“You stood up back there,” the commando said. “To them. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“I didn’t stand up,” Lett said. “I simply don’t see why I should do their dirty work, especially not from a former enemy—who started all this. It’s not what I’m here for.”

The commando laughed. “Don’t tell me. They’re going to fix you, right? Help you with what’s ailing you? What a crock.” He spat.

“Why don’t you get some shut-eye? You’re getting irritable.”

The commando’s head sank between his knees. Lett hoped to hear snoring. After a couple minutes, the commando popped up and started in again. “Listen. You know what the Nips did? During the war, when they had a tunnel or cave or what have you that they wanted kept secret? They buried the help in there right along with their spoils.”

“Like I was saying,” Lett said.

The commando grunted. He then muttered that he was going to go take a leak.

Lett considered using the opportunity to get his syringe from his musette bag and give himself a dose. But he didn’t. He simply didn’t feel the urge. And his body felt too heavy. He was too dazed from all the duty, the intense incidents. He let his eyes lose focus. He embraced the return of the old thousand-yard stare, and part of him even embraced the possibility of his dead friends visiting. But his old ghosts stayed away.

***

The commando didn’t return. No one had seen him.

Lansdale sent out men looking for him, but he didn’t seem perturbed when they didn’t find him, joking that one day they might discover the fellow up in the hills wearing a loin cloth muttering the “native mumbo-jumbo.” He told Lett that it wasn’t his fault.

With the commando gone, Lett had less time for rest. He was left to stand guard while others cleaned camp, loaded up. Lansdale, Kodama, Frankie, and the diligent engineers held meetings and pored over maps. They came and went. They seemed to forget about him.

As he used to do up on the line, Lett drifted in and out of sleep while standing and pacing and standing, his eyes seemingly open to an unknowing bystander. He could march like this, they all could, if they had been worn down long enough. Like this, time itself lost measure or meaning. His state only intensified here with the dense jungle and steep hillsides rising all around, another world completely, just as the cold, wet, pine- and fir-choked Ardennes Forest might as well have been the moon to a Pacific grunt like Jock or the commando. Like this, Lett retained a sense of alertness even as he lost any sense of alarm or urgency—and any recognition that he had to flee all of this now.