He wishes he could have touched their skin, held their sweaty bodies. He wishes he could have stopped it. He wishes. And in the mirror light his own face is reflected across theirs. He obliterates them with his life. He sits—no, he falls—on the ground. For the first time it doesn’t matter if his tears are seen. A man comes by and touches him and says, “Hello, brother.” He’s Indian, too. It is too much for him, Thomas, the untouched man, the smell of the earth and hot stone, to think of their faces, the redheaded Murphy who at first was so innocent. It is too much for him to be touched, and he begins to cry.

One name is missing. So he survived, that boy, the one Thomas pushed out of the way. They, the only ones in that smoky place where they’d been dropped—no, thrown—from the copter, him arguing about them being at the wrong place. It wasn’t part of the country. That day, he was not afraid so much as angry. Thomas is relieved the boy survived. The new boy shouldn’t have been there. None of them should have. Thomas reads his own name. Thomas Just. His face reflected on it makes him wonder, when did he grow to look so haggard? He realizes he doesn’t even know the date. He didn’t over there, either. He lost track of time. But not his map. Some people tried to keep diaries, but those on special operations would eventually give up everything constant. They were called at any time, any place, any year, it seemed, because time was irrelevant when you were there. But it’s engraved on the wall.

It began when Thomas was upset about the defoliation of the rice at harvest time. “What are you doing?” He saw the poor peasants broken, starved, running away from the orange cloud, bending over, weeping, and he said to the men, his men, “What are you doing? Are you trying to starve everyone? They are just poor people trying to live.”

“Hey, we’re just following orders.”

“Who gave you that order?”

No answer.

Or maybe it began at the hamlet where he protested about a girl and then he saw an M16 turn slowly toward him, point at him, and he knew they would kill him. “You even look like one of them,” Murph said. There was laughter. He knew they were no longer together, not a unit. He, with his black hair, dark skin. He was a man who couldn’t lose his whole history of knowing that life was precious, sacred, irretrievable. That’s what he’d been taught at home. It was in his blood. From his grandmother and mother all the way back in time. It was his blood. But he became silent even though the girl screamed because he knew at night when they breathed in tobacco or something stronger, that the M16 was more honest than anything else around him.

After that, something in him changed and he became the land, the life that was precious, the man like his grandfather who could feel the presence of a whale. He felt the presence of the land, the jungle, the bamboo, the rain, the pathways, partly to save himself from his own men as much as to save himself from the enemy. He became the man who could tell where the enemy was, could feel them, even if he still believed there was someone to be trusted, at least an infant four months old. He remembers Murphy killing the babies. “Hey,” he had yelled. And Murph yelled back, “Those aren’t babies. They’re bombs!”