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consistent—sat cuffed in the back of one of them, forgotten for the moment. But as Broker climbed from an ambulance, aided by cops, Rodney raised his cuffed hands and aimed an index finger, cocked his thumb. Through the window Broker saw his lips form a “Bang.”
    Word got out over the radios that one of the assholes had bitten off Broker’s thumb. Security got lost in the scramble to come and gawk. It was a real mess. His cover was blown to smithereens. Nina squeezed his good hand and smiled helpfully. Through a veil of blue curtains, Broker saw Earl wheeling by, thrashing against restraints on a gurney. “Mama, Mama,” he screamed. “There’s snakes in my poop!”
    A pissed-off ER surgeon and his team shooed the rubbernecking cops from his triage. “Out. It’s a bite. No big deal. So get the hell out of here.”
    Nina refused to budge.
    “She stays,” said Broker.
    “You’ll get some time off work now,” said Nina in a matter-of-fact voice, eyes fixed on Broker’s wound.
    “Huh?” Broker watched needles. Tetanus in his butt. Then Novocain in his thumb, then this curved job that strung catgut through what looked like a torn flap of extra-large pigskin glove attached to the palm of his left hand.
    “You see, I’m in a little trouble and I could use a guy like you,” said Nina.
    “Wonderful.” Broker watched, resigned, as the doctor stitched and tied.

9
    B ROKER DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR IT.
    They gave him Dilaudid and put him in a hospital bed. He needed rest, they said. Fat chance. With Nina curled up on a chair at his side, alternately sleeping and watching him.
    She was his doppelganger, come haunting.
    It was about her dad. It was always about her dad. She still didn’t get it. Ray Pryce had stranded him in a real tight spot and almost got him killed. But it wasn’t like that at the beginning. Dilaudid dripped into the adrenaline void and the memory flickered like slow-motion cinema.
    May Day 1972, QTC—Quang Tri City—
Stalingrad South

    North Vietnamese regiments supported by tanks and artillery fought South Vietnamese regiments supported by the U.S. Air Force in the rubble of Quang Tri City. The rubble had been pounded to gravel. The North Vietnamese regiments had won .
    The tank was a low-slung Russian T—54, with a smooth round turret like a green steel igloo, from which protruded the biggest cannon Broker had ever seen. Dozens of other North Vietnamese tanks picked through the junky bricks on the muggy summery morning. Except this one had just pushed a wall over on 2nd Lt. Phil Broker, who had become separated from his unit and who was now pinned under a slab of cement and imprisoned in a bristle of rebar whiskers. Stuccoed in mortar dust and twenty-one years old, he was for sure going to die because he was dumb enough to get caught in a losing battle in a lost war .
    A hatch opened on the turret and a tanker shouldered up and removed his goggles, a smile broadened across his insect-tough Tonkinese face. The treads clanked back, grinding masonry; and the tank realigned, beetle fashion, as the cannon barrel moved left and then down, probing the air. Broker experienced one of those acoustic shadows he’d read about. A roaring battle was winding down all around him but he could clearly hear the hollow shouts coming from the interior of the tank. Happy shouts of the victors .
    Helpless, pinned in the rubble, his rifle crushed, his radio broken, out of grenades, Broker watched the guy looking out the hatch engage in a spirited discussion with his crew mates about how best to squash this most stupid of long-nosed foreign dummies .
    And then, through eyes teared to glue by brick dust and sweat, young Phil Broker witnessed a scene from a 1950s newsreel out of Budapest. A gaunt figure in dusty American olive drab sprinted up and across the rubble. He clutched a smoking wine bottle cocked back in his right hand .
    At first the North Vietnamese tanker laughed at this puny intruder but then very