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knew what he should
     have done—he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background.
     It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked,
     for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole,
     Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not
     do it at all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound—he
     was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a
     minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy—so silent—that Dengler was
     following him.
    They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete
     in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking
     about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed
     his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that
     Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report
     from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He
     felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.
    He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact
     had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial.
     A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made
     him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him
     fit to move.
    If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have
     been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped
     up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had,
     but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over
     again—it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been
     easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even
     Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court-martial. Conor himself
     had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had
     happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS—but he knew that just beforethe court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck
     a Koko card in his mouth.
    Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had
     ever mentioned Manly.
    “Refill,” he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The
     other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader—other people always
     counted on him to provide their good times.
    “Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.” Conor swallowed another ice-cold
     bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch
     was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days
     after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly
     because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of
     the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed
     a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only
     difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way
     it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial—Conor promised
     himself he’d find it, once they all got there.
    Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew
     that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious.
     Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio,
     who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard