The target this morning was a village that had been evacuated and then reoccupied. Their job was to clean it out and level it.

First they had to find it. Navigation was difficult in the jungle. Landmarks were few and visibility was restricted.

And Charlie could be anywhere, maybe a yard away. The knowledge kept them all on edge. Jasper had learned to look through the foliage, from one layer to the next, scanning for a color, a shape, or a texture that did not fit. It was difficult to stay vigilant when you were tired, dripping with sweat, and pestered by bugs, but men who let their guard down at the wrong moment got killed.

There were different kinds of jungle, too. Bamboo thickets and elephant grass were impassable in practice, though the army high command refused to admit it. Canopy forests were easier, for the dim light restricted the undergrowth. Rubber plantations were best: the trees in neat rows, the undergrowth kept down, usable roads. Today Jasper was in a mixed forest, with banyan, mangrove, and jackfruit trees, the green backdrop splashed with the bright colors of tropical forest flowers, orchids and arums and chrysanthemums. Hell has never looked so pretty, Jasper was thinking when the bomb went off.

He was deafened by a bang and thrown to the ground. His shock did not last long. He rolled away from the trail, stopped in the flimsy shelter of a bush, deployed his M16 rifle, and looked around.

At the head of the line of men, five bodies lay on the ground. None was moving. Jasper had seen death in combat several times since arriving in Vietnam, but he would never get used to it. A moment ago there had been five walking, talking human beings, men who had told him a joke or bought him a drink or given him a hand scrambling over a deadfall; and now there was just a mess of mangled bloody chunks of meat on the ground.

He could guess what had happened. Someone had stepped on a hidden pressure mine. Why had the mine dog not set it off? The boy must have spotted it and had the presence of mind to keep quiet and walk around it. Now he was nowhere to be seen. He had got the better of his captors in the end.

Another of the men came to the same conclusion. He was Mad Jack Baxter, a tall Midwesterner with a black beard. Screaming, “That fucking slant led us into it!” he ran forward, firing his rifle, sending rounds uselessly into the greenery, wasting ammunition. “I’ll kill the motherfucker!” he screamed. Then his twenty-round magazine was empty and he stopped.

They were all angry, but others were more sensible. Sergeant Smithy was already on the radio, calling in medevac. Corporal Donny was kneeling down, optimistically looking for a pulse in one of the prone bodies. Jasper saw that a chopper could not possibly land on this narrow trail. He jumped up and yelled to Smithy: “I’ll look for a clearing!”