At Witka’s, Thomas covers his face with his hands. Then he goes out to the water and drops himself in. Dwight sees him when he’s on the way home.

“Hey, you’re all wet.”

“I went for a dip.”

“Don’t kid me. You fell in. So, are you gonna go to DC and see the Wall? You should come. Where are you staying? Your dad doesn’t answer the door, so we haven’t been able to find you.”

“I’ll catch up with you later.” He wondered what they knew. Damn the travel agent.

Back at home in the dark, he remembers leaving this place he’d been from since all his ancestors had carried him through their cells, then flying over, seeing water and the reflection of the sky in water, then clouds and waking to green, green land. Brilliant green, colors he had never seen before. He looked down from where he was flying at the clouds piled up high.

Once in his life there was rice. Now there are black stones in the water, whales. But something was starting to grow again as if it hadn’t heard the story of what the world was aboveground.

The whale hunt set off his memories. He needs to speak them over and over again and he realizes he is telling Witka. Witka’s spirit in his house, the spirit of the old man who still lives there:

“Lots of them were like that,” Thomas says. “Sometimes the men just fired, heard a sound, saw anything move, and fired. Like what happened to us.”

He tells about the way they had no shelter and ate rotten food. “I felt only fear, and I wished I had the courage to shoot myself so I did not have to witness it, and I would have, too, except I knew someone else would do it for me.”

He’d felt terror, then the need for survival, then nothing, then hatred.

He omits a part of it at first. But Witka knows. And Thomas knows that Witka knows. To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone. Witka forgives him but Thomas doesn’t feel forgiven yet.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “There were good men, good men.” He read about the attempts to rescue American POWs and MIAs. He’d been one. “Some real good men.” But mostly now he hates everybody, as if the whole world were to blame for the rain and the flooding, the weight of his army clothes with rain and mud and his own thirst and sweat constant, always dripping and it was all in the line of duty, the way the world goes, really goes, leaves, and it was all only money in some people’s pockets. How small men are to try to prove they are warriors, better warriors, better hunters. He says these things out loud.

“You know what the worst day is?” he says. “The worst day is the one before you go home because you think you have come this close, so near, and then you won’t make it.”