Vu and Trang yell, as if she can hear them, but Phuong doesn’t come back up. They’re paralyzed. Maybe they can’t swim. Maybe everything is just happening too fast for them to react.

Without giving it any thought, I jump in and swim after her, aiming for the spot where she went under, hoping the current will take me to her. The plunge shocks me out of the brain fog that’s dogged me since the interrogation. I dive under where I think Phuong might be, but visibility is zero. I find the bottom and kick off, pushing myself farther downstream. Lungs bursting, I surface, take a breath, see an arm thrashing out of the water, and swim harder to catch up. I lift my head again. The arm is gone. I keep swimming. I dive once more and reach blindly and feel something, flesh and hair. I grab Phuong’s shirt and pull her to the surface. She’s limp, but I manage to get her face above the waterline. Dim memory of an old lifeguard training class that I never finished kicks in. I loop my arm under her ribs and sidestroke toward the bank, kicking out of the current, losing strength and breath with every second, too tired to keep going, but knowing I can’t quit or we’re both dead.

My feet touch the soft, murky bottom again, and I drag us to land. With what feels like the last of my strength, I turn her on her back, tilt her head, and do CPR, my mouth on hers, quick shallow breaths, chest compressions, whatever I can think of.

She finally shudders and coughs and vomits. I roll her onto her side so she won’t choke, pull her long black hair out of her face, make sure her mouth and nose are out of the sand, and then just sit there until her breath slows to something like normal. I look around for Vu and Trang. There’s no telling how far we’ve been pulled down the river. Another wave of fatigue sweeps over me, and I collapse in the sand next to Phuong, keeping my hand on her side to feel the shuddering rise and fall. I can’t tell if she’s unconscious or just exhausted to the point that she might as well be.

As long as she’s breathing, though, that means she’s alive. I close my eyes. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day, the middle of the night, the middle of the war, the middle of anything—all I want to do is sleep.

Vu and Trang eventually find us, and we end up staying here for the night, just up the bank in a secluded spot in the dense woods, still within earshot of the murmuring river. For a long time, Phuong doesn’t speak, just sits, wrapped in her poncho, back against a tree. I want to warn her about snakes, but even that seems as if it would take too much effort. I lean against my own tree but keep checking over my shoulder to make sure nothing is about to slither onto me.

Vu and Trang scowl and tend to their pots of rice and chicken—which they don’t share—and some peppers they must have pilfered from the hamlet without Phuong seeing.

After they fall asleep, Phuong whispers to me in French, “Why did you save me?”

I shrug. “You were going to drown. I didn’t really think about it.” I’m quiet for a minute, then add, “Plus you were sort of nice to me before. I mean, you took that noose off me that first day. And in the tunnel where they tied me up, you didn’t let them strip me all the way until I was, you know, naked.”

“I would not have done the same for you,” she says, and from the long, serious look on her face, I believe her. Almost.

“You would have died,” I say. I can’t think of any other reason for what I did, or why there should be another reason for saving somebody.

“Je suis votre ennemie,” she says. I am your enemy.

“Yeah,” I reply. “I guess so. Well, how about this, then: I figured I’d rather have you still be alive and in charge. I don’t think Trang likes me very much. Maybe I knew I would have a better chance of surviving with you than with him.”

“Vu doesn’t like you, either,” Phuong says. I think maybe she’ll smile when she says it, but her expression doesn’t change, so she must be serious about that, too. Maybe about everything.

“This is a war, Taylor,” she says, her expression still not changing. “You still don’t seem to know what that means, but you will learn. I didn’t know what it meant when I was a schoolgirl in the North, in Hanoi, but that was a long time ago. Before the Americans began bombing us. Before we were forced to see, right in front of us, in our own families, so much death. The carnage. Before we left our homes and came to liberate the South and face your army. You are a foolish boy who thinks he did a heroic thing. If I had died in the river, I would have died as a martyr to the great cause of uniting our country. The People’s Army requires that dedication of all.”

It sounds like a propaganda speech, but everything she’s saying, I can tell she believes. In her mind, we’re the enemy—the Americans and the South Vietnamese. And I guess the French before us. We’re the bad guys. Phuong says they’re fighting to liberate their own country. Geoff, whose parents are both liberal, pacifist professors at Columbia University, is always saying the same thing back home—that the South Vietnam government is corrupt, a puppet controlled by the US, and that America is on the wrong side in this war. Geoff says Ho Chi Minh is, like, the Abraham Lincoln of Vietnam, and this is their Civil War.

It’s the opposite of everything I’ve ever heard from Dad, who says the North Vietnamese are communists, in league with the Soviet Union and the Red Chinese, out to destroy democracy. He says Ho Chi Minh is as bad as Stalin and Mao, and all the communist countries want the same thing: world domination.

I don’t know what to think.

I lie back on the hard ground and close my eyes. Vu is doing a kind of whistle-snoring, until Phuong crawls over and pinches his nose. He flops around for a second and then is still. I shut my eyes again, taking some small comfort in the soft night sounds—the river, a gentle wind through the trees—and I’m almost asleep when a thought comes to me: Phuong said my name, for the first and only time. That has to mean something.

The next morning it’s cold sticky rice and nasty tapioca roots for breakfast—a smaller handful for me; not much more than that for Phuong, Vu, and Trang—and then we’re back on our feet, following the curve of the river to find the trail we lost, or gave up, or haven’t yet found after the crossing. The new sandals chafe some, but not nearly as bad as Dad’s wing tips did. The black uniform I’m wearing is cooler and a lot more comfortable than what had been left of my suit, and as the sun rises and bakes the earth yet again, the straw hat is a great relief, like having an umbrella on my head to keep me in shade. Any time we find water, no matter how small the stream or how shallow the pond, Phuong, Vu, and Trang splash themselves head to toe, and then air-dry as we continue walking afterward. I start doing the same thing, and that helps keep me cooler, too.

And then suddenly there’s no more jungle. We pull up short at the edge of what looks like it should be a cliff. Instead we’re just a step removed from a barren landscape that stretches before us farther than we can see. A ghost forest, ground cover gone, no leaves on the trees, the trees themselves little more than white-gray stalks, thousands and thousands of them, most broken, some nothing but ragged stumps with shards so sharp that to stumble into one would mean being impaled. Everything seems white, not just the trees. Everything. Like somebody dumped massive amounts of powder in every direction.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I ask Phuong. What is this?

“The Americans call it the Iron Triangle,” Phuong says.

“What happened here?” I ask.

She scowls and then counts off on her fingers: “Phosphorus. Poison herbicide. Agent Orange. Napalm. American bombers have sprayed hundreds of thousands of kilograms across the whole province, from this forest and the Saigon River in the South, to the Thi Tinh River in the East, to the Than Dien forest in the North.”

“Can we go around it?” I ask. The last thing I want to do is be anywhere close to all this chemical death.

“We’ll have to wait until night when we can’t be seen by spotter planes or patrols,” Phuong says. “And then we’ll go through.”