The chopper landed and Jasper led the stretcher team through the jungle to the site of the explosion. He remembered his landmarks and found the platoon without difficulty. As soon as he arrived he could see, from the attitudes of the men standing around, that all the casualties were dead. The medevac team would be taking back five body bags.

The survivors were fuming. “That slant led us right into a goddamn trap,” said Corporal Donny. “Ain’t that some kind of fuckin’ us around?”

“Fuckin’-A,” said Mad Jack.

As always, Neville pretended to agree while implying the contrary. “Fool kid probably thought we might kill him when we had no more use for him,” he said. “Too dumb to realize that Sergeant Smithy was planning to take him home to Philadelphia and put him through college.” No one laughed.

Jasper told Smithy about the peasants he had seen in the rice paddy. “Our village must be in that direction,” Smithy said.

The company went with the bodies back to the chopper. After it took off, Donny deployed an M2 flamethrower to napalm the rice field, burning the entire crop in a few minutes. “Good work,” said Smithy. “Now they know that if they come back they won’t have anything to eat.”

Jasper said to him: “I guess the chopper will have warned the villagers. We’ll probably find the place empty.” Or, Jasper thought, there could be an ambush; but he did not say that.

“Empty is okay,” said Smithy. “We’ll flatten the place anyway. And intelligence says there are tunnels. We have to find those and destroy them.”

The Vietnamese had been digging tunnels since the start of their war against the French colonists in 1946. Beneath the jungle were literally hundreds of miles of passageways, ammunition dumps, dormitories, kitchens, workshops, and even hospitals. They were difficult to destroy. Water traps at regular intervals protected the inhabitants from being smoked out. Aerial bombing usually missed the target. The only way to damage them was from the inside.

But first the tunnel had to be found.

Sergeant Smithy led the platoon along a trail from the rice field into a small plantation of coconut palms. When they emerged from the palms they could see the village, about a hundred houses overlooking cultivated fields. There was no sign of life, but all the same they entered cautiously.

The place appeared deserted.

The men went from house to house yelling: “Didi mau!” which was Vietnamese for “Get out!” Jasper looked into a house and saw the shrine that was the center of most Vietnamese homes: a display of candles, scrolls, incense pots, and tapestries dedicated to the family’s ancestors. Then Corporal Donny deployed the flamethrower. The building had walls of woven bamboo daubed with mud, and a roof of palm leaves, and the napalm quickly set the whole place blazing.

Walking toward the center of the village, rifle at the ready, Jasper was surprised to hear a rhythmic thumping noise. He realized he was listening to the beat of a drum, probably a mo, a hollow wooden instrument struck with a stick. He guessed that someone had used the mo to warn the villagers to flee. But why was he still drumming?