We were, indeed, near-prisoners of the base, which made my feeling of isolation all the more acute. It was into this deep well of loneliness that I poured myself, my obsession with words and writers and writing reaching a kind of fever pitch in the first months of my time in that mud field, an obsession broken only momentarily by the mixture of boredom and terror that struck me each time my unit was ordered outside the wire and into the jungle beyond. I had learned very early that were I to die in Vietnam, my death was unlikely to be in actual combat but rather via a form of random deliverance impossible to predict or to fight against: a sniper’s bullet, a land mine, or any number of nefarious and ingenious booby traps set by the invisible enemy. I had read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and had imagined war with a clear enemy who would be fierce and uniformed and would be, of course, indisputably in the wrong, and we would fight them on terms agreed upon by both sides using the military might we had each built and the training we had each received. But in fact it was wholly unclear what we were trying to do in those endless islands and waterways, the whole of it seeming to rise up from beneath us like the incoming tides, leaving only the great twisted vertical shapes of the mangroves towering from that muddy influx.

Two months shy of my return from that country, my unit took fire from a thick dark tangle of jungle near the village of Cái Bè. We had been out beyond the wire for several days and I had the increasingly claustrophobic feeling that sometimes came upon me when I felt certain that death’s bony fingers were preparing to pull me under the malarial waters, so when the first shots rang out I was almost relieved, for the waiting, at least, was over. I could hear Chiggers shouting from somewhere to my left and the others scattering everywhere through the shallow mire. And already my friends were dying. Phil. Apache Dan. Professor Ted.

I did not know I had been screaming until I dialed air command and had to stop long enough to relay a set of coordinates. There was no order given me and the coordinates I shouted into the handset would bring half the jungle to our north to flame. When I was done I lay down in the mud, my hands on my helmet, listening to the rounds zip into the brown water and tick through the trees and foliage all around. I could hear, as if from very far away, the sounds of the others in my unit—those still alive—their voices raised against the onslaught of their own firepower.