We’re lost, though Phuong won’t say so. But I can tell. She takes us down jungle trails that dead-end into hostile brush. She slashes our way through with her machete, or as far as we can get before she drops to the ground to rest, her face dripping with sweat, barely able to lift her arm from exhaustion. Once, sitting splay-legged on the jungle floor, she lets a viper slither close, inches from her feet. She doesn’t move. Even when I reach for the machete and slice off the viper’s head. She gives me a dead stare, lifts her canteen to her lips, then holds out her hand. I give her back the machete.

“Are we lost?” I ask, but she says no, just orienting ourselves, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

“Soon we’ll arrive at a training and supply camp,” she says. “Deep in the jungle—hard to find even for those who know it’s there, which means it’s impossible for the Americans to find.”

We keep hiking, all that day and into the next, but there’s no sign of the camp. I don’t say anything, though. I just go where she tells me, rest when she tells me, and try not to think about home and where I’m going instead, farther and farther away.

I didn’t know what to say when she told me about her and Vu and Trang and what happened to the man on the banks of the Saigon River, and I still don’t know what to say. It’s so far outside my experience—at least my experience before the night of Tet. A part of me keeps repeating that it can’t be true. No one would ever do anything like that to anybody else.

But of course it’s true. The murders of the MPs, the night of the executions, the underground hospital, the body parts in the jungle, the malaria victims in the tunnels, the shredded victims of the Dragon Ships in the ghost forest, Trang’s gore—after all that, how can I not believe that Phuong and Vu and Trang killed a wounded man in his delirium, smothered him in the muddy bank of the Saigon River?

But what do I have to say back to Phuong? “That’s terrible”? “How awful for you”? “I’m so sorry”?

Do I tell her about my misdeeds in New York—shoplifting records from a music store and getting chased down the street, jumping turnstiles to ride the subway for free, sneaking out to clubs in the Village, cheating on tests at Dalton, that time Geoff and I climbed underneath New York in search of the tunnel people?

But that all seems so lame, doesn’t it? Compared to Phuong’s life and all she’s had to do, all she’s had to endure.

We’re clearly in the foothills of something. Instead of the flat, sprawling acres of rice paddies and dense stands of bamboo that can hide a company of soldiers, we find ourselves on narrow trails crowded by unbroken forest, and climbing and then descending rolling hills and then up steeper slopes, wading deeper and deeper into more hostile vegetation. More tiger-tongue vines. Ridiculously tall palms. Twice coconuts shake loose and fall—landing with a loud thud just a few feet from where we’re walking. If they’d hit us, we’d be dead.

At least it gives us something to eat.

As if all that isn’t bad enough, I wake up the next morning with a white rash on my arms that itches like mad. But when I scratch it, white splotches spread farther up my arms, as if whatever is under my skin is trying to get away from the scratching. It spreads all over my torso and legs as well. And worse, my face swells so bad I can’t swallow. My cheeks get so puffy that I can barely see.

I’m stumbling over every rock, every hole, every vine on the trail, when Phuong comes to an abrupt halt. There are people, some in pants and shirts, some only half-dressed. A couple of them have rifles, but others carry spears, bows, knives. It’s like something out of one of those old war movies I saw with my dad years ago where the landscape is empty and then the enemy is just suddenly there.

Phuong tries to speak with them, but they don’t know Vietnamese, and she doesn’t know whatever language they speak. There’s a lot of pantomiming, some flashing of money. I’m so miserable, still clawing away, continuing to spread the white cloud under my skin, that I think about grabbing Phuong’s machete and scraping the blade wherever I itch, which by now is everywhere.

Phuong tells me to follow them, and she shoves me in their direction, off the trail we’ve been blundering down and onto another that could be mistaken for nothing more than a random break in the bamboo.

We don’t go far before the jungle opens into a clearing with a dozen thatch-roofed huts, a couple of open fire pits, children dancing around us and pointing and laughing, elderly women wearing some sort of sarong or skirt, some bracelets, necklaces, but little else, squatting close to the fires, tending to things cooking.

Someone grabs me by the arm and pulls me down on a grass mat under one of the huts. Phuong takes my empty rice sash and canteen and hat, then tells me to take off my shirt and pants. “They will need to boil your clothes,” she says. “You must have laid in a patch of something. I don’t know what they say it is, but it’s causing your rash.”

The itching is so bad that I don’t care about being left in my underwear. I balk when two women come at me with fists full of leaves, but they grab my arms and start rubbing the leaves all over me, head to toe, painting me with something sticky. It smells terrible, but the relief is immediate. “Thank you!” I gush, not sure if they understand. They smile at each other and keep rubbing, a second round, and then a third. I could cry, it feels so good to not feel so miserable anymore. With every breath I take, the itching subsides more, and after maybe an hour, the rash is all but gone. The women leave me sprawled on the mat, relieved, spent, done.

Phuong comes to check on me after a while. She has my clothes, which are steaming and still wet. I don’t put them on right away. She also has a bowl of food, a stew of some kind. It smells nearly as bad as the leaf resin the women rubbed on me, but that cured the itching, so who am I to complain? My stomach growls, telling me to just eat it already.

I drink and chew and force myself to swallow the chunks of unfamiliar meat. It’s so tough that I could chew for an hour and not break it down, so I just swallow and keep eating until it’s gone.

“What was that?” I ask Phuong when I finish.

“You may not want to know,” she says.

“No really,” I insist, though from the way she says it, she might be right.

“Singe,” she says. She makes a simian face and bends her elbows to tickle herself under both armpits, in case I don’t know the French word for monkey.

I think I’m going to throw up. Phuong points to a skinned carcass hanging on a rack just out of the reach of a few skinny dogs. It looks almost human—dead human with most of the flesh stripped off.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Because you wouldn’t have eaten it,” she says. “But it’s necessary. We have to continue and you need food for strength. I doubt there will be more coconuts on the Trail. And we have no more rice.”

“But monkey?” I’m still struggling to keep from losing it.

“These people are hungry themselves,” Phuong says. “They may be starving. Many of my people making their way on the Reunification Trail are starving. The Americans have disrupted everything with their bombing raids, their mass destruction anywhere they suspect we may be. In Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Laos. Crops, livestock, the wild animals these people hunt to feed themselves. All killed. And you complain about eating monkey. Do you not realize they are sharing with us all they have for themselves?”

Embarrassed, I start to apologize—which isn’t something I’m used to—but Phuong cuts me off.

“Next time you will go without,” she says.

“Can we at least stay here for the night?” I ask, but she says no, we’ve already lost too much time and have to get farther down the trail before stopping for the night. She doesn’t know the name of the tribespeople but does her best to thank them for the food and for treating my rash. She offers them the money that apparently they hadn’t accepted when she showed it to them before, but they just look at it, then drop it on the ground as if it’s nothing.

We shouldn’t have eaten the monkey.

I find out first, an hour down the trail, when I’m hit by stomach cramps. I try to ignore them at first—I’ve had dysentery off and on since Saigon—but when they get too bad, I double over, drop to my knees, and vomit up everything I’ve eaten.

Five minutes later, Phuong is on the ground next to me, throwing up so hard that she ends up on her hands and knees, her AK-47 flung to the side. It’s noisy and nasty and violent and terrible in every way. My stomach is on fire. Phuong rolls onto her side and curls up in a fetal position, arms crossed over her abdomen, rocking and moaning.

I know we can’t stay here, exposed, so I crawl off the trail, pulling her with me, until we find our way into a stand of bamboo and enough space for a nest where we can collapse, hidden, until hopefully the monkey, whatever of it is still in our bodies, somehow can pass through without killing us.