We rest and sleep through the heat of the afternoon, hidden in the jungle where the air force hasn’t reached with their—I guess with our—chemical sprays and mass defoliants and incendiary bombs.

As soon as it’s dusk, we move out—Phuong once again in the lead, then Trang, me, and Vu bringing up the rear and making sure I don’t try to run. Not that there’s anywhere to run to. I can’t see that we’re following a trail anymore, so maybe it’s the stars, the constellations, something nocturnal, anyway. We’ve only been walking for half an hour when Phuong pulls up suddenly. We all step to the side of the path. There isn’t any place to hide except almost comically behind one of the white trees—all four of us. With the moon out, and no clouds, and no other cover, we couldn’t be more exposed. We might as well be out in the daytime.

A line of soldiers materializes out of the ghost forest. Phuong steps out from behind the tree and quietly hails them, her voice a whisper. But the forest is so deathly quiet that it still seems to echo. The line freezes and three people in the lead, two men and a woman, separate themselves from the night army to speak to Phuong. Vu and Trang pull me out into the open as well. The officers, if that’s what they are, look me over hard. One woman lifts her weapon and keeps it leveled at me.

Phuong lowers her voice even more and shows them some papers. Vu and Trang are summoned and hand over their papers as well. One of the officers produces a penlight and studies the documents, then turns the light on me, directly into my face. I blink nervously and can’t stop blinking until he shuts it off.

There’s more whispered conversation, and then the officers rejoin their unit and march on, or rather creep, through the prairie of dead trees and white ash. What I thought was a small unit, maybe a platoon, turns out to be several hundred—a battalion—moving not in a straight line as I also thought, but spread out much wider. We wait for them to pass, but every time I think they’re gone, there’s a break, and then another wave of soldiers—all of them in military uniforms, none of them with ranks showing that I can see.

And then, without warning, the night explodes. A squad of low-flying planes suddenly appears overhead, flooding the forest with searchlights. The gunships roll over on their sides as they pass, opening up with their side guns. Hundreds of rounds rain down on us, red phosphorus tracers lighting up the sky and the ground and everything in between. I know what they are—converted cargo planes that the Vietnamese call Dragon Ships because those red tracers make it look like they’re spitting fire. The Americans call them Puffs, like Puff the Magic Dragon, each one capable of spewing eighteen thousand rounds a minute from three massive guns, blasting soldiers and trees into splinters. I can’t move, just stand there, transfixed by the suddenness, by the awesome firepower, by the deafening sound, by the psychedelic light show, by the chaos and frenzy as everyone runs in every direction until they can’t. I see a man literally shot in half not ten feet away. Two men run past me going as hard as they can, stupidly looking behind them. Both slam into trees, knocking one out completely, while the other becomes a slow-crawling target who is quickly killed, his head split open, his body dancing on the ground as more bullets catch what’s left of his corpse.

My legs give out and I sit at the base of a white tree. I press my hands over my ears and, without meaning to, start shouting, not saying anything that makes sense, just noise to try to drown out the horror. The Dragon Ships keep circling and I keep squeezing, but there’s no escape: It’s every monster that ever hid under my bed when I was little, or lurked in my closet and sprang out at me in nightmares; it’s every siren screaming toward every blood-soaked tragedy down New York streets; it’s riots in Harlem, a meteor striking Earth, the atomic bomb, the end of the world.

And it stops as abruptly as it began. The Puffs straighten themselves and leave, maybe out of ammunition or maybe on to a new target, leaving behind murdered earth and skeletons of trees bursting into flame and white dust, a ghastly rain falling on everything and everybody, the living, and the dying, and the dead.

There’s a terrible efficiency to how quickly the NVA survivors bury their dead. Teams with trenching tools hack out shallow graves. Other teams pick up bodies or what’s left of them. Some collect identification papers from their dead friends, some take their weapons, some gather rucksacks and rice rations and ammo pouches and knives and anything else—uniforms, boots, helmets. Some fashion stretchers with bamboo staffs and ponchos. Others take up the stretchers and the march continues toward Saigon.

