For My Daughter

Foreward

My Dear Collette:

I considered setting this aside for your 25th or even 30th birthday, but realizing you might marry young, as your mother and I did, I want you to know all this before you marry.

Why? Because we are naturally drawn to echoes of our parents, and perhaps the young man you want to marry will have some shadow of me in him—yes, a dreadful thought, I know.

There are aspects of this account—and of me—which may repulse you. Rather than obscure these with polite half-truths, I ask instead that you distance yourself by thinking of them as a stranger's experience rather than your father's. Perhaps this will enable you to forgive or at least accept, though that may be a tall order.

It is the fondest wish of any parent that their child might learn from their own painful mistakes rather than from the harsh school of experience, and as foolish as this hope may be, I have held nothing back in the belief that unadorned honesty is more likely to be of value to you than half-truths.

If this should open a rift between us, I shall regret the rift but not the hope or the honesty.

Your father,

Dalton

Chapter One

I will begin with the war, for that is what took me from you.

If you hadn't been ten, and if I'd understood war's aftermath better, I might have been able to reveal more of this back then. But no ten-year old should be burdened with this darkness, or witness it; and even describing this to you as a mature and thoughtful 21-year old worries me.

Like most reluctant veterans of combat, I have spoken little of the experience or the aftermath; I finally unburdened myself to your mother after my recuperation—or more accurately, as one of the final steps of my recuperation—but I have said nothing to you, my daughter, for fear that you would find such a distance between my experience and your own that you might look upon me as a stranger.

But now I realize that it isn't the honest recounting of my war experiences which will separate us, but your ignorance of those experiences. For if you don't ever see the war and its aftermath through my eyes, then what can there be between us but unbridgeable distance?

If I had been able to describe combat to you then, you would have heard a fresher, more anguished version. But the passage of time has smoothed and filled some of the memories, and this is what remains.

I apologize for being unable to provide you with a more snap-crackle-pop version. This is the tired version, the one which has replayed in my mind too many times, the one I have grappled with for too long, the one I continue to grapple with from time to time in my sleep.

It began with a practical financial decision; I'd just been laid off in a corporate merger, and by joining the National Guard at 24 years of age—shortly before meeting your mother, and just a year before you were born—I reckoned that the monthly duty would allow me to both pay off my student loans and fulfill my civic obligation.

In those days the National Guard was only called upon in natural or civic disasters, and in a youthful enthusiasm for contributing to society—one I sense you already share—I joined with no reluctance whatsoever.

A taste for solving problems with solutions—for not all problems in life have solutions—had led me to computer security, and the Guard was delighted to make use of my civilian skills. Later, after you were born, the monthly weekend of Guard service which had seemed so brief arrived with burdensome frequency, and I felt a bit guilty leaving your Mom with all the parenting duties while I went off to play soldier.

Since my service had always been part of your life, it needed no explanation; I recall you asking once why other daddies weren't in the National Guard, and me giving you one of my usual convoluted answers. Although I didn't mention it then, since we'd decided that your Mom should not have to work until you went to school, the extra money was welcome.

When my first six-year term was up, you were about to start kindergarten. Your mother was having trouble finding part-time work in the biotech industry, and we concluded that the benefits were worth the weekend of duty; and so I re-enlisted at 30 for another six-year tour. I'd made friends in my unit, and jobs like filling sandbags were both a break from the computer and a practical service to the community and nation—which was part of why I'd joined.

Toward the end of my second six years of service, just after my 35th birthday and your tenth birthday, the world abruptly changed; and as war clouds formed over Mesopotamia, my unit was called up.

Deserts, I reckoned, lacked much variation; but the desert of Mesopotamia was unlike any I knew in the Great American West, for it was barren and featureless in a way I had not imagined. The composition of its surface was another unwelcome revelation; if there is an American desert with such uncommonly tiresome dust, I've missed it. The extreme fineness of Mesopotamia's windblown dust lends itself to a pervasive sort of trespass; it drifted beneath tent flaps, seeped into equipment cases, and clung to sweaty skin in a ubiquity of annoyance.

A colleague had a matrioshka nested Russian doll in her kit, purchased on leave in Odessa; to no one's surprise, she found the dust had worked its way through the seals to the innermost figurine. Working as we did in network security, our work environments were largely insulated from the suffering laid on truck mechanics and infantry, but the dust still managed to permeate our world in a most irksome fashion.

Having walked a bit in Death Valley one May before you were born, I foolishly reckoned myself inured to desert heat; but Mesopotamia soon deposed that illusion. The desolation of the landscape was matched by the enervating permanence of the open-furnace air; shade and night offered shallow relief, but not enough to restore vitality. Humans habituate to virtually any climate, but the relentlessness of the desert's heat and dust worked to reinvigorate our misery at regular intervals.

As a rear-echelon technician, the odds of being shot were low. The risks of a sudden death were certainly present in a low-probability roulette—a helicopter carrying men and women from my unit would be shot down within the first month, and any tent could be struck by a randomly aimed night-time mortar round—but after a few weeks of camp boredom my fears had quieted.

A high fever laid me low just as hostilities began, and in my absence our unit was transferred north along with the great bulk of the American Army. Once the fever broke, I asked to join a supply convoy heading to the general vicinity of my unit, which was safely ensconced behind the rapidly advancing front lines.

The convoy had picked up other wayward soldiers trying to join their units: a chaplain, a Marine corpsman, and a motley assortment of transferees. Our young commanding officer was also National Guard, and had never seen a day of combat. But as this wasn't a combat unit, his lack of experience didn't trouble me. Unit cohesion, so highly valued in war, was entirely missing; most of us had nothing to do with the supply unit and had never laid eyes on our fellow travelers.

As we were chaperoning supplies into what was at least nominally a combat zone, M-16 rifles were scrounged up for the non-infantry among us. I strapped the rifle over my shoulder and wondered in a remote way if it had been cleaned recently, for M-16s were notorious for jamming in dirty environments. It seemed doubtful I would ever find out, as the convoy's route was through territory long since overrun by our forces.

But for reasons which never reached the rank-and-file, our convoy was sent out beyond the rear echelon to the right flank—presumably to re-supply a frontline unit. On the way we saw neither American troops nor the enemy; everyday life had retreated inside, and the only evidence of war was dirty plumes of black smoke on the horizon.

We were ordered to take possession of a circular highway intersection on the edge of a small city. Driving into the circle, we found no activity; the streets were utterly deserted, though the nondescript flat-roofed concrete buildings surrounding the roadway appeared untouched by the war. The convoy pulled to a stop, and the only sound seemed to be the idling engines of our trucks. The heat inside the vehicles can only be described as Death Valley contained, and I was looking forward to being outside, even if the temperature difference was fractional.

With an uncanny suddenness a great shattering roar of rocket-launched grenades and heavy machine guns erupted around us. What little sonic void remained between the rolling-thunder explosions were filled by the staccato pops of AK-47 gunfire. It seemed as if an entire regiment of the enemy was firing on us all at once; it was as if the air itself was being torn apart.

As bullets struck our vehicles—jarringly loud to anyone inside—we leaped out and hugged the pavement, wriggling like overactive worms toward any cover.

Amidst this instinctive rush for shelter, I slithered from the rear of the vehicle and tumbled into a defensive trench which had been dug by the locals beside the circular roadway. There were no enemy soldiers in sight, and with my heart beyond wild I crouched for a moment, trying to gather my wits.

Glancing up, I expected to see many dead or wounded soldiers beside our trucks; but the Guardsmen around me were all shooting at the squat curve of the concrete overpass and the surrounding buildings.

Bullets kicked up dust in front of the trench, and I lowered my head in renewed panic. Images from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam filled my mind, and in mimickry of those embattled urban warriors I clicked my M-16 to semi-automatic and held it above the trench; desperately hoping the gun wouldn't jam, I braced myself and fired aimlessly at the unseen enemy.

My curiosity about the rifle's condition gave way to an immense relief, for squatting in a trench with a jammed gun was suddenly an extremely vivid version of Hell.

The clip went quickly, and in my first non-panic thought I realized my ammunition should be used more wisely. As I set the rifle to single-shot firing, I remembered my own gun, a single-shot .22 which had afforded me many hours of pleasure plinking tin cans in my early teenage years.

You are probably surprised that I once owned a gun, but the reason is simple: in a rural setting, it's natural to own a rifle in a way which it is not in the city. And as a boy, the desire to shoot cans is as natural as an attraction to vehicles and engines and things which whir off at high speed.

I hadn't shot an M-16 since training years before, but the feel of a rifle was not alien to me; the M-16 is basically a high-velocity .22 rifle, and the recoil was not unlike larger caliber rifles I'd fired as a boy.

Despite the many boxes of .22-short ammo I'd expended as a youngster, I had never killed anything but lizards; with the rather detached amusement peculiar to boys of a certain age, my friend and I had shot them repeatedly with a BB gun, all the while marveling at their ability to keep moving after being shot. His mother, horrified by our cruelty, scolded us so sharply that I recall her outrage to this day.

But a mother's outrage is only a temporary brake on boys' genetic propensity for shooting; while we might have been less frolicsome with larger non-reptilian creatures, that is far from certain; we might well have shot mammals with the same sort of detached glee.

My presence in the trench soon attracted unwelcome attention, for I saw the heads of enemy soldiers bobbing above a nearby concrete barricade. My position was precarious, for they had both a clear shot straight down the trench and the relative safety of the concrete barrier.

Seeing that doing nothing would get me shot in short order, in an instinctive desperation I began aiming at anything rising from behind the barrier. One enemy soldier lifted his head up and I fired at him.

In a kind of infantryman's luck, he was crouching in front of one of the overpass's concrete pillars. As a result, I saw my shot chip off concrete dust well above his head. Realizing that my sighting was high, I instinctively calculated how much lower to adjust my aim.

This same soldier leaped up and fired his AK-47 directly at me, and I braced for the impact of his bullets. Instead, the bullets rent the air above my head; he too had overshot. No sooner had he ducked down than he rose up again and fired a burst directly at me. I was close enough to see him well, and his features reminded me of a Turkish friend from college. I could see the dark bands of perspiration on his uniform, and his surprise at missing me.

In a panic of over-correction, I jerked my aim down and squeezed off several shots; with a hard strange relief I watched him shudder as each bullet hit him in the chest. We each had weapons that shot high, and the only reason he was now dead and I remained alive is that I'd had the good fortune to note the defect before him.

A half-dozen rifles suddenly bristled over the barrier, and a hail of bullets began kicking up dirt around me. Edging back to the very rear of the trench, I knew it was only a matter of time before a stray round hit me.

At that moment one of the enemy made a dash from the barrier to another which snaked around by my trench. Once behind that shelter, he could slip within a few feet of me.

I automatically swung my rifle around and fired at him. As he stumbled, I recalled an account of a U.S. Ranger who had survived the grim battle in Somalia; he'd reported of one opponent that it had taken several of the lightweight M-16 bullets "just to get his attention." With that thought firmly in mind, I shot the fallen enemy soldier several times without hesitation. He stopped moving, and I swung my rifle back to the barricade. In a final bit of luck, another soldier raised up to draw a bead on me just as my barrel lined up with his head. I fired, catching him a split second before he squeezed his trigger. His rifle fired a shot into the air as he fell back, and I knew that sort of luck couldn't last.

I realize a non-combatant like you may feel my use of the word "luck" is horribly misplaced, but I am hoping you will understand the terrible finality and randomness of such a setting.

I could have refused to fire a shot, as it is estimated some 10% to 40% of soldiers in combat do, preferring to let the odds of being killed roll without being part of the killing. But when someone is aiming a rifle at your face and pulling the trigger, the urge to do something to stop him is, I think, stronger even than the desire not to kill.

At that moment a burst of gunfire from behind me spattered the barrier, and the enemy soldiers withdrew behind its bulk. Someone grabbed me by the shoulder, and as I jerked in fear I heard the young Commanding Officer—he must have been ten years younger than me— shout, "Come on, buddy." He half-lifted me from the trench and I scurried after him to the line of parked trucks.

The vehicles had all been riddled like the tin cans in my boyhood target practice, and for the first time I took notice of our unenviable tactical position. The barriers and trenches behind the trucks had been cleared of enemy troops, and our unit was clinging to these positions. The enemy was pursuing a classic flanking movement from both sides, trying to encircle us; if they succeeded in working around either flank, they could easily overrun our precarious defenses. There were about 60 of us, and some hundreds of them, so the odds did not favor us.

I was not a good soldier, but I was a dutiful one; when the CO grabbed a very young corporal— I would guess she was about the same age as you are now, 21, or perhaps even younger—the chaplain and myself, and instructed us to stop the flankers trying to work around the barricade, we crept forward and took up a position at the edge of our defensive perimeter.

As we steeled ourselves for a dash across open ground to the contested barrier, I heard our CO shouting into the radio, reporting that we were low on ammunition and about to be overrun, and begging for whatever air cover could be scratched together. Then the chaplain touched my arm and I no longer heard the CO's desperation, for my own displaced all else.

The fury of the firing was unceasing, but after the first few moments, the din which had seemed overpowering to me at first no longer dominated my attention. My focus was now on the ten yards of open dirt between the trucks and the concrete barricade. The CO had promised us suppressing fire for the mad dash, but there were so many enemy soldiers shooting at us that even a partial suppression seemed impossible.

I should mention here that we were severely outgunned; against our lightweight M-16s, all firing single shots to conserve ammunition, the enemy had rocket-propelled grenades, each of which spewed deadly flechettes over an indiscriminately wide area, and heavy machine guns, as well as hundreds of soldiers with AK-47s and apparently unlimited ammunition.

The corporal went first, and I fully expected to see her cut down in the first few seconds. But though the dirt was kicked up by bullets, she tumbled behind the other barrier unharmed.

"I'll cover you," yelled the chaplain, and when he raised up to start shooting, I ran as I have never run before, low and fast and expecting a bullet to find me any second.

In yet another miracle I made it to the barricade, but instead of respite I found the corporal under fire by enemy soldiers crouching behind the other end. The trenches and barriers curved to conform with the circular shape of the overpass, and as a result, opposing sides could each maintain a tenuous hold on one end of the snaking concrete barrier.

Outnumbered at we were, the odds of us holding out in such an exposed position were poor, and it came down to who could shoot whom first. It was an odd thing, to hope that the chaplain was a good shot; and my fears were alleviated when I saw him shoot a man edging down the barrier toward us.

For my part, I took up a prone position and waited for the enemy to advance. It lay with them to do the advancing, and a few moments later three enemy soldiers crept around the slight curve, hoping to find a clear field of fire; but the clear field of fire was mine, and I shot at least one of them before they slipped back behind their end of the low barrier.

The feebleness of our hold on the barricade was easily visible, for an RPG round exploded against the barricade, showering the area in front of us with weirdly whistling shards. The corporal had cleared a trench parallel to our contested barricade, and as she drew up to a position where she could pick off the enemy clumped at the other end, they hesitated and then withdrew.

I should note here that I had never met any of my fellow citizen-soldiers before the previous morning, and now we were depending entirely on each others' training to survive a battle stacked heavily against us. At the time, I only hoped each wouldn't die and leave me even more vulnerable; but the fear that they might fail in their duties dissipated within the first few minutes of the battle.

As the enemy soldiers fled, a heavy machine gun swept over our position, and our future bleakened considerably. The corporal was pinned in the trench to our right, vulnerable to rooftop fire from the surrounding buildings, and the chaplain and I were trapped behind one end of the barrier. It was only a matter of time before an enemy squad crept close enough to lob a grenade behind the barricade, or we were overwhelmed by a sudden rush.

An RPG swept over our head and exploded on the roadway behind us, and we crouched tight against the hot concrete as the resulting shrapnel cut through the air around us. In a sort of instinctive curiosity, I looked back at where the shell had landed, and at that instant another exploded to our left.

I instantly felt a hot stinging in my face and shoulder, and my first thought was a peculiar relief that the wounds did not feel catastrophic, followed by a resurgent fear that perhaps they were yet fatal. That morning I'd seen the body of a teenage boy crumpled alongside the road; he appeared to be resting, as there was no visible wound on him. A medic rolled him over and found that a tiny flechette of shrapnel from an explosion many yards away had severed an artery within him; the wound, when finally exposed, looked like the puncture of a small penknife. Yet the boy was dead.

I quickly felt my neck for any blood and was relieved to find none. There was something wrong with my vision, however, and I automatically closed each eye as a check. My sight appeared normal until I closed my right eye; then it seemed as if I was underwater, for objects around me swam in an unrecognizable blur. Something was wrong with my left eye, but I did not know what.

Sweat trickled down my forehead, and I wiped it away; it was blood, and the amount surprised me, for I did not feel the wound.

The chaplain caught me sitting dumbly and he gazed intently at the left side of my face.

"You're hit," he shouted. "Are you OK?"

I nodded head 'yes,' and a third RPG exploded behind us. Our situation was increasingly untenable, and I thought, This is it, I'm going to die right here. There was a very coarse sense of unreality to the thought, even as it struck me as undeniably true.

The chaplain spotted movement in the building just beyond the corporal's trench, and it soon became clear that snipers were taking up position to pick us off. If we switched to the other side of the barricade we would be swept by the machine gun, but if stayed put then the snipers had clear fields of fire on us.

With no better choice, we gamely took up firing at shattered windows in the upper story of the flat-roofed building, hoping to stave off the inevitable.

At that moment fierce gunfire pocked the upper floor windows, and we swung around to see who was covering us. Our CO must have observed our plight, for a squad had slipped along the elevated roadway and surprised the snipers.

Seeing our chance, the corporal leapt from the trench and frantically waved us to follow her back to our unit's fragile perimeter.

In a lagniappe of good fortune, the roar of a jet engine became audible over the steady staccato of gunfire, and from the relative safety of a more sheltered concrete barrier we glanced skyward to see a gray F-18 lazily circle our small battlezone. The twin tails and exhausts were clearly identifiable, and I knew it had taken off from some distant aircraft carrier, for only the Navy and Marines flew F-18s.

The plane disappeared from view, and I wondered what the pilot had seen in those few seconds. The fear that he had left us abated when the plane swept overhead in a ground-shaking roar, and the buildings across the roadway shattered and burst under its cannons. Such warplanes shoot exploding bullets, which do fearsome damage. Although it sounds terrible now, I was madly hoping that the F-18's guns would kill every enemy soldier.

Racing toward us in a gray sort of invulnerable majesty, a second plane roared over us and riddled the building facades with a hail of exploding shells. Our CO must have been in radio contact with the pilots, for the first plane lined up some distance out and then came straight in, guns winking in the haze, blasting the sniper's nest in a shower of explosions and puffs of concrete dust. His wingman followed suit; then the jets roared off at a seemingly leisurely pace. They were probably low on fuel or out of ammo, I reckoned; and I would have traded any possession or any future hope for a seat in that plane.

With the F-18s blasting from on high, the odds seemed to favor our survival; but with the red wavering glow of their engine exhausts receding, the odds turned back against us.

There was little time to ponder the exact probability, for the CO knelt briefly by the corporal and ordered us to accompany the squad who had covered our retreat into the sniper's nest building. The wisdom of not waiting for the next flanking movement seemed obvious, but with a renewed lump of fear I could only hope the F-18s had cleared the building rather than simply forced the snipers inside to take cover.

The Marine Corpsman—and we were lucky to have one with us, as he was only heading north to join his unit—was working on a gunshot wound in someone's ankle, and the corporal gave me a shove toward him.

The medic was a young man, far younger than me; his face was a comic mask of sweat-streaked dust below his helmet, punctured by red-rimmed eyes and nostrils caked with grime, and with a peculiar recognition I realized we all shared—even the female soldiers in our unit—the same grim, dust-caked anonymity.

He looked me over with the unhardened eyes of a combat virgin and then quickly pressed bandages on my forehead and shoulder. Peering at my eye with a professional curiosity I shall never forget, he wiped the blood from my brow and gingerly taped a bandage over the damaged eye. Then he patted my shoulder and shouted "You're good to go," and a gratitude that will never leave my memory hit me hard; he turned to attend another wounded soldier and I arose to rejoin my squad.

Following the corporal, the chaplain and I scuttled first to the barrier and then along the roadway to join our mates. As we edged toward the building, the sergeant crept up and gave us a gruff warning. "Once inside, don't shoot wild or we'll end up killing each other." The thought had never occurred to me, and a new fear traced through me. The sargent gave brief orders to the corporal and another senior infantryman, and then it was my turn to cross open ground again.

The firing from the enemy had been greatly reduced by the F-18's sweep, but bullets were still kicking up dust around us as we huddled against the shell-pocked building, catching our breath. The corporal led us through a doorway, and I was grateful to follow; I hadn't the foggiest notion of urban warfare, and was terrified by the possibility of ambush within the shattered building. I had no idea if the corporal had any infantry training or not--unlikely, if she was attached to a supply unit--but her combination of caution and verve made me trust her.

We ran upstairs and burst into a room overlooking the circular battlefield below. The F-18's 20-millimeter cannon shells had blown off sections of the aluminum window frames and chunks of concrete; beneath the blasted windows lay shattered furniture and several fallen enemy soldiers. We'd all heard of boobytrapped bodies and enemy soldiers faking death just long enough to roll a grenade under you.

The trick, I'd been told, was to poke the apparently dead soldier in the eye with a rifle barrel, as no one could unflinching absorb that pain; but who wanted to get close enough to try that? Unsure what to do, we hesitated and warily eyed the wreckage.

The F-18's exploding bullets had torn the room apart as surely as a wrecking crew; what had once been an office of some sort was now scattered debris. The wooden desks lay in splinters, so fresh that I could smell the resin of newly-cut wood through the stink of gunpowder and my own sweat. The enemy soldiers might well have been killed by the fierce splinters flung off the furniture rather than the shells themselves.

Color photos of families still clung inside the broken picture frames strewn on the carpets, and wall posters in Arabic script still exhorted the absent workers; but now, three crumpled figures lay still in the office, and we could only hope that the adjacent rooms would be equally harmless.

A movement in the corner caught my remaining good eye and I turned, rifle raised, to watch one of the seemingly dead enemy soldiers shift position. He had raised his head, and had one hand on his rifle. Whether he intended to gesture surrender or lift his own rifle, I could not tell, and as our eyes met a sudden flush of fear caused me to pull the trigger. He was the Enemy Other, implacable, heedless of anything but my death, and in that split-second instinct for survival I shot him several times. He twitched as each high-velocity bullet hit him and then slumped to the blood-spattered carpet.

"Jesus!" the corporal yelled, as frightened by my sudden firing as I had been by the enemy's movement. "He moved," I shouted, and in response the corporal gingerly approached another fallen enemy soldier, rifle at the ready. The man lay in a splayed rag-doll pose, as if he'd been dropped from a great height, and the corporal motioned the chaplain to check the third body.

"This guy's still alive," the chaplain reported, and the tension in his voice reflected the danger and dilemma this created for us.

"Christ!" the corporal said in a peculiar tone of anger, for it fell to her to decide how to handle the wounded enemy. The chaplain looked up, and it was clear he was unwilling to shoot a seriously wounded soldier, even if the man posed a potentially terrible danger to all three of us.

"Get his weapon," the corporal ordered. "Roll him over and make sure he doesn't have any grenades."

She turned to me and snapped, "Make sure your guy is dead."

I reluctantly approached the corner and with my heart in my throat I knelt down by the man I'd just killed. I knew he was dead the moment I'd shot him in the chest several times, and his half-closed glazed eyes only confirmed the obvious. With a squeamishness I could not have predicted I touched his shoulder; fearful of a boobytrap—an unlikely possibility, given the short time between the F-18s shattering the room and our arrival—I noticed the chest pocket of his sweat and blood-stained uniform bulged with a rectangular object.

Bracing myself, I gingerly pulled it free. It was an ordinary ripstop nylon wallet, as worn as my own; I flipped it open and saw a photo of the man with a young woman, either his sister or wife, I could not tell. Without making a conscious decision to do so, I slipped the dead soldier's wallet into my pocket and turned with a newfound shame to face my fellow soldiers. Although there was no time for anything but the anxious task of clearing the next room, I could not erase the photo from my mind.

The corporal motioned for us to cover her, and with a sharpening fear we paused by the doorway, listening through the staccato gunfire outside for any movement in the next room. None of us wanted to be shot by another nervous Guardsman, but shouting out might signal our presence to a lurking enemy.

As the seconds ticked by I wondered if the corporal had lost her nerve, and with a grim ardency I hoped she didn't order me into the lead. With a sudden resolve she edged round the doorway and shouted, "Hey!"

In an inexplicable reaction the firing outside suddenly diminished and a muffled American voice next door yelled out an answering, "Hey!" As the chaplain and I peered round the doorjamb behind the corporal, another American soldier eased out of the adjoining room and motioned to the room across the hall. So we might have been shot had we rushed the next room, I thought, and the proximity of bad luck and irrevocable error drained me.

It was not an idle threat, being killed by another American soldier; by some reckonings, up to a quarter of all casualties are caused by friendly fire. That alone should give you a taste of what chaos reigns in combat.

Joining up with the others, we readied ourselves, and the sargent kicked open the opposing door. The room was empty, and we listened with puzzlement as the gunfire outside faded to sporadic shooting.

A moment later a heavily armed American convoy rolled through the circular battleground and took up position on the other side of the overpass. I looked out the gaping window at the ground below and realized a miracle had occurred; the dead, dozens it seemed to me, littered not our side but the other side. We had persevered, and been lucky, and so victory was ours.

The enemy soldiers had been our equals in bravery, but we had survived despite our inferior numbers, arms and position. Luck, training, an inexperienced commanding officer who displayed uncommon aplomb and leadership, the F-18's intervention: it was impossible to say which mattered most, but Divine Intervention did not seem at all improbable.

The only American combat deaths, it turned out, were suffered by the column which relieved us; they had been attacked on the way, and two of their number killed. Our unit of citizen-soldiers, a group without cohesion or combat experience, had somehow escaped with only wounds. Not one of us had been killed, despite the fierceness of the attack and the overwhelming firepower aimed at us. My own guess had been that at least half of our number must have been hit in the initial fusillade; and so it was incomprehensible that we'd been spared from what should have been a lopsided slaughter.

I have often thought that this small engagement, as it's called in military terminology, should be studied as a textbook example of what citizen-soldiers can do when adequately trained and properly led. But to my knowledge it is a forgotten battle, unwitnessed by the unblinking eye of the media, and thus reduced to a brief footnote in the official accounting.

When I think of Divine Intervention, the image which comes to my mind is the chaplain shooting the enemy soldier who was creeping along the barricade toward us. He saved our lives by that killing, although it violated his spiritual training and beliefs; so the intervention is rather cloudy. Was his calm aim the intervention, Divine Will wrought through human hands?

In pulling me from the trench, the CO had saved me from certain death. Maybe it was that simple; an especially plucky CO saved a grunt he didn't even know. But from the point of view of the grunt, it certainly felt like a miraculous intervention.

The cliche is that there are no unbelievers in combat. I cannot say if this is statistically accurate or not, but I can say the desire for something approximating Divine Intervention must indeed be universal. The atheist may wish for Luck or Karma with capital L and K to save him, while the believer is tempted to cut a deal with God, a deal which only slants more in God's favor as your situation becomes more precarious.

I myself invoked prayers for deliverance without even thinking; prayer came as naturally as breath itself. Whether this stemmed from a deep-seated human instinct to appeal to the supernatural when endangered or from my early religious training, I cannot say. But I am troubled by the notion that God saved me and took the lives of the men I killed.

I prefer my divine intervention to show more majestic distance from human will and fortitude; and of course divine intervention cuts both ways.

If we were protected, then why did God forsake the other side, who no doubt prayed just as devoutly and perhaps even more diligently, for deliverance and victory? Didn't they deserve victory as much as we did?

Their loss makes a mockery of divine intervention, it seems to me, and nothing can quite explain this away. I wish I could banish the ambiguities of randomness, death and chance, but I cannot; those of sufficient faith may be able to do so, but I am deficient in the genes which code for that kind of faith, and so I lack the grace needed to dismiss ambiguity in favor of certainty.

For some, it was God's will; how much easier I would rest if only I possessed the genes which made this apparent.

You will notice that I have consistently used the term "enemy soldier" to describe the men who were vigorously trying to kill us. I know they were sons, husbands, and fathers, just as we were, men who didn't deserve to die in some dusty highway intersection any more than we did; but they were trying to kill us, and even though I will never erase the face of the first man I killed, the one who reminded me of my Turkish friend, I cannot feel remorse as I understood it before the war.

I have dreams, of course; many of us do. Mine are of being rushed by enemy soldiers, and as I lift my M-16, it turns to sand and dissolves in my hands. I snap awake, and remind myself that the dreams are getting less frequent; but that doesn't reassure me in the long moments of stark alertness.

I must also explain one other element of the battle to you; we were not all of one race, my little squad of the corporal and the chaplain. Our skins were all different, but I defy you to say whose was light or dark or chocolate or tan; and in the entire unit, which were men and which were women. What mattered was your fellow soldiers protected you, and in this I was fortunate.

I have left one sensitive topic unaddressed, but honesty demands that I give you—now the same age as the corporal, or perhaps even a year older—an account of the differences between men and women in combat. The idea of female U.S. soldiers killing people—let's be direct and acknowledge that they killed enemy soldiers in combat—is troubling to most people.

As for our young corporal, thrust so unexpectedly into combat leadership, I cannot say I ever saw her shoot anyone, or even fire her weapon. I believe she did, in the sort of aimless way one fires at a generalized enemy, but she may well have been one of those many soldiers who cannot bring themselves to kill someone else, even in peril of their own life. I know she considered killing the wounded soldier as a way of ending the threat he posed—after all, I had just done so—but she rejected it, as a violation of the rules of war or as an assessment that he posed no danger, or as a private decision, I cannot say.

I can say, however, that if she did not kill anyone, it did not detract from her leadership, or endanger anyone under her command; nor does it mean she would not have reacted just as I did if the wounded enemy soldier had reached for his rifle.

On the other hand, she might have frozen, unwilling to kill him, and let him kill her instead. As with any other individual decision in combat, there is no way to answer such questions except to witness the moment and then survive to recount it.

As for the woman I know best, I would guess that your mother might well let herself be killed simply because she would not be able to shoot anyone, no matter how pressing the need. She is, after all, the type of person who catches a moth indoors and releases it outside rather than simply extinguish it as a nuisance.

But if someone were about to shoot you, I think she would deliberate; and if no other way of stopping the killer were at hand, she would shoot them with the intention of incapacitating rather than killing.

But no one knows how a human will react in extremis, and so I could be wrong about Waiahn's reaction to deadly force. It's best not to lean too heavily on the differences between the sexes, though such differences do undeniably exist.

But at the moment our corporal had to decide whether to shoot the wounded enemy soldier or not, I did not see her so much as a female but as another soldier caught in a chaotic environment where a wrong move could be fatal. She did not have the luxury of making a decision for herself only, for by the rigid rules of rank she was responsible for all of us.

I think this responsibility weighed on her more than her sex or her religion; if the wounded enemy soldier had reached for a grenade, I would have expected her to kill him instantly, for this responsibility to her fellow soldiers demanded it.

There is something else I must describe to you: I know too well what is commonly called survivor's guilt; the two soldiers who died on the way to rescuing us haunt me. It is the supreme injustice, I think, that the rescuers die and the rescued live; I know, I know, it is the nature of combat that we all take orders and the chips fall where they fall. But this does not answer the injustice; it simply shunts it aside.

We choose none of our genes and precious little of our experience; I did not ask for combat duty, nor for the terrible consequences of my wounds. Not the consequences to myself, mind you, but to innocent others; for I am ashamed by the insignificance of my injuries in a way you cannot understand.

Yes, a tiny flechette of wickedly bent steel sliced through my cornea and iris and embedded itself in the retina of my left eye. But even though I lost 95% of the sight in that eye, the eye itself could be salvaged—and I still had my hands and feet, treasures you cannot possibly imagine unless you have seen bloody pulp where once a foot throbbed with untroubled life. As I went through the field hospital and then another in Germany, I saw the wounds of other men and was overcome with the special shame of one let off so easily.

Despite what you may think from watching films, the injury to my eye did not hurt much; and so I was spared the lifetime travails others must endure from their brief moments of combat. I am ashamed of my good fortune: a million-dollar wound in my first firefight; no leg blown off, no arm shattered, no lung torn by a high-velocity claw of shrapnel.

And I was blessed with an enemy I could see; the soldiers after us had to face the uncertainties of cleverly hidden bombs, and the frustration of no one left to fight.

My modest wounds, not to mention my rear-echelon duties, guaranteed that this one day would be the sum of my combat experience; and as a result, I experienced only the incredible first ascent of combat, which is to survive your first firefight.

But beyond that initial exhilaration, the experience dims and then grows dark; you see your friends killed, the weird chances and random mishaps of the battleground pile up inside you, and sometimes even a lifetime is too short to sort them all out.

Or the boobytrap goes off, and your leg is left hanging by a tendon which does not even look like part of you, for it was never visible before; and then your stump is cleaned off, or perhaps two stumps, and you have a life far more arduous than you could possibly imagine before that split-second explosion.

The exhilaration of the survivor fades, but for some reason the shame remains, lingering on like an invisible wound.

But I have not been entirely truthful with you, and you will soon understand why. I am not so ashamed to tell you of my survivor's guilt; it is another aftermath of that day which I want to keep from you: I did not hate combat. Perhaps I would have grown to hate it, but it is just as possible that it would have grown even larger within me. As it is, I must admit that it was the most exhilarating day of my life.

I assume this is incomprehensible to you, and I have no answer for that. This is the gulf which may well remain between us, and I ask only that you try to feel the physical intensity, the surge of instinct and the profound emotions of survival which marked me that day, and every day since.

Chapter Two

I'd returned home without major difficulties—or so I confidently reckoned at the time. My eye was healing as well as could be expected, and I expected the gulf which my brief exposure to combat had opened between your Mom and I would close with the passage of time. I felt reprieved, and anticipated a renewed joy in the simplicities of life: picking you up from afterschool care, the warmth of your Mom's body at night, Chopin's Nocturnes and a tumbler of cognac, and even the camaraderie of the securities office where I worked.

But it seemed instead that the gulf between myself and the world widened, against my will and against my hopes, in the imperceptible manner of tectonic slippage. Perhaps I had constructed too glorious an expectation of renewed appreciation for the plentitude of life; or perhaps I was willfully blinding myself to the temblors which were still reverberating through me.

My own inner voice, I finally admitted, had the hollow sound of false persuasion. I felt not rebirth but erosion; the stock market, which had never failed to engage me, now seemed thin and poor; my work of blocking intrusions and probing for weaknesses in our network had been reduced by the intensity of combat to a pale, sunless routine.

My attempts to bond with you seemed just that, attempts; once, when I was in the last harried rush of getting coq au vin and a salad on the dinner table, you asked, "Daddy, what's wrong?" Gladdened by your sensitivity—do you even remember this?—I made a parental show of honesty by saying that I was overwhelmed at the moment.

But I knew you were sensing more than that, and the paucity of my answer weighed on me long afterward. I wanted to tell you what was wrong with me, but I could not identify it; and this failure deeply frustrated me.

If we possessed the ability to intuit danger, I think it would be called upon most urgently to save the life of a child. Yet I felt nothing that afternoon driving home. You know the afternoon, and I worry about raising it in your memory. It was an intersection I had crossed a hundred times without incident, and a situation—driving you and your friend Shelley to our house.

I had adjusted rather well, I reckoned, to being almost entirely blind in my left eye. While I could distinguish light and dark shapes with an acuity akin to looking through a sheet of wax paper, I'd found that the brain compensated for this truncated field of vision by simply editing out any signals from my left eye which overlapped those of the right eye; as a result, I saw nothing to the left of the bridge of my nose except an underwater-like blur.

Other than bumping into people within that afterglow of true sight, I found no discomfort beyond occasional shooting pains behind the eye. The visible disfigurement of my iris caused some minor self-consciousness, as people observed the irregularity of my left pupil and thereafter sought to focus on my undamaged eye; but my impairment was almost entirely untroublesome, especially when compared to a prosthetic foot or hand.

But in this I was mistaken.

As the crosstraffic signal turned yellow, I automatically glanced to my left for any oncoming vehicles. There was only one, as the boulevard's lights were sequenced to allow free flow only within the speed limit. As the one laggard sped past, I returned my gaze to the intersection and waited for the light to turn green.

I was aware of the neighborhood store and the restaurant on the opposite corners, and of two pedestrians waiting to cross the boulevard, but only in the manner of background information; in my mind's eye, I can see the long yellow marquee of the restaurant, and the accordion security door of the market in its closed position, but nothing specific to that moment.

For my conscious thoughts were of an entirely invisible concern. I'd noted Shelley's reticence, and suspected she'd sensed the awkwardness behind my bonhomie. To my surprise, I'd found myself unexpectedly anxious about being with you girls; it was as if I'd forgotten how to be with children. Suddenly self-conscious, I began overcompensating with an exaggerated cheeriness. Children, as you know, are not bamboozled by such fakery, and I hoped that by recalling Shelley's visits prior to my Mesopotamia service, I could slide back into a more relaxed presence.

The light turned green, and without any sense of alarm I released the clutch and started forward. If my left eye had been undamaged, my peripheral vision would have detected movement; but as it was, I saw nothing.

I do not recall the actual collision clearly, or the sound, though it must have made a horrific crash; I remember entering the intersection and reacting with adrenaline fear to a sudden squeal of skidding tires to my left. I have a split-second memory of a pickup truck far too close and far too fast, and then a dream-like sensation of being violently spun into a secondary collision with some other object.

My first post-impact memory is a hazy awareness of objects being out of place; Shelley's knit cap, dark blue against her impossibly straight blond hair in my memory, was on the ceiling of the car next to the dollar bills which were squirrelled away for bridge toll. There is a blank spot between that and my next memory of being in a gurney, and of a paramedic in a blue uniform holding the gurney steady inside an ambulance. Struggling to swim back up to consciousness, I tried to rise and realized I was having trouble breathing; straps restrained me, and felt a hot iron bar twist my left lung.

"Are the girls okay?" I asked in what must have been a very weak voice.

"Just take it easy, buddy, you're going to be alright," the young man said, but I knew by his face that everything was far from alright. "We'll be there in a few minutes," he added, and despite my best efforts I could not figure out where we were going. If you have ever experienced deep shock, you know the sensation; it was like swimming in a murky sea, and being too weak to ascend to clearer water.

We talked about the accident after I came home from my travels, and you told me you too have only foggy memories of the collision. I wonder what you remember as you read this now, ten years later; if you ever want to tell me, I would be an attentive listener.

The young man driving the pickup truck was drunk; at his trial for manslaughter, he testified that he had glanced up to his rearview mirror to see if the police car was still following him. The police testified that he was traveling in excess of fifty miles an hour, but his speed upon impact could not be measured with precision. Our car, a small compact, provided little protection for its passengers; it was thrown some distance and landed against a utility pole. The young man, of course, survived with only modest injuries.

