Guards swing their bamboo staffs to herd us out of the truck—me, TJ, and a dozen other prisoners, all Vietnamese. I should have figured out already why we’re here, but I don’t put two and two together until they order us to lift the stretchers and carry them single file along narrow dikes through the rice paddies toward the distant hills. TJ says the North Viets must have a hospital hidden over there to treat their casualties from the fighting in Saigon. I nod and keep my head down. Any time we slow, guards sprint up next to us, knee deep in the water, their AK-47s slung over their shoulders, and strike harder with their bamboo staffs. I have blisters on my feet from Dad’s dress shoes. I want to peel off the suit coat I still have on, but I’m afraid to stop and put down my end of the stretcher, so I continue, sweating profusely until I’m too dehydrated to even do that. The dirty, stagnant water in the rice paddies starts to look good, but there’s no way to stop, and I take my cue from TJ, who marches ahead at a pace that seems to please the guards but is killing me.

The man on our stretcher suddenly moans and opens his eyes. He winces in pain with every step we take and presses his hand to his heavily bandaged side. Blood has seeped through the bandages, and he lifts his hand to his face and seems surprised to see it covered in red. TJ’s face, which was crusted in blood when I first saw him, is openly bleeding now, too. When it gets in his eyes, he stops and wipes his face on his T-shirt. I pull off my paisley tie and knot it into a headband.

The sun is a merciless ball directly overhead, burning what’s left of my brain.

Eventually the rice paddies end and we enter the jungle—so thick I can’t see a way through. Once we’re there, though, an opening, just wide enough for us to pass inside, materializes and to anyone watching from the trucks back on the red dirt road it probably looks like we just suddenly disappear. It’s darker in here, with overhanging trees, impossible to see more than a few feet into the foliage. The path twists and turns, runs straight for a while, then seems to run the other way, the way we just came. Another trail branches off, then another.

A soldier stands guard where the path makes yet another sudden turn. He wears a wide-brimmed conical hat like the peasants in the fields. He points and we follow the stretcher-bearers in front still deeper into the jungle. The path dips slightly, to a trickle of water that was probably a true stream before this winter drought—and no doubt will be again when it’s the rainy season. TJ says something in Vietnamese to the guard. The guard looks around before nodding.

“It’s okay to get a drink,” TJ says. I hesitate at first, because as desperately thirsty as I am, all I heard from Mom for the past three days was how I wasn’t to drink the water, no matter what, unless it was boiled for twenty minutes first.

TJ lies flat on his belly and scoops handfuls up to his parched lips, and I decide better to catch some disease than die of thirst. The guard brings a canteen to the wounded man and holds it to his mouth, though most of it dribbles down his cheeks.

The guard pokes us with his bamboo staff. We stand up from the water reluctantly. He waves at us with his AK-47, so we pick up the stretcher again. I brace myself for miles of the same, but a few minutes later we’re standing at an opening in the ground I might have walked right over if another North Viet guard hadn’t been standing there, gesturing for us to lower the wounded man inside.

Peering into the hole, I see several of the men from the truck, our fellow prisoners. TJ and I hand our stretcher down, then climb in after it to an enormous underground room, with wood and rope beds, kerosene lamps, and crude operating tables, every one of them holding a bleeding man or woman, surrounded by a team of doctors or nurses or whatever they are—none wear surgical masks or scrubs or gowns or anything that makes them look medical, just NVA uniforms or what look like black pajama pants and shirts like I saw earlier on people working in the rice paddies.

We pick up our stretcher again and carry it to a triage area, and as my eyes adjust to the semi-dark I see armed soldiers everywhere, food cooking in large iron pots over small fires, cisterns full of water, tables and chairs, and more lanterns, and entrances to other rooms or tunnels shooting off from the hospital area. Somebody shoves small plates of rice and grub worms at TJ and me and the Vietnamese prisoners who’ve brought in other stretchers. I hesitate, but the others dig in, scooping the food with their fingers. Two minutes later, a guard snatches the plates, and I have time to shove a fistful of rice in my mouth before the guard gets mine, too. He finishes what’s left as he walks away with the tin plates.

Then they’re back at us with their bamboo staffs, shooing us out of the underground and into the harsh sunlight.

“What now?” I ask TJ.

“More stretchers,” he says. “That’s my guess.”

I want him to keep talking to me, but he lapses into silence after that and we plod back down the trail. I wish I could shut off my brain, but every few minutes, my anxiety spikes so high I find it hard to get a good breath. I’m afraid that at any second one of the guards will turn his weapon on me. I’m afraid they might have already killed Mom and Dad. I’m afraid they’re going to take me to North Vietnam and nobody will ever know what happened to me. I’m afraid I’ll never see my family again, or my friends, or anybody. Never go home to New York, or hear any more bands, or swim on the swim team, or hang out with Geoff, or learn how to drive a car.

