My fear in that moment was that Chiggers would want to talk through it all. I expected his voice to come out of the darkness, from the point of his cigarette: “Do you remember what Professor Ted said that time when we were in the boat on the Vàm Cỏ Đông?” and I would say, “You mean the time when we called in the air strike on that village?” and he would say, “Which village? There were a million fucking villages,” and I would say, “Two million,” and he would say something like, “Three,” and then, “You loved your radio, ese. Call in the big guns,” and I would say, “No doubt about that,” and we would both laugh. I had called in so many air strikes that neither of us could have ever kept count of them all, and we would go on like that, maybe all night.

But he did not say this or anything like it. Perhaps Chiggers too felt the need to both talk and not talk about that time in our lives. Perhaps acknowledging that we were both okay was enough because it acknowledged that although we were alive neither of us was really okay or ever would be.

CHIGGERS TOOK THE FLOOR of my room, as I knew my grandmother would be up and about early in the morning and I knew too that my friend and I would sleep well past her waking. I could hear him begin snoring almost immediately. That simple sound might have gotten us all killed just a year earlier, a thought which reminded me that in many ways I had never really left that place. I had mustered out in April and yet there remained a sense of humidity in the dark thick muscle of my heart, that tight fist continuing to pump even as all those others—friends and companions and enemies too—had disappeared into the flat relaxed palm of death. In the end, they loaded me into a 747 filled with similar survivors, only a few of whom I knew at all, Chiggers among them, and that great silver ship had lifted into the sky and we, those who had lived through it, burst, as one, into applause. The landscape that shrank beneath the windows of the plane had become synonymous with death, from the sucking mud to the biting ants and snakes to the water buffalo and grass-roofed villages standing in the deep green of palms and reeds, the very richness, the living fecundity of the place predicated upon the simultaneity of its rank and fetid decay. And yet from the air it looked a tropical paradise, prelapsarian in its beauty and grace, its shape shining through the vaporous scrim of my own escape, my own understanding that I was alive, that I was still alive.