BooksBarbecue
Back Lost Soldiers Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. COVER PAGE
  2. TITLE PAGE
  3. EPIGRAPH
  4. PRAISE
  5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  6. MAP
  7. PROLOGUE
  8. CHAPTER ONE
  9. CHAPTER TWO
  10. CHAPTER THREE
  11. CHAPTER FOUR
  12. CHAPTER FIVE
  13. CHAPTER SIX
  14. CHAPTER SEVEN
  15. CHAPTER EIGHT
  16. CHAPTER NINE
  17. CHAPTER TEN
  18. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  19. CHAPTER TWELVE
  20. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  23. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  25. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  26. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  46. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  47. COPYRIGHT PAGE
  48. What’s next onyour reading list?

He dozed again. In minutes a flight attendant awakened him, bringing him tea and a sandwich. As he ate, the plane suddenly descended from the high skies and settled toward the wide green paddies and the sluggish, curving rivers, and in one beat of his heart Condley felt that he was home again. Below him were earthly rhythms that had formed his adulthood. Merely seeing them brought him again into their cadences. In the last moments before the plane touched onto the runway at Tan Son Nhat, he looked out at abandoned military towers, the long rows of curved concrete parapets that had once housed dozens of American warplanes, the ruins of an old military hospital, the streams of thin brown people on motorbikes and bicycles, past and present mixing into a yeasty dynamism that jumped up at him from every face and tree.

Yes, he liked Hawaii, but he felt more at home in Sai Gon. He did not know why. He only knew that it was true. Sai Gon, Condley remembered from an old and happy song that spoke of the city’s beauty and its carefree ways. Dep lam.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

District Four, Sai Gon

Underneath the old green mosquito net five feet away, the baby was crying again. Dzung lay next to his wife in the dark room on the square board that was their bed, forcing himself awake, studying her face and trying to think of what to do. It had rained all night, and although the water had stopped flowing along the floor of their small wooden shack, the wet remained behind. The water had awakened all the odors of the cramped and squalid neighborhood, filling their shack with the reminders of someone else’s food, someone else’s human waste, someone else’s struggle. It had brought out a legion of mosquitoes and cockroaches as big as mice. It had actually made Dzung cold.

His wife’s face was beautiful as she slept, smooth as a child’s and framed in a swirl of tangled black hair. Dzung wanted to wait as long as he could before awakening her. He knew that when she awoke, her mouth would immediately tighten and her eyes would go distant and her tiny body would grow rigid with responsibilities that would not let up until she again was freed by sleep that evening. And yet the baby, now only two weeks old, was insistent, starving, demanding. His wife needed sleep. The baby needed his wife’s breast. The burden of these two loyalties was too complicated. So Dzung stroked his wife’s face and watched her sleep and waited for the problem to solve itself.