some big palms to my right, and I figured I could use the leaves to pull myself up the slope.
I yelled. Loud. And jerked my hand off the first leaf. I was bleeding. The old man slid back down the hill to where I was and looked at my hand.
“You’re okay. It’ll bleed a bit, but it’s not poisonous or anything. I should have told you about those. Nipa palms. The leaves have sharp edges. But I guess you already figured that out.”
He pulled a not-very-clean piece of cloth out of a pocket and wrapped it around my hand. “This won’t stop the bleeding, but it should keep some of the mud out of the cut. The bleeding will stop on its own.”
He pointed to an area to our left. “It’s not quite as steep over there. We’ll go that way.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re doin’ good, Nate.”
For some reason I liked hearing him say that. I wasn’t at all sure I was doing good, but I wasn’t doing all that bad either. And I realized something. I hadn’t complained about anything, not really, for at least a couple of days. Ruining my image.
4
In the next half hour my guess was that we covered a hundred and fifty yards, maybe less. The only good part was that the old man was having as much trouble as I was. At least I didn’t look like a total jerk trying to get up that hill.
I’d pretty well forgotten about my hand, but the handkerchief had been a good idea. I lost count of the times I had my hands in the mud up to my wrists trying to get a little further up that slope.
I lost track of the old man again, this time for longer than the time before. Sometimes I could hear him, and I could see where he’d worked his way up the hill. I tried to follow as closely as I could his exact route. That whole unexploded shells thing had spooked me. I tried to look down too as I scrambled through the mud. But I wasn’t sure that I’d see anything even if it was there. It could be covered in mud. Or buried just far enough to be out of sight.
For most of this trip I’d been either bored or pissed off that I was there at all. That it was killing my well-planned summer. Now there was something else. There was danger here. An average of five people a day, the old man had said. And they probably weren’t scrambling through a battlefield on their hands and knees.
I called out a couple of times, but he didn’t answer. I wanted to stop. Every muscle was tired, and I was totally out of breath. Sweat was pouring out of me. And the old man wasn’t answering me.
Terrific.
I finally caught up, but only because he’d stopped. As I came up behind him, he was looking around. I couldn’t see that where we were looked any different from where we’d been twenty minutes earlier. And looking ahead, it didn’t look like the next twenty minutes would change much either.
But something was different. The old man was different. I flopped down on my side, propped myself on one elbow trying to catch my breath. I looked at him. He turned toward me, and what I saw scared me more than the idea of hidden exploding stuff.
His eyes were open wide, and he was making some kind of moaning noises. I was pretty sure he wasn’t seeing me even though I was five feet away at the most. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack or something. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. What I could do.
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer me. I tried to get up to where he was, but I kept slipping back. Finally I was able to get my feet against some rocks and push my way up beside him. Both of us were covered in mud.
He was on his belly now, his head barely off the ground, looking up the slope. I reached out and took his arm. He jumped and grabbed me by the shoulder. Hard. Scared the crap out of me. He was looking at me like he was seeing something else. Maybe someone else. Someone he wanted to hurt.
“It’s me. It’s me, Nate. Nathan,” I told him.
I said some other stuff too, but I can’t remember what exactly it was. I still couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. But even through all the mud and stuff, I saw that his face was all changed. There was a look, no, not a look, not an expression, something more than that — it was like his face was all out of shape. Like he was in pain.
He wasn’t the only one. He still hadn’t let go of my shoulder. And it was starting to hurt like hell.
“It’s okay. It’s just me, Nate. Your son.”
It felt weird to hear those last words coming out of my mouth. I managed to get hold of one of the canteens, got the top of off, held it toward him. “Here,” I said.
I wasn’t sure he understood at first. But finally he let go of my shoulder and took the canteen. He twisted over on his side. Drank like he was someone in the desert. Like people you see in movies, the water rolling down the sides of their mouths.
5
After that he started to look more normal, breathe more normal. He passed the canteen back to me, and I took a drink, then twisted the top back on.
“You okay?” I asked again.
He didn’t answer, but I thought maybe he nodded his head, just a small nod, but something, I was pretty sure.
He took some deep breaths, trying to get himself back. He pulled himself off his belly and sat up, still looking around, but his eyes looked more like they usually did. Intense but not crazy. Not like they’d been a couple of minutes before.
“Over there,” he pointed. “Work our way over there.”
I looked where he was pointing. Up a little ways and to the right. The jungle growth did seem a little less there. There was nowhere for him to get by me, so I led the way this time. We slid our way up and over to where he’d indicated, to a bit of a clearing. Not as much mud there. It was steep, but there were a couple of trees, not nipa palms. I sat down in a small depression right next to one of the trees. I could kind of brace myself against the up-slope side to keep from sliding. It was grassy and fairly dry. Better. Almost comfortable.
We sat there close together, both still breathing heavy, sweating. Looking up the slope.
I was too tired to talk. I just wanted to breathe, but each breath hurt my chest. It was quite awhile before the old man said anything. When he spoke, it wasn’t much more than a whisper.
And he wasn’t talking to me. Not really. He was just talking.
“I was so scared here. So scared. I never knew a person could be as scared as I was that day. I’d been in firefights before, been shelled before, even wounded once, not much more than a scratch, but still I’d been in the heat of battle. I knew what it was like to have people shooting at me, trying to kill me. And I’d been afraid before, being afraid in a battle isn’t being a coward … but nothing like this. Nothing like here.”
He shifted his weight, leaned back against a tree trunk.
“It was an alpha-bravo, that’s the term we used for ambush. Bo Doi, Uniformed North Vietnamese Army
