We’re walking again, back on the narrow trail. Maybe it’s a different trail than before. Maybe it’s the same one. Thick brush, overhanging trees, rice paddies, dry stream beds, brutal heat. We stop outside a village and hide while Trang goes off on orders from Phuong to find new clothes for me. He comes back with black clothes and a straw conical hat, similar to what they’re all wearing. The pant legs and sleeves are too short by a couple of inches but fit okay other than that, enough so that Phuong says from a distance I will look like them, and we can all pass for peasants—except for their weapons and ammo belts, and my wing tip shoes, which are still crippling my feet. I struggle with the lingering effects of sleep deprivation—everything happening in a kind of brain fog—and my aching shoulders that make it difficult to raise my arms over my head. But my feet are the worst.

I pull off the shoes to show Phuong. My toenails have turned black. The shoes are wet with fresh blood inside. She tells me I have to keep going. “We have no choice,” she says. “We can’t stop here, not during daylight. It’s too dangerous. We must keep going.”

I respond by throwing Dad’s shoes into the brush.

Phuong nods to Vu and Trang, and they shove me down the trail, making me walk barefoot. Over the next few hours I seem to step on every rock, thorn, stick, and snake on the trail until I can’t take it anymore. Maybe they’re making me walk all the way to North Vietnam. Maybe just to the next tunnel complex, where they’re planning to torture me some more. Maybe they have a secret execution site and that’s where we’re going. But I don’t care. “I’m done!” I shout. “I can’t walk.” I drop to the ground in the middle of the path and refuse to get up. I even yell that I hate them. It’s a pretty good tantrum. A stupid one, too.

Vu doesn’t wait for orders from Phuong. He hits me hard across the shoulders with his bamboo, and then again on my thighs. I roll into a ball as he keeps hitting me until Phuong makes him stop. She drags him off into the brush and speaks to him in a loud, angry voice until he calms down. Or maybe they’re just talking about the weather. From the recesses of my foggy brain it all seems abstract, even Vu beating me with his staff.

When they come back, Phuong pulls out the bamboo and noose. My heart sinks. “Okay, okay,” I say in French. “You don’t have to do that.”

She nods and puts it away. They lift me to my feet, and once again we march—or in my case, limp—down the path. After half an hour, Phuong leads us off in a new direction, toward one of the hamlets we’ve been avoiding all day, except for Trang’s solo excursion for clothes. I don’t see it at first. The thatch-roofed huts and animal enclosures blend in with the bank of trees and brush on the far side of yet another expanse of rice paddies.

Phuong looks nervously in every direction. Vu and Trang do as well, mostly up at the clear blue cloudless sky, as if they’re afraid jets will come racing over to drop bombs on our heads, or helicopters with their side-door gunners spraying everything in sight: two small boys guiding a water buffalo somewhere, women trudging toward the hamlet carrying heavy loads of something, and of course, us.

We make it safely across the rice paddies, zigzagging on the narrow dikes. Dusty-faced children blink up at us from some odd game they’re playing in the dirt. Two old women, bent practically in half, squawk at Phuong and hobble away. An elderly man shows up, maybe summoned by the old women. He speaks to Phuong and Vu and Trang, then looks at me and scowls in such a way that I wonder if he might rather kill me than welcome me to his village. We follow him through the hamlet and back into the jungle. He slashes vines and thick elephant grass with his machete to make a path. It’s still a struggle to keep up, until we come to a gash in the earth where trees, brush, everything has been torn violently out by their roots, or sheared and burned, or tossed by the force of impact of something that crashed there.

We follow the gash down into a ravine until we see it—the wreckage of an A-1E fighter-bomber. American. The nose and propeller are crushed and half buried, the cockpit destroyed, one wing just gone, flung somewhere I can’t see. The fuselage is crumpled and partially burned, but the US Navy insignia is still visible.

“Why are we here?” I ask Phuong.

“Sandals,” she says as the old man goes to work cutting rubber off one of the large, heavy tires that seem to have already been worked over in the same way before. Trang grabs my shoulder and forces me to sit, and the old man takes my foot to measure against the rubber slab. He makes his large cuts with the machete, which is disturbingly sharp, then goes to work with a smaller knife and some hemp, and in ten minutes has fashioned a pair of sandals that he gives to Phuong, who hands them to Trang, who shoves them at me to put on my feet.

