Four photos fell out. As before, they were before and after shots. An Oriental girl, fourteen or fifteen, head and vagina shaved bald, on all fours in a dark and dirty room. The same girl, legs amputated and propped in back of her head, face screaming with agony and terror. An even younger girl, possibly Asian, possibly white, tied spread-eagled to stakes embedded in the dirt, dark-green jungle behind her. The same girl, eviscerated, eyes wide and unseeing, mouth frozen in a rictus of tortured pain.

Hobie felt his bowels contract. The fear was strong within him. His palms were sweaty, his hands shaking, and the paper rattled noisily as he held up the letter, but he forced himself to read it:

Bro,

Things here are getting pretty hairy. We’re out of the cities and into the villages. The damn jungle is really thick, green everywhere as far as you can fucking see. Even the sky’s starting to look kind of greenish. We don’t know where the VC is or when they’re going to attack. It’s a tense scene. Everything here makes you jump. We’ve been waiting on edge for something to happen just like we were told, but the sergeant decided that the best defense is a good offense and the other day we went out on our own. You can see the pictures. A guy named Mac took them and developed them. It was a VC village. The men were all gone, but their wives and daughters were there and you know what they wanted. Lots of good healthy American dick. We couldn’t just leave them, though. They’d be able to tell the others which way we’d gone, so after we were finished with them we silenced them. You can see the pictures. Gotta go. You can tell Dad, but don’t tell Mom. I’ll write her a letter when I get a chance.

Dan

Hobie stared at the letter a long time after he’d finished reading it. It was from Dan. There was no doubt about that. Even after all these years, he still recognized his brother’s handwriting. But the hardness, the insensitivity, the casual approach to raping and killing, that was something entirely unlike Dan.

He found himself thinking for some reason of a time when he was eight or nine and he and one of his friends had been pouring salt on a snail, watching it dissolve. Dan had seen them and had burst into tears, crying for the snail and its now fatherless family, and it had taken both their mother and father to console him.

Hobie wanted to cry now, out of sadness for the loss of his brother, which even this tentative connection made once again real and immediate, and out of sadness for the change that had occurred within the boy before he died, a change that neither he nor his parents had ever seen.