shared with Bey had a corrugated tin roof the rain struck like hammers. The hut had belonged to Thuy’s husband, but he’d gone to fight against the Saigon government and the Americans, and he’d been killed in an ambush only thirty kilometers away. He’d been nineteen when he died, and she’d been seventeen. She’d been carrying the child who her mother, who was never wrong about a baby’s sex, had assured her would be a girl. Bey and Thuy’s mother was dead now, but Thuy had her daughter, whom she named Jiang.
Now only women, children, and old men lived there. But some of the village’s men-and women, too-had fought and been captured and had been made to talk before they died. In Saigon’s eyes the place was a nest of traitors, and in the end they paid for that.
It was very late. The village was asleep, and the rain had driven even the dogs inside, so there was no warning when seven heavily armed men came up the path: three Americans and four Vietnamese troopers. The Vietnamese were scum, tattooed and drug-raddled, released from the worst of the city’s prisons to earn their freedom by killing the men and women who were trying to reclaim Vietnam for the Vietnamese. It took the team only a few minutes to kick in the village’s doors and drag the terrified people out of their houses and into the downpour, making them squat in a dark field of mud at the edge of town.
There they waited for hours as the rain pounded down, all sixteen of them: eight grown women, six children, and two very old men-one of whom was crippled-cold and shaking. Their muscles cramped as two of the uniformed Vietnamese troopers systematically found and shot every dog in the village and tore most of the huts apart, looking for arms.
The leader of the group was an American, short even by Vietnamese standards, with hair the color of fire. He paced in front of the soaking, terrified villagers, shouting and cursing at them as one of the Vietnamese troopers tried halfheartedly to translate. It would have been clear even to someone who spoke neither Vietnamese nor English that the translator was putting no effort into his task, but the red man never slowed the flow of words. A demon controlled him, pushing him from one fury to another: He screamed at the villagers when he learned there were no young men there, he slapped the ear of one of the Vietnamese troopers for accidentally getting in his way, he raged at the skies and the trees. When a buffalo emerged curiously from the rain, he shot it for no reason at all.
Where were the men? he wanted to know. Where were the men? The more he raged, the more his rage grew. He grabbed a sopping, sobbing child of five by the arm and hoisted her in the air, demanding to know who the mother was. The dangling child was Thuy’s daughter, Jiang.
Thuy instinctively began to stand, but Bey pulled her down and rose instead. For years afterward Thuy was ashamed that she’d let her sister face the beast.
The red man, still holding Jiang in midair, called Bey to him like a dog, pointing at her and then at a spot in front of his feet. He made her kneel there and demanded to know where her husband was and where the weapons were hidden, and when she couldn’t give him the answers he wanted, he pulled a short, ugly gun and aimed it at Jiang as she twisted and kicked in his grip. When Bey said again that her husband was dead and there were no weapons there, the red man swung the back of the hand with the gun in it at her jaw and hit her, and she’d gone down on her side with a splash, and he’d thrown Jiang at her.
And then, as Thuy watched Bey creep back to the circle of squatting villagers, trying to quiet the sobbing Jiang, the morning sky began to lighten and three young men-boys, really-blundered down the path and into the village, having heard nothing over the rain’s roar. They were just children, boys of twelve and fourteen from the next village, but they tried to scatter when they saw the soldiers. The red man shouted at his Vietnamese troopers, and within moments the boys had been brought back, their hands tied.
The red man stood them about a meter apart near the tree line, and one of the Vietnamese troopers pulled an automatic pistol and pointed it at the forehead of the boy on the left. The trooper was only a few paces from the boy, and he held the gun steady, obviously waiting for instructions. But the red man turned his back on the trooper and the boys and left them standing there, motionless, to walk toward the field where the villagers squatted or knelt.
