It was still night when I woke up. I knew both because of the darkness surrounding me and because of the music floating along on the evening breeze: a gritty, down-and-out, jump-off-a-bridge blues tune that I couldn’t quite place. Someone—probably Greg—had rolled me onto my side and tucked one of my arms beneath my head, a triage recovery position, designed to keep me from drowning in my own vomit while unconscious. Nice guy, Greg. A real sweetheart.

I sat up feeling, for all the world, like I’d just had a solid twelve hours of shut-eye. My head felt less hazy than it had in days, and my thoughts came clear and unobstructed, though I was having one helluva time remembering how I’d gotten here. I had no problem remembering the freaky-ass Dac Cong chasing us through the trees. I remembered holding them off at the overturned log, and even getting into a brutal knockdown drag out with one of those thugs. But damned if I could remember how that whole mess had ended. One moment I was reaching for the E-Tool, and the next moment I was blinking my eyes open.

There was a hole in my memory the size of a bomb blast, and I had some nagging sense that those missing moments were important.

Whatever. The way I reckoned things, I was alive, which meant that we’d beaten those bastards back and broken free. Good news just about any way you cut it. Not to mention, my muscles felt alive and vital, my spirits surprisingly refreshed. What I wanted was a bottle of beer, a fat celebratory cigar, and a long night of dancing at a shitty tavern. I don’t even really like dancing, but dammit, I felt that good. And though the music trickling through the trees was depressing enough to make a guy want to down a bottle of pills or swallow a gun barrel, that only made me feel more alive. I’d dodged a bullet and I knew it, all the way down to my soul.

Shaking the thoughts free, I scanned the area looking for any sign of Greg, Rat, or Corporal Stanton. We were in a small clearing and nothing looked even remotely familiar. The tree trunk we’d been sheltering behind was nowhere to be found, and a patch of brightly colored flowers, little stars of red, spread over a swath of jungle floor a few feet away. I swatted off a fat fly that landed on my cheek while a flare of annoyance flared up in my belly. Where the hell was everybody? What kinda damn game were they playing here?

I pushed myself to my feet, making far more noise than I intended and not caring.

Someone or something rustled behind a broad tree with broad leaves and wandering roots. I instinctively reached for my pistol, but my hand landed on an empty holster. I couldn’t believe those assholes had left me lying by myself, in the middle of enemy controlled territory, without a weapon. Bunch of assholes. Greg was gonna hear about this for sure.

More rustling followed, and after a moment, the tip of a Colt 1911 poked out from behind the tree, its owner completely obscured by tree cover. “Yancy?” Rat asked, his voice warbling with the squeak of a teen going through puberty. He got like that when he was scared.

“Yeah, it’s just me, Rat,” I called out, moving slowly forward, palms upraised in case he was actually looking. “Put that thing away before you hurt someone, dickwad.”

“Don’t come any closer,” he said, the gun muzzle bobbing slightly as he spoke. “I mean it. You just sit back down and cool your heels, man.”

“What?” I asked, disbelief thick in my throat. “The hell is wrong with you? It’s me, Yancy. Now where in the hell are Greg and Stanton?”

“I’ve got Corporal here with me,” he said. “He’s resting. Greg’s out securing our perimeter, but he’ll be back soon, so don’t get a wild hair up your ass and do something stupid. I like you, you’re a real gone cat, and I don’t wanna put you down. But I’ll do it, man. Swear to God, I will pull this trigger if I have to. I’ve done it down in the tunnels plenty of times, so don’t push me.”

I slowed to a stop, confused, then slowly sat back down, legs folded beneath me Indian style, hands still out in front of me. This didn’t make a damn lick of sense. I just couldn’t square any of this in my mind.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll stay put. Just don’t go doing anything stupid. If you pull that trigger, we’ll both regret it, and neither of us wants that. Now how’s about you calm down and explain what happened? I think maybe one of those DC shitheads clocked me in the noggin or something.”

“What happened?” he said, both a question and statement. “You set ’em all on fire, man. Roasted those dudes like pigs on a spit, that’s what happened. I’ve never seen nothing like it.”

