How strange that hardly a year before we stood together in the Forest of Assassins, the radio’s antenna waving in the air like a great black arrow pointing ever and always to my blood and bone. The fact that we both escaped the entirety of the war unmarred in body if not in spirit did not speak of skill or even of luck but instead only of randomness. Chiggers, being Catholic, might well have felt otherwise, but I could not understand how one could hold fast to the idea of a benevolent God watching over one’s physical and moral self in the midst of what was, quite literally, a quagmire. And now we sat smoking and drinking endless coffee in the landscape of my childhood. What world was this? How did this world and the Forest of Assassins exist simultaneously? Along a muddy canal, a line of thatch-roofed hootches exploded into gouts of bright orange flame. How many human beings had been inside? A half dozen? A dozen? More? Men and women and children burned alive. We counted them all as VC kills. And in all the ways I could tabulate, every one of those kills had been mine. Hot contact north river. Yankee Sierra. Zero-One. Five-Seven. Six-Two. Smoking purple haze. And then straining to hear the impossible shriek of the Phantoms as they came screaming down their fire from on high.

Chiggers and I had already talked about some of the guys from the old company but neither of us had any real information to share. One of our squad members was getting married—we had both received wedding invitations—but he lived in rural Alabama and that provided excuse enough not to attend. We mumbled about money but in fact we simply did not want to see him acting as if life were normal and that it would go on despite all we had done and all we had failed to do.

I do not know why I began to tell him of the first time I drove Mrs. Wilson to San Jose. Perhaps it was only because that trip had begun something which had managed to hold my own interest sufficiently enough for me to expend some effort in investigating its contours. I had begun telling him of the strange conversation in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room and then swerved into a long digression that ended with the buses departing the square. That Chiggers, stoned as he was, could somehow remember where the story had begun was a kind of miracle. He had asked what had happened to Ray Takahashi and now sat as expectant as a Labrador, smiling and awaiting my response.

“I don’t know what happened to him,” I told him. “Nobody knows.”

“But his girl had a baby.”

“Yeah that’s right.”

“His baby.”

I nodded.

“So he came back to find her?”

“He might have,” I said, “but really I don’t think he knew.”