An hour later, we’re still there with the elephant. Trees are cut down, ropes are pulled out, logs are rolled into the mud pit. One brave soldier leaps onto the elephant to cut loose the sled. The elephant continues to struggle, but at least he doesn’t seem to be sinking any deeper. Maybe he’s reached whatever hard bottom is under all that goo. The bo doi who wade in for the supplies have to be dragged out by their comrades. Phuong, Le Phu, and Khiem help. I don’t move until Phuong orders me to get up and help, too.

Two soldiers beat the elephant with bamboo staffs to urge him forward, though I can’t imagine the elephant feels it much. Maybe the way a human feels a gnat. Others loop ropes over the elephant’s head and around his front legs. They shove more logs into the muck. The elephant shakes, swings his trunk wildly, and makes what sounds like an anguished roar, though it could just be normal elephant noise. There’s more thrashing. Mud splatters everywhere, covering everybody.

The elephant surges forward. He finds one of the submerged logs to step on, then another, but then he stops, exhausted. More trees are cut down. More logs thrown in. The beatings from behind, the pulling from in front, all continue. People are yelling, as if they can order the elephant out, or coax it, or just convince it to save itself.

Finally, in a last lurching motion, the elephant gets his front legs on solid ground. Everyone cheers. But the job isn’t finished. We redouble our efforts: beating, pulling, yelling. I’m into it now, too, shouting with everyone else. And then, with what seems to be a giant, involuntary spasm, the elephant crumples forward, his front legs buckling, his trunk and mouth sinking into the mud. His eyes widen in panic, then cloud over. There’s more beating, more yelling, more pulling, but nothing comes of it.

The elephant slumps onto its side, and that’s the end. The eyes stay open, but opaque. The mouth and trunk are submerged. There’s no way he can breathe. I have to look away. I don’t know why. It’s just a stupid animal. Over the past three weeks I’ve seen people dead in just about every way somebody can be dead, but seeing this elephant die seems to be tearing me up worse.

Two soldiers, frustrated and enraged, open fire with their AK-47s, shooting and shooting until their ammo clips are empty. I glance back to see that it hasn’t done much damage to the elephant. An ear tattered, half shot off. An eye exploded. Holes in its side. But it’s still there. Still the same elephant. Only dead.

There’s nothing to do after that. Except that the elephant is now blocking the way. The bo doi lower their weapons. I wonder what they’ll do about it. Will they plant explosives and blow it up? Cut planks to lay over the mud hole and just keep going while the elephant decomposes, or wild animals emerge from the jungle and little by little tear it apart? Or maybe they’ll get lucky and the air force will drop some incendiary bombs. They’ll have to rebuild the trail, or redirect it through a different part of the forest. But at least they’ll be rid of the obstruction.

I back away, climb on a rock, and look down on the strange tableau. Phuong is talking to the elephant handlers. Khiem and Le Phu squat off to the side of the trail. Le Phu seems upset. Khiem, his hand on the small of her back, looks to be consoling her.

For some reason, I start thinking about this German philosopher named Nietzsche we learned about in lit class. Nietzsche was walking down the street one day when he saw a man beating on an old, sick, nag of a horse pulling a heavy cart. The horse collapsed in the street, blocking traffic and attracting a crowd of gawkers. Nietzsche was horrified. He threw himself on the horse to stop the beating, wrapping his arms around the horse’s neck and breaking down and sobbing right there in front of everybody. He was never the same again. They took him to a mental hospital. Later on he thought he was Jesus, and Buddha, and various other deities. But mostly he just sat and stared at the walls in an asylum for the next eleven years until he died.

I’d copied down one thing Nietzsche wrote when he was still mostly sane, because I didn’t quite understand it, but I sort of did: “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

Like, maybe there isn’t all that much difference between the elephant and me. The doomed GIs back in the cage and me. Vu and Trang and me. TJ and me.

Before, I couldn’t have cared less about the elephant. Now I want to do a Nietzsche and crawl in that mud pit and throw my arms around the poor animal and hold on to him so they won’t hurt him anymore, or blow him up. And if I could just sit in a chair staring out a window and not move or say anything or think anything for the next eleven years like Nietzsche, maybe that would be okay, too.

We don’t stay to find out what they do about the elephant. We press on for higher ground and less-traveled trails. The thick forest gives way to terraced rice paddies that climb the hills like enormous stair steps. Cambodian farmers work the fields with their buffalo and their children. The children stare when they see us passing. The adults don’t bother to look. I suppose that’s how it is with war. The civilians keep their heads down and try their best to live their normal lives, maybe try not to think about how it can all be taken from them in a quick burst of gunfire, or an errant bomb, or worse.

Phuong buys food from the farmers when she can. A handful of greens here and there. The occasional chicken. Most villagers are reluctant, and she never does anything that’s threatening to them, as far as I can tell.

The more we walk—fifteen, eighteen hours, from before sunrise until after dark—the more everything and everyone I’ve ever known seems to recede. Some days I can’t picture my mom’s face or remember the sound of my dad’s voice. My friends from school and the swim team are all a blur—kind of recognizable, but mostly out of focus. Even Geoff. I might as well have never met Beth at the Moby Grape concert, for all I can remember of her.

Snippets of songs play in endless loops in my head, but I can’t come up with much of the lyrics. Dumb romance songs, mostly. Jefferson Airplane. The Doors. The Troggs. I wonder what month it is. Can it still be February? Has it already turned into March? I do the math as best I can and finally settle on the end of February.

The main thing that occupies my thoughts—that occupies every fiber of me—is food. I ask Phuong why she doesn’t just take what she wants from the farmers we encounter. She doesn’t like the question at all.

“We’re not fighting the peasants,” she says. “We’re fighting for them. Whenever we can, it’s our job to provide them with food. And medical care. And protection.”

It sounds like propaganda, all communist sunshine and unicorns. But I suppose it’s true, too. If the NVA steal food from the villagers, the villagers will hate them as much as they hate the Americans. Of course from what I’ve read and been told over and over by Dad, the Americans give the farmers and villagers food and supplies and medical care, too. At least we do when we aren’t bombing their villages and cities, killing all their livestock, and burning everything to the ground.

I remember Dad one time talking about a place where that happened. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” he said, somehow managing to keep a straight face.