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I focused on not crying. I wanted to look at Chris, to burn his features into my mind, but I didn’t dare.
    He went to bed before I did. He was gonna have to leave, as he put it, at oh-dawn-thirty tomorrow morning so he could get his transport back without being AWOL. I went upstairs maybe half an hour after him, brushed my teeth, and almost opened his door. It was all the way closed, and I wanted in. I wanted to see him, to hear him say nothing was wrong, to have him tell me he’d be back in no time at all. And I stood there maybe ten seconds before I admitted that I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t some eight-year-old kid needing to have his tears brushed away by big brother. I went to my room.
    I lay there for a while, listening to the sounds of my folks getting into bed themselves, before I snapped off the light and turned onto my side. But I wasn’t ready to fall asleep, so I turned onto my back again. Hands behind my head, I thought about jerking off, but I couldn’t even work up the energy for that. It was like everything in me was focused on the room on the other side of this wall. Just beyond this very wall, the one behind my head, was Chris’s bed, with Chris in it, the same Chris who might go over there and die before I ever saw him again.
    Then I decided I was being morbid, and ridiculous. I nearly laughed; hell, maybe he was jerking off. This actually cheered me up a little, and I shifted my position so my head was closer to the wall. Again I almost laughed, because I could hear something. He was definitely doing something in there. I got onto my knees and pressed my ear to the wall.
    He was crying. It sounded muffled, like he was sobbing into his pillow, but he was definitely crying. Gut-wrenching sobs. I pulled away and stared at the wall I couldn’t really see in the dark. What the fuck? Chris? The brave soldier, the guy who pulls his buddies out of punji pits, is in there sobbing like a baby?
    But no; it wasn’t like a baby. There was way too much pain in it for that. He wasn’t crying for his bottle. It sounded like he was crying for his life.
    I threw myself onto my stomach and covered my head with a pillow. I didn’t want to hear this. I couldn’t stand the thought of him in there, crying like that. My mind reached back over the last week, going through his stories, trying to come up with something he’d said, or something he’d left unsaid, that might account for this. He hadn’t overtold anything, hadn’t made himself out to be this big hero, and nothing he’d described made him sound like a coward. He’d done some heroic things, he’d done some crazy things. He’d helped his friends, they’d helped him. He’d almost made some of it sound like fun, or at least like it made for stories that would be good in years to come. It sounded like he’d made some friends who would be his friends until he died.
    Until he died. Is that it? Is he afraid of dying?
    Would I be? Would I lie in there sobbing the night before I had to go back to a place that was hot and muggy and full of bugs and bullets and bombs and beer and koon sa? Would I go back to a place where I didn’t know whether the Vietnamese girl I’d just met wanted to cut my throat? Or, really, when what I knew was that she did? Chris didn’t talk like that, he didn’t tell stories where the worst part was like some dark secret that could kill you, but I’d heard them, and I knew they were true.
    Why hadn’t he told stories like that?
    Thinking back again, none of it had that fog of not-knowing about it. None of it except maybe that comment from Mason, about when something unexpected happens and you just don’t know what to do. Sometimes in Chris’s stories he wasn’t sure where the enemy was, but he always knew who they were. There were no shades of gray. He didn’t talk to us about killing villagers, or wondering who was a spy.