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One. The village is a known VC way station, and Tompkins’ orders were to test Green-6’s effectiveness on the enemy before we introduce it into the Black River, another day’s trek from our current position. The Black River feeds thousands of gallons per day to NVA stationed all along the trail through secret gravity-fed pipelines. After we dumped a canister of Green-6 into the local water supply––a gurgling, serpentine creek––we crossed what passes for a small tropical pasture before melting back into the jungle. Fowler is the youngest of the Berets. His father was an Austin cattleman. He walked up to the domesticated steer, patted its broad chestnut head while it stoically chewed grass, and slit its wrinkled throat with an eight-inch sawtoothed Bowie knife. Stepping back from the gusher of blood, he’d quoted Napoleon. “An army marches on its stomach.” I had had to look away, nauseated, afraid I might regurgitate my B-2 individual combat meal ration (beans with frankfurter chunks).
    There’s no mistake: the thing shambling into the edge of our camp is the same animal. It doesn’t blink in the harsh beams of light. Its beautiful auburn coat is now a matted cape of flies. It raises its head and emits a horrible whistling bellow, baring gore-streaked teeth; the gaping sickle-shaped wound is stretched open like a giant blood-caked smile.
    “What the f––” Fowler sputters, and the dead steer-thing charges into a burst of automatic fire and muzzle flash. Fowler’s bullets crash into its skull and it collapses on top of the lanterns and compact camp stove.
    Tompkins utters a string of profanities and orders Fowler to cease firing. The echoes of Fowler’s gunfire roll away across the valley before being absorbed by the muggy night air.
    Silence. Darkness, except for the bobbing spooklights.
    Fowler stalks over to the steer’s crumpled tent-pole body, prods its hide with the muzzle of his rifle. The body releases a belch of gas. The stench of raw, rotted beef makes me slap a hand over my nose and mouth.
    “Okay, which one of you fuckers put LSD in my canteen, because I killed this bag of meat deader than shit five klicks from here––”
    Fowler doesn’t finish. Something titanic steps out of the jungle, reaches down, and lifts him high into the sultry air. One of the Berets screams. I glimpse an impossible black-haired nightmare face, and hell-fired eyes.
    Fowler shrieks once and I hear a wet crunching sound.
    The attack commences.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    In 1962, at a time when most Americans couldn’t locate Vietnam on a map, President John F. Kennedy approved Operation Ranch Hand. This covert operation involved the airborne spraying of chemicals in an attempt to destroy the hiding places of the National Liberation Front . In 1969 alone, Operation Ranch Hand erased over a million hectares of forest and a few thousand civilians who dwelled in or near those forests. The chemical used in this defoliation program, Agent Orange, also caused chromosomal damage in survivors. Between 1962 and 1969, 700,000 agricultural acres were sprayed with another chemical called Agent Blue––a mixture of two arsenic -containing compounds, sodium cacodylate and cacodylic acid. The objective was to deny food to the NVA and NLF. But the civilian population suffered most from disastrous rice harvests that followed the spraying.
    In 1963, a frustrated Kennedy asked the Pentagon to mount subversive operations against North Vietnam––a job he felt the CIA had been bungling in the same manner as their farcical attempts to unseat a certain vociferous Cuban dictator. JFK didn’t live to see the fruits of his decision.
    After his assassination Johnson ordered the Pentagon to form the Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG, often shortened to SOG, or to those who participated in its covert atrocities and mud-caked fiascos, SLOG). SOG ran America’s covert war against Hanoi and the