This experience is not uncommon. Some 45,000 people are killed each year in the United States in traffic accidents, of which 16,000 are alcohol-related. Imagine for a moment if an equivalent number of innocents were killed in airplane crashes caused by drunken pilots. Would the public tolerate such needless slaughter? They would not; yet they accept it without comment on their roadways.

It is an odd deficiency, this human knack for systematically overestimating imagined danger and underestimating actual danger. Thus we fear flying, snakes and lightning, and a completely impassive acceptance of a million random highway deaths every generation, of which at least 150,000 could be prevented by removing habitual drunks from the roads.

As a result of my own injuries, I could not attend Shelley's funeral, and this absence left me guilty and relieved at the same time. As the adult responsible for her death, I should have been there, as witness to her parents' grief; but I felt unprepared for the burden, even as I knew that it could not be shirked.

Her parents made every effort to lighten the burden; they visited me in the hospital, and through their tears, held me blameless. Though not religious in a pentecostal sense, they professed spiritual resources I could only imagine; they could not understand why God took their child, they said, but there was a reason for her to be in Heaven before them. Perhaps they said the words even though they did not believe them, but I think not.

We each cried, for own reasons, and I told them quite sincerely that I wished with all my heart that I'd been killed and their daughter saved. Her father shook his head and said nothing, and I could read both his grief and his understanding that it wasn't our choice; my time to die had not yet come.

As my body knitted itself back together, my mind filled with the bitter aftermath of unexpected death. First, there were all the contingencies: if only I'd pulled out a bit faster, or slower; if only the police officers in pursuit of the young man had switched on their siren; if only the young man had looked ahead a moment earlier; if only Shelley had sat behind you; and lastly, always, always: if only I'd died in the desert battle, as I should have. Then I wouldn't have been driving at that moment, and Shelley would still be alive.

The battle memories twisted and curled back on me in other peculiar ways. During the young man's trial months later, I found myself fantasizing that he, rather than the man who reminded me of my Turkish friend, was shooting at me, and in the fantasy I gained immense satisfaction by shooting him repeatedly in the chest.

But killing him, either in fantasy or real life, resolved nothing, and it did not lessen my agonies to see him shift uncomfortably in court, mouthing words of remorse, but already looking beyond his all-too-short prison sentence to living fully again. He would marry, have children, and perhaps win over the inner demons of drink; but Shelley would still be only a memory, a permanent hole in her parents' lives, and in yours.

Time creates the ultimate helplessness; I could never change the outcome of that one moment. Taking my own life, which would have done the trick before the accident, no longer served any purpose except ending my own purgatory. Knowing the burden of responsibility would never be lifted, killing myself had great appeal; but in cooler moments I reminded myself that it would deprive you of your father. Even though I was a useless father, it was not my place to burden you with my death.

I know this sounds overwrought, but it is what occupied my mind.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I owed you at least ten years; even if I was worthless as a parent that entire time, you deserved a childhood with at least the background stability of a living father. And, in my rare moments of rash optimism, I ventured to hope that perhaps by the end of those ten years, when you turned 21, I might learn how to carry the burden standing up.

As it was, I could not stand up. I could not believe in a God who would take a child for some unknown purpose and leave her murderer unharmed, to go on with life once he'd served a few years' term in prison. Oh, I envied him as well; imagine the relief of serving your term of punishment and then being freed. You were responsible, but you'd paid your debt in full; and now you were free, in both body and soul.

Your mother could not understand my guilt; it was the young man's fault, not yours, she repeated time and again; it could have happened to me or either of Shelley's parents.

Intellectually, I knew this was an entirely reasonable line of thinking, but it did not penetrate my own sense of failure. It was such a miscalculation, to imagine that the free pass from death I'd received in the desert would protect those around me.

I'd been spared despite killing others, I reckoned, in a simple luck of the draw. There was no reason why the man who tried to shoot me shouldn't be alive, while I moldered in my grave, except chance. But having won that draw, I'd awarded myself an illusionary protection. Now I'd survived yet another encounter with violent death, and killed a complete innocent through my negligence.

It made no sense, and I lacked the gene needed to truly believe in a God who took the life of a child for a reason beyond our understanding. I wished, many times, that I could believe this; but profound belief cannot be forced. We must come to it on our own, and on our own terms, or not at all.

It was hubris of the worst sort, I realized, a failure which could have been avoided by mere caution. In my godlike overconfidence, I'd reckoned being half-blind would have no effect. But it had.

The essence of tragedy is a noble hero or heroine who makes a bad choice and suffers the consequences. In real life, humans dash for the exits, desperate to escape any consequence of their foolish actions. The tragic figure is tragic simply because he or she had the courage to face the consequences of their poor choice. The rest of us are untragic because we are cowards.

The residents of the Hanoi Hilton and similar institutions of torture tell us that every human has a breaking point. It is not intuitive, this breaking point, for it has little to do with bravery or physical strength; it resides somewhere beyond bravery, strength, or the will. The seemingly strong may break first, while the apparently ordinary will endure the unendurable far longer than anyone else. No one knows their own breaking point until the moment of truth arrives; nor can anyone predict another's final line of resistance.

There is no shame in breaking, they report, for everyone eventually snaps; coming to that inflection point is beyond your control, as is the time of arrival.

Although I cannot explain the process exactly, the accident and its aftermath broke me, just as surely as if I were the subject of well-practiced torture and deprivation.

I had lost my inner compass, and the will to persevere; and as a result, my wife asked me to move out, at least until the physicians could make me whole. I would have asked the same, had such a fate befallen her, and I complied without a fuss. I was incapable of a fuss, and neither the hospital staff nor the Veterans Administration doctors could weld the breaks within me. The therapies which worked for others did not lessen my burdens, and while the medications planed off the sharper burrs of distress, their relief was more an absence than a cure; I simply felt less, not better.

They did their best to repair the mechanisms broken by combat, but they were unable to repair the damage to the soul wrought by killing, the spiritual losses unreachable by therapy or drugs. We are trained, in certain duties, to be windup toys; but some springs cannot be repaired.

Despairing of ever having me as I once had been, your mother lost hope. Along with faith and charity, hope is one of the Spiritual Virtues, and I reckon it the most fragile. Looking down from the window of my shabby rented apartment as she walked to her car, I felt as if my body were being torn apart; but I could not blame her any more than myself.

Neither of us had been entirely honest with the other, and this dishonesty laid waste to what remained between us. She could not voice her frustration and resentment at my collapse, for she knew it was not my fault; and to express her true feelings seemed petty and mean. But not expressing these legitimate feelings did not banish them; it only fed the sour heart of her anger and frustration, silently lending them the strength to overwhelm all else within her. I could not explain my hollowness, or give voice to the guilt, grief and self-hatred which scoured me. I could not yet identify words to describe those feelings; but even if they had come to me, I would not have expressed them. For I did not want to appear a self-piteous broken cripple, even if that is precisely what I had become.

It was these truths, too painful, too inflammatory, too destabilizing, which we held within us; and it was there that they wreaked the damage which dishonesty brings, even the well-intentioned kind.

And so this is how the first transition ended: we were still entangled, you, your mother, Shelley and her parents, the young man, the CO who saved me, the young female corporal and the chaplain, and the men I'd killed in battle; but the distance between each entanglement was widening, as if we'd been flung light years apart.

Chapter Three

Why do I want you to know the history of your parents' romance? We all approach this topic with a combination of curiosity and squeamishness, for we want our parents to be safely in love but not distastefully passionate. After all, how can "old people" be passionate? But old people were once young, just as you are now. And the truth is that you, dear daughter, were conceived in just the sort of high passion depicted in movies you dismiss as over-romanticized.

The reason is that you share your mother's practicality and intensely romantic nature. In understanding our romance, you will learn about yourself—perhaps not what you want to learn, but nonetheless this knowledge will help you understand your own romances, just as an understanding of our separation will help you understand such rifts in your own life.

It is my hope that you will marry easily, and be fulfilled without turmoil and crisis; but should such events take hold of you, then this knowledge of your Mom's inner life may well prove decisive in reaching your own insights and decisions.

You already know your Mom's welter of names and nicknames—how Karine Waiahn Chuang begot Reenie and Lita still befuddles me—and how her mother and father, a Vietnamese girl born in Paris of expatriate parents, and a handsome Chinese-American, met while studying in Paris. Your mother kept her own name after our marriage, as befits an independent woman, and I would be surprised if you too did not keep your own name when you marry.

As I met her at work, I knew her at first as Waiahn, the name she had chosen after university to use professionally. Once I entered her circle of friends, then I came to know her as Reenie. To know her as Lita, you would have to be one of her sisters; and I think you were always a bit envious of this sibling-only nickname. Now you finally have a sibling, so you too will share nicknames unique to you two.

I'm sure your Mom has already revealed that she asked me out for our first date. Why? Frankly, she was too attractive for me to even imagine asking her out. She is generally not an impulsive person, so I believe she had her eye on me long before she decided to approach me at the company party. At that time we both worked for a large biotechnology firm with hundreds of employees: as I was in network security and she was in life sciences, we did not work together. We'd met at a previous company gathering through a mutual acquaintance. I thought her very pretty and lively, and as a result well out of my league. How she sized me up between company events, I do not know; when I asked, she was evasive in a joking, mysterious way not unlike flirting. I have since learned that it was well within her capabilities to gather an informal dossier on me through our mutual acquaintance, and to confirm her intuition that we might make a good match.

Most of the people in life sciences dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans, but on the day she approached me at the company gathering, she was wearing black tights, a black-and-white tartan skirt and a clingy, long-sleeve black blouse. Her hair was pinned up most fetchingly, and in a form of full disclosure, she wore her everyday glasses rather than contact lenses.

I have to smile here, for I imagine you've never seen your Mom dress so youthfully or flirtingly.

I felt her eyes on me, and as a result was more self-conscious than usual. Her intelligence, reflected in the quickness of her jokes and in the accompanying flash of her dark eyes, raced ahead, leaving me bedazzled. By way of small talk, I asked what she liked to do on the weekends, and that provided her with the perfect opportunity to ask me to accompany her on a hike the following Saturday. Pleasantly surprised by her invitation, I accepted, and on the appointed day, found myself in the dusty trailhead parking lot, nervously pacing from one oak tree to the next, conjuring up topics which I hoped wouldn't bore her to tears.

Of the many questions roiling my mind, the first was why such an attractive young woman was still unattached. Was she flawed in ways invisible to co-workers, or had she simply not met a marriageable mate?

Quite naturally, it turned out she'd had several serious boyfriends, even going with one for a year or so. Much later, she'd revealed that they'd been engaged, and that she'd broken off the engagement shortly before the designated wedding date. The engagement had been, she'd explained, more a matter of what was expected of her than a match chosen to endure the ages.

It's peculiar, isn't it, to realize that you would never have been born had your Mom married that suitor. I think it was a closer thing that she lets on, but perhaps she will tell you things about it that she has never told me. Those are the prerogatives of the mother-daughter bond, and I hope you will make good use of this prerogative.

She seemed too young to have acquired such a busy romantic history, but her unblemished youth—the sort of skin and sparkle you associate with girls of nineteen, really—belied that she'd just turned 25. I was 24, having just recently joined the National Guard.

She was late, and I reckoned that at a minimum I'd gained the experience of being jilted; but then she drove up in a practical white sedan and approached me with flustered apologies. Her appearance—her black hair whimsically tied up in a blue kerchief, skimpy white shorts showing off sleek tan legs, and the tails of her light green buttoned-down blouse tied together to reveal a narrow brown band of flat belly—rendered me speechless; if she'd set out to enthrall me, she'd succeeded most perfectly.

The trail to the seasonal waterfall, it seemed, was known to her, and as a result I followed her up the narrow path, focusing more, I must admit, on the flex and sway of her derriere than on the other attributes of the scenery. We touched in the most practical manner that day; scaling a steep patch of root-entwined hillside, she reached down and gave me a hand up when I slipped. She didn't seem to mind the contact, nor did I.

Over our picnic lunch—peanut butter sandwiches and cranberry juice, for which she apologized most profusely—I found her face held a perfection of small imperfections. Her cheekbones were too wide and her lips not wide enough for the current standard of beauty, but refined intelligence glistened in her eyes, especially when she laughed, and the soft lines of her cheeks, chin and nose formed a most lovely union. There was a reflective quality to her eyes in repose which stood in contrast to the youthful enthusiasm of her gestures; for her features moved easily from pixey laughter to pensiveness, which knitted the dark curves of her eyebrows with vigilant concentration. Her glossy hair fell just below her shoulders, and smelled lightly of conditioner; she did not seem to wear perfume, or jewelry except a thin gold necklace, and I found that casual practicality most becoming. The skin of her arms and legs was a creamy brown, nurtured by her parents' Southeast Asian gene pool and her love of being outdoors; her comfort in hiking up hillsides inspired a fluttering in me which I hoped would remain invisible to her.

Although she claimed later to have been very nervous, I detected more confidence than nerves. It was confidence, I reckoned, rather than lack of preparation, which prompted her to bring such sparse and informal fare; had she been out to impress me, wouldn't she have gathered an elaborate meal? Rather, it seemed she'd gone out of her way to avoid impressing me with any first-date guile.

You will have your own dating and romantic experience by the time you read this, and I hope you are smiling at my awkwardness and how obviously I was enthralled by your mother. And she had one trait then that she retains to this day: the ability to surprise me.

So though I'd reckoned the date had gone rather well—especially given my jitters and poor social skills—I was completely unprepared for her parting gesture.

There is an awkwardness to every first-date parting, of course, as the participants must mask their true feelings. A rejection is carefully avoided, as are expressions of affection; and so I reckoned our carefully imprecise good-byes had ended the date. We shook hands, rather cautiously, I would say, and then I got into my car; but she drew closer, as if to say one last thing, and so I rolled my window down. Her smile was rather fixed, and as I awaited her words, she suddenly bent down and kissed me, not at all a peck but an unambiguously full and gorgeous kiss.

When she finished, our eyes met, and in that brief moment my world toppled.

A new landscape grew within each of us over the following weeks, newly peopled by those important in the other's life, and scattered with newly seeded meanings. We talked daily at work, spending our lunch breaks on the pathways which meandered alongside the bay, and then hiking together on the weekends.

We'd kissed again, of course, after her unexpected gesture that first day, but I'd sensed her resistance to any intimacies beyond. For the third weekend walk, I brought a beach towel, and an excuse for using it: with the next weekend given over to my National Guard service, it was unfair that I should miss the luxuries of her lips; so we should, by all rights, double our diversions.

As it was early summer, and our hikes meandered not by the foggy Pacific but in the inland hills just turning brown, Waiahn had again dressed for warm weather: a pink tanktop and her skimpy white shorts, and a straw hat with sat very fetchingly on her head. As always, she led the way, and I enjoyed the perfection of her long brown legs from behind. And I say this not in the exaggeration of new romance--her legs were indeed flawless lengths of warm brown.

Though you can look at photos of us from that time, I've failed, I think, to adequately describe just how attractive your mother was to me. No one would deny that she is pretty, with soft, symmetrical features, expressively intelligent almond eyes, smooth cheeks and perfectly sized nose and chin. She is pretty in an almost anonymous way, for there was no one feature which called attention to itself, nothing like bee-stung lips or high cheekbones; she was the sort of pretty girl who remains indistinct in a passing crowd peppered with other pretty girls.

There was a serenity to her which is not an absence of expression, but something which arises from the very composition of her features: a mouth neither voluptuous nor severe, an alertness not of anxiety but of sensitivity, a rounded chin, pert nose, generous brown eyes and an oval face which all together lend her youth even as she ages.

To my great satisfaction, she agreed to spread the towel out beneath a copse of trees far from the trail, ostensibly for our picnic lunch of roast chicken breasts and rice balls. It took a long climb through open grassland to reach the sheltering shade of the oaks, and so our first hungry kisses were taken between gasps for breath.

It had taken only a moment to select a well-protected spot of grass shielded by a lichen-covered rock formation on one side and oak trees on the other; the thick grass interspersed with golden wildflowers made a comfortable cushion beneath the big towel, and with the sun of early summer warm on our bare skin, and the air filled with the distant calls of crickets and the scent of new grass, it was a fulsome romantic hideaway.

Our picnic was a quiet affair, for we both anticipated renewing the kisses we'd interrupted for lunch; despite our best efforts, our conversation suffered from this suppression of passion. I wasn't much for smooth transitions, and so as she tucked the last of the picnic remains into her backpack, I tucked into her.

Your discomfort level must be reaching a high pitch now, and so I suggest you think of us as young actors on the screen, or a safely anonymous couple deep in the throes of blossoming love. For the fact is that I unexpectedly overcame your mother's chaste resistance in that secret copse, and though I deployed birth control, it failed at the crucial moment. I will leave the gory details unsaid, but suffice it to say that condoms do not go through a clothes dryer unscathed.

Such an abject failure of birth control is surely one of the most awkward moments of any newly budded romance. I shamefacedly reassured her that I was disease free; she offered me the same reassurance and then silently pulled on her shorts.

I was afraid that she'd felt forced, but she insisted that she'd wanted me, and that her desire had been all too obvious. Despite the warmth of her reassurance, there was a distance between us disconcertingly at odds with the intimacies we'd just shared. Suddenly I foresaw the consequences of my rash lust: in taking her before she was ready, I'd lost her trust; and now that there was no repairing it, our promising bond was drying to dust.

My regret weighed heavily, and I left her at her apartment door that afternoon with a foreboding very distant from the happy anticipation which had animated my morning.

My worst fears seemed confirmed at noon on Monday, when she turned away our usual lunch together with an excuse about a project deadline. I tried to convince myself that it was indeed work-related, but the likelier prospect was that I'd mortally wounded our romance.

Unable to concentrate on my work, I struggled through the afternoon and the following day, when she again put me off with complaints of deadlines. On Wednesday, I was debating whether to make a heartfelt plea for another chance, or to relinquish all hope. Waiahn's agreement to meet me after work Thursday struck me as business-like, foretelling, I feared, her distaste for the task of cutting our bond.

But contrary to my expectations for a gloomy meeting, she met me with a smile and a burbling release of work tensions: the deadline, the ornery lab boss, the management pressure, and all the roadblocks that had unexpectedly cropped up in the past three days.

I listened, trying unsuccessfully to assess her underlying state of mind, as she led me outside along the grassy knoll between the lab buildings and the glittering bayshore. With her hair separated in two glossy black pigtails, her studious glasses and a white button-down blouse, she exuded a winsome college-student adorability which seemed at odds with the serious nature of our meeting.

We sat down on a patch of well-tended grass just beyond the shade of a tree, and I could not help but be impressed with the calmness of her demeanor. She'd written me a letter, but decided at the last minute to tell me in person. I readied myself for rejection, but instead she told me in the matter-of-fact voice you know so well that she was pregnant.

You can imagine my surprise, for we'd only been together the once, and only a few days had passed since then; it was impossible to know if a child had been conceived. Yet she insisted she already knew, and I felt unmoored; it was tempting to dismiss her certainty as the romantic fantasies of an overly imaginative girl, but she did not strike me as that girl.

She handed me her letter which I immediately opened. I hadn't seen her handwriting, and I immediately liked the crisp boldness of the first letters in each word, and the artistic regularity in her rounded hand. I read the pages straight through, re-reading each paragraph several times. It stunned me; this young woman, who still looked like a girl with her smooth soft cheeks and bright, inquisitive eyes, was revealing landscapes far beyond my initial understanding of her, and a profound humility took me.

Your Mom may have forgotten that I still have this letter, or the exact contents of it; and it would probably embarrass her to know you are reading it. But there is a father-daughter prerogative, too, and I think it important enough to reprint it for you without her permission.