They fill canteens from a nearby stream, and when they do I climb up on the side of the plane to see what’s inside. The instrument panel is smashed. All the wiring has been pulled out. The seats are gone. There’s no trace of the pilot. As I climb down—Vu and Trang barking at me angrily for going off without permission—I see, twenty yards away, a flight suit with the pilot’s body impaled on a branch, twenty feet up, his head, hidden by helmet and visor, dropped forward to his chest, arms dangling, both legs severed. I’m furious—not just that he’s dead, but that he’s been left there while people from the village troop past to pirate parts from the plane.

“Can I cut him down?” I ask Phuong in French. “Can’t I at least bury him?”

She shakes her head. “We have to go.” And she turns, expecting me to follow. But I don’t. I start walking over to the tree where the pilot hangs, until Vu and Trang catch up with me and knock me to the ground. The old man follows them. He stares hard at me for a minute. I think he’s going to say something, but instead he spits a stream of black tobacco juice in my face.

They don’t let me bury the pilot. I’m not sure I have the strength to do it anyway. We leave. Stumbling back down the trail. I wipe off the spit. I keep on the sandals.

We’re at the outskirts, just before we get to the rice paddies, when a scrawny chicken pokes its head out of the brush. Vu snatches it and, in one quick motion, rings its neck and pulls off the head. Blood sprays out of the stump, and Vu holds the now-dead chicken upside down by its feet as the blood drains to the ground.

Phuong stops in her tracks and then explodes, shouting at Vu as he tries to back away. She points toward the hamlet, and we all march quickly back. One of the old women from before sees the dead chicken and begins yelling at Vu and Phuong.

Phuong speaks sharply again to Vu. He opens his rucksack and pulls out a small pouch and gives the old woman some coins. She stares at them, her palm open. Phuong says something else, and Vu adds to the pile. Vu and Phuong both bow to the old woman, and we leave the hamlet again—with the chicken, which I pray we’ll all get to eat with the meager ration of sticky rice that evening. Something tells me it will be a long time before there’s any more pho, with or without the worms.

We come up on the Saigon River the next day—Phuong tells me the name—running wide and fast. We follow the bank, coming up from the southwest, until we find a broken rock plateau that juts into the water. Phuong, Vu, and Trang squat in the brush, studying the topography. I sprawl on the jungle floor, not caring where I lie, but thankful that the back of my head finds a patch of soft moss and ferns.

Phuong sends Vu out onto the exposed rock to scout a way to cross. There’s a ferry, or there was at one time, but we can see the remnants of it a short way downriver, bombed into splinters.

When Vu returns, they have a feverish conversation for a few minutes. Trang pulls a tightly coiled rope from his pack and ties it around Vu’s waist. Vu doesn’t look happy at all, but he doesn’t say anything about having to go first. They summon me to go with them out on the rocks and help hold the rope as Vu enters the water, leaving his pack and weapon and rice pouch with us. The current sweeps him into the middle of the river. He pushes off the bottom to send himself forward, but when the water gets too deep, he dog-paddles furiously for the other side. Every time it seems as if he’s making progress, he loses it to the current. But he keeps up his struggle, his wild splashing, kicking now, too, until he finally makes his way out of the current and into flat water and eventually to the other bank.

He drags himself out, catches his breath, then walks the rope up so he’s directly across from us and ties the rope off to a tree near the river’s edge. Trang ties our end to a boulder. He has an easier time getting across, going hand over hand, though he’s carrying both his and Vu’s weapons and packs. Phuong makes me go next—obviously there’s no way she’s leaving me alone to go last, or try to escape. I have nothing to carry except my sandals, which I’m not about to risk losing to the current.

After I make it across, Phuong unties the rope on her end, then when she plunges into the river, the current sweeps her downstream the same as it did with Vu. She holds firm to the rope with one hand and somehow manages to keep her weapon and pack over her head with the other. I can see her straining, the water up to her chin and at times over her mouth and nose. Vu and Trang give me some orders that I don’t understand, until I see they’re pulling on the rope to reel in Phuong to our side. I join them, and in a few minutes she’s here, clearly exhausted. She lets go of the rope so she can shove her AK-47 and gear up to us on the bank.

Trang extends his hand to pull her up next, but he loses his grip, or maybe she slips. Phuong screams and then suddenly she’s back in the water, sputtering, flailing, pulled away by the current.

And then under.