They traveled in the copters and they set down in many places. He ran into Dwight in Da Nang and Dwight said, casually, almost his first words a lie, “Your father’s sleeping with Ruth, you know.” And then he said, “Hey. Have you heard this isn’t a war? That’s what the president says. Did you know Lenny, my cousin, is here now doing body bags? Counting ’em.”

Thomas thought of how his father had always wanted Ruth and all around him the men were losing their wives and lovers, getting letters of betrayal and loss.

Dwight had always been jealous of Thomas, a small part hating him, his buddy, his friend. Thomas never knew it. “Okay, well, see you, bud,” Dwight said, throwing boxes and bags of food into a plane. “Don’t come back in a bag.” Thomas waved down at him as they left, feeling pain, grief, doubt, his body wracked not by the war this time, not by what he saw daily, but by what he imagined from Dwight’s words. They grew like a strangling jungle plant from a seed.

Then he didn’t know if Dwight was still alive. Dwight had CARPET BOMB written on his helmet. Thomas’s father always had his way with women. Thomas had trusted Ruth. Now he doubted her. But no, she wouldn’t do that. But then, other men’s women were betraying them every day. Dwight’s words lived. Words have their way of living on long after the breath, long after a history, long after.

At first when Thomas arrived he prayed to the creator with tobacco. Then he believed only evil existed. The Firmament according to Thomas’s new understanding of the world: And god created good and evil. God created jungle law. In the darkness of the void, god created water and it fell from the sky and he created evil and he created fire and it fell from the sky and the earth was full of fire and black mists mingling with black smoke and jungles of beauty and forests in which a man could be trapped. He said, Let there be and it was. Let there be man and there was the enemy standing right before you. Let there be light and it fell from the sky with great beauty and with the power to kill. Let there be daylight and there was morning with bodies all across earth in positions unimaginable. Let there be mountains and let there be weapons that devastate them. Let there be animals that roam earth and the men will kill them. And god created the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, the Americans, and eventually he would create the Khmer Rouge, and the capacity for men to torture others and to laugh about it.

He had been watching keenly the split in the human heart, including his own. He took to the airfield and with orders to report to one of the worst places in the world. When they arrived he found himself seeing a river of blood and he was sick with it and the smell of gas, napalm with its ceaseless burning. God created it and what kind of a creature was this god, and he was afraid at first, then he hated, and then he was no longer Thomas. Monster. That’s what he was with brother M16 and AK and grenades. What a family he and his weapons were together. There was always a tumble of events and he was too tired to remember them except for the flies which god also created.