“I’m glad you’re okay, man,” Chiggers said.

“Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re okay too,” I told him.

He was silent for a long time, puffing at his cigarette. In the night all around us, there yet remained a sense of sun-heat radiating up through the deck boards, from the trees, from the grass, but the air itself had cooled enough that I felt gooseflesh rise to my skin. From the dark shadows of the yard’s shaggy verdancy came the overlapping chirp of crickets beyond which drifted the occasional shush of cars on the interstate or the great choking moan of a diesel truck barreling downhill against its gearbox. I tried to find words that might divert Chiggers from the drift of his own mind but nothing would come and at last his voice reappeared from the shadows. “It’s just that, well, you know, you kinda faded out toward the end there,” he said. “I mean we all did, right, but after Phil and Dan and all that shit. That was a hard time.”

“It was all a hard time.”

“You know what I mean.” Chiggers pulled on his cigarette. Mine had been smoked down to the nub. For reasons I could hardly articulate, I suddenly and inexplicably wanted him to leave. I had tried not to think of him or any of them. Although I never moved much further than the one piece in Esquire and the various note cards stacked by the typewriter in my grandmother’s spare bedroom, when I thought of Vietnam it was almost always as a source of fiction. The quality of invention offered a tangible albeit illusory sense of control that extended not just to the landscape but to specific situations and characters, so that even though my fictional squadmates lived and died in ways not so far removed from their actual counterparts, the role of random and unfeeling overlord was not that of some distant God but was rather my own. I could ponder the feeling of it all and the topography and the intensity of the green, and the unmitigated liquid seep, and the high metallic shriek of gunfire, and the bright eruptions of orange flame when the Phantoms came low and obliterated their targets, but the actual facts of my own experience I held in secret, a feat of memory which I recommitted to each night. So I had tried not to think of any of them. Not Phil or Apache Dan or Skip or Mark-One or Mama or Professor Ted. Not even Chiggers.