In normal times, there is no love lost between the Montagnards and the Vietnamese.

We spread out. Move and fire. Fire and move. We give the impression of a much larger force than we are, barely thirty fighters, no match for fifty Nung mercenaries.

The new widows are running from dead body to dead body. When each of them finds the right dead body, she wails in agony. Then they all are wailing in agony, and the wails join together into a horrible song.

We follow the retreating Nungs, pressing them, never giving them time to think about turning around and making a stand. As we charge through the village we yell, "XUNG

PHONG!". . . "Comrades, advance!" And we say, "We are the Liberation Army!"

We see an old woman, squatting on top of a table, moaning, holding her stomach--somebody's gutshot grandmother. Bo Doi Bac Si drops back to help her.

The Nungs are tough sons of bitches. They drop a man back every twenty yards. Each man dropped fights until our point men kill him, which takes time.

I try to stay close to Master Sergeant Xuan, as ordered, but my leg has started bleeding again and I lag a few yards behind.

A Nung sniper fires at us from the branches of a tree. Master Sergeant Xuan orders me to stay put, then tries to flank the Nung, exposing himself to draw fire. The Nung fires. Somebody fires back. The Nung falls out of the tree like a sack of dirty laundry.

Commander Be Dan waves us forward. As we advance, Master Sergeant Xuan pauses and kicks the dying Nung sniper in the balls. The Nung groans, looks up at us without fear or pain. When he sees me, he's confused. Master Sergeant Xuan ends the Nung's confusion with a burst of AK.

We chase the Nungs until we come to flat open ground that has been bulldozed and defoliated, leaving the Special Forces compound a clear field of fire.

A single howitzer inside the compound starts banging out rounds. We fade back into the jungle as a shell bursts harmlessly in the treetops.

We all know that the Phantom fighter-bombers have been called and are already in the air and will be coming in on bomb runs within twenty minutes.

The Nguyen brothers appear, proudly escorting two bound Nungs they have taken prisoner. The Nguyen brothers are still New Guys.

"Good!" says Commander Be Dan. He waves the Nguyen brothers back. Master Sergeant Xuan steps forward and butt-strokes each Nung prisoner to the ground, then fires a bullet through each of their heads.

Commander Be Dan looks at his wristwatch, then at his map. We follow him to a new position and wait for night. We can hear the Phantom fighter-bombers booming overhead and we can hear the bombs. With our ears and with our feet and with our bones we can hear bombs hitting the edge of the jungle.

We wait for night.

The night is our friend.

For hours, repeating the same speech a hundred times, I talk into an olive-drab battery-powered bullhorn. I read word for word from a script written for me by Ba Can Bo, our political cadre:

"Come, brothers, I say. "You are fighting on the wrong side. Turn the guns around.

"This country is not yours.

"We do no harm to your homeland.

"Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?

"Do not join with the Saigon lackeys in using armed forces to suppress the just struggle of the South Vietnamese people for freedom and independence.

"Armymen! You are sons of the great American people who have a freedom-loving tradition. By your barbarous acts, inflicted upon patriots in their own land in the name of deceptive contentions, you besmear the honor of the U.S.A.

"Refuse to obey all orders to carry out mopping up operations to kill the Vietnamese people, to destroy their crops, burn their houses.

"Say 'No!' to the White House gangsters. You are fighting on the wrong side. Honor the memory of your ancestors. join us in our struggle for justice. Turn the guns around . . . "

Commander Be Dan meets with a Chien Si officer. They bow, salute, and shake hands. The officer is smoking a cigar.

The jungle is full of Chien Si fighters now, hundreds of them.

Hoarse, I join Master Sergeant Xuan's rear-guard unit. I imitate my comrades-in-arms by tying black comm wire around my ankles so that if we are forced to go into combat and I am wounded I can be dragged to safety. Or to a burial. The Chien Si fear that if they are not buried in Xa--in their home ground near their ancestors--their souls will be doomed to wander for all eternity, forever alone.

The assault troops check their weapons and move to their attack positions. The Nguyen brothers tie their rifles to their web belts with long pieces of string so that if they are wounded they won't lose their weapons.

For the first time I look at an American compound with the eyes of an attacker. The Special Forces compound is not very big, just another sandbagged dot on some Army general's grid map. But it does look mean. Nothing human could ever survive its firepower: long-range artillery on call, air strikes on call, mortar shells, howitzer shells from tube-sighted 105s, .50-caliber machine guns, antipersonnel mines, Claymore mines, thirty yards of leg-ripping barbed wire secured by engineer's stakes and festooned with trip flares, and a thick wall of sandbags which will be illuminated by a golden string of muzzle flashes from automatic rifles.

But so far the compound has been silent. No one awake except a few drowsy sentries I've bored with my political speech.

As silent as ghosts, the sappers go in, calm and professional, their minds focused to a burning point, their naked bodies covered with grease and smeared with charcoal. Each sapper has spent his final hours alone, deep in the jungle, building his own coffin and writing his name on his coffin with mud. A hundred yards from the wire the sappers lie down and then crawl forward on their bellies, into the black barbs of the concertina wire, armed only with wire cutters.

Close behind, the second wave of sappers drag bangalore torpedoes into position. A third wave waits in the shadows with satchel charges strapped to their backs.

