Phuong comes to the bamboo cage that afternoon with three older men, two who look like officers and a smaller man with round, rimless glasses and thinning hair, who looks like an accountant or something. They talk for a while, looking at me the whole time. Phuong is holding food but stands quietly with it and listens to the conversation, nodding when they address her but otherwise staying out of it. The accountant doesn’t say much, either. He has one of those tongues that’s always darting out and then back in, a nervous tic.

“Looks like they got some plans cooked up for you,” Darryl rasps. There’s no shade—the cage is set in the center of a small clearing—so we’re sweltering under the brutal sun. The three officers—or the two officers and the accountant—leave. Phuong approaches the cage and hands me my straw hat through the bamboo, and the food in a small wooden bowl—not just sticky rice, but dried peppers, and some kind of meat.

“Tomorrow we leave to continue the journey north,” she says, speaking our usual French. “You’ll need to eat more for strength.”

She glances at the other Americans. I put on the hat, grateful to be able to shield my face, which is blistered and raw. The food I hold on to, knowing I should share it with the others since they shared theirs with me.

“Just us?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “There will be replacements for Vu and Trang,” she says. “One is a young woman, Le Phu, and her friend Khiem. They’re from the same village. They’ve been assigned to accompany us to the next supply station, in Laos.” She curls her hands around the bamboo bars, examining the places they’re lashed together. She glances again at the GIs sprawled on the ground behind me. “Are you well here?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “The ground’s soft. Good for sleeping.”

She smiles. “I would think you’d be used to it by now.”

I smile, too, but it isn’t lost on me how strange this is. The Army Rangers say I should have killed Phuong when I had the chance. They’re convinced that they’re going to be killed soon themselves. And yet here is Phuong, bringing me a hat and extra food, checking on me, making small talk as if it’s all just a lot of polite nothing.

After she leaves I try to share the food, which would amount to a single mouthful for each of the seven of us in the bamboo cage, but our guards bang on the bars and shout orders that nobody understands. They aim their AKs and take off the safeties. Greg gets the message.

“We can’t eat,” he tells the others. “It’s just for him.”

“What?” I say. “No. I’ll share it. You shared with me this morning. Really, it’s okay. Here.”

I offer them the bowl, but they scoot away. The guards yell louder. Nobody takes the food. I feel terrible. My stomach growls. Greg tells me to go ahead already—Eat!—so at least they don’t have to see it or smell it. So I do, averting my gaze from their gaunt faces. I look up just once, and they’re glaring. They can’t help it, and I can’t blame them.

I finish, lick the bowl, and hand it out to the guards. One of them snatches it from me. The other pulls down his pants and urinates through the bars, the pee splashing off the hard ground toward the Americans. Nobody bothers to move. I feel guilty for eating the food, and doing it right in front of them. But, I hate to admit, a part of me is grateful that I didn’t have to share. It isn’t even a matter of being grateful. It’s something deeper than that. Like I’m an animal, and it’s instinct, and all that matters is surviving.

Later, after the Rangers forgive me—or at least after I’m able to convince myself that they forgive me—I rejoin their ranks. They want to know what Phuong was saying, and why we were speaking French. I tell them.

“So you’re out of here tomorrow?” Antwan confirms. “But now you’ve got three of them to guard you. You better hope there’s more land mines out there for them to step on, because I don’t know how you’re gonna survive getting up into Laos, never mind once you’re there. You have to travel over the Annamite Mountains most of the way, all steep climbs and nasty jungle that’ll make what you’ve been through look like a city park.”

“Yeah, you be careful,” Greg adds. “We’ve been dropping what you call bouncing land mines all up and down the trail. Bump into one of them yourself and you’ll wish you were dead. And that wouldn’t be the worst way to get killed, either.”

I ask what they know about the Hanoi Hilton, which is where I’m sure Phuong is taking me, though she still hasn’t said it. But what will happen to me there, assuming I make it that far? They look at one another, at first not wanting to say. Greg breaks the silence. “He has a right to know. No sense pretending.” I end up wishing I hadn’t asked, as they tell me about prisoners spending months in solitary confinement until their minds snap; meat hooks on the ceiling and men tied up, their arms behind their backs, hanging from their wrists until their shoulders pop out of the socket; “hell cuffs” on prisoners’ wrists that cut off circulation and cause so much nerve damage that they can no longer use their hands; men forced to kneel for hours with their arms spread like frozen wings, beaten unconscious if they move.

