“SO WAIT—WHERE WAS HE, THEN?”

“Who?”

“Jesus, Flip, who do you think? The Jap kid.”

This was but a few days after I had returned from San Jose. The man I sat with I knew wholly by the nickname he had borne in Vietnam. I have no real notion of how it was in other units, but in ours most of us had nicknames of some kind, some colorful, some mere abbreviations of the names our parents might have called us, so that amidst Phil and Skip and Mike there was also Apache Dan and Mark-One and Tenn (short for ­Tennessee) and the great gruff African-American philosopher we all called Mama and the thin reedy stoner poet known to us as Professor Ted. And there was the man who sat across from me in the booth: my friend Chiggers, a man with whom I had lived and died in the mangrove swamps and whom I loved in the way that men who have been in combat together loved each other, many of our number bleeding out into the muck or exploded into pieces unrecognizable as human flesh. Those of us who survived had promised each other that we would stay in touch and that we would visit one another and be there for weddings and christenings and the like, and perhaps in the moment of our parting some of us actually believed such things were possible. But the truth was that I did not really think I would ever see any of them again after leaving the delta, not even Chiggers, who had been my best friend there. Indeed it had come to feel, in the year or so I had been stateside, that the war had been some strange dream from which I had never entirely awakened. It had all happened over there, in that other place, in another world than this. That the war was still ongoing did not seem possible, and yet it was present on a daily basis in the papers and on television and it would not be stilled.

And so it was strange to see Chiggers now. He had called my parents’ home in Alhambra and they in turn had given him my grandmother’s number. His voice through those miles of electric cable had sounded not unlike the crackling sound of my radio, and for a moment, so fleeting it was hardly present at all, I felt myself back in the muck and mud and blood, back in the fear, but then that sensation was gone and I was on the phone in my grandmother’s living room, listening to Chiggers tell me that he would be on the way to Oregon to attend his cousin’s wedding and could he stop by. I said yes and gave him my grandmother’s address. When he finally arrived we drove around some and got more than half stoned on the fine Southern California pot he had brought with him from San Diego. Now we occupied a booth at a mostly deserted Denny’s restaurant attached to a long rambling motel pressed hard against the interstate at the very edge of Auburn, the seat of Placer County and a town of six thousand or so souls.