We eat blackened deer. We rest. Khiem rouses himself, fashions a fishing line, and returns to the lake, to a rocky spot a hundred yards away from where we set up camp. Phuong cleans her weapon. I go back to the water’s edge, swim again, sit some more until it gets too hot, then move into the shade. And wait for what’s to come. Phuong cleans her AK a second time and keeps glancing around nervously. Twice she follows Khiem to his fishing spot and then disappears into the pine forest. She doesn’t say anything when she returns about where she’s been, but I have my suspicions. Hard as I try, though, I don’t see any signs of the NVA commandos hiding out there, preparing for the ambush.

At dusk we eat Khiem’s fish. He insists we finish it all and then dispose of the bones and scales and guts far from our campsite, because if there’s any left, bears might come. Phuong translates.

That night, unable to sleep, I ask Phuong if she’s still awake. We’re lying on beds of soft pine needles, just inside the forest cover, which feels luxurious in contrast to the hard ground that we’ve slept on for weeks. I can see the lake, the distant hills, the stars. A chill wind blows over the water. The air is filled with the citrus scent of a thousand orchids growing on the trees.

She says yes, she’s awake. She says she can’t sleep, either. Anticipating. She doesn’t say anticipating what, but she doesn’t have to.

I want to ask her where she went during the day, and if she knows where the commandos are hiding, if she’s been in touch with them. I want to ask if she was letting me swim alone, without her or Khiem close by standing guard, because that’s part of the ambush plan.

But I know she won’t answer any of those questions. So instead I ask something I think she will. “What will you do after the war, Phuong?”

It takes a long time for her to respond. “I will return home to my family, of course,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to let them out of my sight for a very long time. My brothers and sisters. My aunts and uncles and cousins. My grandparents. If they’re still alive. They were already very old when I left Hanoi two years ago. I would want to eat everything my mother used to cook for me when I was a girl. Her pho bo rien, banh xeo pancakes, spring rolls, dragon fruit.

“If the bombing stopped, I would go for a long walk every day all around Hanoi—along the Red River, which the old people still call Ascending Dragon. Across Long Bien Bridge. Through the French Quarter, around Hoan Kiem Lake—the Lake of the Returned Sword—through Ba Dinh Square. I would take my little sisters to mountain gardens filled with sea flowers and daisy nightingale and milk flowers and lotus. We would visit the Buddhist pagodas, if they’re still standing after the war, and pray for our ancestors, and for all who’ve been lost.”

She sighs. “And I would go back to school,” she says. “I’ve always loved being in school, and I’ve missed so many years already.

“To become a doctor,” she adds. “There will be so many who need help after the war. So many injured and crippled. So many to be made whole again.”

We’re silent for a while. I’ve only been away from my home and family for two months, and I’m heartsick and homesick. For Phuong it’s been two years. I can’t imagine how difficult that must be.

“And what will you do after the war?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Before I would have told you I’d go back home to New York, and go to concerts, and hang out with my best friend, Geoff. Go to the Hamptons to my grandparents’ house and let them spoil me there. Go back to school. Just have fun. But now …” I trail off.

“Now the first thing I would do is make sure my parents are okay, and then I’d be nicer to them. My dad, he’s such a big believer in the war. I wouldn’t know what to say to him about it, except to ask him to please let somebody else take over so he can come home and we can be a family again, him and me and my mom. I would tell him that I’ve missed him, and I want him back.”

I think hard about the question. After the war. After the war. My stomach growls. “And I would definitely eat, too,” I add. “A lot. Pizza. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner I would eat pizza. And bagels and cream cheese. And hamburgers and french fries and chocolate milkshakes.

“But I don’t know besides that. Being here. What we’ve seen and done since Saigon. It’s just—the world isn’t the same anymore. I don’t know what my place is in it anymore. I don’t know if I have a place anymore.”

I wake up with sharp stomach cramps deep in the timelessness of night. I have to go to the bathroom—bad. I sit up suddenly. Khiem sits up, too. I point to my abdomen and make a face, hoping he can see me well enough in the shadows to understand. He nods and I plunge into the forest, wading through brush and ferns until I’m out of sight and can squat and do my business in privacy.

It doesn’t take long, but I stay squatting for a few more minutes, just in case.

A soft breeze whispers through the pines. An owl or something like it flies over my head, so close I duck. I reach back to pull my pants up from down around my ankles, and then freeze, sensing or maybe hearing something behind me. I steel myself to turn and look, but before I can, a hand clamps over my mouth, scaring me so bad that I nearly fall back into what I just did. I feel a breath on the side of my face, and then a voice—an American voice!—practically inside my ear and pitched so low I can barely hear: “You know how to swim? Nod if you do. Don’t speak.”

I nod.

“Good. First light tomorrow, early as you can get away, you have to swim your tail off across the lake to the other side. Understand?”

I nod again. My heart is beating so fast and so loud that I’m afraid Khiem will hear.

“It’s maybe a mile across. Sure you can do a mile?”

Another nod. I tell myself to breathe.

“Look for a signal from us when you’re halfway. That’ll tell you where to swim to. If the North Viets come after you, in a boat or something, we’ll have them in our sights once you make it that far. Don’t worry about what’s behind you. Just keep going, fast as you can. If they start shooting at you when we’re in range, we’ll shoot back.”

He lets me turn around to look at him. He has black greasepaint covering his face, night-vision goggles on his helmet, full camouflage, a handgun, a string of grenades, a KA-BAR knife.

I think he’s going to say something encouraging, but instead his last words to me are, “Don’t screw up. You’ll get yourself killed and get us killed, too.”

Then he vanishes.

I take several more deep breaths, press my hand over my chest, as if that will stop my heart from pounding, then return to the edge of the forest and Khiem and Phuong. Both are sitting up, staring into the dark after me. As soon as I come into view, they lie back down on their nests of pine needles.

I don’t think I’ll sleep any more tonight as I play the conversation with the American over and over in my mind. I should be able to swim a mile. I’ve done it a hundred times. But that was before Vietnam, before the past two months, before I lost so much weight that my ribs stick out. What if I can’t make it? What if I drown? What if Khiem shoots me before I can get away?

What if I freeze in the morning, right there at the water’s edge? What if I never get any closer to home than this side of Nong Fa? My heart is racing again—panic-attack racing. I gulp in air. My head is spinning. Maybe I cry out, or whimper, or something else pathetic.

I feel a hand on my arm, light and warm. It’s Phuong.

She says, “You were making noises. I think you were having a bad dream.” She gives me her canteen. “Here. Drink some. Maybe it will help.”

I thank her. A few hours earlier we were talking about our lives after the war—Phuong in Hanoi, me back in New York. The earth has shifted since then, into a new orbit. Who knows what it will look like when the sun comes up.