It was a difficult decision, whether to entrust my feelings to you or not, and it took me some time to make up my mind. I apologize for keeping to myself these past days, but it was necessary. I am not an articulate person, and so please forgive the clumsiness of this letter.

I'm not used to expressing myself, and never about things like this, but now I must try.

I have asked myself why my heart reached out to you so immediately, and why you've permeated my thoughts since we met, popping into my mind at every opportunity, distracting me from my work, my routines and friends. I can answer, because of your great intellect and kind heart, but these cannot be the only reasons.

I found the answer on Sunday, in the way I felt when you surprised me. You are my fifth lover, too many, I know, and I tell you this so there are no secrets between us, and to show you that I am not naive about men.

I wanted you, I must confess, from our first walk together. I have been romantically impulsive before, and been terribly disappointed; and so I promised myself that I would be careful with you, and not allow you to enter my heart too deeply, or take advantage of my feelings for you.

And so, as foolish as it sounds now, I set out an orderly plan to limit my impulses. In the second month of our friendship, I would let you kiss me, and then more each month, until I was sure about you. But you'd already touched me deeply, just in choosing a beautiful hideaway for our romantic picnic.

Though this sounds stupid, I felt more than just your desire for me. I could tell you hadn't planned to take advantage of me, and that you were being swept up by something larger than either of our intentions. I too, could feel it, and though I thought we should stop, I was also secretly hoping you would ignore my hesitancy.

I have another confession, a small one; although I told myself it was wrong, I'd worn those lavender panties, my favorite, just in case you managed to catch a glimpse of them.

It is very hard to write this, but I must tell you that I have never felt anything like the way I felt with you. I knew then that there was a special bond between us, and though this sounds like such a horrid cliche, so much changed in that moment: in how I felt about myself and you, and even my place in the world.

When I opened my eyes, I found you looking at me with such affection and strength. I had never thought such emotion, or such sensations, possible; and now I realize that I'd only experienced a weak shadow of love before. I had never felt myself before, and I knew then that you shared my understanding.

A sudden awareness that I was pregnant came to me, and I thought it so strange to know what I knew could not be known.

I have tortured myself these past three days, telling myself it's impossible to feel conception, and asking myself what is the difference between this and my other impulsive romances; maybe, I told myself, the only difference is that this time the condom broke.

But I know that's not true. I am not religious in the sense of going to church or believing in organized religion, but I do feel we each have a destiny. If I were to choose the one lovemaking which would make me pregnant, I would choose the one we shared on Sunday. Before then, such a love seemed only a dream to me, and a distant one. I must admit, first to myself and then to you, that even if you hadn't worn protection, I wouldn't have stopped you, because in a way I couldn't.

I don't expect anyone else to understand my feelings. I don't think anyone I know can, except (hopefully) you. They will think I am crazy for having a child with someone I've known only a month—and if it were anyone else, I would say they were crazy, too.

If I am crazy, it is a craziness I want to keep and hold always.

I know you will doubt my feeling about being pregnant, as your great intellect makes you skeptical of any unproven thing. And so we shall wait for proof.

You must also wonder if I am just being impulsive in my feelings for you, and all I can say is that I have thought of nothing for days but the answer to that question.

I wouldn't blame you if you think me impulsive. We haven't known each other long enough to make a decision to be together, but we must.

But first, know that I love you. And if I am right, or more accurately, if my body is right, then I will bear our child in nine months. After much thought I cannot end this life, and so I will have this child, as I believe it is my destiny to do so. If you love me as I love you, then it will be easy to ask me to marry you, just as it will be easy for me to say yes.

If you cannot marry me, then know I love you anyway, and that our destinies will part ways despite my love for you.

Yours always,

Waiahn

It is difficult to write such a heartfelt a letter in our corrosively ironic age, for it is the nature of such private letters to seem overwrought to strangers. The letter was never intended for anyone else's eyes, but I am sharing it with you to reveal your Mom's passionate nature, and her sure grasp of contingency and destiny; for I hope that you have inherited these traits, and will come to value them in your mother.

I folded the letter carefully into its envelope, overwhelmed with the realization that my life had irrevocably changed in that one afternoon of youthful longing. And of course I pondered the course of our history if I hadn't been quite so aggressive that afternoon, or so cavalier with the frail condom. But it didn't really matter, for if Waiahn was correct about our entangled destinies, then it was inevitable that you would be conceived—if not on that weekend, then the next one or the one after.

Though we may never speak of it, I want you to know that because we wanted each other, we naturally wanted you.

It was such an absurdly movieland cliche, to become pregnant from a first lovemaking, especially for such a careful woman like Waiahn. Although I do not know the odds of such a pregnancy, they must be low; but in that moment when she told me she was carrying you, I knew I'd chosen the right woman. And in choosing the right woman, I'd also chosen the right daughter.

I will make a confession here too fanciful and embarrassing for conversation, which is that after you were born, and I witnessed your immense life-force, I wondered if you hadn't insisted on being conceived at the very first opportunity, no matter how low the odds or cliched the setting.

Unlike many of my friends, I'd never set marriage or children as life goals; until that Thursday afternoon, marriage and children had been disembodied shapes on a future horizon, perhaps a mirage, perhaps real, but certainly too far away to make out. Now, the clock had been set, and I would be a parent in nine months.

It was an extraordinary experience, sitting on the grass beside Waiahn, dumbfounded by the stealthy speed of our romance and its sudden acceleration toward marriage. Sensible young women don't get pregnant in the first month of a relationship, and responsible young men don't impregnate a young woman on a third date; each of us had violated the norms of our class and families, and so it was to the great consternation of our families and friends that a wedding was abruptly planned and consummated.

Her father had long hoped to present her with a grand marriage of white satin, ceremony and eloquent toasts raised at long tables beneath crystal chandeliers; but given the grim appearance of a shotgun wedding, he swallowed his bitter disappointment and treated us to a small affair of immediate family and friends.

I did not enjoy the wedding, perhaps because the dank fog of forced union hung uncomfortably around the bride and groom; but Waiahn, thankfully flat in her first trimester, seemed unaffected by the scent of disgrace which drifted round the subdued onlookers.

Thinking it a natural outcome of such an unplanned pregnancy and hasty marriage, I anxiously anticipated the emergence of her own doubts; but either she concealed them with uncommon fortitude or accepted them without distress. She weathered the irksome nausea of morning sickness with no more complaint than could be expected, and bore the imbalancing discomfort of her distending belly with more good humor than I could ever have managed.

It ran so counter to my own trepidation that it took quite some time for me to recognize that she actually welcomed motherhood, even though it entailed tumultous changes in her body and life. With a kind of unspoken awe, I realized I did not yet know her, nor fully grasp her decision to marry.

I believe that her mind was made up about me before that afternoon picnic, and that the decision was less mine than hers. Although I would hesitate to suggest this directly to her, I believe that at some level she might have found the decisiveness of pregnancy preferable to a lengthy and uncertain courtship. Or as I have said, you may have forced yourself on us in some soulful manner, and our own actions were pre-ordained by your desire for life.

By her own admission, your Mom been severely disappointed by previous romances, and perhaps becoming pregnant may well have been a way to bypass the long, careful courtship expected of her and cut directly to the motherhood and marriage she'd secretly desired.

Although I hesitate to place much weight on such an unsubstantiated hypothesis, I also believe that Waiahn's intuition proved correct not just about your conception but also about selecting me for her mate. Perhaps I have fallen into the common trap of projecting my own thoughts onto someone else; for in truth, I admit to some parallel relief in the brevity of our courtship and the clarity of our decision. That moment of your conception cleared a very clear path ahead for each of us, and it was in each of our natures to prefer a clean transition over a leisurely clutter of indecision.

Though the brevity of our romance appeared highly risky to outsiders, Waiahn's four previous lovers and her disappointments gave her the experience to make sense of her intuitions, and to leave the uncertainties and excitements of the mating search behind without regret. My own abysmal experiences certainly left me regretting nothing; and in a similar fashion, I believe we each secretly enjoyed shaking the expectations of our families and friends; to conceive a child and wed so passionately and irresponsibly—it filled us with the joy of rebellion we each had denied.

But romance does not bring a toolkit when it gathers you up; you may have the desire, and perhaps the will, but you do not necessarily have the skills to negotiate tumults which overwhelm the reach of everyday life.

For these, we were both ill-prepared.

And this is why I want you to understand the history of our romance, and of your conception, so that you are prepared to understand the turmoil which beset us afterward.

It is not easy to recognize which tools you lack, and to fashion them yourself, as we all must. Using these handcrafted tools, all so clumsy at first, requires practise, and the forbearance of your mate; some must be worked together, others must be wielded as individuals. Despite the universality of wartime injuries, there are few guides to the tools needed to clear the wreckage, repair the damage and rebuild shared lives.

I want you to understand this painfully uncertain process of discovery and apprenticeship, and to understand that there are states of internal distress which are inaccessible to those who know only everyday life. In such states, the sufferer breaks off from greater humanity, and is cast adrift on their own uncaring island. For it is not just the despair of loss which sets you apart, but a profound dissolution of caring. Once adrift, you no longer care about your loved ones, or life's small pleasures, or even your own despair; and in not caring, you lose your hold on yourself and on life.

Those still within everyday experience cannot sense your distance, or the magnitude of your isolation; and so their entreaties to "snap out of it" or "get a hold of yourself" fall on profoundly deaf ears.

For the person thus adrift can no longer hear the bustling cacophony of everyday life, much less participate in it. He is lost to it as surely as if it lay beyond the horizon. He may sense its presence at times, in the shifting currents or the patterns of clouds, or in the faint scent of earth which drifts in the lightest breeze, but he no longer cares how far he drifts, or in which direction, for it is no longer within his power to change course.

Such a lost soul is a sorrowing automaton, beyond the sight of the shorebound, navigating perilous waters alone without provision or compass. To be marooned on such an uncaring splinter is to be profoundly alone, and distressed in a painfully gray way.

Lacking both the experience and the tools, your mother could not see a way to cross the gulf opening between us. Unable to comprehend my loss or her own frustrations with my collapse, she set herself free by dissolving all but the most incorporeal threads connecting us. We remained entangled, but the distance between our experiences widened to the far edges of the world.

Chapter Four

I now come to the part of my history which I fear will be most inaccessible to you. Why would I leave my wife and daughter? And why would I deliberately place myself in mortal danger? The reasons are hard to describe, and so I will simply relate what happened. While I think you understand the triggers—the war and the accident—my attempts to heal myself may well be opaque to you.

I ask only that before you read this, you close your eyes and try to imagine yourself living the combat I have described, and awakening to the dream I have described, and feeling a pervasive guilt over Shelley's senseless death. Now imagine your mother's confusion and frustration over my breakdown, and my own desire not to burden either of you.

Then perhaps you can understand my decision to seek healing on a spiritual pilgrimage.

As for volunteering for the mission in Burma, I ask that you consider your own intensely idealistic nature, and imagine a confluence of events which might lead you to accept risks for above those in everyday life in the service of a cause you are uniquely prepared to serve.

I will start in central France, awakening to the hypnotic bronze peal of nearby church bells. The other pilgrims had already arisen, and so I found myself alone in the whitewashed gites d'etape with a neat row of empty cots and the spartan room's single piece of decoration, a wood-framed print of a beatific haloed Christ.

It was unlike me to sleep through the noise of other beds being made and the murmur of voices discussing the day's walk; surprised by the depth of my slumber, I lay on the cot listening to the birds outside. Having nothing else to think, I counted the different calls. There were four; a fluttering chirp, a sweet trilling song, a harsh, almost metallic cry, and in the distance, an occasional squawk.

I hadn't had anything to think about for some time. As my dissolution became complete, Your mother had asked—actually, demanded—that I move out. Understanding her frustration and exhaustion, I hadn't protested. A small and somewhat squalid studio near downtown was cheap and available, and with uncaring relief I signed a lease with the florid Tibetan building manager.

It was an odd revelation, discovering I had nothing to think about. My attempt to return to work had faltered, and in an unspoken compassion my unit boss had conjured up an excuse to lay me off, ensuring I would receive unemployment. At Waiahn's insistence, I'd applied for disability benefits, but the nearly invisible nature of my wounds meant the application would shunt around the bureaucracy until I wearied of it. The Veterans Hospital refused to support a psychiatric claim; it had been abused too often, I reckoned, and the clerks as much as said so; but for the sake of thoroughness we both dutifully filled our respective forms and acted as if there was some hope.

Having nothing to think about was reminiscent of childhood's long slow afternoons of summer heat; but where a child will find or invent a game, I had long ago lost this capacity for self-beguilement. And so I lay in the creaking pilgrim's cot and listened to the bell clanging.

As in many French villages, the highway ran straight through the town; crossing the village square to the bakery could cost your life. I heard the doppler rise and fall of autos motoring past, and reckoned that the European cars sounded different from the Japanese-made cars that keened past our apartment at home.

Resting beneath my scratchy starched sheet, I detected other differences: the countryside just beyond the village murmured with sounds quite unlike the industrial quiet of American farmlands, and the room smelled moldy, unlike either the recently-cleaned scent of my rented apartment or the lived-in incense smell of our home. (You know how much your Mom likes incense.)

I couldn't tell if the knowledge that I was in a French village colored my senses, or if the differences were real. Retrieving daily life is not an easy thing, especially after you have lost the taste of it on your tongue; and so my mind lost the busy birdcalls and returned to an ever-present regret.

There are shades of regret, of course, ranging from the banal—the university degree we didn't get, the house we should have bought—to the profound; the blindness to risk, the inattention which costs another's life.

I must have entertained the routine regrets of a banal life, but I could not recall them; did I regret not buying an apartment earlier, or the Master's program I did not enter? I supposed I did, but such floating weeds no longer had any bite; one might as well regret ordering the omelet over the French toast twenty years ago on a forgotten day.

And so the familiar wrenching twisted me yet again; if only I'd glanced to my left in that fateful moment before the collision; if only I'd been present instead of distracted; if only I hadn't held so smugly to a foolish invulnerability in the critical seconds when I should have been wary.

After losing my job, I'd set my faith in the Veterans Administration doctors. They did their best, but they had many Desert War patients and too vast a spectrum of traumas to offer me the rapid cure I was naively anticipating. The medications made me feel worse without stopping the thoughts I wished to stop, and so I gave the colored pills up.

The therapies gave me initial hope, as they'd worked well for others. But whether it was my peculiar constitution or a self-defeating desire not to get better—for why should someone so undeserving suddenly be freed—the therapy did not have a clinically visible effect.

In one new form of therapy, the veteran re-lived his combat traumas through playing a realistic videogame. For reasons no one can yet pin down, this re-living of experience in an interactive display seems to alleviate post-traumatic stress symptoms more than talking with counselors.

My one day of combat was not all that was wrong with me, however, and rather than relieve me the games inspired me to consider re-living combat not as a game but as a real experience. If that sounds crazed—if combat games didn't work, maybe the real thing would—then you haven't grasped the last length of my desperation.

So I decided to re-enlist. It was not unheard of, re-enlisting in wartime; some do so out of loyalty to their mates, but I cannot count myself in this noble troop. I had heard stories dating from the waning days of the Vietnam conflict in which re-enlistment was seen not as a mad re-entry to a hopeless cause but a retreat to a cushy existence. The food was plentiful and free, the distractions vibrant, and the sharpened edge between life and death glinted brightly in the sullen tropic sun.

My reason sounds so foolish when spoken; I simply wanted something to think about, and I'd had plenty to think about in the war zone. There were other possible reasons, of course; an opportunity to die not at my own hand but in the intensity of combat, or perhaps a desire to re-test my mortality as a way of recovering the positive sense of destiny my first combat experience had bestowed.

I don't think my lack of explanation troubled the recruiter, but my re-enlistment was denied on medical grounds. It was true that the sight in my left eye had been destroyed by the thin sliver of shrapnel, but I reckon it was less my sight impediment than my psychological profile which stalled my re-enlistment. I had, after all, made it clear that I wanted assignment to combat duty rather than a posting to my old network security unit.

Perhaps the Army did not want a half-blind soldier, but it may well have found my request for ground combat patrol invoked Catch-19, which states that a too-ardent desire for combat duty disqualifies the soldier for combat duty. Fighting for God and Glory are fine things, and I say this without irony; the soldier's creed of duty, honor, country has a firm place in my secret heart. Though the irony of my rejection struck me hard, I understood the reason for Catch-19: no officer wants an overly zealous trigger finger in their unit.

I found no glory in shooting another man in the chest, but I did find purpose in defending myself and my adopted unit. And for this reason I bitterly resented Catch-19. The Armed Forces excel at providing purpose through the two conditions I sought: staying busy and following orders.

And combat, I realized—at least in those waking hours free of advancing enemies and dissolving guns—offered respite through its immediacy. Nothing occupied my mind now except regret, and I longed for something, anything, to push it aside. Combat patrol offered plentiful boredom interspersed with electrifying terror. If I offered myself up to save my fellow soldiers, at least my death would have purpose; and you, dear daughter, would have a memory of me other than that of the incompetent who killed her friend with his clumsy inattention.

Would I have the inner steel to make such a sacrifice? I would never know, and so I was left to conjure up another pathway to the future. I ruled an empire of loss, and an emptiness without measure stretched out ahead of me; I'd decided to last ten years for your sake, but the prospect of enduring even another week seemed to call for more strength than I possessed.

A few dreary days in my room convinced me that prescriptive solace was worth a try. To the dismay of the Tibetan building manager, I forfeited my security deposit, took my few boxes back home and packed a single black canvas travel bag. Leaving signed instructions that any disability payments I might receive should be deposited to our joint account, I converted my personal savings (not our joint savings) into traveler's checks and set off on a pilgrimage I'd read about years before, from France to Saint Jacques de Compostelle in Spain. I knew little about the destination—the tomb of Saint James, miraculously discovered in 820—and I held no illusion that a Believer's redemption awaited me; it was the routine of walk and worship, not the end point, which held promise.

I also had no illusion that I could travel as the hardy medieval pilgrims did, 50 kilometers a day on foot, or that I would have the stamina to complete the full 1000-kilometer route; but I reckoned a spiritual journey of prescribed length and duty would be better than aimless disconsolance.

Though not a Catholic, I anticipated the rituals of pilgrimage with some hope; for if so many millions drew solace from religious practice, perhaps I could as well.

Waiahn and I had rushed through a belated honeymoon in Europe at the end of her first trimester; of Paris I remembered the Tour Eiffel, our impossibly small hotel room and its pink-tinted closet-sized bath, and our romantic dusk boat cruise down the Seine. Then it was off to Rome, Berlin, London and finally home, dutifully frazzled and financially drained.

I bought a ticket to Paris and boarded the plane with memories of my last plane ride to Europe, the one from Mesopotamia to the hospital in Germany. This was different, of course; I wasn't bandaged, and my mind wasn't alternating between worry about my eye and gratitude that I hadn't suffered the terrible wounds visited upon those around me. My stay on the continent had been short; my memories were of relief that my eye and a fraction of its sight would be saved, and of the maimed young men in the hospital with me.

My internal movie of that hot day at the highway junction replayed itself, of course, whenever given a chance; the expression of the young man as I shot him, the other man scrambling and my bullets finding him, leaving him a crumpled pile of dusty clothing; the mad rush across open ground as bullets puffed the dust around me, and the sudden sweat-soaked silence at the end.

Paris; you might well imagine I planned to enjoy myself. But pleasure was a crown cracked and broken, and so I reckoned visiting the famous cathedrals might establish a proper pilgrim's frame of mind.

I took a room in a small 16th arrondissement hotel which catered to genteel families and Continental businesspeople, and busied myself studying a map of the Metro. My plan was childishly simple; begin with Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur, and then proceed to the Left Bank cathedrals of Saint Sulpice and Saint Germain-du-Pres.

