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green canvas raincoat.
    Something on the smooth rocks caught his eye. It was a torn white bra. In the dim light it looked like a strange large
    flower with smooth, soft petals. On one petal there was a trace of blood.
    Kien shivered as though twine had been wrapped tightly around his heart. Then he pictured several greenish, ghosdy enemy forms passing silently under the jungle canopy, quietly arriving at the jungle's edge to find the farm, then entering . . . finding three young girls. One girl had been in the bedroom, another in the kitchen near the table, the third at the bathhouse.There had been no time to react. No cries. No shots. No escape.
    "The commandos! The commandos, they did it," someone howled.
    "Oh, Kien," said Thinh in a whisper, his voice hoarse and trembling.
    Beyond them the bamboo branches scratched eerily against the bamboo walls. Kien sighed, tightening his lips.
    "Did you hear anything this morning?" he asked.
    "No. Nothing," they replied.
    Kien tried to put the picture together. So, what had happened? These young men had been here with the girls last night, enjoying themselves.
    This was 1974, not the dark times of 1968 and 1969, the worst years of the war. This was now a day's walk to the front line.Yet this morning the young lovers in the platoon had sensed something wrong. They had persuaded Kien to take a look. Kien now agreed their hunch had been right.
    "How do you know they're commandos?" Kien asked, aware that whoever the visitors had been, they were still alive, and not far away.
    "We found a Rubi cigarette-end. And footprints," Thinh said.
    "What made you sense something was wrong this morning? You were happy enough when you came back,"
    Kien said, letting them know he had known all along of their nocturnal visits.
    "Nothing specific.We suddenly felt unbearably anxious, that's all."
    "Now you tell me! Did any of you go back looking for them this morning?"
    "Yes. But we found no trace."
    "You missed this," said Kien, pointing to the bloodstained bra.
    Thinh stepped out front, slowly kneeling down. His AK rifle dropped from his shoulders, clattering on the rocks.
    "It's Ho Bias! This is Ho Bias bra!" he whispered, raising the bra to his lips. "Oh, darling, where did they take you? "Why? You were so innocent! "Why would they hurt you? "What can we do?"
    Thinh sobbed and moaned, uttering urgent prayers in a despairing voice.
    Later, many years later, while watching a pantomime where an artist bent over, writhing his body in agonized desperation, by magical association Kien recalled the moments when Thinh had similarly crouched in sobbing despair, praying for Ho Bia.
    The audience around him in the theater had seen Kien suddenly sit bolt upright, remembering the war scene clearly. His attention on the pantomime faded as the sharp detail of the tragic love story of his men and the three farm girls unfolded in his mind. He drifted off into a reverie as he dreamed of that day, blind to the pantomime before him.
    How deeply moved he was, and how he trembled at the joy and the pain the memories brought. He wanted to etch into his heart these memories, and wondered how he could have forgotten this tragedy for so many years.
    It was almost dark that same day before they found the commandos' hiding-place. They had not killed the three girls on their own farm, but had chosen to take them down the valley, away from the farm. The rain had erased their tracks and it was by total chance that Kien's platoon had discovered the seven commandos at the foot of a hill.
    They had ambushed the commandos, killing three of them in the first attack and capturing the remaining four at gunpoint.
    Lofty Thinh, one of the lovers, was killed in close fighting, getting a bullet through his heart. No time for tears or for vengeance. He fell, his face to the earth, without seeing Ho Bia again.
    Kien stood before the captured men. They were not tied up, but they were exhausted from their lost battle, their clothes torn, filthy with