That damn fly buzzed around my face and I swatted at it again, before rubbing at one temple. Set ’em all on fire? A grenade maybe? But that didn’t sound right—I’d used my last two to scatter our pursuers just before I’d jumped over the downed tree. I was missing something, but I knew it was there somewhere in my head, fuzzy, buried, but not gone.

“I don’t understand,” I said in a quiet, unsure voice. “Look, Rat, I don’t know what happened back there, but I’m still me, I swear. I’m not like Moody, Wilson, or Lewiston. It’s all me here.”

Rat poked his face around the side of the tree trunk, eyes narrowed, and squinted as he looked at me in the ghostly moonlight. “No shittin’ me?” he asked.

“No shittin’ you.”

“Tell me something then, man. Make me believe it’s still you.”

“You yankin’ my chain?” I asked. “What do you want to hear? Want me to tell you about Lauren or the kids? Maybe you want to hear about how I like blues, gambling, mouth-watering ribs, and long walks on beaches that don’t have land mines? Huh? Or how I never shoulda joined the friggin’ Marine Corps? No, I got it. You want me to say something about you, about what a good guy you are, maybe. Well, you’re a jackass, Rat, a likeable jackass, but a jackass.” I batted at the fly, crushing the little buzzing shit up against my neck. I hate bugs. “Now put that shooter down and tell me what the hell is going on here.”

His face split into a wide grin, mouth filled with uneven teeth. “Shit, man, it is you.” He moved out from behind the tree and slid his piece into his leg holster, then motioned me over with one sweep of his arm.

I stood, still moving at half-speed just in case he was on edge, which seemed damn likely to me. I strode over and followed him a little deeper into the bush, pushing past the tree and through a clump of green leaves. Corporal Stanton was indeed lying on the ground, eyes shut, a damp, dirty rag over his head, while his injured leg sat propped up at an incline. He was breathing, but each breath was shallow and appeared labored. His wound was covered with a new pressure dressing, so I couldn’t get a good look at the extent of the damage, but from the sheer amount of blood that had soaked his pant leg, I knew he had to be in bad shape.

Rat turned to me. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it, man,” he said, his eyes wide and a little wild, his lip trembling as he spoke the words. “I don’t even like Stanton, but I can’t stand the idea of anyone else dying. Shit, man, I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot you. It’s a good thing it really is you—I’m not sure I could’ve done the deed, y’know? Probably woulda chickened out at the last minute.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped a little from the sudden presence. Partly it was genuine fear, genuine worry and regret, but it was also the music, already back at work on him.

“It’ll be alright,” I said, knowing that sometimes a word of comfort could have its own power. “We’ll get out of this shit-storm. We’ll find the music, find medical supplies and a radio, diddy-bop right on outta here. Get you back to see that old lady of yours—Cindy or Candy or whatever the hell her name is.”

“Cinder,” he said absentmindedly. “She goes by Cinder. She’s just some nasty skag. I wrote her seven times, y’know that? Seven times and she never wrote me back. Not once. Bitch has probably slept with every guy in the barracks by now. Shit, man, I doubt she’ll remember my name any better than you remembered hers.” He looked down at the jungle ground, running one hand absently over his short-cropped hair. “But I would like to see my mom again. We didn’t leave on such a good note, her and me, she didn’t want me signing up. Didn’t want me coming over here. I wish I’d listened to her. Two years, man, two fuckin’ years since we talked. Feels longer, though.”

We were both quiet for a while.

“You’ll see her, Rat,” I finally said. “We’ll all get outta here. You can see your mom, I’ll see Lauren and my boys, Corporal Stanton can see his favorite workout bench again, and Greg … well, Greg can see my knuckles when I punch him in the nose for dragging me into this shithole.”

He smiled; it was a small grin that pulled the lips up at one side of his mouth. He shrugged my hand off and plopped down to the ground. “You’re full of shit, y’know that?” he said. “You don’t believe that line of crap. We ain’t gonna make it outta here. But hey”—he shrugged his narrow shoulders—“who knows, maybe with you on our side …” He trailed off, as if he didn’t want to finish the thought.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. “I’m telling you, last thing I remember is that son of a bitch with his legs squeezing the shit outta me, then picking up the E-Tool. Goes blank after that.”

