In the village, somebody is banging a shell casing with a bayonet.

At the grenade factory the women collect our uneaten bowls of rice and dump the rice back into the earthenware jugs.

Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si dee-dee down the paddy dike. The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan have a muted but animated conference that, this time, does not end in an angry confrontation.

As we watch the gray puffs of smoke whump-crumping into the treeline we think about how sometimes the Arvin puppet soldiers like to crank off a few rounds of artillery for no particular reason except that they get nervous and the noise boosts their morale.

But these shells are obviously not intended to hit anything, not even ghost battalions of Viet Cong, and are not marking rounds. All of the shells are striking the same spot, in a tight group, not in a pattern. A pattern kills, a tight group minimizes the danger of hitting innocent bystanders.

General Fang Cat may be a corrupt public official, but he is an honest businessman. General Fang Cat is firing his rusty old guns to fulfill his contract with the Woodcutter. The incoming shells are a warning.

Commander Be Dan, the Woodcutter, and Bo Doi Bac Si are all running down paddy dikes in different directions, and Song has disappeared.

"Truc Thang!" yells the old man without teeth who hacksaws artillery shells. "Truc Thang! Truc Thang!"

And he's right. The sky is full of helicopters. The killer locusts are coming, armed to the teeth, gunships and troop carriers, buzzing high in the sky, holding off, waiting for the artillery barrage to lift. No doubt company commanders are screaming obscenities into radio handsets, asking what stupid son of a bitch opened fire ten minutes early and what stupid son of a bitch is continuing to fire ten minutes late.

Everyone is running somewhere. The village gong bongs with heavy resonance, announcing the attack.

I don't move. Johnny Be Cool waves goodbye, then charges off to take care of his water buffalo. My leg is still stiff from the wound I got on the combat mission. I can hump, but I'm awkward, slow, and clumsy when I run. There's no cover crossing the paddies. I don't want to be caught out in the open by the gunships.

When General Fang Cat has decided that he has jumped the gun on his orders as much as he can safely explain away as merely the fortunes of war, the artillery lifts, and the sky is open for the gunships.

Under the canopy of the Luu Dan factory I watch as American airplanes fill the sky. There is the knifing of green wings and four Phantom fighter-bombers roll in for a bomb run across the village.

Five-hundred-pound bombs drift down at an angle, black blobs with Xs on top. Energy bells blossom and hang in the air for an instant, faintly visible, like heat coming up off a hot road. Hooches, trees, and disassembled people float up into the sky. Then, as though unrelated, a muffled thud, followed closely by a tremor in the ground.

I pull up a reed sleeping mat in one corner of the Luu Dan factory and lift the trapdoor of a tunnel. I climb down into the tunnel and the trapdoor drops back into place.

I learned the locations of every tunnel in the village by playing an educational game with Johnny Be Cool, Battle Mouth, and the kids. We walk through the village and I say "Boom" and the last kid into a tunnel loses the game.

The first thing I learned about life in a Viet Cong tunnel was that Viet Cong tunnels were not constructed for tall people. I crawl a few yards, then squat and push my back hard against the earth wall. I can't see my hand in front of my face. I can't breathe. Mud has sucked my rubber sandals off and now is closing in cold and wet over my toes. A spiderweb catches me in the face. I spit. Furry lumps splash in water. I hear rats clawing for high ground.

The wall against my back reverberates. Moist soil falls down all over me. I spit again. I cough. There is dirt in my eyes. I press my ear against the cold tunnel wall and I can hear the battle, big thumps, rhythmic strings of impacting raindrops, and, as clear as any field radio, the rumble of tanks.

And I think: They are going to blow the tunnel, they are going to blow the tunnel, I just know that they are going to blow it. Some dumb grunt is standing up there popping a Willy Peter grenade. The Willy Peter grenade is a light green canister with a yellow stripe. I hear it. There, that's the spoon flying off. The grunt is going to drop the Willy Peter grenade into the tunnel and fry me like Spam. Then the tunnel rats will come down and be scared and amazed when they find me.

I panic. I hear more rats. I think I hear boots topside. I feel something slimy trying to crawl up my leg. My test drive of a grave has inspired me with a sudden will to live. I push, pull, heave, climb, and claw my way up out of the tunnel.

Back out in the light, I rest on my stomach, pumping air, cold and wet, plastered with mud, dead leaves, and sweat.

Somewhere a water buffalo bellows horrible death agonies.

When I stand up, I see a world of shit coming down.

In the rice paddy water the reflection of a prehistoric flying monster grows larger and larger at a fantastic rate until it turns into a Cobra gunship and roars in at one hundred miles per hour, shaking the canopy over the Luu Dan factory with a hot blast of wind and sand. Miniguns are chopping away chug-chug-chug and the Cobra fires hissing rockets with long tails of smoke. The rockets look like white snakes with heads of fire.

