I spend most of the day panicking about Mom and Dad and the attack on the embassy. I tie my coat around my waist and refasten my tie around my head, and for hours without stopping we carry more stretchers from the road through the rice paddies to the jungle, or we carry more pieces of men and women that no longer matter out to the lime pit. All of it reminds me that the battle must still be raging back in Saigon, but not knowing anything about it—and especially about what happened at the embassy—is making me crazy. Mom and I haven’t gotten along in forever, and neither have me and Dad, since he abandoned me for the war in Vietnam, but they’re still my parents.

They let us drink out of the filthy stream that TJ and I drank from the day before, but there’s no more food, no sticky rice, no nothing. The guards no longer follow us so closely, and they don’t hit us with their bamboo staffs. I guess they figure they have us trained well enough by now that none of it is necessary. And since they killed TJ, everybody knows what will happen if they try to escape.

It’s funny how even the most awful things—carrying amputated limbs, corpses, and dying people, with their horrible wounds and gross smells and awful noises—can become not normal, exactly, but not abnormal. You don’t get used to it, but you don’t freak out about it, either. Not after a while. Not after a couple of days. Maybe exhaustion makes you deaf and blind, or maybe your senses just turn off because you can’t take anything else in. All I know is that I’m numb, but I keep walking, keep carrying stretchers, keep drinking from that stream, keep filling the tarp with body parts, keep putting one foot in front of the other. My brain even shuts down, so that I eventually quit worrying about Mom and Dad, or anybody or anything. I just want to finish the trek I’m on and get back to that stream, back to that water, and drink and rest, and nothing else matters.

Except that, from time to time, the panic hits me again, never far from the surface. And then, in those flashes, it’s all I can do to keep from collapsing in a little heap and crying for my mom and begging the guards to let me go see her and make sure she’s all right—or yell at the guards that my dad is going to come looking for me and they better be ready when he finds me, because he’s going to make them pay in all kinds of terrible ways for what they’ve done.

Several of the prisoners do collapse when we’re out in the broiling sun, negotiating the dikes through the rice paddies. They stumble, sag to their knees, carefully place or drop their end of the stretcher, and then fall forward or pitch sideways into the dank water and the rice shoots. Sometimes the guards pull them up and they regain their balance. Sometimes the guards have to drag them to some small spot of shade to let them rest. One man falls and doesn’t get back up. They drag him away. We never see him again.

Late in the afternoon, in the bunker where we’ve just brought another wounded NVA soldier, they let us sit, and then seem to forget we’re there, shuffled to the side, our backs against the wall. A couple of the prisoners fall asleep, slumped over on their sides on the stone floor. I just sit there, slack-jawed, dully watching the frenzied activity as the doctors run from patient to patient and fight to remove shell fragments and bullets and shattered bones and shredded tissue and all those arms and legs and feet we’ll be carrying off soon enough to the lime pit.

I’m vaguely aware of people climbing down into the hospital, an NVA patrol pausing at the bottom of the ladder, surveying what’s going on, and then making their way deeper inside—and over to our little squad of prisoners. They stop in front of us. I try not to look up—TJ warned me not to make eye contact—but there’s something deeply familiar about one of the new soldiers. And the way he’s gazing, hard, makes me think he sees something familiar in me as well. And then it hits me, shaking me from my stupor.

“Hanh!” I shout, jumping to my feet. It’s Dad’s driver!

“What are you doing here?” I say, my voice way too loud. I’m so excited to see him, sure that he’s here for me. “Did you come to get me?”

Hanh frowns, takes another step forward, and slaps me so hard that I fall back to the floor, sprawling into the other prisoners.

I just lie there for a minute, not moving, not seeing or hearing anything, my mind blank. When the fog lifts, I pull myself into a seated position and press my hand to my burning cheek. Hanh glares at me, then turns away to confer with some other soldiers. After a few minutes, he turns around to look at me again. A young woman wearing the loose black clothing instead of a uniform—but still carrying an AK-47—turns with him. I crab-walk back, afraid he’s going to hit me again.

“Stop cowering,” Hanh says. “Get up. No one will hurt you—as long as you do what you’re told.”

I struggle to my feet but keep as much distance between us as I can. Most of the activity has stopped.

“What are you going to do to me?” I ask in a shaky voice. “And can you tell me, about my mother—”

“I know nothing about her,” he says.

“But is she alive? And my dad?” I ask. “Can you just tell me that? Please?”

“I know nothing about them,” he says again, his voice even, his face impassive. “Do not ask again.” He nods at the girl. “You will go with this soldier, Comrade Phuong Tram. That is all you need to know.”

He looks me up and down, then says something in Vietnamese to Phuong. He turns back to me. “In America you can be a stupid, foolish boy and nothing will come of it. You think you can do whatever you like. You think the world belongs to you. Do not make the mistake of thinking you can be so stupid and foolish here.”

He turns on his heel and leaves. Phuong and two young Vietnamese soldiers, wearing all black like her, stay. One of them hands her a length of bamboo with a rope threaded through it and a noose on the end. I back farther away, stones in the wall cutting into my back, convinced they’re going to hang me. I beg them to please, please don’t, but I’m helpless to stop them. The two young soldiers grab my arms and hold me while Phuong fits the noose over my head and tightens it around my throat—tight enough that I can feel it, but not so tight that I can’t breathe or swallow or speak. The other soldier ties my hands behind my back. I’m trembling so hard that I can’t stand on my own. The rope cuts into my neck when my knees start to buckle.

But it’s not what I think. Phuong steps behind me, the end of the bamboo prodding me in the back of my neck, and she forces me forward. Too fast and the rope chokes me. Too slow and I get stabbed by the bamboo. We head east on a narrow trail into the jungle.

I remember what TJ told me about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Hanoi Hilton, and my heart sinks. I trip and fall forward. The noose jerks my head back and bites into my throat, cutting off my air. I flop helplessly on the ground, trying to breathe and not panic, until the two soldiers grab me under my arms and pull me to my feet. Phuong gives me a minute, then forces me on down the trail, with stones and roots and vines everywhere to trip me again and again. I pitch forward a second time and nearly land on my face, but somehow manage to catch myself, though I stagger sideways into a thornbush. The thorns rip away what’s left of one sleeve of my coat and rake my arm bloody. Phuong loosens the noose a little. I hope I’ll see something like sympathy in her eyes, but instead it looks more like hate.