Colored fragments pour down toward him through the hole in the ceiling. Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. Red mud pressed in patterns to an ooze by Amtrac treads. The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram. The color of human ears a guy from another company had drying under his belt like withered apricots, yellow. The black of the ao dai pajamas the delicate little whores wore, so figurine-fine he couldn’t believe he could touch them though this clammy guy in a white suit kept pushing, saying, “Black GI, number one, most big pricks, Viet girls like suck.” The red, not of blood, but of the Ace of Diamonds a guy in his company wore in his helmet for luck. All that luck-junk: peace-signs of melted lead, love beads, beads spelling LOVE, JESUS, MOTHER, BURY ME DEEP, Ho Chi Minh sandals cut from rubber tires for tiny feet, Tao crosses, Christian crosses, the cross-shaped bombs the Phantoms dropped on the trail up ahead, the X’s your laces wore into your boots over the days, the shiny green body bags tied like long mail sacks, sun on red dust, on blue smoke, sun caught in shafts between the canopies of the jungle where dinks with Russian rifles waited quieter than orchids, it all tumbles down on him, he is overwhelmed. He knows he can never make it intelligible to these three ofays that worlds do exist beyond these paper walls.

“Just the sounds,” Skeeter says. “When one of them Unfriendly mortar shells hits near your hole it is as if a wall were there that was big and solid, twenty feet thick of noise, and you is just a gushy bug. Feet up there just as soon step on you as not, it doesn’t matter to them, right? It does blow your mind. And the dead, the dead are so weird, they are so—dead. Like a stiff chewed mouse the cat fetches up on the lawn. I mean, they are so out of it, so peaceful, there is no word for it, this same grunt last night he was telling you about his girl back in Oshkosh, making it so real you had to jack off, and the VC trip a Claymore and his legs go this way and he goes the other. It was bad. They used to say, ‘A world of hurt,’ and that is what it was.”

Nelson asks, “What’s a grunt?”

“A grunt is a leg. An eleven bush, right? He is an ordinary drafted soldier who carries a rifle and humps the boonies. The green machine is very clever. They put the draftees out in the bush to get blown and the re-ups sit back at Longbinh tellin’ reporters the body count. They put old Charlie Company on some bad hills, but they didn’t get me to re-up. I’d had a bushel, right?”

“I thought I was Charlie,” Rabbit says.

“I thought the Viet Cong was,” Nelson says.