Taylor didn’t think he had slept, so maybe it wasn’t a dream.

SOME OF THE children hid at the bottom of the ditch beneath the bodies of their parents.

EACH DAY TAYLOR saw fewer villagers around. It worried him. Maybe they had tunneled out, or maybe they were off on a secret mission or something. If something awful happened because of them he’d be blamed for it. He hated them. They were the ones who brought all this dying; they were the ones who’d birthed all those corpses lying out there, fertilizing the jungle. He tasted blood on his teeth. But the woman and her son were still there. They came back to the garden at the village’s edge each day.

Some days it got so hot he started scratching at his skin. It seemed every inch of skin had begun to itch, leaving shallow, bloody furrows up his sides and chest. He dug body hair out, roots and all. But there was always more hair. Under the dirt and grime, there was hair even under his skin.

At night his nerves tingled. His nerves rang like hundreds of tiny screeching bells. Roaches crawled inside those bells and kept them ringing. He still didn’t think he slept, and the dreams that were not dreams rolled drunkenly through his head.

He thought he must be pretty sick. There were no more villagers, except the dark woman and her evil, grinning son. He’d watched them for days. He tasted blood. He was always rubbing away at his nose because of the awful smell. He burned in every organ in his body. His hair sang.

He had been eating one of the last cans of beans and motherfuckers. His head had drooped, as he would remember it later. Something else drooped, something around his neck, and brushed his raw, burning chest. He looked down.

It was a necklace made of nylon string. Strung along the entire length of the necklace—maybe two dozen or more—were these black, shriveled things. Like dates. They were ears. Some of them were new—the blood was still drying on them—and some of them old. They were usually only good for about four days; after that they started turning sour on you, and then the flies showed up. Eventually they’d just drop off the string.

Sergeant Taylor dreamed he was running, but he never slept, so how could he dream? He was screaming when he entered the village, his nerves exploding from his body, making a copper-colored mane that ran like wildfire over his bare skin, eating its way through muscle and bone. The dark lady and her son stood up from the small garden, their faces dusty in the light falling through the trees. They grinned like old friends. Welcome home… He heard a dog bark. The boy was running toward him, wanting to leap into his daddy’s arms.

But Taylor was ready. He had the grenades hanging on his arms like a morning’s catch from the old catfish pond. He was throwing his arms forward, ready to swim for safety, his daddy excited and crying from the boat. He didn’t want to die, but the dark blue water had such a strong grip, the lady just might have him this particular day. Hard insect wings raked the back of his skull and he looked at the boy again. He remembered something; he was remembering. He remembered going through this a thousand times before. The boy’s dying face all too familiar. It stopped him, made him wonder. The boy was running toward him, wanting to leap into his daddy’s arms. That stopped him. He looked again. His daddy’s arms. And so Sergeant Taylor dived into the ground, the grenades dropping, breaking open like eggs around him, before the boy could reach him.

Black billows of smoke with vague blue highlights. An awful smell of phosphorous in his nose. And Taylor continued to dream, without light or movement, but it wasn’t like a dream. Whoever was in the room with him—dark insect faces, hard wings and legs scraping at his brain—would not let him sleep. Taylor didn’t think he ever slept, and he knew that those who took care of him weren’t able to tell.

He knew the teeth he had grown in the dark never slept. It wasn’t like a dream. It was like being alive but still going to Hell. All around him he could hear the other men in the ward moaning in their sleep. They were all still in the jungle, and it was night, and Sergeant Taylor with his brand new teeth was crawling toward them in the dark.

DANIEL STOOD INSIDE the body of the soldier whose name he did not know at the edge of the irrigation ditch—shocked and numb with despair. He wasn’t seeing it right. The ditch was full of bodies, and drifts of blood like scarlet oil slicks, and yet he could not quite believe it was real. They had faked it somehow. The special effects in this… memory, were remarkable.

He watched as a lone soldier climbed down inside the lip of the ditch, lowered one arm into the tangle of bloody limbs, and pulled out a small child who had been hiding beneath the bodies of his parents. He gathered the boy into his arms and carried him off to the waiting helicopter.