We keep climbing. Steep slopes, unsteady footing. Loose rocks, erosion. Sudden drops, limestone cliffs. In and out of forest cover. Phuong nervously checking the sky whenever we’re exposed. Twice we encounter long lines of bo doi with their crippling loads and have to press ourselves against stone walls, or balance on the edges of scary drops, while they pass. One of the columns—a hundred bo doi—carry pigs and piglets in baskets on their backs. The pigs have been sedated to keep them quiet and still.

I spend a couple of sleepless nights shivering, curled in a ball, unable to get warm, until Phuong convinces one of the columns to give me a blanket. She and Le Phu and Khiem have thin, quilted jackets that they pull from the bottoms of their rucksacks, and they wrap themselves in those and in their rain ponchos when we camp off the trail and sleep on the hard ground.

Even with the blanket, I’m cold at night, but at least I’m not freezing. The days are still blisteringly hot, especially on those trail sections with no tree cover.

Phuong is back to not speaking to me. I can’t take offense, though, because she and the others don’t talk much, either. I figure this is just the way it’s going to be, trudging silently up and down the Annamites, which Phuong refers to as the Truong Son.

But then a freak storm catches us. One minute clear skies, and the next, black clouds, and then, a rain so hard it hurts. We’re crossing one of those open sections, so nowhere to hide, nothing for cover, no choice but to keep going. I pull the blanket over my head. Phuong and Le Phu and Khiem put on their coats and ponchos and tilt their hats low on their faces. In minutes, the trail starts giving way to streams cutting down the side of the mountain, some of them so wide we have to jump over—and fight to keep our balance landing on the other side.

Phuong begins running, with the others right behind her. She yells something back to me, but it’s in Vietnamese, and the rain is making too much noise for me to understand her no matter what language she uses. I hear something above me, look up to the higher reaches, and see what she must be yelling about—a wall of mud and rock sliding loose. I take off behind her as fast as my jellied legs can carry me, toward the tree line a hundred yards ahead. Twice I slip, but I manage to catch up to the others just in time to dive for cover.

The landslide continues to roar down the mountain behind us, ripping out trees, so Phuong urges me to get up again, this time in French. We aren’t yet safe. The whole mountain could come down on us.

We keep running, stumbling, catching ourselves, crawling, lurching down the trail until it finally seems okay to stop, the four of us huddled under an outcropping of rock, rainwater washing in sheets over the edge, a full-on waterfall, and us hiding behind it, as if that might be the protection we need.

But somehow it holds, and the landslide doesn’t reach us, and the thunder ends, and, after half an hour, the freak rain lets up and then quits altogether, leaving a thick mess of a trail ahead of us.

“We could have been killed,” Phuong mutters to me in French, as if I need to be told. It seems like a funny thing to say. Every day of this trip, every hour since I was kidnapped, I could have been killed. In a hundred different ways. And I still might. Who knows what’s waiting for me. And I’m sure Phuong could say that about her life the whole time she’s been in the South, since leaving her home and family in Hanoi. Maybe it’s the nature of this latest threat. You don’t expect to be attacked by a mountain.

We return to the busy truck route, back down in the Truong Son foothills, but find it strangely quiet. No convoys, no bicycles, no bo doi staggering under their unwieldy burdens of fuel or pigs. The rain didn’t reach this far, so every step we take kicks up dust. There’s more tree cover, so that’s good, though a lot of the trees are barren, with that skeletal look we saw back in the ghost forest. Phuong says the Americans must have sprayed their Agent Orange here, but probably not in great quantities. Yet. The chemical smell is fainter than it was in the ghost forest, but still present, making me vaguely nauseous.

The silence isn’t just from the absence of traffic, I soon realize. Just like back in the ghost forest and the devastation that was Ben Suc, there are no birds chirping. No insects buzzing around our heads. Our footfalls echo, but that’s the only sound I hear, other than my own ragged breath.

“Maybe the war’s over,” I say to Phuong. “Maybe everybody went home already, and we’re the last ones to know.”

“You are so foolish,” she says, but she smiles at me.

We continue for mile after quiet mile, grateful for the shade but growing thirstier from all the dust and the heat.

