“They spread-eagled me on the ground, wrists and ankles tied to stakes. Put a nest of biting ants on my chest. Stuck slivers of bamboo under my fingernails. Fuckin’ animals, man. I’m screaming in pain and they’re laughing.”

It’s raining, and under the tarp we’re being regaled by a strange guy wearing a torn, stained green army shirt. He sits cross-legged, talks nonstop, lighting the next cigarette off the last. His name is Karl and he says he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“They gave us this watery soup with pieces of shit in it. You either ate it or starved to death. My best buddy? He got ahold of some lye and swallowed it. Can’t imagine a worse way to go, right? But he’d had it. Enough was enough. They’d hung him upside down and whipped him with bamboo sticks until he was bleeding head to toe.” Karl’s been here five minutes and hasn’t stopped talking or blinked once: speed freak.

It’s early evening. Still light out. From the distance come the sounds of drumming and a crowd chanting. Eva nudges Zach and they cut out. Karl keeps right on rapping. His cheeks are sunken, cheekbones protruding. When I look closely, I realize that his long brown hair is a wig. His bony fingers tremble each time he brings a cigarette to his lips.

Karl is appalling and fascinating, pitiful and damaged. You can’t watch and you can’t not watch. But mostly you feel like you have to listen. He and five other soldiers were captured and held in a jungle camp. The Americans attacked and the Vietcong abandoned the camp, quickly executing the prisoners before they left. Karl played dead, lying among the corpses of his fellow soldiers, covered in their blood.

No one I grew up with — and except for Chris, no one I’ve ever met — has had to face anything close to that.

“I came home and people spat on me and called me a baby killer. How’s that for thanks?”

You sense he’s told these stories a thousand times, trapped in some loop of constantly reliving the horror. A terrible sense of guilt grips me. I recall those stamp-size photographs of the 242 dead men-children in that Life magazine. Since the beginning of the war, more than thirty thousand American soldiers have died over there. And then there are the wounded. We’ve all seen the photos of GIs with one or both legs amputated at the knee. GIs with their heads bandaged, torsos wrapped in bloodied gauze, a buddy holding the plastic bag of saline solution being IVed into a forearm. But this evening I’m seeing the psychic damage . . . close up for the first time. Karl may have his limbs, but what’s left of his mind?