Although I would like to credit my poor restless sleep to jetlag, I knew it had other roots. After hours awaiting the light of dawn, I dressed and went downstairs to the hotel's petit dejeuner of strong cafe au lait, croissants and assorted fromage and jams. One of the families had also arisen early, and as the girl admonished her younger brother, a special ache tore deep into me and lodged in a crevice inaccessible to reason or will. She was perhaps twelve years of age, only few years older than you at the time, but with all the unblemished enthusiasm of high childhood, that wonderful peak of native spirit girls reach just before their decline into a gawky self-consciousness; and my loss had never seemed so painful or acute as in that moment of watching the girl toss her long chestnut hair in a willfully comic pout.

With my mind filled with unhappy thoughts of abandoning you and being unable to go home whole, I found the Metro station, bought a carnet of ten tickets and boarded the line to the Right Bank and Notre Dame.

It is always a mixed experience to clap eye, to borrow Melville's phrase, on an iconographic structure or vista; its magnificence is apparent, but so are its limitations and the collateral costs of viewing it from a swirling horde of fellow tourists. The press of bodies awaiting entry to Notre Dame surprised me—it was, after all, early September, when the world had returned to work and school—but I held fast to both my goal and my wallet, as pickpockets were as plentiful as pigeons.

The line moved slowly, and I had abundant opportunity to gaze up at the cathedral's time-stained incrustations of gargoyles and filigreed stonework. It was the work of a lifetime, I realized, to have held a chisel and mallet during its long construction; life is so short and mastering a trade so time-consuming, a stone-cutter would never know a loss of purpose. Indeed, the notion would have been as alien as a godless universe.

Once inside, I found the cathedral vast enough to absorb the multitude and leave some small circles of intimacy for anyone who stood silently and looked upward.

It was an alien wonder, this hushed, dimly lit volume, for my parents had attended a small spartan Protestant church; this was an architecture I'd never experienced, designed to instill a reverential awe. Time lay heavily in each saint's niche, as heavily as the scent of the worshippers' candles, and the brevity and insignificance of each human life stood starkly revealed.

Having escaped the crush with my wallet intact, I set off on foot for Sacre Coeur. It was a mildly challenging walk of several kilometers to the hilltop landmark, but the effort paid the dividends of street life leisurely observed. Spotting a chapel steeple off a main avenue, I turned into a fabric of narrow one-lane streets and found the modest gray stone chapel facing a small and rather barren children's playground. As I watched a dark-moustached father push his son in the swing, a wiry man in a striped pullover sweater approached me and asked for directions. At least this is what my feeble grasp of French suggested, and my swell of pride in being mistaken as a native vanished in my faltering reply: Pardon moi, je connais pas.

My meandering toward the three clotted-cream spires of Sacre Coeur sparked my appetite and I stopped at a patisserie. From the array of decorated confections I chose a round custard-filled tart topped by a puff pastry ball encrusted with burnt sugar. The name, puits de l'amour, well of love, cut me, and the unlikelihood of ever being worthy of your mother's love hit me in a hammerstroke. If there is a greater loss than this, I do not know it, and I ate the custard not with the relish it deserved but automatically, with my heart wrung painfully tight.

A short, steep hike up a multitude of stairs brought me to the entrance of the cathedral, and another, albeit shorter, entrance line. The interior, though not as grand as Notre Dame, resonated with a less august reverence, and I took a seat behind a dark-haired woman and her crisply dressed husband. From the care and quality of their clothing and the deep black of her hair, I reckoned them Asian tourists; the woman was reading a guidebook, and the husband was studiously scrolling through his life as reflected in the light-blue screen of his cellphone.

Trying to ignore their appallingly secular presence in this sacred place, I gazed at the stained glass above the tourists and tried to conjure a pilgrim's noble thoughts.

Gazing at the woman's elegant neck, knowing from her flowery red-and-white dress and jade-studded gold necklace that she was unlike your mother in more than just age, an unwelcome truth came to me. In leaving so abruptly, I'd hoped to hurt Waiahn, or at least trigger remorse in her; but instead I'd hurt only myself, and in a sudden rush of regret I considered flying home the next day. But Waiahn's reaction had been one of relief at my absence; and there was no going back until I'd somehow healed myself, or allowed unknown forces heal me in their own time and way.

The elegantly dressed couple arose and left, and though frightfully alone—not just alone, but in a place no one else could reach or understand—I was determined to make the best of it, for stoic resilience was my phrase of the moment—and a few minutes later I made my way around to the rear of the cathedral.

Though Sacre Coeur was another site promoted in every language from Albanian to Urdu, the simplest deviations in route paid ample rewards. The park behind the thronged entrance was empty except for a few locals lounging on the dark green benches watching their kids scoot plastic cars around the gravel walkways. The small park afforded hazy views of the city, but my attention was on the children, and the child lost to my heedless inattention.

Je suis fatigue de Paris. Unfortunately, suffering is solipsistic; the pain is always terrible until you've suffered a quantum step up the scale. Without that experience, then your pain will always be the greatest in the world.

But I was beyond the reach of such judgments; I would have traded a far harsher existence for a moment of time travel in which I could correct my error and restore Shelley to life. Since that wasn't possible, nothing else mattered; that I was richer, healthier, more blessed than most: it was akin to telling me happiness lay entirely in being six-foot-two inches tall. It did not, and I was the proof.

The emotion I knew well in Paris was envy, for I envied the unburdened everything: their living children, their companions, their easy pleasure in a glass of wine and crust of crackling fresh bread, and their sleep unbroken by bouts of terror. You know envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, along with pride, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust, in just such a descending order of evils; but of these all, the worm which burrows deepest is envy.

My next stop was St. Sulpice, a dull gray cathedral fronting a spare, unlush plaza just below the Jardins de Luxembourg. Though it is the plainer sister of the more famous churches, I liked its interior more than the beehive innards of Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame. One of only a handful of weekday worshippers, I took a pew and suddenly felt inadequate to the arduous vows of pilgrimage. Even at the start, my hopes for salvation or the release of even a partial redemption were threadbare; but I knew that humans must toil and spin at some task, or they would fill their idleness with the peculiar solace of destruction. If there were windows to break, that would do; and if there were no windows, then we work on destroying ourselves.

Possessing a full measure of that thanatos urge already, I knew I needed the distraction of a quest; and even if the pilgrimage returned no spiritual dividends, it would certainly occupy my time. And that is all I asked of it.

I could dwell on the frustrations and comedies of finding the pilgrimage route this late in the season, long after the main body of pilgrims had left Puy-en-Velay; but I shall not, for you have plenty of travelogue materials at your disposal.

Walking through France provided me both variety and distraction, and I though I found precious little spiritual solace, despite my attendance at pilgrim's Masses, I did find my fellow pilgrims of great interest. The lay travelers, the ones taking the route as a touristing lark, did not interest me as much as those seeking spiritual goals. I wondered if the value of pilgrimage lay not in the path's source—in this case, the Catholic Church—but in the solitary communion of pilgrim and God and the solidarity of fellow seekers.

I could recount vignettes of my fellow travelers—a rheumy-eyed bent man with a worn sheepherder's cap apparently sewn to his scalp, barely able to stand, it seemed, who nonetheless logged twenty klicks a day and cooked his own spare meals on a tiny camp stove, or the sunburned young Catholic couple from the American Midwest, eager to touch the face of God and mine the veins of their faith.

But I will focus on one. Not on the man himself, but on his story of another pilgrim. In conversation one night at the gites d'etape where I ended my wearying day, he asked the reason behind my walkabout, and I mentioned my service in the Desert War. He then told me about a young friend of his, also a discharged veteran, who had joined him on the St. Jacques pilgrimage only to leave shortly thereafter for the politically unsettled border of Thailand and Burma.

His friend, it seemed, had heard that relief missions to the Christian Karen tribes in Burma were being ransacked by renegades who operated with either the acquiescence or outright support of the despotic Burmese military junta which despised the Karens. The mission's sponsors, he said, had reluctantly decided that armed guards were a necessity, and so they were recruiting guards, preferably devout Christians with military experience.

The means of separating the devout from the merely mercenary were ingeniously straightforward: the guards would receive no pay, only room and board. Guarding the delivery of desperately needed medicinal supplies was viewed as a form of Christian charity, not a mercenary activity. The job immediately appealed to me, and I asked for the young vet's email address. With that in hand, I located an internet connection and sent him a message expressing my interest in joining him.

Although my devotion as measured by church attendance was zero, as measured by the willingness to ride shotgun on aid convoys to oppressed Christian minorities, it was high enough; and though I was only a congregation of one, I reckoned being Christian by birth and a recent St. Jacques pilgrim would qualify me for the duty.

The following day my thoughts were not on the winding route through the green hilly French countryside or on the late-summer blue skies pounding my sweat-soaked safari hat, but on my hopes for a response from the young Christian soldier. For truth be told, like him I was restless with a largely passive pilgrimage. Tiring of just killing time, the purposeful escorting of supplies through the lawless Golden Triangle immediately seized my imagination.

I only hoped there wouldn't be a Christian equivalent of Catch-19, in which my eagerness to serve disqualified me.

That evening I was as overjoyed as an anhedoniac can be, for the young man had replied that any Christian veteran would be more than welcome, and he gave me the address of the mission in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which would connect me to the field outpost on the border.

My impatience at the local train station was intense, for I could not get to Thailand fast enough. Fears of the mission folding its tent or of the guard ranks being oversubscribed by Christian zealots filled my mind, and my agitation remained even as I'd boarded a fast TGV train bound for Paris.

At 300 kilometers an hour, it took only a few hours to reach the City of Light, and I took a taxi straight to DeGaulle International to catch the next flight to Bangkok.

A purpose, especially one driven by sacrifice, is akin to a life preserver tossed to a drowning person who has tired of the thrashing struggle to keep afloat; glorious telos, the promise of accomplishment, even at the risk of danger: I sucked each of these dry for nourishment.

Bangkok was a steaming, fetid, fascinating, speeding whirligig bustle of stained concrete drabness broken by saturated golds and living greens, a sensory overload montage fast-framed over an incessant doppler drone of impatient bumblebee motorbikes, a hive of pretty black-haired girls in blinding-white blouses and blue-skirt school uniforms, gaunt brown men pushing fruit carts, and shining Mercedes autos with the windows rolled up against the heat, the want and the need jostling for humid air on every street.

These were my first impressions, mostly drawn from a cab window, for I'd taken a taxi to the cheap lodging paradise of Banglamphu via the chaos of the Chinatown district. I could not know then that I would return to Bangkok as a resident, or even that such residence existed on the periphery of possibility; I knew only that it was unlike any place I'd ever been. Never mind the rich: the Thais, they are not like the rest of us, unless of course you are Thai.

I will spare you the travelogue except to to say that though we were adrift in a culture entirely lacking an American worldview, we could still buy a lukewarm can of Coca-Cola and NATO .223 ammo clips in the sprawling frontier shantytown which had sprung up on the border crossing into Burma.

Maybe you have already guessed that my motivation wasn't entirely noble; for the crazy idea that reliving actual combat, not an electronic facsimile of it, but the real thing, would somehow right my inner world had me firmly by the throat.

Of course this sounds like nonsense; but in certain states of mind, such crazed ideas carry their own logic.

I will admit to missing the quiet routines of the pilgrimage route when I reached the decaying little mission in Chiang Mai. One glance telegraphed that it was all hopeless; the supplies, if there were any, would not reach the border, much less the Karen, and all effort was doomed to the wastebin of history.

But my contact there, a good-natured South African man with a wondrously cultured accent, restored my willingness to proceed. His confidence that all the obstacles towering over the ramshackle mission's unkept courtyard were trifles infected me, and it seemed that even one person with his cheerful assurance could indeed move the world a fraction toward better.

The Land Cruisers were already on their way to the border, he reported, with Karen drivers who knew the roads and who to bribe along the way. My young fellow-guard Johnny was already at the border town awaiting the vehicles. Despite the disrepair of the mission—and only a subtropic clime can lend that air of Nature triumphant over paving stones and moss-encrusted planking—the relief operation appeared well-planned, even down to my transportation to the border.

After a ride out of town with a jitney of brown-faced uniformed school children, all in the aforementioned white blouses and shirts and navy-blue skirts or shorts, I joined a kindly looking, copiously sweating missionary on his way to the Karen refugee camps just inside the border in Thailand.

We shared a wood seat in a covered jitney heading for the border areas where the Karen refugee camps were located. From his accounts, I learned the desperately poor prospects the Karens faced as either unwelcome refugees in an impoverished region of Thailand or as undesirables in military-governed Burma. Some 120,000 had been driven into shanty-towns within Thailand, supported by aid from a reluctant Thai government and various global relief agencies.

Several hundred thousand other Karens still lived in Burma as "internally displaced persons," or IDP in the argot of relief agencies, harassed, murdered, raped and forced into labor gangs by the Burmese Army. Their survival was a precarious shuffle from one remote village to another; always in hiding, they collected wild honey and scratched a meager living from crude slash-and-burn fields cut from the deepest jungle.

To complicate matters further, the Thai government had begun cooperating with the Burmese military to seal the border. It was an open secret that the Thais were as pleased as the Burmese to collect huge "fees" for allowing illegal drugs, timber and precious stones to be smuggled out of Burma, the missionary reported. The hapless Karen did not approve of the poppy-heroin trade, and so were relegated to impoverishment in a land filled with lavishly funded private militias and state armies led by corrupt officers.

There may have been people less deserving of oppression and more deserving of medical supplies in Asia, but I did not know of any, and his account only strengthened my belief in the rightness of the task ahead.

The missionary explained that I would be joining a group called the Free Burma Rangers, a Christian relief agency which smuggled supplies into Burma and offered training and outreach to the Karens still in Burma. The group, he explained, was one of the few sources of data on human rights violations inside Burma. Though dedicated to peacefully improving the lot of the Karens, the Rangers would defend themselves if attacked. One of the founders, an ex-Special Forces American who went by the ironic code-name of Colonel Sanders, was both a devout Christian and a dedicated leader of relief missions. To the Christian aid groups subversively active in Burma, the government's dismemberment of Karen villages was nothing less than genocide, safely committed in a largely inaccessible jungle.

The plan was straightforward. We would smuggle the two Land Cruisers past the Thai military guards and then follow what amounted to widened trails, creeping as deep as we could safely get into Burma. From there, Karen porters would carry the medical supplies on to the remote villages. The Rangers, a small group even in the best of times, were busy with other missions; we would be on our own.

The Ranger's credo gave me pause, especially the last line:

"Love each other;
Unite for Freedom, Justice and Peace;
Forgive and don't hate each other;
Pray with Faith, Act with Courage;
Never Surrender."

The border town awakened a new understanding of just how distant civil authority lay from this region of the world. The only analog I could muster was the cliched Wild West Town; not the neatly kept streets of Hollywood towns presided over by a tin-starred sheriff, where gunfighters practised a nobly fair game of quickdraw on each other, but the actual Western towns, muddy shanties where most gunfights consisted of unsuspecting victims being shot in the back.

The prostitutes were present, dressed not in frilly Victorian skirts but in tanktops and salacious shorts, as were the saloons and storefronts, if you counted tin-roofed shacks as stores. Chickens and pigs shared the muddy tracks with Mercedes diesel trucks and the ubiquitous small-bore motorbikes, which carried either two youths or one youth and a huge box on delivery, or perhaps a slaughtered pig slung carefully over the rear wheel guard.

The hamlet's scent was of course not of hot Sierra foothills dust but of decaying plant matter, gutted meat, fish sauce and sweet-stenched discarded papaya rinds.

There was a touristy border village at Three Pagodas Pass further north, but with the Burmese Army on the lookout for any aid to the Karens, it was only possible to slip across at one of the rougher border crossings further south.

I reckoned the wiry young man tugging at the ropes holding down the goods piled atop the muddy Land Cruisers was Johnny. Spotting us, he turned with spring-loaded energy and walked excitedly over to meet us.

His handshake was overly firm, perhaps nervously so, or perhaps it was just another expression of his overwhelming energy. He fairly vibrated with life-force, and I reckoned at once that all would be well with our trip. He was smaller than I'd imagined, his light frame revealed by his white T-shirt, but well-armed with the alertness of a predator holding the advantages of youth, intelligence and high metabolism on its side.

As I have said, your own life-force has been strong, not just from birth but I think from conception; and if you could have been beside me that day, you would have recognized a kindred spirit in Johnny, who was very close to your present age of 21. Perhaps you would have even been smitten by him, for he was good-looking and vibrant and friendly and confident, much as I reckon you are now at 21.

Removing his floppy olive green hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he revealed a short-cropped thatch of dark hair and a polite enthusiasm in meeting me. Thoroughly tanned by his days in these subtropic highlands and sporting a patchy week-old beard, he removed his dark Ray-Ban sunglasses and took in my uniform of worn blue jeans, khaki shirt and tourist's wide-brimmed hat. I felt my own questions mirrored in his brown eyes: how would I be in a firefight? Would I let him down in that moment of ultimate need?

His conclusion was not evident, but his energy demanded movement, so he led us around the heavily loaded Toyotas, showing us the carefully knotted ropes holding down the oversized loads which reared up over the battered cabs.

Inside the big canvas tent which housed the mission's field headquarters, he led me to a pile of faded olive-green tarps and then withdrew the weapons which had been procured for our trip: two new AK-47s, their mechanisms still greasy.

"Do they work?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't want to pull them out around here. Might make people nervous."

In the awkward silence—even though we hoped their visibility alone would be deterrent, here were two avowed Christians inspecting contraptions whose sole purpose was killing other people —he re-hid the rifles and asked me about his friend on the pilgrimage. The tent could not contain him for long, however, so we took a stroll through the roughshod outpost. Judging by his animated smiles and waves aimed at many of its inhabitants, he was already well-acquainted with both the lay of the land and the locals.

Swooping beneath a sagging blue fiberglass tarp, he took a plastic stool at a small noodle shop's sole table and motioned me to join him. Over a steaming bowl of noodles festooned with fish balls and watercress—the best in town, he assured me—he gave me a brief precis of his short adulthood; and what he did not describe in his outline, I could fill in from my own experience of other young men.

For I recognized in him the tumbling-cascade type of young man ill-suited to the orderly life of his elders: bored with school and consequently a poor student, he'd found distraction in the sort of aimless pranks which quickly earned the label of trouble. He was not a bad kid, far from it; a faithful attendee of church and youth activities, he simply had too much whirring energy within him to prosper in a society which did most of its work sitting down.

Rejected by the Army for lack of a high school diploma, he went to night classes and diligently earned an equivalent degree. Thus qualified, the recruiter was delighted to accept him into the U.S. Army, where he earned a position as machine gunner in an infantry unit assigned to the Desert War.

His discourse of combat experiences was generously peppered with a soldier's nomenclature—we lit the truck up like it was the 4th of July, I blasted the crap out of this building across from the mosque, and so on—and I recognized another archetype in him: the citizen-soldier whose religious faith ballasted him against the worst excesses of war.

By his account, the war was surreal, crazy and frightening beyond any hope of description to the folks back home—in other words, every soldier's story—but it also sounded like the most fun he'd ever had, too. This resulted not from a callous soul, but from his unwavering belief that all was in God's hands; taking a bullet in the desert was little different than being crushed by a big-rig back home on Route 23. Sometimes bad things happened that got you down, but then God put us here for a reason and we had to Charley Michael, continue mission.

The larger political forces at work held little interest to Johnny, for they seemed irrelevant. Fingering the heavy silver cross dangling from his neck, he ended his account with a simple statement: "Then God brought me here, so here I am."