“Seriously?” he asked, his face twisted up in disbelief. “It was epic, man. You picked up that E-Tool and turned the fuckin’ thing into a flamethrower. Except I ain’t never seen a flamethrower like that. The fire was alive. Moving around in the air like pot smoke, curling, slithering, wrapping around those Dac Cong dudes. You looked at me—right at me, man—and I coulda swore I was next. I thought that fire was gonna swallow me up too. Even if we do make it through this, that’s a sight I’ll never forget.” He shook his head, as though he might just be able to shake those pictures away after all.

We were both quiet for a moment, him with a far-off look glinting in his eyes, me struggling with the idea of shooting fire out of the E-Tool. I couldn’t quite get my head around it, but my hands burned as I dug deeper into my mind, trying to bring the memories to the surface.

“I never told anyone this,” Rat said, “but getting burned alive, that was my worst fear coming over here. I heard about guys getting drenched in napalm, scared the shit right outta me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t wanna die—who the fuck wants to die, y’dig?—but gettin’ burned up? That has to be the hands down worst way to go out. When they made me a tunnel rat and gave me all these explosives”— he ran a hand over his belt, absently patting at the frag grenades and incendiary white phosphorus charges stowed away in his web gear—“it was like my worst nightmare walking right up to me and kicking me in the junk.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, no response seemed good enough. “You’re an asshole,” I said, because I needed to say something. He grinned again, because he understood. “Enough of this touchy-feely bullshit, huh? You got a smoke or what?”

He reached into his sleeve pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. He upended the pack in his hand and shook loose the last smoke, slightly bent in the middle, but unbroken and totally smokable.

“Last one,” he said. “We can pass it around if you’ve got a light?”

“Asshole,” I said again, thinking back to our conversation about fire, then nodded and fished around in my pocket, pulling out a thin Lucky Strike matchbook. He put the smoke in his mouth, letting it dangle from his lips while I tore a match free. After a little fumbling, I got the thing going and held it up beneath the cigarette’s end, watching the tobacco burst to life and glow cherry red. Rat took a deep drag, holding it in for a moment before letting the smoke trickle from his nose.

“That’s some good shit,” he said, passing me the cigarette.

I took a long pull—it was old, stale, and tasted like a bag of ass. I never did like Chesterfields, and it wasn’t good, but it was also sublime. I nodded my head. “Yeah,” I said. We sat there smoking through the cigarette, passing it back and forth as Corporal Stanton slept and we waited for Greg to get back.

“Did you see Phillips back in that clearing?” Rat asked as we smoked, a cloud of gray wandering between us.

I bobbed my head.

“I always liked that guy,” Rat said. “He was down to earth. Not much of a sense of humor, but he never treated me like a shitbag, not like most of the other guys.”

“Yeah, I liked him too.” I grabbed the cigarette from Rat’s outstretched fingers and drew a deep lungful of nicotine.

“You think Wrangle did him in?” he asked, holding his eyes closed.

I paused, not wanting to say anything, since we both knew what it meant: one of our own was still out there somewhere, loony as the Mad Hatter on acid and maybe hunting us. “Yeah, probably,” I admitted.

We smoked the rest of the cigarette in silence, wrestling with thoughts of Phillips and Wrangle. Wrestling with thoughts about all of it.

Greg stomped back into the clearing fifteen minutes or so after we’d killed the smoke. When he saw me sitting there with Rat, looks of relief and fear flashed across his face in turns. I could tell that he wasn’t sure about me, but was also happy that Rat hadn’t put a round into my skull.

“You good?” he asked me.

“Yeah, super,” I said. “Sunshine and daisies all around. And I’m me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He nodded, though he didn’t speak for a beat. “Well, alright. It’s good to have you back. Now how’s about the two of you stop lollygagging around and get ready to move. Last time I checked, the Corporal was the only one with a serious wound.”

“And go where?” I asked. “Look around, Greg, we’re lost in the sauce. I can’t tell my head from my asshole out here. We need a plan, or we might as well just wait here for the VC to gun us down.”

“I’ve got a plan,” he said tersely. “The plan is to go put an end to this daggon mess.” His lips compressed into a tight line. “I think I found where the music’s coming from.”