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razor sharp elephant grass, pretending to be brave and sometimes convincing ourselves we really are.”
    After a few weeks Jake’s heart descended from constant dread to periodic dread, from red alert to yellow alert. He often wondered, Am I getting braver, or just getting accustomed to being terrified ? There was always somebody new coming in, somebody you liked spending time with, because you knew he was more scared than you were, which by comparison made you brave.
    There’s Harvey, from Zionsville, Indiana. “Harvey,” Jake chided. “You look like you shaved blindfolded!” This was what a sergeant said to him the first day he had a run in with a thorn bush. He hadn’t thought it funny then, but got a good laugh out of saying it now. Between mosquitoes and thorns and elephant grass you could be a mass of welts for days. Fortunately, you had things like diarrhea and bleeding feet to take your mind off how impossibly sore your face was. Yet, underneath all the unappealing aspects of this place ran a current of dignity, a nobility. Something every man needed, whether he knew it or not. A reason, a purpose for living, a mission. A cause.
    Jake came here to fight for Dad and Mom and his brother Bryce, and his extended family and friends back home, and the children and grandchildren he’d probably never have precisely because he was here. Now, though, his world shrunk to the thirty men in his platoon. It was reduced to the guy on his right and the guy on his left, guys who reminded him of Doc and Finney. His loftiest dream was no longer a career in journalism, or winning the Pulitzer Prize. It was to keep his buddies and himself alive, survive that day, and to put a year of those twenty-four-hour survivals back to back, to be done and to go home.
    “Twenty-four is a ripe old age here,” Jake wrote Janet, his college sweetheart, whose life was on hold while she waited for her man to come home standing, not in a box, to start a life and a family. The average age of the combat soldier was nineteen. Though as a lieutenant he outranked them, all those nineteen-year-olds had seemed seasoned veterans when Jake first got off the chopper. Once he had a couple of months under his belt, Jake was the veteran, and he exuded a veteran’s confidence, partly because he knew he was supposed to.
    Jake watched himself now in his dream, playing poker by moonlight. That dripping blast furnace wound down at midnight just enough to give a hint of relief, only to begin its swing into the fires of hell known as tomorrow. The stench of dead fish and rotting vegetation seemed to ease when the oven turned down. The night sky lit up like fireworks, a surreal Disneyland extravaganza minus Tinker Bell. What would have absorbed your full attention any other place became mundane here. The luminous trail of tracer bullets and explosions in the darkness far outshone the brilliant Northern Lights Jake once saw in Canada. And then it would be morning again, too soon. You were never ready.
    Snakes and insects Jake and Doc and Finney would have used to terrorize every young female in Benton County, here they routinely brushed aside. At first Jake whistled and commented on them, now he just flicked them off and moved on. There was Bilbo, the tree monkey his company adopted. He was the closest thing to Champ, his golden retriever he missed more than he wanted to admit. Bilbo would crawl up Jake’s back, dance on his shoulders, reach out and steal rations from his hand just as they came within inches of his mouth.
    Jake shunned the tempting shortcuts through the vegetation, where VC booby traps killed two men in his platoon, Jim from Oak Ridge and Warren from Port Angeles. The uncertainty of it all plagued him. He saw himself poised, as he had been dozens of times, to shoot the man in the bushes over there, only to discover that moving body was one that slept by him at night.
    He cursed the NVA for not having the decency to stand row by row in bright colorful