He was twenty-­four then and new on the beat. It was spring 1965 and Dutch elm disease was everywhere. The elms on Nostrand were dying, and the city was cutting them down. Hawkins had stopped to watch a man sawing at a limb from a metal box raised on a mechanized arm; the branch snapped as a blast of spring wind came up the street and pulled the branch out of the ropes. Hawkins dodged, but he was too slow and the thick part of the branch grazed his head. He didn’t think it had hit him with any force at all; but he sat down without knowing he was going to. He saw people coming out of the shops and rushing toward him along the street, and felt his own blood run down the side of his face and into the corner of his mouth. He meant to lean back until the dizziness went away, and all of a sudden he was back in Vietnam—Laos, to be exact—in a tree, his parachute hopelessly tangled in the branches, his arm caught up in the shrouds and broken. The B-­52 pilot was dead, he knew the rest of the crew was dead, too, and there was nothing for miles in any direction but the Laotian jungle. He tried to pull free. But the pain made him faint, and when he woke up it was raining. At least he wouldn’t die of thirst, and he raised his head, opened his mouth, and let the fungus-­tasting rain wash down his throat. Later he slept. When he woke, he reached for one of the frondlike leaves of the tree he hung in; he chewed it, then spat it out. It rained again; the pain radiated from his arm to his groin, to his ankle, then it changed direction and focused in his ear and the back of his head. Then it eased, or he numbed, and he fell asleep again. It rained again, the integument of his skin began to break down, and he could feel insects inside his clothes. He fantasized that there were leeches in his boots, and he thought he would rot before he died, hanging there in the fog and rain. As the rest of his consciousness thinned out, the pain got worse, until he wasn’t aware of anything else except that he thought he’d been hanging there for three days. He heard something in the bush; he prayed for a tiger or some wild animal capable of killing him; but from the sounds he knew it was men coming through the jungle and he hoped the VC would kill him quickly, not try to keep him alive as a prize of war. They got closer, and through the fog he saw that they were Americans. They cut him down, laid him back on a stretcher, gave him a shot, and in a few minutes the pain stopped. The end of that pain was the best feeling he’d ever had. It was so good, he risked opening his eyes.