The bruised sky suddenly lit.

Or maybe it began with the planting of mines in the paths of villagers who merely wanted to survive. The rain already beginning. Him, scared, having to shoot at a sound only to go look and find it was a water buffalo and not a group of men making the sound, and he felt bad about killing it. The other men wrote on it with knives, words he hoped no one would read, all the while he felt terrible about killing it and tried not to cry.

And then there was a little old woman huddling behind a wall with her grandbabies. They were hungry. In a war, unlike now, a wall can be no place to hide behind.

He disappears inside this black stone wall, remembering how he feared some of his own men.

“What are you?” one of them asked him after he started to leave his things behind. The heavy things that made some of the men lose balance and fall. He was going to survive. It began this easily in the suddenly unholy world. That way he could slip into the grasses easily, the bamboo. He could hear the sound of someone moving in the jungle. He became the jungle. He knew by feel where things were and weren’t. He knew if it was a trail they were on or if it was a trap because the Cong, as they called them, could make a weapon out of a tin can or anything. Soon he walked in front of them, not a point man; they were not that organized any longer.

He’d seen it coming and asked for a transfer because these men were not right. The organization had left them long ago. Then, he refused to kill a woman.

“Hey, she’s probably got a grenade in her snatch!”

“Probably,” he said, walking on, letting the woman flee from them, his own vulnerable body in the way to protect her. She was small and he could tell by her movement, her face, that she had lost everything. It was as if he had become awake in a new way, able to see into the heart of things, the place, the people. Those who vanish into the trees silently. But he could never be too sure and it was not untrue that a child could be a bomb, the Cong had seen to that, had created fear in the American boys. But him, he got into the minds of everyone in order to live and to save his own comrades.

At The Wall a man takes off his glasses and weeps, his face turning red. It is a place where a person’s allowed to be overwhelmed by the names of the dead and the overwhelming language of the heart. The men come together as if they know one another, but mortality is what a person really knows here.

Thomas’s fists are clenched. He looks at this wall as if it is a living thing, not only names carved in stone, but the silencing of a jungle, the sudden flare of deafening bombs, every sense attacked. Ordinary people. American men and women whose mothers sang lullabies to them when they were children, who had been boys with bicycles, handsome young men, ordinary women who wanted children, boys who once stole apples, whose mothers and fathers read them stories, as Ruth had surely done with Marco, the boy named out of his mother’s desire that he would do what she never did, travel and see the strange and beautiful world. He thinks sadly of Ruth and his treatment of her. He carries her in his thoughts, the vision of how she stands straight and has cared for his own daughter better than he has. He wonders if there are times when she falls to earth and weeps, if she looks for Marco when she is out at sea. He thinks, out of all the warriors he has known, she is the true hero.