He walked among them, zigzagging between them, the only person standing. Most people kept their faces down, not wanting to attract the demon’s attention. From time to time, the red man would pull someone to her feet and ask questions, but he was never satisfied with the answers, and he ordered each of them down again. After a few minutes of this, he stood still, looking at the ground, and then he cleared his throat to spit, just missing one of the village’s oldest women. He raised a hand and pointed it at one of the other Americans and then pointed to the nearest hut-one they had left standing-and the American picked up his pack and went to the hut. The first thing he removed from his pack was a spool of thick cord. Barely visible through the curtains of rain, he began to circle the hut, paying out the cord and looping it through the bamboo uprights on the walls.
Rafferty says, “Did you hear his name? The man with the cord?”
Thuy says, “Eddie. Red man call him Eddie.”
At the name Eddie, Ming Li’s eyes swing to his, but she says nothing. She wraps her arms around her upraised knees and turns back to Thuy. In this room she’s the obedient child.
Rafferty says, “Sorry to interrupt.” He has never been less sorry to interrupt any story in his life.
Thuy had been looking at the red man through a haze of terror, without seeing him clearly. Now, as he passed her on his way toward the trembling boys, she saw the things that were hanging around his neck, thick and meaty as a string of sliced dried fruit. And she smelled the odor of death they trailed.
He turned his head and glanced back at her as though her thought had touched him, but he kept moving until he reached the boys. He stepped up to each of them in turn-their eyes following him the way they’d have followed the movements of a cobra-and lifted the thick, black hair from the sides of their heads. When he’d done it to all three, he waved two of the Vietnamese troopers over and had them hold up the boy in the center, and then he drew a short knife and sliced off the boy’s left ear, as easily as Thuy might slice crackling from a roast pig. The boy let out a wail, his knees folded beneath him, and he went down. The troopers picked him up, one by the shoulders and one by the feet, and held him so that his head was lower than his feet, as a ribbon of blood ran from the place where his ear had been, mingling with the rain as it fell. When he came to, shrieking and wailing, and they put him down, the boy couldn’t stand. He was crying like a small child. One of the troopers pushed him to his knees, between the two standing boys, whose faces had gone blank, motionless.
Thuy knew they were waiting to die.
The red man put the ear in the pocket of his shirt. The pocket was already mottled with the rust brown of old blood. He wiped the knife on his pants and put it away. He didn’t have to look down in order to slip it into its sheath.
The third American had stayed apart from the red man and the others, keeping an eye on the villagers. His eyes came again and again to meet Bey’s eyes, and then Thuy’s. He’d looked away when Red cut the boy’s ear off. Thuy thought she saw disgust in his face.
The red man stepped up to the boy on the left. He held his left hand in the air, like someone who is about to signal a group of men to move forward. The boy looked at the center of Red’s chest, unwilling or unable to meet his eyes. Red shouted, in accented Vietnamese, “What’s the name of your village?”
The boy hesitated, and Red said, very loudly, “Too slow,” stepped to the left, and lowered the upraised hand. The trooper shot the boy through the forehead, the bullet pulverizing the back of the boy’s head and lifting him off his feet, throwing him backward. By the time he landed, the red man was in front of the second boy, the kneeling boy.
He said to the boy, “Did you see that?”
Thuy could see the boy say “Yes,” although she couldn’t hear his voice. He was swaying on his knees, forward and back, and he’d clasped his bound hands at chest level, fingers interlaced in a position of prayer. The shoulder beneath the remains of the sliced ear was pink with blood, diluted by rain.
Red said, loudly, “Good. Fast answer. What’s the name of your village?”
The boy shouted the village’s name, his voice breaking at the top of his range.
“Quick,” Red said. “Who’s the highest-ranking cadre in the village?”
The boy opened his mouth, and Red, without waiting, dropped his hand, and the trooper fired. The boy fell flat on his back. His knees, which had been folded beneath him, came up for an instant and then sagged sideways. Thuy found herself staring at the soles of his sandals, so worn down that she could see his pale heels peeking