While the sappers are cutting the wire, illumination shells from a mortars section inside the compound burst overhead, lighting up the battlefield, just a routine periodic illumination.

The light from the flares catches the second wave of sappers in the open and half of them are cut down as sentries in the compound open fire. The surviving sappers run into the wire, shove bamboo bangalore torpedoes up into the wire as far as they can, then, lying next to them, detonate them.

While the Nungs inside the compound watch the sappers blow themselves up in the wire, the third wave attacks. The sappers who are not killed fall down and pretend to be dead. Under fire, they wait.

Someone gives an order, "Sung coi!"--"Mortars."

The assault troops advance aggressively. Each fighter carries one mortar shell and drops it into a mortar tube as he passes. All along the edge of the jungle, mortar tubes tonk, and the first wave of assault troops charges forward.

By the time the mortar shells dropped into the tubes by the first wave of assault troops arch in and bang somewhere inside the compound, the enemy mortar crews inside the compound are already dropping shell after shell into their own mortar tubes--thump-thump-thump--illumination rounds shot out, followed by H. E.--high explosives.

"DAI LIEN!"--"Machine guns!" The jungle sparkles with green tracers, going out.

Our first mortar shells fall short and kill our own troops. The range on the mortar tubes is adjusted.

The compound perimeter opens up with everything in the world that shoots. Muzzle flashes wink like fireflies. The Chien Si human wave attack advances, not returning fire.

An enemy grenade bursts ten yards from where I lie with Master Sergeant Xuan's reserve force. We do not return fire.

"XUNG PHONG!" is the order, and the second wave of assault troops echoes back in unison: "XUNG PHONG! XUNG PHONG! XUNG PHONG!"--"Assault! Assault! Assault!"

The Liberation Army attacks, a fearless horde of shadows.

Moments after the first wave of assault troops has been shot to pieces the second wave hits the wire.

The sappers with satchel charges now rise up as one man, pull fuses, and fling heavy canvas blocks of TNT into the perimeter bunkers. A few of the sappers are shot down before they can throw, but all of them are shot down after they throw.

As the satchel charges lift the bunkers up in slow motion, spilling sand in sheets as sandbags burst and sandbag walls are blown apart, the second wave is coming through the wire, walking on bloody stepping-stones that are the backs of dead comrade-soldiers.

Our mortars do not lift their fire until our assault troops are being wounded by our own shrapnel.

The third wave advances into the gray cloud of smoke boiling across the compound. All we can see now are the blue and orange flashes of RPGs--rocket-propelled grenades.

Inside the compound the fight is a noisy toe-to-toe show-down of hot-blooded man-killing. It is over very quickly. One minute they're overrunning the wire, the next minute they are grenading the bunkers.

Someone blows a whistle and the Liberation Army pulls out without hesitation, leaving the Special Forces compound blown up and on fire, leaving the Nungs and the Green Beanies and their spook bosses overrun and fucked up totally.

The rear-guard reserve under Master Sergeant Xuan holds its position while hundreds of fighters of the Liberation Army flow past in the returning darkness. Wounded fighters limp along on crude, freshly cut crutches. Friends haul dead comrades away by the wire loops on their ankles.

Life in the shit is a rush, but you come down hard. After thirty minutes in a firefight you feel like you've pulled a double shift at the coal mine. Everybody's ass is dragging.

In the safety of the jungle the fighters call out the names of their units to one another in the darkness, and the attack force breaks up and reassembles into small local units for the march home.

The rear-guard unit waits for an attack from the compound, or the arrival of a reaction force from another command. But the only movement inside the compound is a lone figure, stumbling around blindly, calling for help in that unknown language sometimes invented by dying men.

Our scouts report that a reaction force is ten minutes away. Moments later, an avalanche of bombs and shells hits the fields of fire from the direction of our attack, while we in the rear-guard withdraw in the opposite direction.

In the jungle I see Song squatting beside the trail, trying to bandage her hand. Battle Mouth is with her, but is of no help; he appears to be in shock.

I squat down and look at Song's hand. A piece of shrapnel is embedded in the loose flesh between thumb and forefinger. The shrapnel is a shark's tooth of steel, black and silver, and the wound is oozing red blood.

I search until I find Bo Doi Bac Si.

Bo Doi Bac Si sponges the wound clean, then clamps down on the piece of shrapnel with shiny little pliers. Song grits her teeth and whimpers. I hold her wounded hand steady and Bo Doi Bac Si pulls out the jagged chunk of metal. Bo Doi Bac Si bandages the hand quickly and hurries off to help the other wounded, handing me a tiny blue and white tube of ointment "for her cuts."

I wash Song's legs and feet with water from my canteen.

I wipe the deep cuts clean with her black and white checkered Front bandanna. I massage greasy yellow ointment into deep ugly gouges left by barbed wire.

As I bandage Song's legs and feet with captured battle dressings, four American prisoners are led past us on their way to the Hanoi Hilton. Their hands are bound behind their backs with wire and they are roped together neck to neck. The prisoners stumble and collide. They see me. They stare back at me in stunned disbelief as they are led away. The first two prisoners are Special Forces officers. The last two are both over forty, wearing new jungle utilities with no markings or insignia, both of them too pale and too beefy to be lifer light colonels. I've seen men like this before: spooks. Errand boys playing God. They look at me like they've seen a ghost.