A reciprocal telling of tales was expected, and I kept mine brief: married, one daughter, joined National Guard to do computer-type work, and then the rest: called up, wounded in the eye in a firefight, discharged, starting to get back into civilian life when a drunk driver kills my kid's friend while I'm driving; a strained pause to suggest my shattering, and then the pilgrimage.

At the end of my sketchy story, I realized he hadn't covered his own discharge. He seemed to sense the vacuum, for he acknowledged my story with a polite expression of sympathy and then added that some stupid stuff with his CO had ended his days in the Army, even though he'd been willing to re-enlist. If it wasn't a dishonorable discharge—and given his obvious good-heartedness, that was unlikely—I gathered the Army had passed on someone who might be more trouble than he was worth. As it seemed roughly parallel to my own experience with Catch-19—maybe he'd run into Catch-20, Loose Cannon and Unbent Spirits—I delicately left his vague explanation as the last word.

"A lot of people say this," he concluded, "but it's really true that God works in strange ways. Just look at us here."

His enthusiasm and Army experience raised my natural sympathies, as did his easy friendships with the noodle shop owner and numerous others who waved to him from their muddy motorbikes. If he was an Ugly American, he was a well-liked one.

We dawdled for what seemed too long a stretch of time for a person of his restless energy, and then the real reason for our visit to the makeshift bistro bent low to clear the tarp, balancing a bulging net of dried noodles on her head. It was a girl with long black hair, lithe and pretty beyond any expectation based on the border town's mean squalor. Johnny leapt up to help the young woman with her load, and fashioned an excuse to remain in her proximity for a few moments while she reported to her father. Dressed in khaki capris and a pink blouse, she looked much like the young women I'd seen winding their way through stalls of clothing and snacks in Bangkok.

Aware of his attention, she offered a flustered smile and motioned him back to the unsteady plastic chair. A moment later she brought us weak tea in battered, rounded tin cups embossed with pointillist swirls that looked to have been part of Ghengis Khan's original kit.

Bowing his head appreciatively in a modest mimicry of local custom, he turned to me and took out a small plastic bottle of pills. Handing me several, he said, "Anti-malarial meds. You gotta take them every day." I dutifully swallowed the pills with the aid of the lukewarm tea, and with a seriousness weightier than our brief acquaintance allowed he asked in a low tone, "Do you figure it's a sin to marry a Buddhist?"

His question initially struck me as naive for someone who had seen as much of the world as he already had, but then the outlines of its cleverness became visible. For my answer to this query would instantly reveal what kind of Christian I was—judgmental, lapsed or something in between—allowing him to calibrate his friendship to my limitations.

"Not at all," I replied. "If someone loves God, is humble and kind, would Jesus turn them away? No, he'd welcome them, even if they weren't Christian by name, because they had the heart of what he was all about."

He nodded thoughtfully and said, "I'm not too up on Scripture. Does the Bible say that?"

Surprising myself and him equally, I answered, "It's better to rely on what you know about Jesus that this quote or that quote. After all, at one point the most important Scripture was 'Thall shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Would Jesus have said that? I don't care what some preacher quotes, I know he wouldn't."

This personal exegesis seemed to impress him, and he said, "So you figure Jesus would say marrying her would be OK?"

"Absolutely," said. "You sure don't need the church's permission."

He considered this blasphemy carefully and didn't reply; fearing I'd spoiled our friendship over theological nonsense, I added, "The part of the Bible I can relate to right now is Jesus wandering around the wilderness for 40 days. If you don't know that story, then I guess I don't make any sense at all."

"Sure, I know it," he said, brightening. "You mean the pilgrimage, right?"

I nodded, and he seemed satisfied by the obvious devoutness of my pilgrimage. "I haven't met too many Christians like you," he said with a renewed ease. "You think things out for yourself. So what did you learn over there in France?"

"That I belong somewhere else," I shrugged.

"I guess this is God's plan for you right now," he said, and I answered with a thin smile. "That's the way I see it," I said.

You may be surprised to find me making Biblical references, but to my thinking—and I'd had precious little else to occupy my mind—what we call Destiny is, held beneath a different light, the same as God's Will; or tilted ever so slightly to an Augustinian angle, Fate; or tilted yet further, as Karma. Does such a thing exist, or is it a mere figment of hope? I was unable to answer that question for myself, never mind for anyone else, and so it was natural for me to refer to Jesus' temptations in the wilderness.

For this part of religious doctrine I understood: the temptations of a god-like status. I also understood His second temptation, that of testing God's Will, or Destiny, if you prefer that word; for in my own small way, I'd decided Destiny had awarded me a sort of invulnerability. It had not, and now I was trying to understand what was left to me, if anything; I was seeking an understanding of humility, not of ego but of spirit. For I'd succumbed to both temptations without fully realizing it, embracing my special position as Fate's survivor, and also testing God's Will with impunity. But I'd been wrong, and my inner world had collapsed.

Taking one long last look at the brown-skinned goddess behind the steaming noodle cauldrons, Johnny stood up, stooped beneath the sagging blue tarp and said, "Well, we got our work cut out for us. Bad guys hijacked the last two Toyotas heading for the Karen camps."

This piece of intelligence set me back, for I'd never heard such an explicit description of the threat.

Treading carefully between muddy tire ruts of reddish rainwater, we made our way back to the mission tent. "How many bad guys?" I asked.

Johnny shrugged. "Maybe a dozen, maybe less."

"Are they Burmese regulars, or militia, or what?"

"The Army's got patrols all along the border," he replied. "From what the missionaries tell me, they massacre any armed Karens they catch with supplies. But a lot of these guys are just teenagers who got shanghia'd into the Army."

I absorbed this, and he continued. "There's also the drug warlord militias. The best trained are the Wa, but they don't operate down here much, or so I'm told. They're in cahoots with the Burmese Army, paying them off with drug money to be left alone. Then there's a non-Christian group of Karens who've sold out to the Burmese government, which pays them to hunt down the Christian Karens."

"Nice bunch of folks," I commented, and he nodded. "It's one pack of wolves after the other."

"It'd be nice not to bump into unfriendlies," I said carefully, for my stomach had descended sharply into queasiness at the number of potential enemies and the tangled relations between them. Johnny waved a greeting to a glistening young man stripped to the waist, bending under the weight of two propane tanks, and then turned to me. "It's just been too easy. Everybody already knows we're here to guard the mission's supplies, and that should be enough right there."

I must have looked dubious, or scared, or both, because he continued in a reassuring voice. "The Karens will bribe the Thais to look the other way at this little crossing, and they'll steer us clear of the Burmese Army patrols. They want the supplies so bad, they're gonna do everything in their power to help us."

His confidence seemed plausible, for despite his friendliness, Johnny looked as dangerous as any man I'd ever seen; he'd lit up trucks like the 4th of July, blasted the crap out of buildings filled with fanatical enemies, and survived each encounter.

Sensing a natural segue, he said, "So tell me about this firefight."

I'd made up my mind to keep the particulars to myself, for it sounded too good to be true—a non-infantry unit, green as new buds on a peach tree, surprised by a superior force, and yet no Americans KIA.

But with nothing better to do, we squatted outside in the shade of the big olive-drab tent and I told him my story. An outline at first, and then more, and then all of it, a catharsis I hadn't experienced even with the Veterans Hospital's solicitous doctors. Here was someone who knew first-hand, who listened attentively, whose own descriptions rang true.

It was a good way to pass the time, to know each other through the Desert War before we spoke of hometowns and what our fathers did for a living, and what we liked to do for amusement. He liked diving, he said, loved it down there in the Gulf of Thailand; thought about getting his NARI certification and becoming a beach bum, teaching tourists how to dive.

The long conversation and my travels through various time zones left me tired, and I crept inside the stifling tent and pulled a mosquito net over me just as the sky clouded over and rain began to fall—a common dusk occurrence, according to Johnny. The blustery rain quickly cooled the fusty tent's interior and I fell asleep.

I awoke much later, having missed the dinner hour and indeed, the entire evening. The heat of the day was long gone and I was thoroughly chilled; it felt as cold as the high Sierra. Shifting in the light cot, I listened to the night sounds for some minutes. With the oily buzz of motorbikes finally silenced, an unfamiliar symphony of insects and disquieting rustlings filled the night air.

The various forests of the planet have their own nighttime orchestras and scents, and I'd once been frightened by soft footfalls outside our tent in the remote Sierra. (You were about five, sleeping soundly beside your Mom.) Lacking any weapon but a kitchen knife, I had no choice but to stick my head out the tent flap to see what stirred; with great relief the dim starlight revealed that the large animal lurking a few feet away was merely a deer and not a bear, cougar or even worse, a human predator. Pine and fir scented the night Sierra air, and I'd left the tent open to enjoy the Milky Way in all its horizon-to-horizon splendor.

Here, the sky was clouded and low, and i could not tell the size of the creatures stirring the leaves outside the tent. The jungle scent was as close as the cloud cover, peaty and fecund, and I suddenly wondered if the local's knowledge of our mission to guard the supplies would scare the brigands off, as Johnny expected, or cause them to consider a first strike to eliminate this hindrance to their thievery.

I glanced over in the dim light at Johnny; he lay peacefully under mosquito netting, huddled beneath blankets, his earphones still pumping digital tunes into his unconscious.

Envying the peace of youth, I silently uncovered the AK-47s, slid one out and checked the ammo clip; grabbing a spare blanket with my other hand, I slipped the thin sleeping mat from the cot to the dirt floor, the better to evade any pre-emptive gunfire aimed at us, and found the safety switch on the AK-47 by touch.

If happiness is a warm gun, then a cold one is solace, at least in such a lawless land, for I was afraid.

I wished I could talk with your Mom, or feel you nestle against me, but with a terrible bitterness I knew there would be nothing to say, and you were lost to me as long as I was lost to myself. And so I despaired of ever being whole again, or of ever returning home; and there is a misery to this I cannot easily describe.

I fell into an uneasy sleep and awoke to the sun brightening the canvas tent wall beside me. The AK-47 seemed an embarrassing paranoia, and I shuffled it back to its spot beneath the tarps. Johnny awaited me outside; he slouched easily in camouflage trousers, a faded red T-shirt, his dark shades and worn Red Sox cap. While I completed a cold toiletry of splashed water and toothbrush, he explained that he'd gathered some additional gear for us: cheap black nylon knapsacks for the extra ammo clips, some rope, tarps and insect repellent. He held his proudest scavenge out for my inspection: a battered satellite phone.

"Does it work?" I asked.

"Heck no," he guffawed. "But it'll baffle 'em with bullshit. They won't know if I'm calling in support or not, but they'll have to wonder."

I smiled at his far-fetched notion—the only gunships in the sector would be those the Burmese Army might call in against us—but did not speak of my fears, for there was no need to. I did not have the requisite training to truly be effective on this mission; I was just a grunt who'd survived a single firefight. There was no point in calling Johnny's attention to my inadequacies, for he needed confidence in me to go on himself. And so we focused our attention on communicating with the Karen drivers and trying to trace our proposed route across the Salween River on a topographical map.

I have neglected to describe the countryside, which in other circumstances I would call ruggedly beautiful. Rock spires rose from rough hillsides covered with vegetation and an irregular mix of tenacious trees. It was somewhat reminiscent of Hawaii, especially the higher, cooler forests; unlike Hawaii, where palms thrived in the lowlands, here they were scattered about despite the chill nights.

In my jittery anticipation, the mountainous terrain struck me as brooding rather than pretty. It recalled a conversation I'd overheard in the desert just before the war began. A grizzled old non-com was asked by a green lieutenant which environment he'd prefer: the desert or the jungle. The newly minted officer had reckoned that the desert would be better, because you could see your enemy. The old hand replied that he'd pick the jungle any day, because it offered plenty of cover. The words weighed on me, for we were entering a jungle that provided an abundance of cover for anyone with a mind to ambush us.

I would like to report that we broke the tension by clowning around, but we did not yet know each other well enough for that. Having taken the measure of my beaten spirit and twin jackals of paranoia and fear, Johnny kept our interactions to a cordial minimum.

We debated riding in the cabs with the drivers, or riding atop the overloaded Land Cruisers; the first left us vulnerable, in my view, while the considerably less comfortable ride on top offered the cover of the strapped-down boxes. I opted for riding atop the second vehicle while Johnny chose the cab of the lead Land Cruiser. Neither of us were willing to assert leadership over the other, for neither of us had led others in the Desert War. I was older, but he had more combat experience, and so it was a draw. It seemed like a reasonable configuration—Johnny visible from the front and me with a clear field of fire from the rear vehicle.

Once clear of the village, we jostled down the muddy road to a Thai Army outpost. There, the drivers offered up the cover story and bribes. Our weapons were not visible, but the Thai officer eyed us with a glare hovering between suspicion and malice. My paranoia jumped to a new level, for it seemed all too easy to pocket our bribe and then radio the Burmese Army to await our arrival.

The Karen drivers seemed unconcerned, and I reckoned they'd established some sort of uneasy cash-greased peace with the Thai troops. The portly missionary had told me that Burmese Army troops had recently crossed the border into Thailand to raid a Karen refugee camp, an incursion which did not endear them to the Thais. Furthermore, he said, the Thais and Burmese had fought for centuries; the Thais had yet to fully forgive the Burmese for leveling their magnificent capital of Ayuttaya in the late 1500s.

We passed one of the Karen refugee camps, a tight cluster of bamboo and thatch huts grouped around a well-swept dirt area shaded by three large canopied trees. It reminded me of images from the Vietnam War, of U.S. soldiers torching such huts after taking fire from a village. Glancing at the dense growth and the unbroken mountains stretching into a blue haze, I wondered how anyone, American or Burmese, could believe physical control of such a wilderness was possible.

We turned off the road roughly paralleling the border and edged between two banyan-like trees onto a track which seemed to be a wild boar path widened by occasional human use. We stopped for one of the drivers to relieve himself, and I was glad to stretch my cramped legs and numbed derriere.

I explained to Johnny that we should test our AK-47s, but my request drew horrified expressions from the drivers, who immediately ran through every possible gesture denoting "absolutely no." Their fear of giving away our position to any Burmese Army patrols lurking about was evident, and they made it clear via disgusted looks that I was either too reckless or too desirous of death to be a trustworthy companion.

Thus chastened, I climbed back onto the crowded roof of the Land Cruiser and embedded myself between the roped-down boxes.

Our small relief caravan inched forward in first gear, coming to a stop on several occasions to negotiate a small stream or rough clutter of boulders exposed by rain-swollen erosion of the reddish mud track. At one point it seemed impossible to thread our way through a rocky incline without tipping over, and I braced for what appeared to be an inevitable toppling. But after a sharp lurch the vehicle held its ground and then jounced from rock to rock, swaying like a rudderless ship.

We stopped once to check the load, and I was bolstered by Johnny's nonchalant manner. Gazing coolly through his Ray-Bans, shielded by his Red Sox baseball cap, AK-47 slung easily over his shoulder, he seemed entirely at ease. I felt humiliated by my own skittishness, and realized I was ill-suited for such tense work.

The drivers distributed a lunch of rice balls wrapped in banana leaf and a piece of dried broiled fish which we all devoured hungrily, and then set off down a descending slope which I reckoned would lead us to the Salween River.

My surmise was proven correct a short time later, and the broad greenish-tinted river greeted us through the jungle's oppressive glare. Wide banks of sand upstream suggested a river that flowed far more vigorously in the monsoon season; our drivers surveyed the gravel bed of the river and watched as a small group of brightly attired Karen women and children forded the river downstream. The water seemed to be no deeper than their knees, and our drivers headed slowly toward the same ford. Getting out to refresh ourselves in the cool flow of water, we watched the drivers grind across the fast-flowing river in low gear and then pause on the other side, awaiting us.

Just as I boarded the second Land Cruiser, a half-dozen armed men in tattered khaki shirts emerged from the line of trees and spoke roughly to the drivers. My heartbeat surged, for the conversation did not sound friendly, and my initial hope that these were Karen guerrillas melted in a tense fear. The men's appearance was ambiguous, their manner much less so; their shirts could have been uniforms of a poorly equipped Burmese Army detachment, or they could have signified a group of pro-junta militia in the service of a drug warlord. None of the alternatives seemed promising, and I wished I could confer with Johnny without shouting.

I reckoned it best to do nothing which might intensify the situation but be ready for any degradation, and so I propped the barrel of the AK-47 visibly skyward in a non-threatening pose and carefully clicked off the safety. The gun metal glistened with oil and my sweat, and I mentally mapped out what to do if the lithe sun-browned men raised their own AK-47s. I had a clear field of fire down on them, and the question was whether a spray of full automatic would last long enough to catch the entire semi-circle of sullen soldiers. They did not seem prepared for combat, and I'd decided to only return hostile fire; then one man edged away, widening their circle, and with shallow breath I reckoned that his move could be either retreat or a precursor to attack.

Switching my rifle from full auto to semi-automatic, I reckoned I'd start with the guys on Johnny's side of truck, which would give him a chance to roll out the side door and get some shots off at the remaining enemy. It would be a close thing, if it broke; any one of the glowering young men could riddle the cab of the lead vehicle with a quick burst, while the other four blasted the boxes around me, an event I would be unlikely to escape.

As the voice of our driver softened to soothingly conciliatory, the men's leader grew ever more agitated; clearly, our driver's offer or explanation was unacceptable. The driver fell silent and a standoff ensued, a situation I found more dangerous than any dialog. I was sweating profusely, and I wiped by forehead in slow motion so as not to jink the soldiers blocking our way.

At this tense juncture Johnny slowly opened the door of the Toyota and eased out, the bulky dead satellite phone in hand. He proceeded leisurely around the first Cruiser, checking the ropes holding down the boxes, all the while speaking in a conversational tone about our location in a military-speak jive.

The irregulars watched him balefully, but since he was unarmed they found little ground for protest. No telling what a farang might do, but without a gun he looked harmless. His chatter visibly unnerved them, however, just as their unknown tongue unnerved us, and a sharp panic that a misstep would get us killed swept through my anxiety. As he'd foreseen, the impossibility of calling in aid did not erase the unsettling reach of his apparent conversation; but what he hadn't foreseen was the possibility the irregulars would resolve that uncertainty by killing us.

Johnny paused his Potemkin conversation as if to hear a reply, and then continued on, this time addressing me. "So hey old buddy, you know what to do. Light up the leader and then move on down the line."

"Okay," I said, and my strained voice sounded alien to me. "Just don't get us killed."

"Roger that," he said brusquely. "That's what I'm working on."

The scowling leader seemed to sense his new role as first target, for he shifted uneasily and seemed to re-assess the risks of further engagement. Glancing from Johnny to me, his scowl deepened and I readied myself to swing the rifle down and pull the trigger. Waiting to return fire was no longer an option; it was strike first or not at all. A tense silence dragged on, and the futility of the situation filled whatever territory in my mind was not occupied by fear. We would be killed, along with some of them, for nothing but a load of cheap medicine and kids toys. The Karens wouldn't get the shipment, but it wouldn't matter; they would persevere or be eliminated, regardless of what happened on this sandy spit of gravel. You would never have a father again, and the stupidity of heedless risk fell hard around me.

In a tone which strived unsuccessfully for his previous hostility, their leader snapped out some brief demands. In what would have otherwise been a campy show of nonchalance, he pulled a cigaret from his chest pocket and lit it, awaiting our driver's acknowledgement of his superior position.

Another pause settled over the sun-beaten riverbank, and I prayed that this would not end in a burst of gunfire. I sensed it would not, but it was insane to be without an interpreter, to understand nothing of the threats and transactions on which our lives hung, to be so lightly armed in such a dogs-of-war place, and to have no sense of the shifting alliances and enmities of the various armed groups infesting the area. I wanted it to be over, and I was greatly relieved when the driver's door swung lazily open.

