We have our sticky rice in the morning but no fish. I don’t know if I can hold anything down anyway. My hands shake—not a lot, but enough that twice I drop rice in the sand. Phuong asks if I’m all right and reaches over. For a second I think she’s going to put her hand on my arm again, but instead she picks the rice out of the sand, blows on it, and hands it back. I eat it because what else am I going to do, even though I get grit in my teeth.

“Do you feel better?” Phuong asks. “You seemed feverish last night.”

“I think I was just dehydrated,” I say.

She hands me a canteen—Le Phu’s this time, the one I’ve been carrying—and urges me to drink more. We have a polite conversation about nothing. The kind you have with someone when there are secrets you can’t let them know about, and they have their secrets, too.

Khiem finishes his rice and goes into the forest to do his morning business. Phuong asks if I’ll teach her how to swim.

“Now?” I ask, panicked.

“Well, no,” she says. “Perhaps the first lesson could be in another place, where the water is shallow. They say Nong Fa has no bottom, so I think it would be too deep for me here, but I would like to learn one day. I’ve always wanted to swim in the ocean, especially at Tuan Chau Island. My parents took us there once, before the war, but we only waded in the surf.”

“Were you on a vacation?” I ask, relieved that Phuong doesn’t want me to teach her today.

She smiles. “I suppose we were. I don’t remember ever going on a holiday before or after that. Maybe it was a special occasion. I was just a little girl. The ocean was so big, and I was terrified, but at the same time I wanted so badly to be out in it.”

I promise I’ll teach her when we’re farther up the Trail, someplace where she can touch bottom.

“I would like that very much,” she says. She cleaned her AK-47 twice the day before and has been cradling it in her lap while we talk. She begins breaking it down to clean it again.

It’s time.

“I think I’ll go for a swim now,” I say, standing up. My legs are shaking. I pray she won’t notice. I glance back at the forest, but there’s no sign of Khiem yet.

Phuong smiles and nods. She tells me to be careful, then turns her attention back to the gun.

I look at the lake. I look across the water to the distant shoreline, which seems twice as far as it did the day before. I wonder what signal there will be—if I make it far enough for the commandos to even bother. I take a deep breath and let it out slow.

“Good-bye, Phuong,” I say.

She smiles again. “Good-bye, Taylor.”

Once again my feet sink into the filmy sediment as I step into the water, and I splash forward immediately. I swim out fifty yards, then lift my head, turn around and look back to shore. Khiem has returned. He’s sitting next to Phuong and breaking down his weapon, too. I wave. Khiem doesn’t respond, not that I expect him to. Phuong waves back. I wonder if she suspects what’s about to happen.

I tread water for a little longer, keeping my gaze on her. I’m looking for something, but have no idea what. Maybe she’s looking for something, too.

Then I take off, swimming freestyle, praying that I’ll be strong enough and fast enough to make it to the other side.

Five minutes into the swim I pull off my clothes. They’re so heavy, dragging so much, that it hardly seems as if I’m making any progress. I’m afraid Khiem will start shooting any second. I have to go faster. I pick up speed and swim hard for several minutes, just like old times in the pool with the swim team. It feels good to stretch out without the anchor of wet clothes. I might not have ever been fast, but I always had good form. I let myself glance back and sure enough, the shore has receded. Khiem and Phuong are standing now—I can see that much—and waving, maybe yelling, though I can’t hear anything. Khiem raises his AK-47 and takes aim at me. Phuong pushes the barrel away, toward the ground.

I try to swim faster, keeping with freestyle for as long as I can, as far across the lake as it will take me, until fatigue sets in, then I switch to breaststroke, which makes it easier to study the far shore for whatever signal the commandos send. After another ten minutes in the water, I finally see it: a flash of light, like a hand mirror reflecting the morning sun. I swim toward the light.

I settle into a new pattern of ten strokes freestyle, ten strokes breast, back and forth, and when my arms lose all feeling and I think I can’t go any farther, I kick backstroke, which is the closest I can come to resting. I know there’s no way I can stop again.

The lake is flat, but I still manage to breathe in water, which sends me into a coughing fit. My chest feels like it’s on fire. I get side cramps. Nausea. But I keep going. Backstroke kicking again. Breaststroke. I no longer have the strength for freestyle. My arms won’t cooperate. My legs go dead. My breaststroke is more like dog-paddling. I see the mirror flash again, closer. Something zips through the water near me. It must be Khiem, Phuong no longer stopping him from shooting at me. I can’t stop to look around, to find out. I dive underwater and swim as far as I can holding my breath—which isn’t far at all. I try freestyle again. I flip over on my back again. I kick and kick and kick, but I keep going under, keep swallowing water, keep breathing it in and choking.

And then someone is with me in the lake—throwing an arm across my chest, gripping my side, pulling me against him, swimming for me, swimming for both of us. Other hands lift me, drag me onto land, drop me onto my back.

There are voices, but I’m blind, incoherent from all the lake water in my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my lungs.

“That him?”

“Yeah. Who else could it be?”

“Why’s he naked?”

“Beats me. Guess he swam right out of his clothes.”

“Somebody give him some shorts. That’s embarrassing.”

“No time. Grab him and let’s go. Chopper will be at the LZ in five. Place has to be crawling with North Viets.”

“Haven’t seen any sign of them.”

“Maybe not, but they’re here, and we’ve gotta get out fast. No way they haven’t figured out our position.”

They half-carry, half-drag me through the forest and up a steep hill, threading our way around trees and bamboo stands, tearing through brush. I try to help, try to walk on my own, but they move too fast and I’m too weak. We burst into an open meadow just as a helicopter roars into view overhead and descends. The commandos crouch low to keep us clear of the whirling blades. The door gunner waves us in with one hand, keeping his other on his M60. We dash toward the chopper.

They throw me on board. They throw themselves in after me. They yell to the pilot, “Go, go, go, go, go!”

I feel the helicopter lift off the ground. And then the world explodes.

Nearly everyone is hit by bullets or grenades or shrapnel. Something rips into my leg, and I bolt upright with a surge of adrenaline to see splintered bone and gristle. I reach down, to touch it, to make sure it’s real, because that has to be somebody else’s leg. No way it’s mine. Someone falls on top of me. I can’t push him off, but it doesn’t matter because the pain, delayed by the shock, now sears my leg, my whole body, and all I can do is scream and scream and scream, only I’m not the only one screaming. Everybody is screaming: Medic! Medic! Medic! Bullets tear through the chopper as the pilot takes action, clipping the tops of trees, listing hard to one side, then overcorrecting to the other. The door gunner unloads everything he has, spraying bullets in every direction as I thrash around, crazy from the pain. Someone pulls the body off me, holds me down, pins my shoulders to the floor of the chopper. A medic ties a tourniquet above my knee, then stabs me with a syringe.

In minutes, the pain dulls and I’m in shock again, and trembling, dimly aware of the frantic activity going on all around me, wounded men helping one another with blankets and gauze and more syringes and more tourniquets, and the door gunner still firing at the jungle below as we pull farther away from the LZ and the ambush.

As if from a great distance I see the faces of the men who saved me, every one of them twisted in anguish and dripping with their own blood or the blood of their friends. I want to thank them and to apologize for swimming so slow, for getting them into this mess, but I’ve lost the power of speech.

There are two miracles that day.

The first miracle is that the helicopter, which by all the laws of physics should be destroyed under the furious onslaught of automatic weapons fire, is still able to lift off and make its way thirty miles to a firebase with a field hospital in the foothills of the Truong Son mountains, back in Vietnam.

The second is that—though no one on board will ever be whole again—everyone lives.