Small arms fire and then mortar fire erupt near the racetrack. We’re still in Saigon, and I’m pretty sure we’re still in Cholon. There have been explosions across the city throughout the night, but this is closer, though I can’t see anything except the soldiers outside the cage setting up defensive positions behind the concrete barriers and trucks and some armored vehicles that also pulled in during the night.

“Light infantry,” someone says in English, practically right in my ear. I turn to see another American, an adult, who has somehow worked his way through the crowd of prisoners, because I know he wasn’t here before that.

“Whose?” I ask.

“American and South Viets,” he says. “I’m guessing they’re still several blocks away. Judging from the sounds. North Viets are returning fire. You can tell by the different sounds the automatic weapons make—our M16s and their AK-47s. I’m betting the North Viets are shooting from windows and rooftops of whatever high-rises are over there. Our mortars will take them out, but it’ll be awhile.”

I already know that about the M16s and the AK-47s. I know a lot about weapons, and a lot about the military, from when I was little and still hanging on to every word from my dad. You might say he and I bonded over the war. Though not over this war. Once this war started, my dad basically went MIA on Mom and me. It was like he was marking time, living with us for a handful of years in Paris, and for a few more back in New York, then he jumped at the chance to go off to another war. But I couldn’t get enough of his World War II stories when I was a kid, as sanitized as they were so I wouldn’t get freaked out by the horrors I read about later on my own. He’d been part of the invasion of Normandy on D-day. Fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Spoke German and worked in army intelligence. Interrogated Nazis after the fall of Berlin. Met my mom when she was a college student in post-war Paris and my grandfather, a big Eisenhower supporter, was ambassador to France.

Not that that’s any help to me now.

“What’s going to happen to us?” I ask this new American.

He shrugs. More explosions light up the early dawn sky, and he looks back over that way. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with blood splattered on it. He has a heavy five-o’clock shadow and more blood caked to the side of his face and in his thick black hair, which is way too long for the military or anybody who works at the embassy. But he’s the only other American as far as I can see.

“How did they get you?” I ask.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” he says. “Who are you, kid? How’d you end up in a mess like this?”

“Taylor Sorenson,” I said.

He blinks at me. “Any relation to Frank Sorenson?” he asks. “He your dad by any chance?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We got here three days ago. Me and my mom. For his birthday. Then there was a party at the embassy. I sort of cut out and didn’t tell anybody.”

“They got your passport, your ID?”

“Yeah,” I say. “But there’s so many people. They probably forgot who it belongs to by now. Right?”

There’s a heavy barrage of small arms fire that starts and doesn’t stop. We have to shout to hear each other.

“Don’t tell them who you are if that’s the case,” he says. “You don’t want them to put two and two together and figure out you’re connected to Sorenson if they don’t already know. Though I’d be surprised if they don’t.”

“Why?” I ask. “I don’t understand. He just works at the embassy. What difference does it make? You think they’ll, like, hold me for ransom?”

“Your dad does a lot more than just work at the embassy,” he says. “So keep your mouth shut tight. They’ll have to do something with us and hopefully that doesn’t mean execute all of us right here in the middle of the infield like this. Not exactly the way to win hearts and minds. Hasn’t worked for us, and won’t work for them. Not like this. Not a public massacre.”

“Execution?” I stutter. “Public massacre?” The words hit me like a fist in the gut.

He doesn’t have an opportunity to respond—to reassure me that nothing like that could possibly happen, which is what I desperately want to hear—because the guards open the cage and wave some of us out and over to a section of the infield where dozens of stretchers hold wounded men, some just lying there, as still as death, some moaning and writhing in pain.

One of the guards barks orders in Vietnamese, which the stranger seems to understand because he grabs me by the shoulder and says, “Stick with me. We’re loading these stretchers onto trucks.”

Just as he says it, a couple of flatbeds pull up next to the wounded men. The stranger takes one end of the closest stretcher and I lift the other. At first I can’t see what’s wrong with the man we’re carrying, but then the blanket falls and I see one of his legs has been blown off, his bloody, ragged stump leaking onto the stretcher. For some reason, the leg is lying on the stretcher, too, next to him. The boot is still on the foot. I’m so shocked I nearly drop my end. The leg is raw and bloody and mutilated, with shattered bone protruding out of the flesh. Bile rises up my throat and into my mouth, making me gag.

“Come on!” the stranger barks. “Don’t draw attention to yourself!”

I force myself to swallow it back down. We hand the wounded man up to other prisoners in the back of the first truck—military green, US Army insignia on the side.

“Stolen,” the stranger says.

“But why would the South Vietnamese steal from us?” I ask. “Why are they attacking us? And their own people? We’re on the same side. Is it a coup?”

“No,” he says. “These aren’t South Viets. They’re regular army North Viets. Some of them dressed up in South Viet Army uniforms they also must have stolen. They attacked all over Saigon. They even attacked the embassy. Broke through the wall. Killed a bunch of marines. I don’t know what’s been happening there since.”

“But my mom and dad are there,” I say. “Do you think the attackers got inside? Do you think my mom and dad got out first?”

“Sorry, kid,” he says as we lift the next stretcher. The man lying on it is already dead. He has a massive chest wound that’s disgusting, shards of bone and slices of organs spilling out through the rags of his uniform. They didn’t bother to cover him with a blanket. But we load him on the flatbed anyway. I keep my eyes averted and try not to throw up.