The Broom-Maker runs past the Luu Dan factory, her clothes charred and smoking. She runs steadily and with intense concentration, ignores me, ignores and is perhaps unaware of the fact that both of her hands have been blown off and blood is pumping out of the shredded flesh of her wrists.

The Cobras swing around and roar in for another gun-run. Bullets blast the hooches to pieces. There is red fire on the thatched roofs and black smoke beyond the fire.

I turn to face the tanks.

The tanks are bulky mud-splattered monsters, attacking on line through the rice fields, crushing through the paddy dikes with no effort at all, grinding the rice into heavy crunching treads and destroying the crop, plowing deep into the paddies like bloated iron hogs grunting in the mud.

Small-arms fire cranks up to full volume on the far side of the village, recon by fire, right on cue, and I know it's a ground attack. The popping of AKs begins to mingle with the whack-whack of M-16s.

Johnny Be Cool reappears, picks up an Easter basket full of red metal eggs from the end of the Luu Dan factory assembly line.

A tank with CONG AU-GO-GO painted in big Day-Glo letters on the turret growls up and stops twenty yards away. Painted on the tank hull is a squad of little yellow men in conical hats, neatly X'd out.

Behind the tank, enemy infantry is coming in on line and in force.

The grunts are wearing new jungle utilities, new canvas jungle boots, new web gear, new everything. They are legs, line doggies, Army pukes. It's as easy to tell Army grunts from field Marines as it is to tell a bag lady from a Paris model.

From behind a burning waterwheel a squad of Army grunts charges my position at high port. The squad sets up a perimeter protecting the tank while the Tank Commander gives them covering fire with the .50-caliber machine gun on top of the tank.

"BAN! BAN!" yells Commander Be Dan, and suddenly I am no longer alone in my heroic one-man unarmed defense of the Luu Dan factory.

Commander Be Dan yells in English: "Airborne armymen, airborne armymen, fuck you."

As the Army grunts exchange fire with the village Self-Defense Militia I crawl out of the way of some bullets and take cover behind a dead water bo.

The firefight gets hotter. Johnny Be Cool takes a grenade from the Easter basket, pulls the tin cap from the end of the bamboo handle, hooks his thumb into the comm wire pull ring, and throws, as hard as he can.

The grenade arcs out, string unraveling until it is taut and jerks a sparking pin from the grenade. Friction ignites the firing mechanism. After a couple of more seconds in flight the grenade explodes.

Johnny Be Cool throws homemade hand grenades, one after the other, by the numbers. About half of the grenades are duds.

The noise level gets scary and black powder smoke floats across the battlefield like ground fog. The stubby barrels of black M-16s spit sparks of gold fire as Johnny Be Cool throws hand grenades at the tank.

I peek over the warm carcass of the dead water bo. The tank looks undamaged.

I see a grunt. The grunt is trying to pull himself up by clawing at the steel treads of the tank, but he can't stand up. He looks down, then screams at the sight of his thigh bones jammed into the earth like white stakes.

Johnny Be Cool cocks his arm to throw his last grenade.

Bullets tattooing the air over my head and rocking the water bo carcass tell me it's time to change my position. As I stand up something hits me a glancing blow on the side of the head. I fall backward. The sky above me is filled with the black tumble of grenades. I watch the lazy flight of the smooth green ovals. Somebody is sowing hard noisy seeds of kiss-your-ass-goodbye.

Concussion sucks all the blood out of my face while a stone elephant sits down onto my head and black noise embeds hundreds of fragments of steel wire into my living flesh.

People are yelling at one another all around me. I don't know what's going on.

Somebody screams, "GUNS UP!" Then: "MEDIC UP!" Then: "PONCHO UP!"

Two brown balloons are having an argument right above my face. The argument is about some guy who is maybe dead or maybe not dead. I think maybe it's me.

They roll me onto a poncho and lift me up. They carry me into the village while I bounce around like a rag doll and wonder if I'm alive.

By the time we reach the village common, which is being used as a landing zone for the medevac choppers, I'm feeling better. That is, I'm feeling alive enough to be in pain. My face is throbbing like it has been string by yellow jacket wasps and I've got blood coming out of my nose and ears.

The brown balloons drop me onto the deck next to a platoon of wounded grunts.

Ten yards away, a big Sergeant, a white giant with a steel-gray crew cut and a bomb-shaped head, drags Johnny Be Cool kicking and screaming out of a drainage ditch by his ankles, and drops him on the deck. Somebody gives Johnny Be Cool a vertical butt-stroke to the head with a shotgun. Thirty yards away I can hear the crack of Johnny Be Cool's neck.

The big Sergeant bends down and lifts Johnny Be Cool's body, with both hands, the way you might pick up a seabag, and carries it to the edge of the common and throws it down a well.

Surrounded by chaos, I stand up. Some bad poison washes through my body. I stumble like a drunk, looking for a weapon.