I saved a lot of kids that day, with crude tourniquets and Boy Scout first aid.

One of the kids was Johnny Be Cool, the Woodcutter's adopted son.

After that, the Woodcutter removed my legs irons. He appeared before the village council and argued that if I ever tried to escape from the village he gave his word to track me down and bring me back. For my own good, actually. In the jungle, without food or weapons, I'd die.

The Woodcutter was on target and firing for effect. I'll never escape from Hoa Binh until the Viet Cong trust me enough to allow me to go on a combat mission. Until then, I must wait patiently and pretend to be a genuine defector or they will ship my scrawny ass nonstop to a broom closet in the Hanoi Hilton. If I've learned anything from these people, it is the power of patience. Escape will take time because my conversion must appear gradual and sincere.

There are no fools in this village.

The walls of the Woodcutter's hooch are woven mats held in place by vertical bamboo slats. The roof is thatched with split-leaf palm fronds. The floor is beaten earth.

As Song and I enter the Woodcutter's hooch the sky is purple behind black mountains. Macaws the color of rainbows are having noisy debates in the shadows. The air is sweet with night orchids and with the wet soil odors of tropical jungle.

While Song washes her hands in an earthenware jug I step out back to a pile of chopped firewood stacked as high as my chin.

I crook my arm and load up, careful not to disturb the Woodcutter's two special pieces of firewood. Both pieces of firewood look ordinary enough but have been hollowed out. Inside one is a Swedish-K submachien gun. But no shells. I haven't been able to find the Woodcutter's hiding place for the ammo. In the second piece of special firewood is an old Playboy magazine, wrapped in plastic.

As I unload the firewood by the hearth, Song is pouring rice from a cloth sack into a black kettle over the fireplace.

While the rice boils, Song makes tea. I watch her. I watch her every day. Watching Song make tea makes me feel peaceful.

In a battered China teapot with a wire handle, the tea boils.

Song and I huddle together in the pale yellow light of a kerosene lantern. Song reads aloud to me from a crumbling paperback book stenciled FREEDOM HILL USO LIBRARY. The book is The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. Song reads slowly, carefully. When she makes a mistake in pronouncing a word I stop her and say the word. She repeats the word back to me until she has it right, then goes on reading.

Song is a few years older than I am and is very smart. She is a graduate of the University of Hue and of the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where tigers are displayed in iron cages like the Woodcutter when he was a prisoner of the French. She was ordered to go to school in Paris by Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region, a great Viet Cong hero. Her expenses at the Sorbonne were paid by the National Liberation Front.

When I first came to the village, Song's English was okay, and her accent was French. Now her English is better, but her accent is pure Alabama white trash.

Song learned pidgin English while working as a hooch maid at the Marine base at Phu Bai. During the day she washed laundry. At night she was a joy-woman and got gang-banged in the bunker by horny teenaged killers. She also was a serving officer in the Viet Cong intelligence unit. As the punchline to an old Marine joke goes, the woman was holding down three jobs.

The Vietnamese culture and Communist doctrine are so strict that the people in this village make the Puritans look like party animals. There is a proverb: Chastity is worth one thousand gold coins. Everyone in the village knows that the Deputy Commander of the village Self-Defense Militia worked as a whore to defend her people, and to every person in the village Song is a virgin.

Song motions for me to drink my tea. I nod, but do not drink. I wait for her to invite me a second time. She motions again. This time I pick up my cup and drink. Song smiles, pleased that, finally, I am acquiring some manners.

This is my favorite part of the day. Song sits next to me, combing her shimmering black hair with her only possession of value--her mother's ivory comb. "I am so proud of the school, Bao Chi Anh, Bao Chi, my brother. Whan I was a child our school was in the forests high in the mountains. We were soldiers. We did not even have books."

"It must make you happy to be a teacher instead of a soldier," I say. "Soldiers destroy, teachers build."

Song looks at me, surprised. "But I am a soldier at the school, Bao Chi. The sword is my child. The gun is my husband. I will never release the gun until we drive away the invaders and save the people, if it takes all my life. The puppets in Saigon want to put us into barbed-wire cities and make us into beggars. We choose to walk through the gates of blood, to fight with the resistance. We fight to stay on the land where we can work and be free and have dignity. I will fight forever for the dignity of my people."

Song picks up the paperback Hemingway book. "Until Gia Phong, liberation, the children must be made strong with books, strong and beautiful like tigers in the jungle. Future generations must be given large wings with which to fly into the future."

Song looks up at me with tears glittering in her dark eyelashes. "Bao Chi, I am so sorry that the war has killed your family by taking them away from you."