The next two days we travel hard, keeping to the forest as much as possible but having to venture out under the brutal sun to cross miles of rice paddies with no shelter or shade, except the occasional copse of trees where the dikes converge to make small islands, or when we stumble on tiny hamlets where the children hide once they see strangers approaching, and especially when they realize one of them is an American. We can’t drink the stagnant water in the rice paddies, but we find a couple of dirty streams along the way and make do.

Sometimes Phuong stops abruptly and listens for the telltale drone of a spotter plane. Twice, when she hears something, we dive into the nasty water and hug the bank until the plane circles and leaves, then we scramble back onto the dike and run for cover in case it comes back, which she says happens a lot—an old trick to coax NVA soldiers out of hiding. I have to fight back the impulse to stand up on the dike and yell and wave and throw off my straw hat and show them my American face.

But she’s still the one with the AK-47, and I’m still her prisoner. Even if we’re lying facedown in the rice paddies together.

Sometimes we talk, other times we don’t.

At one small village, a farmer has just slaughtered a pig. It’s hanging upside down, the blood from its slit throat draining into a bucket. There was a time when I would have been grossed out seeing that, but now I don’t think anything about it at all. Phuong offers to buy some of the meat, but the farmer insists on giving us some, maybe seeing how thin and hungry we both are, or maybe he’s just afraid of Phuong’s gun.

That night we have a feast—not only the roasted pork, but some bean sprouts and peppers the villagers also share with us. I nearly cry as fat from the pork drips off into the fire while we turn it on a homemade spit. What a waste! We probably don’t wait long enough for it to cook all the way through before we pull the meat off the bone.

Phuong chews everything slowly, thoughtfully, as if it’s just another meal rather than the first real food she’s had in a week. I shove my mouth into my bowl to lick it clean.

She cuts me off when I reach for a second helping. “Enough. We save the rest for tomorrow.”

I know she’s right, that we shouldn’t eat it all at once, but I still would steal every bite if I could get away with it.

To distract myself I say, “How did the pilots of those Dragon Ships know about the NVA battalion crossing the ghost forest? Like, the exact time and place.”

“I doubt it was spotter planes,” she says. “But there are other ways they have of finding our troop locations. The Americans have put censors, thousands of them, in places where they think we’ll be traveling. Or it could have been the work of spies. We’ve discovered secret transmitters hidden near the Trail. You remember the questions you were asked about your father. We suspect that he, or others he works with, are behind much of this surveillance.”

I wish I could ask my dad about it myself. It all sounds so complicated and technical—and sinister. Almost like a game, like if pinball and chess got married and had a kid, and they armed that kid with the most lethal weapons on the planet.

“Of course there’s also the element of luck. Or bad luck,” Phuong says. “Often the censors don’t work correctly. Once the Americans slaughtered a herd of elephants in a bombing raid in Laos. I’ve heard that sometimes they pick up sounds of the wind in the trees, and the trees swaying. Sometimes they have targeted montagnards, the mountain people who live near the Trail. Many of them have been killed as well.”

“How do you know so much about the Trail?” I ask.

“You’re not the first prisoner I’ve been assigned to escort on the trails,” she says. “I’ve been here before, and much farther north as well. I had experienced guides with me the first time, and the second time. Then I became the experienced one.”

“Have you gone farther north than Cambodia?” I ask, hoping to get her to confirm where we’re going.

“Only once, into Laos,” she says.

“What about to Hanoi?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No. Any prisoner being taken that far, I was ordered to hand off to others at one of the supply stations in Cambodia or Laos.”

“What about this time, with me?”

She hesitates. “We’re never supposed to tell prisoners this information. But …” She hesitates again. She doesn’t finish. But now I’m more convinced than ever that our ultimate destination is Hanoi. And my heart sinks at the thought of it.

Much later, we’re resting by a shaded stream after hours of walking that started before sunrise. The buzz and whir of insects keeps us company; we haven’t seen another human since yesterday. I ask Phuong about Ben Suc—how she managed to survive when so many others didn’t.

“We knew that the Americans were coming,” she says. “So in some ways we were able to prepare. But we could only prepare so much. Cadres were sent to Cambodia before the American attack. Teams spread out deep into the countryside. But many of us were still in the village when the bomb and the rocket attacks started. There were helicopters, gunships, and fighter-bombers. We recognized the scream of the jets, dropping bombs and spraying automatic weapons fire on Ben Suc.

“After that came the heavy artillery, bombarding us once they were able to draw close enough after the aerial assault. They destroyed most of our supplies and many of our bases. But they didn’t find all our leaders when the American troops and the ARVN swept through and began the arrests. Some fled, some hid, some stayed and fought and died, some perished before there was anyone to fight, only death from the sky. I was able to escape and make my way to the Saigon River, where I covered myself with mud and held on to roots to stay hidden along the banks. That was where I met Vu and Trang. We hid for three days, only able to come out in the dark. But with so many Americans in the area we couldn’t go far to look for food, and we had to hide ourselves again during the day.

“The second night at the river another comrade found us, just before dawn,” she continues. “He slid down the bank and would have gone into the water if we hadn’t caught him. He had been wounded. An awful injury to his shoulder—his arm was only barely hanging on. There was so much blood. He was incoherent, mumbling, weeping. We did all we could. We pressed mud into his wound, made a poultice with grasses from the riverbank, kept pressure on to try to staunch the flow of blood.

“But he was in so much pain. He begged me to help him, to take him to his family. He was feverish. He became agitated. And louder. Vu and Trang and I tried everything to help him, but it became clear that if he stayed with us he would give away our position. The Americans would find us, and they would kill us all.

“When he began shouting, we had to do something. Trang pressed his hand over the man’s mouth to quiet him, but he wouldn’t be quieted. He struggled against Trang, clawed at him. Vu said we had to push him out into the current and let the river take him. We had already seen bloated corpses, many of our comrades, men and women, float past us. It was a river of death. But Trang said the man would panic more and give us away, and it would be a more terrible death for him to drown.

“So Vu and Trang held him, turned him over, and forced his face deep into the mud. I held his legs. It was all I could do. I was so ashamed. We didn’t even know his name. Trang lay on top of the man. Vu kept his hand on the back of the man’s head, pressing it down hard, so he couldn’t breathe.”

She draws a deep breath of her own, then lets it out. “It didn’t take long.”

I think that’s the end of her story, but she isn’t finished. She says, “We eased his body into the water and set him free.”