The guards pair me up with a Vietnamese prisoner who looks as frightened as I feel, and we spend the remaining daylight hours trudging back and forth between the road and the underground hospital. More trucks come with more casualties from Saigon. Part of me feels terrible for all the wounded men and women. Part of me wants them all to die for what they did to the MPs, and to TJ, and to the marines at the embassy, and to who knows how many others.

People speak to one another in Vietnamese—guards yelling orders, prisoners whispering. I stay silent, desperately alone, with no one to talk to and no idea what’s going on without TJ.

At one point late in the day they grab me and my new partner and march us into the jungle to bury TJ. I don’t know why they just left him there all that time. They don’t bother to explain, and I couldn’t understand them anyway. I try not to look at TJ’s body, or to step in the pool of blood that seeps into the dry earth. There aren’t any shovels, just sticks they hand us, and then point to where we’re supposed to dig. It will be a shallow grave at best, and I’m sure whatever animals live in these woods will be able to get at the body without any trouble. But I’m still glad when they tell us to stop. I’ve been working hard to shut down my brain, to ward off a full-blown panic attack. It helps that I’m so exhausted, so woozy from the hunger and dehydration, that I can barely stand up. I grab TJ under his arms and lift. His head rolls back in this ghastly way. His whole body, everything about him, is limp and dead heavy. My Vietnamese partner takes TJ’s feet. Even together we aren’t strong enough to lift him all the way off the ground, so we half carry, half drag him to the hole and roll him in. I stack as many stones as I can over him, covering his face first so I won’t have to look at it anymore, then we push dirt back on top of the stones and then we’re done.

There is no more rice or grubs on tin plates when we finish our work that night. The guards march us deep into the jungle, away from the underground hospital, where they tie us to a tree, me and a half dozen other prisoners, our backs pressed into the rough bark, our shoulders jabbing into one another. Our unhappy guards sit nearby, their guns on their knees as they smoke cigarettes and talk in the growing dark. They give us a single canteen of dirty water. I’m the last to get it, and by the time it makes its way around the circle of prisoners, each of them taking a drink and then handing it off to whoever is next, it’s empty except for a few drops I manage to shake out on my tongue. The man next to me, the one who finished off the last of the water, won’t look at me. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing I can do, but that doesn’t stop me from complaining to the guard. “He drank it all!” I shake the empty canteen at him, desperate for him to understand and offer more water.

He ignores me.

Our hands are tied in front of us, with a longer rope threaded behind our elbows, binding us all together and to the tree. I don’t think it will be possible to sleep. I’m too hungry and thirsty and traumatized by everything I saw the night before and throughout this awful day. Too haunted by the images of the dead military police and TJ. I was in a fight once, in seventh-grade gym class. It was during a basketball game. Somebody fouled me, and one thing led to another and somebody said something and I said something back, and the next thing I knew we were rolling on the gym floor, punching at each other. I got a fat lip. The other kid’s nose got broken, and the coach came over and got him to stop crying long enough to use his thumbs to straighten out the cartilage.

I had nightmares about seeing that kid’s face for weeks after and didn’t want to go back to school. I thought I was a terrible person for what I’d done to him, even though he was pretty much fine and over it in a couple of days.

And that was it—my entire history of violence, except for stuff I’d seen in the movies and on TV and on the news. But that stuff didn’t count. That stuff was all pretend, or far enough away that it amounted to the same thing.

This, though—this is different. I have dried blood on me from the man who died in the cage back at the racetrack. My clothes are also covered in TJ’s blood. And I still have it on my hands. And I have welts all over from the beatings by the guards with their bamboo staffs.

Yet even with all of that, I sleep. They might still be planning to kill me tomorrow, or start the long march with me to Hanoi, but one last thought I have as I slip under is that at least I survived today.

I wake up in total darkness, disoriented, thrashing, confused that I can’t move my hands or my body, just my legs, flailing wildly until someone kicks me back hard in the shin to get me to stop. I freeze, remembering where I am, slowly coming out of the fog of deep sleep as night sounds crescendo around me. Insects, night birds, crawling things in the brush, wind in the trees. My eyes adjust slowly. I rub them with my bound hands and try to blink out the dust. I can’t swallow. My mouth and throat are too dry. I have to pee, only there’s no way to do it. I can’t get up, can’t walk away from the tree and the other prisoners, can’t ask the guards to let me loose so I can go—even if I knew where they were.

I hold it for as long as I can, but then give up and pee on myself. It’s warm at first but quickly turns cold. I try to pull what’s left of my suit coat tighter around me, thankful in the chill of deep night or predawn morning that I didn’t toss it away the day before, even though I sweated through it over and over. I spend the next hour, or however long it is, hating the man beside me, the one who finished off the water in the canteen. All I can think about is how thirsty I am, so desperate to drink that I would do anything, give up anything, for just a sip of water.

Finally, mercifully, the guards come back with another canteen and this time I’m first. I want to drink it all, every last drop, but the man on my other side is already grasping for the water with his bound hands. He can’t reach all the way because of how we’re tied up. I can keep it all for myself and make up for the miserable night and pay them all back for cheating me the day before.

But then a guard snatches the canteen out of my hands and shoves it at my neighbor. He stands watching as the prisoners each have their drink and pass it on. And then, once the canteen makes it all the way around the tree, he unties us. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not let us loose before? It isn’t like anybody is going to run off. My legs are cramping so bad that I can barely stand, and my shoulders are so stiff I can’t lift my arms. All of us stagger around the small clearing, trying to get the blood circulating.

Another guard comes with a pot of sticky rice. The other prisoners hold out their hands. Each gets two fistfuls, which they stuff in their mouths right away, maybe worried that somebody will steal it if they don’t. I take a small bite of mine and chew for as long as I can, and then another, and another, until, sadly, it’s gone. My stomach rumbles, and I have to go to the bathroom. I pantomime for the guard, to get his permission. I know enough by now not to try to do anything without their okay. He laughs and points to a bush, and then stands over me while I squat and do my business. I ignore him, past caring about things like privacy that no longer exist.

Afterward, they march us down a narrow path back to the hospital. The stench hits well before we get there—of rotting flesh and buckets of blood—and I’m not the only one who gags as the guards herd us inside. There are as many stretchers full of wounded men, women, and teenagers as there were the day before. We have a different job this morning, though: collecting piles of amputated limbs and carrying them outside to burn or bury. I freeze for a second and then bend over, dry heaving until a guard strikes me with his bamboo staff across my shoulders and knocks me to the stone floor. They jerk me back to my feet. Sticky rice comes up in my throat and I’m afraid I’ll lose it, so I force myself to swallow it back down, though it leaves a bitter acid taste in my mouth.

We place as many of the severed limbs as will fit on torn sections of tarpaulin and carry them aboveground, then down another hidden path deep into the jungle, where we drop them in a large hole. A guard throws lime powder over each load of arms and legs and feet and hands, covering every new layer as we add them to the pit. I think about the poet Walt Whitman’s description of a similar pile of severed body parts—“human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening”—under a gnarled catalpa tree outside a mansion-turned-combat-hospital in Virginia during the Civil War. We read it in literature class last year, a lifetime ago.

And here it is a hundred years later, another war halfway around the world, and it looks like nothing has changed.