hot meal, a nice bunk, and lots of ugly wire and sandbags between us and other people's bullets.
Ahn clung to my hand all morning, but suddenly he slipped away, looking very excited, and peered intently along the side of the trail. I stopped and he took hold of the tail of my uniform shirt for balance and jabbed at something with his crutch stick. I thought it was a snake, but when Ahn shuddered backward I decided it might be even more dangerous.
'William?' I whispered. He was walking point. We were several yards behind him on the trail, though we were going as fast as we could and he as slow as he could.
'Yeah?'
'I think Ahn found a mine.' I snatched Ahn back when he leaned forward to poke again, but he wriggled from my grasp and once more extended his crutch.
William rejoined us and caught the stick in mid-thrust, pulling it out of Ahn's grasp so that he fell back against me.
'You VC, kid? Try to blow us all up?'
'No VC,' Ahn said. 'Look,' and he made eating motions, as if he were scoopin rice out of a bowl into his mouth.
I took about four hasty giant steps backward as William prodded the mound of earth this time. I could vaguely see little round shapes at the top. 'What are they?' I whispered as William dug at the mound with a stick and flipped something loose that rolled to his feet. 'They look like Sterno cans. Homemade bombs?'
'Don't seem like it, but almost as bad. Beans and muthahfuckers.'
'Huh?'
'Beans an' hotdogs. See here? Some dudes, when they out in the field and they got C rats they hate, they just buries 'em. How you get along with lima beans?'
William had the Army equivalent of a church key in his pocket. A few hundred yards farther down the ridge we found a stream, shallowlooking and only about fourteen feet wide. We choked down the cold food straight from the can.
'$'Wisht I had my canteen cup and a little c-4,' William said. 'I could heat this shit.'
'What's c-4?' I asked.
'You know, plastic explosive.'
We filled the cans with water over and over till our arms ached from dipping and lifting. The morning had been hot and muggy and the water felt wonderful when it splashed me. William waded into the water. 'You wanna get wet, lady? Come on ahead, then. We gotta cross this fucker anyway.' He waded across without blowing ;mything up.
Ahn looked dubiously at the rushing waters of the stream. I stepped into the bone-chilling water and could see right away that he was going to have a problem. The force of it was enough to knock you off your feet. 'Come on, Ahn. Hang on to me.' I let Ahn hold on to my shoulder while I dipped down to my knees to get wet and cold all over. The night before, I'd thought I'd never be warm again, but now I couldn't believe how great it felt. Then we sloshed out. William, just a head of us, began ripping off his clothes.
I scarcely had time to wonder what in the hell he was up to when I saw for myself. An inch-long leech was fattening itself on my forearm. I dumped Ahn unceremoniously on the bank and started stripping too. So did he. I started batting at the bloodsuckers, trying to pull them Off.
'Don't do that,' William said. 'You'll break the head off in there and it make you sick. Break up a salt tablet, put on its back. It'll pull out. Cigarette works better, but mine are long gone.'
Ahn, bare as the day he was born, bent over his clothes and pulled a rather soggy pack of Kools out of his pants pocket. He also produced a Zippo, with which he expertly lit the cigarette he gave me. William was already at work on his crop of bloodsuckers with the salt. For his own, Ahn just plucked them out. You aren't supposed to be able to do that, but he did, pinching them up near their heads. It worked, anyway. When we were done, we had a total body count of about forty-eight leeches.
I turned my back on the men while I did a search-and-destroy mission on the leeches in my lingerie. I am really not all that shy, but guys who are not your lovers can be more modest than somebody's grandma, on your behalf as well as theirs. It is often ridiculously difficult to get a male patient to accept a urinal from a female nurse. I waited until I had my fatigue blouse on again to turn back around. Sure enough, William was buttoning up as rapidly as he could. Ahn was sitting in the grass, smoking a Kool with the savoir faire of James Bond.
In a debonair manner, he offered a smoke to me, to William.
'No thanks, kid. I tryin' to quit,' William said.
The only thing I hadn't taken off was the amulet, and now it had fallen outside my uniform blouse, flashing back the sun like a mirror. William sat down beside Ahn to pull on his boots. 'Uh, Lieutenant?'