And then, rounding a deep curve and stepping out of the thinning forest, we find our answer. The trail opens onto a wide grassy field, bisected by the rutted tracks from a thousand trucks. And everywhere—dead in those tracks, dead everywhere in the field—are the smoldering wrecks of supply trucks, an entire convoy reduced to twisted metal and burning tires. And bodies. Charred skeletons. Severed limbs and torsos and heads. Blackened faces fixed in pain. Strange mounds of fire still flickering are all that remain of a hundred petrol carriers whose cargo must have erupted into flames. There are craters everywhere. Some empty. Some littered with more bodies, more wreckage, more smoldering remains. The stench is terrible. Le Phu vomits, then begins sobbing. Khiem hugs her. She buries her face in his shirt. Phuong steps forward to look for survivors, anyone who needs help, whoever she might save.

I follow, reluctantly, wading through the high scorched grass, around the wrecks and the burnt men and women, holding my breath through waves of acrid fumes. We see others who somehow survived the assault, wandering in shock, also looking for anyone still alive. Or not looking at all—too stunned themselves to even be aware of what’s happened. A few stumble off into the forest, or sit down where they’d just been standing. Several times, not watching closely enough where I’m going, or my eyes tearing up from smoke, I step on brittle bones—a hand, a forearm, half of a rib cage, the flesh cooked entirely off—and they crack like twigs. The sound, and the realization, leaves me with a sick feeling, but I don’t throw up like Le Phu. I can’t be stoic, like Phuong, but after weeks of this, I steel myself and keep going.

We only find a few who are still alive, and they’re just barely so. One begs for water while holding tightly to her belly over a massive wound, to keep her insides from spilling out. Phuong sends me to find a canteen. Ours are long since empty. I scour the field, careful about stepping on any more bodies, but I can’t find anything. Except, finally, a medical pouch. I bring it back to Phuong.

“Maybe there’s something in here,” I say in French. “There’s no water.”

She rummages through the pouch and finds a vial and a syringe, somehow unbroken. She fills the syringe and injects the dying woman with whatever is in the vial. I guess it’s morphine. The woman whispers something to Phuong. There’s a suggestion of tears at the edges of her eyes. We sit with her for a long five minutes. Phuong keeps her hand on top of the woman’s. They don’t speak anymore. The woman doesn’t ever cry. Instead she just dies.

We go on to help a few more survivors, none of them keep breathing for very long after Phuong injects them, too—until she runs out of morphine, and there isn’t anything we can do for anyone else except wait with them until they quit breathing on their own. I don’t know where Khiem and Le Phu are all this time. Maybe they went somewhere else in the field, to help others make the transition from this world to whatever world might be next. I want to believe there’s a heaven, not just for believers, but for everybody, for these poor destroyed souls all dead or dying in this wretched, stinking field.

Late afternoon shadows creep in from the edges of the field and grow longer as the sun expires—way too late to be any kind of mercy.

Phuong speaks to the bo doi who have also been helping. They find ponchos that will have to do as makeshift litters, and we start collecting the dead and carrying them to the edge of the field, where we line them up for burial later. I’m back at the underground hospital carrying stretchers, carrying amputated limbs for burning. I’m back in the ghost forest doing the same thing. My brain shuts down to the horror of it all. Do the job, I tell myself. Do the job. You are the same as them, just a different species of the dead.

Finally, Phuong tells me to stop. “We have to go,” she says. Khiem and Le Phu are standing there, too. I didn’t see them approach. I don’t know where they’ve been. “There’s nothing else we can do to help these comrades.”

“But what about graves for them?” I ask, thinking back to how efficiently the soldiers buried their dead in the ghost forest after the Dragon Ship massacre.

Phuong shakes her head. “There are too many. Word will have gotten out about what happened. They’ll have heard the attack from very far away. Others will come in the darkness to dig the graves and to move the wreckage, so that more convoys can come this way tomorrow.”

“Wait,” I say. “They’ll still use this road?”

“Yes.” Phuong stands and picks up her pack. “It’s how the war will be won.”

I stop at the edge of the clearing to look back one last time, wondering if what I’ve been told is true—that this is my dad’s doing, that he’s one of the architects of all this devastation. A Frank Lloyd Wright of death.