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ground. Mrs. Green would be proud, he thought. It was she, his high school teacher—not a boot camp instructor—who taught him and Doc and Finney and their peers the fine art of head-tucking, in the air raid drills back in the days of Khrushchev and the Bay of Pigs and the bomb shelter Dad built. He always wondered what difference it would all make when the end finally came.
    Rockets and tracers blistered the sky, and Jake watched air burn as he never knew it could. The mortar barrage curled his toes so bad it cramped his legs, and despite his fit youthful body, he felt like a crippled old man. After he thought it was all over and lifted his head, a piece of shrapnel flew in one side of the tent and out the other, as if to remind him of his mortality. As if Death were saying to him, “Tonight you live—but one day I’ll be back, and nothing will save you from me.” Jake saw that shrapnel in perfect slow motion. The loop had run through his mind hundreds of times. It did again, flawlessly, with its own macabre beauty, as if set to music.
    His first week in Nam a supply clerk pointed him to a crate of ammo. Jake saw him clearly now, his untucked fatigues, glasses, and Southern accent. Most of these guys hailed from places like Sebastopol, Mississippi and Arnoldsville, Georgia. He heard the clerk say the strangest words about the ammo—“Take as much as you want.” The rules really were different here. No meticulous counting of each round. Hand grenades piled on each other like ingredients in a tossed salad. Nothing like the neatly stacked rows at noncombat bases. War seemed neat and tidy until you were in one.
    Looking at the crate filled with grenades, Jake shot the clerk a questioning look. “Yeah, grenades too. Just take whatever you want.” You just take stuff till it runs out ? Jake took six grenades. He felt greedy, like he’d taken too large a slice of pie. But coming up one grenade short could cost him his life, or his buddy’s. Now he saw himself toting a Claymore mine as well, its seven hundred steel balls sandwiched between layers of plastic explosives, unbelievably decimating to anyone within range. It was the most effective weapon in Nam.
    The new guys always looked new. They could be older, bigger, wear identical uniforms but they stuck out, walked different, talked different. The veterans walked with steely purpose, alert but not jumpy. The new guys looked at them as if they were gods. Beneath all their mystique and machismo was a nearly impenetrable aura of mutual trust and brotherhood. The perennial greeting “What’s up, bro?” and the familiar backslapping sprung from something deep within. The uninitiated longed to enter into that camaraderie forged only in life and death struggle. But newcomers were on the outside. To get on the inside, they had to prove their mettle. They had to show they were men. On such terms, friendship was won, and once won never lost.
    Young men, if not from Texas or Louisiana, then equally foreign places such as Iowa and Nebraska, with rifles slung over their shoulders, marched across the theater screen of Jake’s mind. Helicopters in Dolby sound served as the audio background. Armies of mosquitoes did perfect little helicopter imitations, using sunbaked soldier flesh as their LZ. Phalanx of black ants and whole battalions of big red fire ants fanned out on the ground. Jake imagined them fighting their own war. In his mind’s eye he saw them hoisting their sand bags, stringing out thimble-sized ribbons of barbed wire, carrying mortars and ammo for their buddies, maybe wearing little ant ear plugs when they fired their artillery. The black ants were friendlies, the red ants hostiles. Or was it the other way around? He got down on his knees to take a closer look.
    “We’re like those ants,” the young man wrote in his journal that quarter of a century ago. “Except we stand on our back legs and trudge clear across this insane jungle of oversized philodendrons and