I was a coward. I did not return fire. Not that day. Instead I lay on my back in the crushed grass, staring up at the sky and weeping and waiting for the F-4s. When that great screeching came at last I rolled to my belly to watch as the trees went black and the whole world beyond burst into a wall of orange flame. I had seen countless air strikes but this had been the most magnificent and I shouted at the sight of those acres and acres gone bright with fire.

When they took the dead away and Chiggers and I and the others wandered through the char of that long swath of destruction, what we found beyond was a burned and desolate village of the dead, among its razed reed structures a cinder-block building, likely built by the U.S. Army as a show of goodwill, its walls still intact but its roof fully burned away. The children within were tiny bone-black sculptures melted to their desks. And I ask you this: Are they more human to you because they are children?

“Fuck fuck fuck,” our unit commander shouted. “Everyone out. We’re getting the fuck out of here right now.” And then, to me: “This is on you, you stupid fuck.”

I do not think any of us in that unit ever really recovered from that day. Six of us were killed and the remainder who survived stumbled through the last two months of our sentence with a kind of grim and quiet determination. We did not talk of it. Had it not been for Chiggers I do not think I would have made it through, for he, at least, seemed capable of continuing to live with some semblance of grace and dignity and even humor. And it was Chiggers too who would, in the dark of the night when I could not stop weeping, tell me that he was grateful for what I had done. “You saved us,” he would say. “Don’t think of it any other way. You saved us.”

Men, women, children, and water buffalo: all were counted among the enemy dead. Command pointed us in the supposed direction of the supposed enemy and so it was into that direction we poured the full liquid metal of our arsenal, the great hot barrage of it like a tunnel of teeth chewing the whole of the landscape down to stubble. God help anyone who stumbled into its path. I thought that if I could only articulate its voracity, on the page, that I might straighten my thoughts, my heart like a burnished disc of hot brass spinning endlessly in the tropic sunlight, its sound a continuous, susurrate hiss.