Our lead man got out and walked purposefully back to the second Land Cruiser. Unlatching the back gate, he removed several cardboard boxes and carried them over to the leader, who watched the reluctant delivery with a show of studied diffidence.

Satisfied, the man gave us a long look which said that we lived only by his good graces, and then he walked to the river to splash water on his face. As his men followed his lead, Johnny jumped onto the lead Land Cruiser and we set off at a pace that made it difficult to maintain my perch. Not that I complained; I was as relieved as the rest of our party to put some distance between the band of brigands and our vulnerable vehicles.

Johnny clung precariously to the boxes atop the lead Land Cruiser, and he smiled in grim acknowledgment of our escape. I felt chagrined by my mistrust of his actions; while the brigands might well have let us go after the bribe, they might just as well have demanded we abandon the trucks and walk back to Thailand.

How Johnny would have responded to that, I couldn't guess, but his coolness under threat suggested he'd either enjoyed the adrenaline spike of the confrontation or taken it in stride. With a renewed humility I realized he was cut out for this mission in a way that I was not; he was like a surfer who savored the rising swell behind him as a bracing challenge while I focused on the crushing power of the breaking wave and the jagged coral just beneath the foam-flecked surface.

Draining a bottle of water, I lurched violently with the increased pace and considered the high-canopied jungle we were passing through. There were precious few signs of human habitation other than discarded water bottles and other trash, and I wondered if the brigands we'd just left had any way to communicate our impending arrival to their brethren further up the trail.

A bone-wearying distance later our caravan came to a welcome halt in a clearing, and Johnny and I both climbed gratefully off the Toyotas. The late afternoon sun was sinking behind the surrounding hills, but the drivers did not seem to be decamping for the night. With their few words of English, they described the run-in at the river: the brigands were part of a drug lord's private army, one that that sought control of local Karen lands to increase his poppy production. The lead driver reckoned that the presence of two armed farangs had at least temporarily foiled their planned hijack of the supplies, but we were still at risk of discovery by the Burmese Army patrols which had been spotted in the area. We were waiting, it seemed, for a previously arranged rendezvous with Karen porters; our final destination, a small village, lay not far ahead, but it had been located by the Burmese and was therefore no longer safe.

Johnny accepted this intelligence stoically, his AK-47 slung loosely over his shoulder; deciding to swallow my pride, I apologized for doubting the value of his charade with the satellite phone.

He accepted this affably enough, and then added, "But you would've lit them up if they'd moved, right?"

Biting back an explanation—what was the point in noting that an armed standoff combined with our ignorance of language and locale hadn't favored a happy outcome—I nodded sourly, and then reverted to watching the narrow dirt track and treeline for any movement.

At dusk our pastime switched from watchful waiting to slapping the mosquitoes which suddenly swarmed around us in force, and as a result of this distraction the line of mute, drably dressed Karen women who emerged from the jungle seemed to appear as if by incantation. Most wore baggy pants and light-colored blouses, with zori rubber slippers for footwear; one with long hair braided into pigtails carried an infant in a sort of sling. The women eyed us with an inconspicuous curiosity; they'd probably seen farang missionaries and Colonel Sanders of the Rangers.

After a brief sharing of intelligence, the drivers began unpacking the second Land Rover's interior compartment, and we pitched in to help. The women fashioned slings of fabric and rope to secure the boxes to their backs, and each was loaded until she staggered under the weight.

The head driver opened a final box and withdrew a red plastic toy which he slipped into the infant's sling. Distributing rice balls, fish and a bottle of water to each porter, he bowed his head and offered a prayer. Thus blessed, the women retraced their route back into the forest and were beyond our sight in a few minutes.

There is such a distillation of human nature in this scene, and I hope you will gain some understanding of this snapshot from my long description: Johnny's vibrant readiness in the face of mortal danger and my own dry-mouthed fear; the hopelessness of the Karens' plight offset by the humble prayer to a Higher Power; the women, so far from daytime television's sappy obsessions with romance, carrying an infant who sprang from what was probably a short and practical courtship in a group continually on the run; and two farangs, hybrids of generosity and danger, ignorant of their hosts' language, topography and politics, far from the protection of their own tribe's power, guarding a pinprick of aid—with terrible violence if necessary—in a hopeless cause.

The still air cooled quickly after sunset, insects raised their calls and the scent of warm decay fell with the temperature. The drivers engaged in a brief, quiet debate; reaching agreement, the head driver turned to us and explained that the supplies were too valuable to leave in the vulnerable village, so we would camp in the clearing for the night and await porters from other more remote villages.

With an obvious eye on security, the Karen drivers pulled the Land Cruisers off the rutted narrow track onto one side of the clearing, which I reckoned had once been cultivated by slash-and-burn techniques for some crop. The situation was far from ideal, though, for our encampment was vulnerable to fire from the treeline across the clearing and from the roadway. I could see no more advantageous arrangement, however, and I approached Johnny with a question about siting our own picket. Glancing around the clearing in the last dim light of day, he suggested positioning ourselves inside the treeline just ahead of the Land Cruisers, where we had both cover and a satisfactory field of fire across the clearing and the mouth of the rough road.

After a supper of more rice balls and dried fish, the drivers made a small campfire to heat water for tea. Staying well back from the fire's flickering light, I watched a quarter moon rise above a hazy cloud cover and tried not to think about the possibility that the brigands had followed us on foot. With a straight march from the river they could reach us by midnight, I reckoned, and the thought gave me pause. Retrieving the heavy black backpack of spare ammo clips from the truck, I slung it over my shoulder and looked around for a comfortable place to take up watch beyond the flickering circle of light.

Again as if by magic another train of female porters appeared and gathered by the fire. Several children were among their group. and they edged toward the warmth of the fire as the night chill took hold. I hadn't seen the porters, for they'd emerged from the other side of the crude road. Pointing this out to Johnny, I suggested we each take a position on either end of our little caravan to avoid blind spots.

My caution seemed to strike him as extreme, but he dutifully walked around the makeshift camp and then recommended that we stay close to the vehicles; we agreed that whomever was on duty should shift positions to ensure coverage of all avenues of approach.

It was an awkward arrangement: two soldiers, neither holding the reins of command, the younger one more experienced than the older man but reluctant to impose his will.

The tea was brewed and distributed in round handleless tin cups similar the ones the beautiful young noodle shop girl had served us; out of respect we waited until everyone was served before sipping the lukewarm liquid; as the night grew colder, even this small circle of warmth held great appeal. Despite the rigors of the day, I did not yet feel sleepy, and so we took up position outside the fireside ring as the Karen women and the two drivers gathered around for a Bible reading. It was odd, not being able to understand the passages the head driver was reading, but recognizing that it was one known to the ladies. After the reading, they all bowed their heads in prayer, which we joined in respectful solidarity.

The head driver then motioned for us to join the circle, and pointed to the Bible. motioning us to conduct our own reading. Johnny glanced at me, and I nodded in assent; he then retrieved his black backpack and withdrew a softbound Bible marked with a smattering of tattered yellow Post-Its. Out of respect for an elder, or perhaps because he felt uncomfortable reading in front of a group, he handed me the Bible and sat just outside the circle, his back to the jungle behind our camp.

Opening the leather cover, I found an inscription in a flowing hand: "To John, in recognition of his faithfulness, by the Silverlake Church." I have always been drawn to Matthew, and in acknowledgement of my reference to Jesus' forty days in the wilderness, I read Matthew 4 and 5, halting despite myself on these lines:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

"Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God."

"Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." At the end of the section, I dwelt as well on these lines: "For he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust."

Turning to one of Johnny's own yellow bookmarks, John 10:10; noting this as his namesake chapter, I found this passage poignant beyond easy expression: "I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep." For we were few, deep in a vast jungle infected with violent Evils, with only our voices and our own willingness to commit violence for protection.

To complete the reading, I bowed my head and made a poor prayer, asking for our safe passage and the deliverance of the supplies to those in need; the group bowed their heads and murmured their amens, and then I stood up to return the Bible to Johnny. Stowing it in his kit, he yawned mightily, and I suddenly saw his extreme youth, and how his smooth-faced vigor had been sapped by the excitement.

Offering to take the first shift, I crept cautiously into the jungle beyond the fire and let my eyes adjust to the blackness. Despite the apparent impenetrability of the jungle, the growth beneath the canopy allowed for careful passage. The partial moon cast a glow too dim for surveillance, and so I settled on listening to the sounds of the jungle: the loud rasping of what sounded like palm tree fronds, the chirp of insects, and the gentle rustling of the higher canopy.

Our porters sat quietly around the embers of the fire, and the children bunked down on blankets between them; all seemed peaceful enough. Some time later—my mind was wandering aimlessly over the day, trying unsuccessfully to avoid painful thoughts of you, your Mom, and Shelley—when the insects stopped their chirping. I tensed, for what would cause insects to fall still except predators, perhaps even the worst of the lot, the ones who walked upright?

Reaching out with my ears, I thought I detected a metallic click and the faint murmuring of human voices. But perhaps my mind was playing tricks, as it was wont to do when balanced so precariously, and that soft murmur was merely pliable leaf on leaf. But I could not erase the sense that someone was in the treeline, and I scuttled noiselessly back to where Johnny lay. He was within the clearing, not far enough from the fire to be cloaked by the darkness, I noticed with annoyance, and I shook his shoulder.

He jerked awake and looked up at me with eyes which shone with alarm in the dim moonlight. "What's up?"

"Somebody's out there," I whispered.

He tossed aside his Army surplus blanket and pulled himself to his knees. "Where?"

"I can't see them," I said with a quiet urgency. "But I can hear them."

"Are you sure?" he asked skeptically, and I answered, "I heard metal on metal." Reaching down for his weapon, he rose to a half-crouch and I pulled him down with a sharp tug. As he turned to complain, the air was ripped by bursts of automatic gunfire, and sheets of bullets swept over our encampment. The tree behind where he'd half-stood was torn by bullets, and he issued a heartfelt oath, for it had been a close thing; if I hadn't restrained him, he would already be dead.

I glanced back at the embering fire; it was abandoned except for a splayed bundle of a dead human being, for it did not move.

We slithered over to the cover provided by a fallen tree and Johnny raised his AK-47, raking the dark treeline with a clip on full automatic. His blast loosed a burst of return gunfire, and bullets left their peculiar whizzing sound just above our heads.

With the sharp fierceness peculiar to great fear, I snapped, "Single shot fire. We may be out here all night." We had enough ammo for an extended night engagement, but not if we burned full 30-round clips on full automatic.

I heard him thumb the switch on his rifle and I did the same. I reached over and put a restraining hand on his shoulder, instructing in a low voice hot with adrenaline. "Let them think they got us or we ran off."

In the patchy light cast by the quarter moon I saw him nod in understanding; if they showed themselves, we could be rid of the lot of them.

Perhaps because I'd anticipated action, my mind seemed crystal-clear. I hadn't heard the sharp metallic ping of bullets hitting the vehicles; a few AK-47 rounds through the half-empty gas tanks would probably ignite the Land Cruisers into worthless charred wrecks, and so they were forced to divert their fire lest they damage the objects of their desire.

"They're not hitting the trucks," I said hoarsely. Johnny nodded slightly and then we both crab-crawled toward the protection of the loaded Land Cruisers. For not only might their gunfire destroy the valuable medicines; if the trucks were rendered inoperable, the brigands would have no way to carry off their treasure.

Suddenly worried that they would send someone through the jungle behind the fire ring and shoot us from behind, I explained to Johnny that I would cover our flanks and rear. He nodded and I patted his shoulder before scurrying back to the cover of a thick tree stump.

I felt then that we would be OK; for he was responding with all the coolness and grace under fire one could hope for, and strangely, even perversely, I felt relieved the battle was on. Their objective was known, and we had the enormous advantage of defense. They had superior numbers and perhaps a rough knowledge of the terrain, but they could not know if we were still alive and willing to defend the Toyotas unless they advanced. And we had the incalculable immunity offered by the supplies themselves

A dead silence fell over the clearing, for even the insects thought the better of revealing their locations in the dim moonlight.

Some dark movement of shadows on our left flank attracted my attention, and I strained to detect its source. A tell-tale rustling of branches seemed close, perhaps just inside the jungle behind the lifeless body of the Karen female porter sprawled by the glowering embers of the fire, and almost simultaneously Johnny and I both pumped a flurry of single shots into the shadows. The recoil of the AK-47 was a relief, for until that moment I couldn't be sure the rifle actually worked. A pained cry went up, perhaps from someone just wounded, and some sporadic covering fire splattered rounds ineffectually around the camp.

I was beginning to hope that the brigands—for that is who I reckoned we faced—might decide retreat was the better part of valor, for it was now clear that killing us would cost them additional casualties. After another tense period of silence, a veritable Hell of small arms fire burst out of the nearby treeline, sweeping the camp behind the vehicles. I feared for Johnny, but he was apparently unhit, for he gamely returned fire yet again from his prone position just behind the first Land Cruiser.

Our enemies—more numerous than I'd hoped—were clearly trying to outflank us, drawing round the clearing to open an enfilade of fire that would sweep our position without hitting the vehicles. Cursing my inattention, I waited for the next muzzle flashes and then spotted my rounds in a pattern over the flashes, aiming low enough to hit anyone hugging the ground. Johnny and I both laid down a steady answering fire, peppering the muzzle flashes with 30 rounds, slamming in another clip and repeating the operation.

Although neither of us were hardened veterans of jungle warfare, we both had fired our weapons in extreme circumstances, and I reckoned that our aim and rate of fire—perhaps half the maximum rate of fire for an AK-47 on semi-automatic, which is 100 rounds a minute—were both having an effect on our attackers, for the rate of muzzle flashes rapidly diminished.

A harassing sputter of shots plinked the tree limbs and dirt around our camp, and it seemed the battle had reached a sort of stalemate; unless they had mortars or grenades to root us out, any advance would draw a withering response. And if the enemy were experienced at all—and perhaps they were not—they would have noted that we were conserving ammo, saving enough to give them full-automatic if they rushed us.

They could sacrifice the Toyotas, of course, but then what would be the point of destroying the battle's sole goal? The notion that they would withdraw no longer seemed improbable, and my hope returned with the moonlit silence.

At that moment the treeline across the clearing burst in a blaze of gunfire, and the windows of the Land Cruisers shattered. A scream went up from the left flank, and a deafening chaos of indiscriminate firing enveloped the entire clearing. A new force was suddenly making itself known, and they were hitting everything, including the Land Cruisers.

I had no idea what was unfolding, and a panicky alarm rose in proportion to my confusion. Had another group arrived to challenge the brigands for the supplies? But then why were hitting the Land Cruisers? Bullets were whirring angrily everywhere, slamming into trees around me; fearful that this new force would rush us from the right, I slithered over to a stump and sent a steady pattern of well-aimed shots into the treeline glittering with automatic firing.

The Land Cruisers shuddered with loud metallic pops as stray bullets struck their sheet metal sides, and with a new dread I wondered how large this new opponent might be: Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? They were either undisciplined or green, wildly targeting the object of their attack; or more ominously, perhaps they were more interested in killing us than in capturing the supplies.

Though the small arms fire seemed to diminish—how could our hundreds of steadily aimed rounds not hit something behind those flickering muzzle flashes?—so did our odds of survival against such overwhelming odds; dashing from the stump to the rear Land Cruiser, I shouted to Johnny, "Move! They're hitting everything!"

As I finished squeezing off another clip and fumbled for another from my shoulder bag, I heard the steady flat bang bang bang of Johnny's rifle, and I wished we had nightscopes and better flash suppressors; if only we'd anticipated a night battle. But we hadn't, and I decided a hasty retreat was better then dying here. The supplies were lost in any event, and so our lives would be forfeited for nothing.

Crawling on my belly over toward Johnny, I shouted, "There's too many of them. Let's get the hell out of here."

Before he could answer, a withering hail of bullets struck the tires of the Toyotas and Johnny said, "I'm hit" in that peculiar mix of fear, pain and surprise I knew so well from my own wounds. Lunging forward, I found his ankles and dragged him back to the stump.

Propping him up on the backside of the wide stump, I asked him, "Where?"

"Leg," he moaned, and in the darkness I reached down and felt the wet pulse of gushing blood. A bullet appeared to have entered his thigh as he was laying flat on the ground, and I couldn't tell where it had exited or if it had hit bone.

Pulling out my knife, I made a quick but poor job of cutting off his trouser-leg. He groaned in what could only be great pain and I feared the worst—either the bullet had shattered a large bone or severed a major artery. I knew that high-velocity bullets, especially if they tumbled upon entering flesh, did terrible things to the human body, and the hollow realization that Johnny might die opened up inside me. With a bitterness which would only grow with time, I wondered, Why the hell hadn't I thought to bring some QuikClot or HemCon? Why hadn't I thought that one of us might need combat dressings?

Twisting the blood-soaked material—in the dim light, the blood wasn't visible, but I could feel its sickening sticky warmth—I fashioned a rough tourniquet with a stick and tightened it on his upper thigh. Taking his hand, I squeezed it hard in comradeship and guided it to the tourniquet, indicating that he should hold it tight.

The gunfire slackened, and in those brief moments I slithered forward and retrieved Johnny's rifle and bag of ammo clips. Scrambling back to the cover of the stump, I checked the clip in his AK—empty—shoved in a new clip, and then propped the rifle in his free arm.

"You're gonna be OK," I said in a urgent voice which I hoped didn't betray my own fear. "When you feel your leg go numb, release the pressure for a bit."

Feeling for the wound, I felt his life pumping out with every heartbeat. Pulling open my knife again, I cut the leg off my own trousers and hastily tied it over the pulsing wetness on his thigh. It wasn't tight enough, and as the firing suddenly surged again, I slid the tourniquet down over the wound and turned the stick as tight as I dared. Tying the stick down with the second pantsleg bandage, I looked into Johnny's shadowed grimace of agony and repeated, "You're gonna be alright. We just have to get to the village."

He nodded grimly, and I positioned the rifle so he could aim it in the general direction of anyone creeping up on us from the rear. There was no need to talk; we both knew our situation was desperate. With a flash of self-hatred, I knew my failure to think of packing a couple bags of QuikClot might cost Johnny his life.

Reckoning that the best way to cover our retreat—necessarily a very slow one given that I would have to half-carry Johnny—would be to show that we were still a dangerous position to approach, I braced myself, prayed that the wild profusion of slugs piercing the air would somehow miss me and then darted out to the front wheel of the lead Land Cruiser, spare ammo in hand. The engine and wheel assembly would protect me from frontal fire, I hoped, and I prayed no one on the flanks spotted me.

Clicking the lever to automatic, I sprayed the shrubbery on the near left flank, suppressing any brigands who might be stealing up through the undergrowth. Slamming in a new clip, I turned, and hugging the flattened wheel of the Toyota, sidled down to the rear vehicle. Taking up position by the rear wheel, I repeated my methodical spray of the treeline across the clearing and then pulled back, awaiting answering fire.

Figuring I'd done all I could from the vehicles, I crouched down and squirmed back to the stump. Johnny was holding the tourniquet tightly over the wound, and I found some hope in his stable condition. The gunfire had become sporadic, and I suspected the larger units had been broken up by the return fire into individuals who were likely separated and confused. It certainly seemed probable that many in the opposing treelines had been killed or wounded in the initial frenzy of AK-47s on full automatic, and the commanders might well have lost control of their troops.

Hunching over, I ran over to a large tree behind the embers of the fire and strained to make out any movement where I'd last seen the brigands. I saw no muzzle flashes in the treelines, though single shots continued to rang out. Reloading my rifle—having plenty of ammo wouldn't do us any good if we were overrun—I pumped a series of shots into the brigands' last known position and then swung round to pepper the treeline across the clearing.

