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had waited until the whole company was on line, and then they had killed them all. Forty-seven, just like that.
    The second time was a month later. Mayfield’s platoon had tracked a VC squad for three days, keeping after them until they caught them in the middle of a paddy. Such things were good for morale, but they didn’t happen often.
    This morning they were inserted by chopper. The slicks moved them inland, keeping above 1500 feet. Two kilometers from the LZ, they dipped down and came in right over the paddies. The pilot and the door gunners cleared their weapons, and two of the accompanying cobras moved out ahead and a little to the side. It was 100 degrees when they hit the LZ.
    With the slicks in line, hovering a few inches above the paddy water, the troops jumped off, moving away in a crouch to keep the prop wash from blowing them over. During the insertion, the gunships and cobras circled in protective lazy spirals in and out over the landing zone. Finally the slicks pulled out, and the gunships gave the area one last look, then pulled out after them and followed them back to the boats. Regrouped and moving out, the men, already soaked with sweat, began walking through the filthy water, some for the hundredth time. After the roaring of the choppers, the tinkling of the men’s gear sounded almost musical. A radio squawked and just as quickly was cut off.
    “Otsun,” Mayfield said matter-of-factly. The RTO turned around. “Tell the men, that if I hear one more radio, I’ll shoot the son of a bitch myself. Understand?”
    The platoons separated so that there were at least 200 meters between each of them, in staggered columns: tiger scouts up ahead, points, and then the main body of almost a hundred men pushing through the muggy heat of the Delta. By noon they were passing little villages, no more than a few wooden huts, built behind mud dikes. Some of the villagers came out to watch them go by. Everyone looked alike, friends and enemies. The little old woman standing next to her hut could have just that morning changed the batteries on the land mines, which might that evening be blowing them to shit. It was hard to like them anyway; it was hard to like anything in that heat.
    The whole time Mayfield had been in the Delta he hadn’t gotten one piece of information out of these people. The only consolation was that they might be just as close-mouthed with the VC. Maybe, from what he’d been told, the VC they’d been helping, or at least not hindering, had really pushed them around at Tet and were still pushing them, killing chiefs and stealing kids. You couldn’t be sure; the truth probably lay somewhere between, like the mud bunkers the villagers had built near their huts. They were there for protection against gunships as well as Charlie—whoever was around at the time. The only thing Mayfield was sure of in all that suffocating heat was that the Army wasn’t winning these people for anything.
    They had walked for almost five hours; the sun on an angle reflected blindingly off the shallow paddy water. Mayfield, halting on the edge of a hedgegrove—his troopers already moving out into the next paddy—stopped for a moment to put on his sunglasses.
    The first mortar round hit fifty meters to his right. Even as he was diving off the hedgegrove, automatic fire was cracking into the mud around him. Mortars were going off all around; a string of bullets hit near the side of his face, slapping mud up into his eyes. Twisting, he began crawling as fast as he could away from the slapping sound of the bullets. He was crawling blindly, arms and legs digging frantically into the soft mud, when he felt a sharp blow against his upper arm, like a baseball bat hitting him across the shoulder. Changing direction, he quickly began rolling over and over, perpendicular to the way he’d been crawling. There was noise and confusion all around. Covered with mud, choking on it, he kept rolling to his left. A mortar round or rocket