Nobody speaks to me, or gives me orders, or even seems to notice I’m here. I could be invisible.

I wonder if Phuong and Vu and Trang have been killed, and if that means I’m on my own. Free, but so far away from home that it doesn’t seem possible that I could ever get back there. Not just to Saigon and the embassy, but New York. Do I even have a home anymore? My parents could be dead for all I know. The full weight of that realization—how completely and horribly alone I am in the world—makes me drop back to the ground, where I sit, legs splayed, arms so weak they fall palms up as if they’ll come unattached like all those amputated limbs I carried out of the underground hospital.

Two ghosts emerge from out of the gloom—Phuong and Trang, covered in that same white dust that camouflages us all. They don’t speak, just slump to the ground next to me, letting their rifles drop beside them. Nobody moves, nobody says anything, no explanation about what happened to Vu, but no need to ask. I care but I don’t care. So he’s dead. At least I’m not alone.

Phuong is the first to stir. She shakes herself. Lightly slaps her own face. Then says, “We can’t stay here. The Dragon Ships might come back.”

That doesn’t seem likely, especially since the NVA battalion is long gone. There’s little cover in the skeletal forest during the night, but there’ll be even less during the day. So we move out, stumbling across the pocked earth. I trip a couple of times. Trang does, too, and accidentally discharges his AK-47. Phuong chews him out in Vietnamese, her voice hoarse from all the dust, or from screaming like I did during the attack, or from fatigue. Trang doesn’t respond.

The Saigon River bends near us deep into our night march, the water a harsh, metallic silver. We climb down the bank to wash the dust out of our eyes and mouths, and to fill canteens. Phuong hands me the extra canteen and says to keep it. It must have been Vu’s. She also gives me a rice carrier like the long cotton tubes she and Trang wear over their shoulders. She tells me it holds two weeks’ worth of dried rice. I wonder if that means we’re two weeks away from Hanoi, but that can’t be right. From what TJ told me it would be more like two months, so we’ll have to get more rice from somewhere along the way—if they’re actually taking me to Hanoi. So far, Phuong hasn’t said.

The sun rises that morning on a new problem: the sudden end of the trees. As dead as they were, as white and ashen, at least they broke up the landscape. But now it’s as if we’re walking on the moon. Even the air feels too thin to sustain us, as if most of the oxygen has been vacuumed out of this place. It’s deathly quiet, our footsteps the only sounds. No birds, no forest creatures, no wind through trees, no trees at all, no wind at all, no brush, no livestock, no roads, no paths, no villages or hamlets, no people.

We pass burnt mounds of what must have once been trees and brush, but long since destroyed and turned to cinders. Then we come to the edge of an enormous crater.

Phuong stops us. The silence is so heavy that it turns just standing here into a battle with gravity.

“This was the village of Ben Suc,” she says.

“It looks like a meteorite landed here,” I say, looking around in horror.

“No,” Phuong said. “Just Americans and South Vietnamese. They attacked from the air first and bombed every hamlet and village in this province. Then the ground troops and the tanks moved in. They dropped leaflets from spotter planes telling all who lived here that it had been declared a free-fire zone, which meant they were authorized to shoot everyone and target anything.”

“There was a battle?” I ask.

“No,” Phuong says. “Only a slaughter from the sky. Some escaped. Some were captured. Some were relocated. Many were killed. Afterward, they drove in with their bulldozers to destroy all the buildings, the trees, everything. More phosphorus from the air. More chemicals, not only in the village but everywhere you see. They set fires that burned for weeks.”

“Because the NVA was here?” I ask.

She nods. “The National Liberation Front—the Viet Cong guerillas—had controlled the province. The North Vietnamese Army sent me and dozens of others from Hanoi to help them establish political cadres, weapons training, medical clinics. We were stationed here in Ben Suc. Until the Americans came. They found our underground stores of rice and weapons. They brought tons of explosives and placed them in bunkers under the village. Then they blew the whole village away.”

She sweeps her arm in an arc in front of her. “And so the crater.”