'Huh?'
'Bout last night. I still don't recollect much of what happened, but what I reckon's I just sort of went dinky dao from all this duckin' and hidin' shit. You know I don't mean no disrespect to women, and it't got nothin' to do with black or white. I wouldn't want you to am think I-to think-'
I knew what he meant, but then it was so soon after the time when blacks were beaten for using the wrong rest room or riding in the front of the bus, when civil rights workers were being murdered, that it was awfully hard to talk about racial stuff, especially between a man and a woman, especially an enlisted black man and a white woman officer, which is just sort of too parallel to the darky-plantation belle bullshit.
'William, let's not get into that shit, okay?' I said. 'I am not nearly as worried about the possibility of having you after my ass as I am about the possibility of getting it shot off. I'm real glad we found each other because I don't know a damn thing about the jungle. But I gotta know: is there some real sure way to snap you out of your sleep, something maybe your mom used to wake you up when you were a little kid?
Because you almost killed both of us last night. I know you didn't mean to, but-'
He shook his head. 'I never done nothin' like that in my life before. I never even had no nightmares before I come to this place. Used to sleep like a rock.' He handed me the can opener. 'Here. Maybe you can jab me with this if I go off again. Only be careful where you stick it, huh?'
As he handed it to me, his aura wavered a little into the brown and his eyes suddenly got wet. 'Goddamn, I am just fucking up all over the damn place. First I just roll under the bed and don't warn the men and they all get blown to shit, then I try to kill you-I don't know what the fuck is happening to me.'
Ahn tapped him on the arm and offered him a cigarette again.
'Thanks, kid.' He lit it this time and took a long drag, then offered it to me.
I don't smoke, but I took a drag too. 'Look, man, you don't have the corner on fucking up.' The chopper crash flashed across my mind.
I pulled on my trousers and tucked the amulet inside my shirt. William watched me with more relaxed interest now.
'What's that you wearin'? Where's your dog tags?'
'In my pocket. They got to irritating my neck.'
'Yeah, well, if I'se you, I'd get shed of that rank sewed onto your collar too. Officers is the first individuals Charlie try to grease.'
I cut off the ends of my collar with my bandage scissors. 'William, how long do you think those C rat cans had been there? Do you think that unit is still nearby somewhere?'
'Sure. I do. Them and a whole bunch of others. And a whole bunch of VC too. just depend on who we find first. You ain't talkin' to no trusty African guide, bwana. I didn't have much call to learn trackin'
in Cleveland. Damned if I know how old them cans was. You the woman.
You probably know more about canned goods than me.'
'Not if I can help it,' I said. I've never been the domestic type.
We walked just inside the edge of the jungle, down along the edge of a valley again that day. The valley was full of soft grass and little round fisliponds and the rain blew gently across it, sweeping toward us, carrying a heady, fresh scent that reminded me of spring on Lake of the Ozarks. The jungle smelled more like a cross between the zoo, the alley in back of the A&P the day they tossed out the produce, and the aggressively green, earthy smell of a hothouse. 'Can't we walk down there?' I asked William. 'It'd be easier walking, especially for Ahn.'
'Easier to get blowed away, you mean. See, some of them things hit but they don't explode. Plus the VC likes to set booby traps round that kind of thing. No way, mamasan. This soldier stickin' to high ground.'
When he spoke to me, mostly William seemed perfectly okay. He was one of the nicest people who ever tried to strangle me, in fact. But when he was walking point, not looking back, not staying in touch with what was going on with us, his spine would twitch and his head circled and dipped like a snake's, sniffing the wind, looking for signs. We started climbing again, up and up into really thickly interwoven jungle with trees growing out of other trees and vines so thickly twined together that we had to stop and climb over them or separate them to climb through. Ahn and I had a tough time keeping up. The boy's adrenaline was finally wearing off and his little face looked pinched again. He started whining. He wanted to be carried, regressing, the way sick kids do, to an earlier age, where people were supposed to take care of them.
'No can do, babysan. You break my back,' I told him.
He screwed up his face as if he was going to cry. 'No way. You carry me