A terrifying spray of bullets clipped leaves and thudded into branches around me, and I pulled back around the tree, hoping no one was near enough to spot me. None of the firefight made sense; if the supplies were the object, why weren't they advancing on us? Instead of being the goal, we seemed to be a sideshow. Or was the new force's first goal to eliminate the brigands, and then move on us? I could not tell; but given the battle's confusion, I thought it best to keep up a suppressing fire until we could slip down the crude road toward the village.

Dropping to the damp earth, I slithered back to Johnny and looked at his drawn face. Even in the faint light filtering through the canopy I could see his wooziness as the blood leaking from his fragile shell drained consciousness from him.

"Are you OK?" I asked stupidly, and he nodded slightly. More to engage him than report anything of value, I said in a low voice, "I'm laying down suppressing fire so we can sneak out the rear toward the road. Do you think you can move?"

"Dunno," he said through gritted teeth. "It hurts pretty bad."

Slinging both hot rifles and the ammo bags over my shoulder, I instructed, "Put your arm over my shoulder." He did so, and I was grateful he was lighter and smaller than me. If we weren't being shot at, we might be able to reach the village before he lost a critical amount of blood.

Gripping him tightly, I said, "We're going to make it, good buddy." I knew he could hear the desperation in my voice, but I hoped he might believe me despite my own fear. I knew what it was like to wounded, and to hope that your mates would do their duty; and I was going to do my duty to save him. Again, the stupidity—or was it hubris?—which had led me to overlook such as basic as QuikClot haunted me. One bag of the stuff poured into his wound would keep him from bleeding to death; without that or a HemCon bandage, it was a race against time.

A rustling surprised me and I turned toward the roadway. A young Burmese soldier stood there, his rifle aimed directly at us. In a flash of panic I wondered if I could swing my rifle up to shoot him before he pulled the trigger, but it was obvious I could not. He looked about sixteen or seventeen, his eyes wide with the same surprise I felt in seeing him. Despite the dim light which barely illuminated the darkness, I saw his eyes fall on Johnny's bandaged leg and my pose of aid. I braced myself for the bullets which would end my life, and prayed to God to take care of Waiahn and you after I was gone.

The young Burmese soldier's gaze met mine and he seemed to hesitate. I dared not even raise my hands in surrender, for any movement might spook him into pulling the trigger.

I could not read his expression in the dimness; but his surprise suggested he hadn't expected to find two wounded farangs; and in finding us, he wasn't sure what to do. It was simpler do do nothing and leave us to the next man. Or maybe he couldn't bring himself to shoot two wounded men limping from the battlefield. In any event, he swung his rifle away and disappeared into the shadows.

We were already overrun, I realized, and the only chance for survival lay in slipping deeper into the jungle. Although the odds were still very much against us—the next young soldier who happened upon us might pull the trigger without a second's hesitation—I suddenly knew I would live, and a spiritual relief filled me; for I also knew that being spared was not luck, but a grant to do so some good.

Newly hopeful I could get Johnny to the village, I edged toward the road, listening intently through the sporadic shots for any approaching soldiers. The battle remained chaotic and nonsensical; I could detect no lines forming or positions occupied, only flurries of gunfire interrupted by pockets of silence.

Dragging him through the underbrush as he tried to support himself on his uninjured leg was sloppy, loud and slow, and despite my epiphany I expected a burst of gunfire to cut us down any moment. Breathing heavily from the burden, I set him down behind a banyan-like tree and then whispered that I would reconnoiter the muddy road. It would be impossible to drag him through the jungle all the way to the village; we would have to use the narrow track.

I slithered lizard-like through wet undergrowth to the rutted ribbon of mud and immediately froze; a group of armed men, brigands, Karens or Burmese Army I could not tell, were crouching beneath the shadowed jungle on the rough roadway's edge. Guessing wrong about their identity would be fatal, and in such a melee the first instinct of anyone would be shoot first lest hesitation be your own death.

Creeping quietly back to Johnny, I explained in a hoarse whisper that the road was covered; we would have to wait it out. I felt the tightened bandage on his leg but couldn't tell if it was containing his lifeblood or not. He didn't acknowledge my report, and when he did speak it sounded so loud that I feared we would be discovered.

He spoke with effort, and I will not repeat what he said. He feared he might not survive the night, and knew he was losing consciousness due to blood loss. What he said, and what he moaned and what he prayed will always remain between us, two soldiers of Christian fortune, and his Lord. I do not think you could possibly understand, and so there is no purpose in repeating his words.

Fighting my own draining hopes, I insisted we'd make it to the village. He closed his eyes and I was overwhelmed with the grief of futility and a powerlessness beyond understanding. Choking back my emotions, I held his hand and whispered that we were going to make it, that I just needed to clear the roadway.

Edging back to the narrow slash in the jungle, I couldn't see the group of soldiers any longer, but feared that they'd simply melted into the treeline to cover the road. With a rising despair—for I needed to get better medical care soon—I ran back to Johnny, set the safety on my rifle and then slung him over my shoulders.

Trying to move forward as soundlessly as I could manage, I tripped over roots and eventually dragged him to a tree near the road before pausing to catch my labored breath. Did I dare chance the open track? Did I have a choice? The gunfire around the clearing has ceased, and the crazed idea of returning to the Land Cruisers and trying to drive Johnny to the village occurred to me. On the barest reflection it seemed like suicide; if anyone was left in the clearing, their first action on hearing the engine start would be to riddle the vehicle with bullets.

Could I find someone to whom I could surrender who wouldn't execute us on the spot? After hearing of the brutality of the Burmese Army, that seemed like a poor chance as well. Knowing I couldn't wait all night, a quiet desperation took me and I knew I would have to hope the road was clear. Dashing across the narrow track, expecting shots to ring out, I stumbled over a deep rut and then fell heavily to the musty dampness of the jungle floor.

My heart was beating loudly in my throat, and I tried to listen for any evidence that soldiers lurked nearby. A weird, late-night silence draped the jungle, and after a time I heard the first tentative insect risk a chirp. The chirp was answered, and soon the cold night air—for I'd re-discovered how cold it was, laying motionless on the damp ground—sounded much as it had before the firefight had erupted.

Just as I was about to edge forward, snapping twigs alerted me to the presence of humans. Murmurs drifted from across the road and I hoped it might be Karens, coming to investigate the firefight. But it was armed men, three or four, I couldn't be certain in the deep-black shadows. My breath stopped, for just as I feared they might spot Johnny, the group paused, seemingly intent on just the spot where I'd left him propped against a tree.

It was a vain hope, that they might help him, or at least carry him out onto the road. But I saw instead the flash of a large knifeblade being unsheathed, and in an unthinking reaction I swung my rifle up, toggled the safety off and shot the men hovering over Johnny with a long semi-automatic burst. The clip emptied and the rifle stopped firing, and I awaited movement or answering fire.

The flat shots reverberated in the quiet night air, and my heart pounded anew. Had they killed Johnny in those few seconds, or had I inadvertently shot him? I'd aimed high, but who could tell what had been hit in the darkness?

How many more were there nearby? How many more would gather round this sudden burst of gunfire? I edged back into the shadows to reload. Knowing it could be my last moment on Earth, I prayed for forgiveness for all my stupidities, and for not taking better care of Johnny and my family; and for the waste of my life in such a useless battle.

But contrary to my expectations, nothing happened; the insects began their calls again, clouds scudded over the crescent moon and I lay there in near-absolute darkness, bracing for a dash back to Johnny.

If anyone was waiting for me to emerge, their patience was near infinite, and I lunged forward across the rutted track and threw myself down behind the cover of a wall of plants. I paused for a reaction, but there was none; it seemed the jungle which had teemed with armed men a few hours ago had been abandoned. Edging forward, I saw the barest outline of bodies crumpled; pulling one off, I found Johnny as I'd left him, slumped forward.

As I feared, he was gone from this world; not from a new knife wound or my shots, as near as I could tell, but from the gunshot wound in his thigh. A small snapping sound by the road jerked me alert, and I withdrew into the jungle. The moon had set and it was too dark to see much of anything; I reckoned the blackness was a form of protection for all who remained in the forest.

The first dim light of dawn lightened the openings in the canopy, and despite my desire to stay alert I must have fallen into an exhausted slumber, for I awoke, shivering with cold, to low voices. Pulling myself up, I crept through morning's first light to a group of brightly dressed Karen conferring near Johnny's body. There were two women in blue parkas and a man who I recognized as our second driver.

Readying myself, I shouted "Hello," waited a moment to avoid any panicky gunfire the call might spark, and then stood warily up to approach the group.

Three bodies lay around the forlorn figure of Johnny, slumped in lifelessness. The Karens' faces registered shock at either my appearance or my survival, I could not tell which, and the driver looked at me and then at Johnny with curious eyes.

He spoke rapidly in Karen to me, as if his limited English could not convey his thoughts fast enough, and his expression communicated respect: here lay a warrior who'd managed to strike down three attackers even when wounded.

It was best to leave it at that, I reckoned, even if I'd been able to tell our story, which I could not. I did not know who had attacked us, or if the entire battle had been a colossal misunderstanding.

It made no sense, this sprawling firefight, for the prize—the medical supplies—remained untouched. I did not understand the conflict's alliances or causes; I only knew it was all a waste, and that Johnny, smaller now in death, was gone.

The driver shifted the bodies of the men I had shot, and I recognized the brigands' surly leader. The misfortune of the other two young men was also Johnny's, a death as futile and needless as the battle itself. I did not feel remorse for the leader—he should not have pulled a knife on Johnny—but the other two will bother me to the end of my time on Earth.

Slinging the rifles over my shoulder, I bent down and picked Johnny up. Swaying heavily beneath his weight, I pushed through the undergrowth to the narrow road, and then trudged the few steps to the clearing. It had seemed like hundreds of yards in the chaotic dark, but it was only a few footsteps in the light, and I realized with a heaviness beyond description I could not have carried Johnny to the village even if the road had been clear. Despite my numbness, touching his cold flesh laid me bare, and I could not repress the emotions which overcame me.

I would have traded an entire Empire to bring Johnny back to life; but such a tradeoff does not exist.

I mourned Johnny with a grief I hadn't felt even for Shelley, and a hard lump formed in my throat. For I wanted to go back to when Johnny was alive, and tell him to go home, or at least stay in the border village and frequent the noodle shop, and smile at the pretty girl there. Then, when there would be no firefight, he could come here, escort the supplies to the village, and go home.

But now I could not tell him any of those things, and it lay on me to bring Johnny home, just as I would have wanted him to bring me home.

But my grief was tempered with the awareness that Johnny could not be someone who happily reported to the safety of an office everyday at nine. I wish he hadn't chosen the Rangers, or that moment, to serve; I wish he'd chosen to go diving that week instead. But he did not; I had done my best to save him, and failed. And now I would have to bring him home to a shattered family.

It was a bleak scene that greeted us in the clearing; Karen men, bundled in a variety of castoff coats against the morning chill, were dragging bodies across the clearing, laying them into a haphazard row by the road. The Land Cruisers were thoroughly shot up, and it seemed a small miracle they hadn't exploded. The Karen women were unpacking the vehicles, setting the boxes into orderly stacks, much like the dead lined up beside the narrow road.

The driver climbed into the lead Toyota and turned the ignition. Amazingly, the engine came immediately to life, but just as quickly faltered and died. Maybe a bullet had sliced the fuel line; in any event, all future attempts to revive it failed. Moving to the second Land Cruiser, the driver elicited only a loud clicking of the starter motor. Disgusted by the loss of the vehicles, he turned his hand to carrying bodies to the roadway.

I did not count the dead because I did not want to count; but in my mind's eye there were dozens laid in a line like bundled cordwood; an unknown number of dead probably still lay in the underbrush. Some were dressed in uniforms I assumed were Burmese Army, but they have been the uniforms of a drug lord's private militia. Others were clothed in the ragtag wear of itinerant soldiers of fortune, young men desperate for adventure or for money, ill-trained and ill-prepared for the battle which had swept the clearing the previous night. There were probably more laying somewhere in pain nearby, wounded by the high-velocity bullets which had shredded the forest in every direction.

It was a scene of supreme stupidity, of needless waste, of terrible weaponry unleashed for no reason other than miscalculation; and I knew the scene was repeated daily somewhere in our world.

The Burmese Army would be on the move, the driver said, so we needed to hurry. Two stretchers were brought up; the female porter who was killed in the battle's first fusillade was carefully lifted onto the first, and we placed Johnny on the second, covering his face; and as we set off for the village, the supplies he had safeguarded with his life followed him.

The village was in the turmoil of displacement, for the firefight had cost both the Burmese and the drug lords men and face, and it was presumed each would be swarming out for blood. For it seemed both the Burmese Army and the private militia had ambushed what they'd taken for a thin detachment of Karens; in their confusion they'd fired on each other with increasing desperation. It was one thing to swoop in with gunships and shoot down unarmed civilians, but a night battle was a rougher beast, vicious, chaotic and not at all lopsided except in favor of death.

The stories were no doubt moving far in advance of the supplies themselves: two Free Burma Rangers defended the convoy, one dead, a hundred Burmese and drug lord troops dead on the field of battle, supplies intact, a stunning victory for the Karens. The irony was not lost on me, but it was a bitter irony nonetheless.

Survival was the only victory, and the massacre of those allied against the Karen largely at their own hands was a humiliating defeat; if not for one unlucky bullet—if only it had flown two inches to one side—then Johnny too might have lived to tell the tale of a terrifying night firefight.

But he did not, and I feared that the newly dead would be abandoned in the mad rush to disband the village. As the day's warmth rose, I knew I could not get Johnny back to Chiang Mai; dead flesh could not last long days on rough trails. Even if had been able to get him there, Thailand was a largely Buddhist culture in which the dead were cremated, and facilities for embalming were perhaps unknown. I resolved to give him a Karen funeral, and transport his ashes to his family; the only other alternative was an anonymous burial in a shallow jungle grave.

Once in the village, I located the head driver and tried to ask about Johnny. The much-harried man sought to re-assure me, and he directed me to the family overseeing the transport of the dead Karen porter. It was awkward in the extreme, approaching the grieving family as they shrouded the body of the young woman; setting down Johnny's litter nearby, I stood hesitantly until they'd finished the task, and then tried to help them pack their meager collection of aluminum pots and other possessions. They declined as graciously as could be expected, and I stood by, helpless in so many ways.

As I sat there, a dazed spectator to children excitedly chasing down the hamlet's squawking chickens, it dawned on me that I should secure Johnny's belongings. Retrieving the heavy silver cross from around his neck, I placed it with his Bible in the daypack, and a bitter lostness crushed me.

The villagers set off up a trail into the green-banked hills, and I grew increasingly nervous that Johnny and I would be forgotten in the press of other priorities; and so I was greatly surprised when an honor guard of sorts—two young Karen men—appeared and lifted Johnny's litter, refusing my help. Feeling much relieved that we would accompany the village on its move, I attempted without success to carry some of the supplies. Many of the boxes were heavy with tightly packed medicines, while others were light with children's bright plastic toys and second-hand clothing; but the Karen female porters refused me even a light load. Several boxes were marked as donations from churches in Denmark and the United States, and a wave of mixed emotion both lifted and oppressed me, for Johnny had seen the supplies delivered after all.

In another bitter irony, I wondered if the supplies contained emergency dressings; but the donations didn't seem to include any; how many Danish or American congregations even knew of QuikClot, and who in the Karens would have known to ask?

And so I joined the single file line of porters winding their way through the jungle on a muddy boar's trail, carrying the AK-47s and ammo bags on my shoulder; it was a heavy enough load, but somehow too martial and proud in such company. I would have preferred to transport a box of toys, or one end of Johnny's litter; but the dignity of my position as a Free Burma Ranger precluded those duties. If we were ambushed, there was little I could do except join the list of casualties; but my armed presence may have lent some thin security to the villagers, and so I carried the rifles, accepting their presence and hating their cost.

My concern that Johnny might be shunted aside turned out to be unwarranted; for rather than abandon him, the Karens treated his body with a reverence most difficult in our trying circumstances. Even my fears of a hasty unmarked burial appeared to be misplaced, for my anxious questions to the head driver drew only gestures of reassurance. As the chill of dusk set in on the exhausted line of porters, we suddenly entered a rough village of a few thatched huts occupying the center of a recently cleared patch of uneven rust-colored earth.

Tired beyond words, I slumped down and watched the proceedings with the dull eye of a numbed observer. Food was rapidly prepared—noodles, dried fish and some vegetables that looked like bok choy—and distributed on platters of banana leaves; tea in the ubiquitous battered tin cups was served by young girls. The boys were set to work gathering dead branches, and two orderly piles of wood grew side by side within the center of the clearing. Bonfires did not seem wise in a village hoping to escape detection by the Burmese Army, but I was too tired and ill-equipped in language to inquire. And so as darkness overtook the jungle refuge, I wearily checked the clips in each rifle and took up position just off the narrow trail leading to the encampment.

It was a show of protection I could not back up but felt obligated to offer; the Karens, who eyed me with a wariness that I found embarrassing, assigned two young minders to me, thatch-haired teenagers with lively expressions who wore T-shirts advertising rock bands and Thai beach resorts a world away from these chilly highlands. Since neither spoke English, we communicated with uneasy gestures; one served as a picket further down the trail, and the other kept by my side, presumably to stop me from accidentally shooting friendlies.

The Burmese Army would be unlikely to accommodate me by marching single-file up the trail, and I only hoped that our day's march had indeed put us temporarily beyond their reach. I hadn't heard or spotted any helicopters, a positive trend that I hoped held, for the light AK-47 bullets would have little effect on aircraft except at close range.

I must have nodded off, for my young minder nudged me cautiously on the shoulder and I jerked alert. He tugged on my dirt-stained shirt, and with a grunt of effort I stood and followed him into the center of the rudely assembled village.

I realized the bonfires were in fact funeral pyres, and with a surge of emotion I saw Johnny's body had been laid atop the near stack of wood. Nearby lay the body of the female porter killed in the opening shots of the battle, and a solemn silence hung unseen but very present in the rapidly cooling night air.

A village elder began a prayer; the group lowered their heads in communion, and I had difficulty choking back my feelings. Perhaps, perhaps, always perhaps; but it was all a dead end, for this is what had happened; and I too sought the solace of belief in a higher purpose for such needless taking of young lives.

The elderly man motioned to me, and with a self-conscious hesitancy I shouldered the rifle and approached him. Wordlessly, he offered me Johnny's Bible, and with a sudden hard lump in my chest I knew I was to read his benediction. I turned again to John 10:10, and re-read the passage I had read the previous evening, more fitting now that the good shepherd had indeed sacrificed his life for his adopted flock.

I could not finish the lines, for a great, wracking grief overwhelmed me, and took my voice; as the Karen waited patiently for me to recover, some of the women began weeping with me, for to lay to rest such a young person is heart-rending beyond the measure of words, even those you cannot understand.

With a great effort I wiped my eyes and tried to focus anew on the words. I completed the reading, and closed the worn Bible. Another man read from the Karen Bible, and as he spoke the young woman's family crumpled under the weight of their own loss and sorrow.

The distraught husband of the dead woman, accompanied by their two children, approached the pyre with a flickering torch and lit the base. Fire jumped from twig to twig, tentatively and then with vigor, and soon the larger branches were alight; and from the smoking, crackling pile flames leaped, illuminating the grave brown faces of the mourners.

As the flames arose to flicker with what seemed a tentative curiosity at the bodies of the dead, I looked one last time as Johnny's earthly body, and something left me which I cannot describe, some part of my own life-force which can never be recovered.