When they see the terror on my face, a couple of the Rangers jump in to say they’re sure it will be different for me since I’m just a kid and all. I want to believe them, but I can tell by their stammering voices that they’re just trying to make me feel better.

Later that day, Kyle says I should memorize all the commandos’ names, so if I get back to the American side—when I get back, he corrects himself—I can let the world know where they were last seen and what happened to them.

“So they can come looking for us,” Darryl rasps. “Last known whereabouts.”

“Yeah,” Antwan chimes in. “So they can at least try to find our bodies. Bury us back home. ’Cause I’d sure hate to spend all the rest of eternity stuck in Vietnam.”

“Cambodia,” Darryl corrects him.

Antwan lets out a dry laugh. “Wherever. Long as I’m not here.”

“But you’d be dead,” Greg interjects. “Why would you care?”

“You think just because you’re not living and breathing, nothing matters anymore?” Antwan responds. “Man, I feel sorry for you then.” He turns back to me. “You just make sure they find me and bury me back home.” The way he says it, I know if he was joking around before, if all of them were, that he’s not joking now.

It starts raining just after sundown. “Never expected this,” Lloyd, the big guy, says, turning his face to the sky and sticking out his tongue. It’s light at first, then quickly turns into a downpour. Guys cup their hands to collect it and drink. Pull their shirts off to soak up water, then squeeze it into their mouths. Fill and drink and fill and drink and fill and drink from the one bamboo cup they all share.

“Been a drought for months,” Lloyd adds. “I’m betting they seeded the clouds again. And this time it worked.”

Kyle, who depends on the others to collect water for him, explains that the Americans have exploded thousands of containers of silver iodide into the sky over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping the rainmaking will work, first, and second, that it will turn the Trail into an impassable mud pit so no bicycles or trucks or foot traffic can make it down with weapons and supplies from the North, or if they do, that they’ll be slowed down enough to essentially still choke off the supply route.

So far it hasn’t worked. “And I bet there’s been hundreds of missions dumping that stuff, too,” Kyle adds. “But maybe tonight will be the start. Maybe it’ll rain for forty days and forty nights like in the Bible, and they’ll be screwed. No more reinforcements for their attack on Saigon and whatnot.”

“And maybe your little girlfriend won’t be able to take you away tomorrow,” Greg says. “That trail turns all good and gooey, and you’re either stuck here or stuck out there in it.”

The rain stops after an hour, though. Not enough to affect conditions on the Trail, but enough to mean we’ll spend the night wet and cold and lying in mud.

Kyle elbows me awake in the middle of the night. It doesn’t take much, since I can’t exactly call what I’m doing sleeping. There’s a buzzing in my brain, like static on a radio or the test pattern on the TV after the station goes off the air, and I can’t shake it, and I can’t get comfortable enough or warm enough to do more than doze a few minutes off and on.

“Need your help,” he says. “I gotta go and can’t use these hands.”

“Go where?” I ask, confused. The buzzing recedes when he speaks, but I still can’t make sense of what he’s saying.

“To the bathroom,” he says. “Have to take a leak. It’s embarrassing enough as it is. Don’t make me have to say it again.”

I peel myself off the ground and shuffle with him away from the others, who are still out cold. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’ve never done a lot of things I can now check off my bucket list, if that’s what it is. Maybe a reverse bucket list. All the things in life you never, ever, ever want to do or see or hear, but you end up doing or seeing or hearing them anyway.

I help Kyle pull his pants down, and when he finishes going I help him pull them back up. Some gets on him, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or care.

“What happened to your hands, anyway?” I ask.

He lifts them halfway to his face, I guess so he can see them better in the dark. I don’t know why. He can’t lift them any higher because of his injured shoulders.

“You know there’s twenty-seven bones in the human hand?” he says. “I didn’t know that before. Antwan, he’s our medic, he’s the one who told me.”

Kyle is quiet for a minute, then continues. “One of those guards got it in his head that he could just come in our cage and have himself a good time with a club he’d made. He took, I guess you’d call it, a disliking to a guy named Dennis. Maybe that guard just didn’t like the way Dennis was looking at him. He hurt Dennis bad before I stepped in and grabbed the guard’s club away from him. But that just got a bunch more of them involved, as you might expect. The guard got his club back, and while his buddies held me down he proceeded to break every one of those twenty-seven bones in both of my hands.”

I don’t know what to say. I feel nauseous.

Kyle doesn’t wait for me to ask what happened to Dennis. He just goes ahead and tells me. “Dennis died anyway. So you might say stupid me, got my hands broken to pieces, and all for nothing.”