“You’ll stay here with Lu,” he told me.
Looking after the farm wasn’t as dangerous as fighting, but I knew that it would be boring and lonely. I wanted to go with the other soldiers, but I had no choice.
“You and Lu get along well, and he listens to you,” the squad leader said, tapping me on the shoulder. “So you’ll stay here. It’s my order.”
The next day, Lu and I saw everyone off at Ben Rung as they crossed the river.
At night I slept in a hut near the farm to keep an eye on the crops. It was comfortable enough, except the nearest source of water was far away. Then, three days after my squad left, I came down with a malaria fever. This was common among soldiers who had been sent to the highlands. I took some pills, but they didn’t seem to work. The fever got worse. I lay on the straw mattress in the hut feeling miserable and unable to eat even a small bowl of rice. Even though I had no appetite, I craved something sweet, so I went and plucked a few young ears of corn and a pumpkin to eat. I knew that Lu was hungry as well, but I couldn’t cook anything for him. He didn’t have a fever and was healthy, so he’d be fine. Probably animals could deal with hunger—at least better than most humans could.
By the third day of the fever, the water in the bamboo containers had run out. I was so thirsty. That night, the fever knocked me out and I had a terrible dream. I was sitting in our house in Hanoi. My mother was across from me—I saw her clearly. My grandmother was sitting next to me and I felt her caress my hair; then she started to sob. When I woke up, the full moon lit up the night sky with bright yellow clouds. One of my arms hung off the side of the bed. In my dream, I’d torn off my sweaty old soldier’s shirt. I sat up in the moonlit darkness, bare-chested and trying to breathe.
It was okay, I told myself. That wasn’t actually my mother. Lu was in the bed next to me. In the light from the moon his eyes looked blue, and I could see that he was staring up at me anxiously. He licked the sweat off my face and chest. Lu seemed to understand how miserable I felt—he put his warm mouth against my neck and pushed my head back onto the straw pillow, as if he were putting a child down to sleep.
I thought about death. The night went on. Even if I didn’t die from the fever, I would die of thirst. I forced myself to get up and walked out among the crops to collect some young corn, hoping to maybe suck the water out of the ears, and I dragged a canteen to the edge of the jungle where I knew there was a small creek. But the ground became steep and hilly all of a sudden and I fell and rolled down into a shallow ravine, knocking my head against a tree trunk.
I have no clue how long I lay there unconscious. When I finally opened my eyes again, Lu was right next to me. He latched on to the hem of my pants with his mouth and tried pulling me out of the ravine. But it didn’t work, the fabric just ripped. I thought I would probably die, and it made me weep all of a sudden, lying there in the ravine, thinking about such a pitiful, lonely death.
Meanwhile Lu started running around me anxiously. Then he stopped and started to howl. It was the first time I’d ever heard a domestic dog howl like a wolf. I’d read books that said wolves howled on quiet moonlit nights to attract a mate. I wondered who Lu was calling. I wanted to talk to him. He probably wanted to talk to me too. Looking into his eyes, I could just tell.
In that terrifying moment, when I was fully aware that I would die, I had no fear. I closed my eyes—I was only semiconscious—and imagined that my soul was leaving my body. With arms extended, I flew above the dense jungle foliage, back toward Hanoi.
Then all of a sudden I felt a strange shaking. It was a sensation I wouldn’t experience again until years later, when I was on an airplane flying abroad for the first time and the plane hit an air pocket that caused turbulence. When I opened my eyes I saw that a group of people were using jungle vines to carry me across a deep canyon. They looked like Montagnards. At some point, I remembered vaguely, we’d patrolled this area. It was a natural border between the two mountains that an average person could never manage to cross by themselves. Once we reached the other side, they gave me some water to drink. It was the sweetest water I’d ever tasted.
They were a Montagnard family who lived on the far side of the mountain. There were three of them—an elderly man, his wife, and their daughter, all living in a stilt house under a tree. They also had a dog that had a Montagnard name I couldn’t pronounce. Lu must have come here looking for help, I figured. Actually, he’d been here before, though I hadn’t realized it. The Montagnard dog was pregnant; her hard swollen belly was covered with nipples.
The Montagnard family gave me a bitter leaf medicine that made me want to throw up. I also ate a kind of root vegetable mixed with honey, and some ground corn stewed with meat. I didn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak Vietnamese. I wasn’t sure exactly why this family was living in such isolation, since the Thuong or La Vang ethnic people