“You mean they did get in the embassy?” I manage to ask, not wanting to hear the answer if it’s bad.

“Just mean I wasn’t there to see what else happened,” he says.

The street fighting grows louder and closer. Soon mortar rounds are coming over the racetrack wall and exploding in the turf, leaving craters and bodies. Men crawl in retreat to the concrete barriers, dragging their friends with them. With the light of morning and dissipating fog, I can see body parts strewn everywhere.

We keep loading the trucks with the wounded and the dead and the dying as the sun rises and it gets hotter. I’m parched, but there’s no water—at least not for us. I can feel my face starting to blister under the burning sun, and despite how freaked out I am, my stomach rumbles. But there’s no food, either. If I stop working, a guard hits me with his bamboo staff—across my shoulders, on my arms or legs, anywhere that’s exposed. I cover my face and head and keep working. The stranger never stops, doesn’t react when they hit me, doesn’t say anything else.

We’re ordered onto one of the trucks with the wounded men and the bodies—and armed guards. A convoy of trucks pulls out of the racetrack, away from the gun and mortar battle, and we lumber through narrow Cholon streets, picking up speed gradually until soon we’re careening around corners in tight intersections, smashing roadside stands. People peek at us from upper-story windows or half-open doors at street level, but few are out on the streets. Chickens fly into windshields and feathers spray all over. Dogs limp out of the way if they’re fast enough and get crushed to the road if they aren’t. The trucks never slow down, not even when we finally leave the sprawl of Saigon and bounce down washboard roads through the countryside, heading east into the late morning sun.

“Just keep your head down,” the stranger says at one point. “Don’t look at the guards. Don’t do or say anything besides whatever they want you to do, even if you’re not sure what that is. They don’t speak English, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”

“But you speak some Vietnamese,” I say. “Right?”

He nods. “Some. Enough to get by.”

I ask him his name. “I mean, what should I call you?”

“Let’s go with TJ,” he says.

“Just initials?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just initials. Better that they don’t know who I am, and better you don’t, either, so they can’t get it out of you. Let’s just say I’ve been doing work over here they don’t like and I don’t want them knowing about it.”

“Okay,” I say. “TJ.” Then I ask him, “Do you really think they’ll kill us?”

He studies the blur of landscape as we sweep past, trees so close that branches slap the sides of the truck—and us, if we don’t duck in time.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he finally answers. “But it’s a possibility. The longer they don’t, the more likely they won’t, is the way I see it. Unless something changes, some part of the equation.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Like they find out who I am, or who you are—or who your dad is. But then again, that might work in your favor. They might think you’re worth something to them.”

“Worth something?”

“Prisoner exchange,” he says. “That sort of thing. But they’d need to stash you someplace, and I don’t know where that would be. Maybe in the North.”

“In North Vietnam?” I say in a panic. “But how?”

The truck bounces through a deep rut in the road. Some of the wounded NVA soldiers are thrown off their stretchers and the guards motion for us to help them back up.

After we get them settled again and discover another one who has died during the journey, TJ explains. “West is Cambodia. Northwest is Laos. North is North Vietnam. Simple geography. The North Viets have a secret trail that crosses the border and goes up through Cambodia and Laos. It’s how they got all their soldiers down here to attack Saigon and how they’ve been supplying the guerrilla army, the Viet Cong, all these years down here in the South. It’s been their supply line throughout the war.”

“If it’s a secret trail, then how come you know about it?” I ask.

He laughs. “It’s a secret trail that everybody knows about,” he says. “Except that they sort of do and they sort of don’t. The US can’t legally cross the border to do anything about it. And anyway, it’s not just one trail, it’s a whole network of trails, and the ones they use change all the time, and most of them are camouflaged, and some are so deep inside Cambodia and Laos that even if we—or the South Viets—do cross the border to go after them, it isn’t possible to go that far, because it would be considered an invasion, and there’s no government authorization for that. Even air raids have limited success. And believe me, we’ve flown hundreds of them. Thousands.”

We’re deep into the countryside now, with wide swaths of green rice paddies spreading out from the sides of the narrow road. “The North Viets call it the Reunification Trail,” TJ says. “They also call it Blood Road. Because they’ve shed so much blood on it—building it, defending it, transporting troops and supplies down it. They even strap bags of gas and oil to their people and have them carry it down the Trail since there’s no pipeline. Not yet, anyway. Our side calls it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. You probably got that from the newspapers back in the States? Or on the nightly news?”

I shake my head. “I guess I haven’t been paying too much attention.”

TJ spits off the side of the truck as we slow down in the middle of nowhere. “You do know who Ho Chi Minh is, don’t you?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “President of North Vietnam. Everybody knows that.”

“Close enough,” TJ says. “Anyway, looks like we’re here.”

We stop under a small copse of trees on an island at the center of more acres of green rice paddies spreading out on both sides of the narrow dirt road. I’m guessing we’re maybe twenty miles outside Saigon. A boy sits on the back of a water buffalo in the middle of one of the rice paddies, his face shadowed by his wide conical hat. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, is a green wall of thick jungle. Red dust envelops us from the dry road and breathing it leaves me parched—too dry to form any saliva and spit it out. My tongue feels swollen.

TJ points to the green wall. “I’m guessing that’s where we’re going.”