Nestled in my duffel on that flight were the notebooks and cards that now sat next to the disused typewriter under the window just a few feet from where I lay. I did not need to thumb through that material to recall what it contained: a series of disjointed and garbled ideas, sentences, fragments, character names without explanation, dates without referent, untethered and unexplained anecdotes (“tell them about the goose” and “bbq at the Bon Mot” and “Chesty’s dream”). It occurs to me now that there is likely a wealth of possible fictions to be found in those notes, but at the time they felt a kind of flood that washed over my imagination with such force that I could hardly stand to look at them, leaving my brain simply empty of ideas, empty even of sentences.

The members of my company were good men on the whole but Chiggers was the one to whom I felt the closest. I wanted to talk endlessly about books and writers and he seemed perfectly willing to listen and even to comment and ask questions and challenge what I took as basic and inviolable facts. I believed Faulkner was a better writer than ­Hemingway and that Thomas Wolfe was the best of them all. I liked Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer and James Jones. Chiggers had come from a world I had sometimes glimpsed when I had lived in Southern California and the stories he told of his extended Catholic family, both in Mexico and scattered up and down the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, were filled with hilarity and heartbreak. He had lived through travails the likes of which I could only dream about and had come through them tough and open and honest and loyal. I envied that about him, that he had such experiences to draw power from, and I wished I had something similar in my own life but my experiences, up to that point, felt unilaterally shallow and pointless.

The base at which we were then stationed consisted of a great sea of tents and cinder-block buildings and plywood structures set in series of staggered and ill-fitting gridworks upon a field of endless mud surrounded by rice paddies and thick jungle. Along the southern boundary ran the brown flow of one of the innumerable rivers that comprised the delta. There was a small Vietnamese town nearby, a town constructed during the French occupation of the region and one therefore rumored to be quite beautiful in the manner of quaint and tender imperialism, but we regular grunts were not allowed to go there and in all the time I was stationed at that muddy base I never once walked its French-inflected streets.