At dawn we take a break on the strangely silent site of theabandoned Marine Corps Combat Base at Khe Sanh. The scary, ghost-guarded mound of red dirt has already been plowed andthe Word is that it's to become a coffee-bean plantation. The section will rest until noon before moving on, because weknow that when the day is hottest, Americans in the field break for chow. Not much is left of my old hometown. What the Marines left behindas junk, refugees have hauled off as building materials or to sell on the black market:scraps of lumber, rusty truck parts, torn plastic sheeting, brass shell casings, scraps ofrotting canvas, steel planking from the airfield. Our trash is their treasure, andthe army ants have stripped the hill clean. I sit down on some crumbling sandbags where I estimate Black JohnWayne's bunker used to be. It's hard to be sure. In the year since theWoodcutter captured me, the jungle has come back like thick hair sprouting all over a baldman's head. I should feel at home here, but I don't. Commander Be Dan squats near me, not for a neighborly visit but to keepan eye on me. Being back on my old stomping grounds might revive my bad road habitsas a running dog lackey of the imperialists. The Viet Cong soldiers laugh, eat chow, and tell tall tales, seastories, about their many heroic exploits against the Black Rifles who held Khe Sanh. When the lies of the New Guys get too big, the older Chien Si tell the NewGuys about fighting
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prive, is take one step. Just one step. Just one step at a time. Anybodycan take one step, Private joker. Even you." I've got arrowheads in my dreams again tonight. When I was a boyI hiked the rolling red-clay hills of Alabama, picking up arrowheads made of flint,obsidian lances, gray stone axes. Sometimes I'd find baked clay beads and brokenpieces of pottery. The crowing of a rooster wakes me. It is not dawn. TheWoodcutter's little red and gold rooster has been fooled again by a false impersonation ofdawn. Illumination rounds popped on the horizon, and the rooster decided that it washis cue to cut loose. It's strange, but Communist roosters don't crow any differentfrom the American kind. For a long second I thought I was back in the World, back inHometown, U.S.A. The moon is red. The moon is burning up in flames behind a blackcloud. Silhouettes of coconut palms are sharply defined against the red sky asmasses of swaying black blades. The frogs crank up their volume another notch. A dog runs alongthe riverbank, barking at the movement of the river. The dog is black and white,half ghost, half shadow. I think about my father, always working, always making a crop, butnever making a dollar ahead of next month's feed bill, happy just to be alive and healthyand with honest work to do. 2ff7e9595c
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