“You get me a goddamn VC courier,” Demarest went on, scowling. “No, you get me an even dozen. If they’ve got paper on them, bring it back—certified with VC blood. Prove to me that military intelligence is not a contradiction in terms.”

That evening, six of them had rolled over the gunwales of the fiberglass-hulled STAB, the SEAL tactical assault boat, and into the bath-warm shallow water of Ham Luong. They paddled through an eighth of a mile of riverine silt and landed on the pear-shaped island. “Come back with prisoners, or don’t come back,” their CO had told them. With luck, they would do so: the island, Noc Lo, was known to be controlled by Viet Cong. But luck had lately been in scarce supply.

The six men wore black pajamas, like their foe. No dog tags, no signs of rank or unit, of the fact that they were a SEAL team, of the even more pertinent fact that they were Demarest’s Devils. They had spent two hours making their way through the island’s dense vegetation, alert to any sign of the enemy—sounds, footprints, even the smell of the nuoc cham sauce their enemy doused over their food.

They were divided into three pairs, two of them in front, traveling ten yards apart; two of them serving as rear guard, in charge of the forty-pound M60, ready to provide cover.

Janson was on point, paired with Hardaway, a tall, thickly built man with dark brown skin and widespaced eyes. He kept his head close-shorn with electric clippers. Hardaway’s tour of duty was up in sixty days, and he was getting antsy about returning stateside. A month ago, he had torn out a skin-mag centerfold and divided it into numbered squares. Each day, he filled in one of the squares. When they were all filled in, he would take his centerfold girl back home and trade her in for a real one. That was Hardaway’s idea, anyway.

Now, three hundred yards inland, Hardaway picked up a contraption made out of tire rubber and canvas, and showed it to Janson with a questioning look. They were mud shoes. The light-bodied VC used them to glide tracklessly through swampy terrain. Recently discarded?

Janson called for thirty seconds of silent vigilance. The team froze in place, alert to any noise that was out of the ordinary. Noc Lo was in the middle of a free-fire zone, where firing was permitted at any time without restriction, and there was no escape from the muffled sounds of distant batteries, mortars booming at halfsecond intervals. Away from the vegetation, one could see the white pulsations on the fringe of the horizon. But after thirty seconds, it seemed evident that there was no activity in the immediate vicinity.

“You know what the mortar fire makes me think of sometimes?” Hardaway asked. “The choir clapping in my church. Like it’s religious, some kind of way.”