I’m afraid I’ll never get to live my actual life. I keep picturing the guy whose leg got shot off, the dead man with the chest wound, the poor military police back in Saigon who ended up dead in the street, all because of me.

The trucks are gone when we return to the road, but there are dozens of stretchers still there, hidden in that copse of trees. We pick up a man whose head and face are so heavily bandaged that I can barely make out the contours of his mouth and nose. Half his clothes have been burned off, and one of his arms and one of his legs and part of his torso are black and charred and oozing pus. The rancid smell from the wounds is even worse than looking at them, and I gag.

“Get it together,” TJ hisses at me. “Don’t make a scene.”

I swallow hard, then lift my end. I ache all over and just want to drop my side and lie down. But off we go, over the dikes and through the rice paddies and the long, searing half mile back to the green wall of jungle and the underground hospital. I’m too tired to say anything to TJ until we climb back out, and once again get to stop at the little stream. “If they bring us to North Vietnam, how far is that?” I ask TJ. “How long would it take?”

“Weeks. Maybe months,” he says, glancing over to keep an eye on the guards watching us. “They wouldn’t waste using their transport vehicles to get us there, so we’d be walking the Trail the whole way. Under armed guard. My guess is it would just be you and me, and any other Americans they’ve captured.”

“What about these other guys?” I ask. “These South Vietnamese prisoners?”

“They’ll keep them around as long as they’re useful,” he says.

“What about when they’re not useful anymore?”

“Like I said, they’ll keep them around as long as they’re useful, but they won’t let them go. Maybe some prisoners will try to defect, to save themselves. Try to convince the North Viets that they want to join the cause. But that probably won’t happen.”

“And what happens to us once we’re in the North? Where would they take us exactly?” I ask.

“Probably the Hanoi Hilton,” he says.

I can’t tell if he’s being serious. “Is it nice?”

He laughs a dry laugh. “It’s not what you think,” he says. “They only call it that. It’s a prison. Where they keep American prisoners of war. Pilots they shot down. Long-range reconnaissance guys that got captured. You see those POWs making propaganda statements on the news, about how America shouldn’t be in the war and they’re sorry they took part in bombing Hanoi and the poor, innocent North Vietnamese people? Those guys are in the Hanoi Hilton. Not a fun place.”

I know what he’s talking about. I’ve seen some of those captured American pilots on the news, wearing striped pajamas with their hair chopped off. They were dirty and weary and thin as skeletons, with dark, cavernous circles around their eyes. They read statements denouncing the American war effort, but not like they meant it.

We finish our trip back into the jungle and the twisting path, once again lowering the stretcher carefully into the dark hole, then climbing down and carrying the wounded man into the triage area. It’s hard negotiating the rough ground coming from blinding light to half night, and even harder stumbling out back into the glare of the afternoon. But we aren’t allowed to stop.

“Look, there might be a way out of this,” TJ whispers to me as we stumble back onto the path. “Up ahead here, there’s maybe a fifty-meter stretch where they don’t have any guards posted, a big curve in the trail, and there’s no visibility from ahead or behind. When I give the signal, we dive off the trail. It’s going to be a steep plunge down the side, and it’s going to hurt. There’s a chance we can get some distance between us and them before they realize we’ve escaped.”

“And then what?” I ask. “What do we do after that?”

“Then we run,” he says.

I’m not at all sure about this plan, if you can even call it that, and I have a hundred questions about how it can possibly work. It sounds insane. Desperate and insane. But before I can say anything else, we’re there.

“Ready?” TJ asks. We’re in the clear, at least for the moment.

He doesn’t wait for me to say, just plunges off the trail the way he said he would, and goes crashing through the brush.

I freeze. I should follow him, but I just can’t. I don’t know why. It’s too sudden. I’m too scared. Too much of a coward.

The guards are suddenly next to me, yelling and pointing. One hits me hard behind my knees with his bamboo staff and I crumple to the ground. He keeps beating me, and I curl up in a ball and cover my head until he stops. After, I just lie there whimpering, my clothes torn, dust in my eyes, blood in my mouth.

There’s more yelling as they chase TJ. A three-round burst of automatic weapon fire. Then more shouting. Then nothing.

I can’t believe it. Just minutes before, TJ was the one person I could sort of depend on to help me survive all this. And now he’s dead. And now I have nobody.