In a bombed-out clearing the order comes back to pick up the pace. "Tien! Tien!"

We enter a smelly black-water swamp. The water is neck-deep and teeming with slithering invisible nameless things and leeches like big black garden slugs. We wade through slime, rifles held high, our sandaled feet straining for traction on an underwater bridge that can't be seen from the air. Some of the fighters giggle from the tickling on our legs as fish nibble at our scabs.

Then we're pushing through blue-green elephant grass ten feet high and as sharp as swords. The deck is a damp, spongy layer of decaving leaves. Creepers and vines grab at our legs and feet as though alive.

We move through the black jungle as silent as ghosts. We don't fight against the jungle the way foreigners do. The jungle is alive and the jungle never dies. The jungle is the one thing you can't beat, and the fighters know it.

To the Americans the jungle is a real and permanent enemy. The jungle is undisciplined. The jungle does not respond to subpoenas. The jungle definitely is not going along with the program.

The jungle grows and eats and fucks and dies and just goes on and on and on, getting bigger and meaner. The jungle is always hungry, always ready to meet new people and make new friends. The jungle is cruel, but fair.

To a place older than the dinosaurs come puny Americans wagging their fingers like sternlibrarians telling library patrons to keep quiet. Naughty jungle, say the white foreigners, and the jungle welcomes them in with big yellow flowers and funny brown monkeys.

When night comes, the jungle sucks their brains out, boils them alive, pulls out their hearts and eats them whole, then swallows up their pale pink bodies, because the jungle eats raw meat and shits dry bones and the bones fall apart and flesh scraps rot and the jungle stands like a black wall while the jungle eats more raw meat and shits out more dry bones and a billion insects are chewing and chewing until the jungle sounds like an eating machine bigger than the world and the green cannibal engine's moving parts are all lubricated by warm red blood and the jungle just goes on and on forever and it never stops feeding.

White Night. When we feel safe we light little perfume bottles full of kerosene. The perfume bottles have been fitted with wicks held in place by shell casings. As we move down the trail the golden dots are like a string of fireflies flying in formation.

A shadow on the trail! The order comes back: danger, halt.

"Dong Lai," says Commander Be Dan on his way up to the point to investigate.

After a infinite or so Commander Be Dan gives us permission to bunch up. We move toward the bad smell.

In the faint flickering light of our tiny lamps we can see the great head of a tiger, still fierce, still beautiful, with teeth as sharp as the point of a bayonet and thicker than a man's thumb. The eyes are gone. The orange-and-black-striped fur is charred and burned. The huge claws are dug deep into the earth. The powerful jaws are locked in a final tree-shaking roar of defiance.

We all crowd in for a quick look.

Even in death there is something royal about all eight-hundred-pound Bengal tiger. We can all see the tiger, awesome in his final moments, roaring, pouncing, clawing at the fire that falls from the sky, strong and beautiful in a burning jungle. We see the tiger, wet with fire, fighting fearlessly against a power it could never understand. Then the great beast shrivels to ash under a splash of napalm while jellied gasoline drips from tree branches like hot jam.

As we stare in respectful silence at the napalmed tiger, Commander Be Dan reaches down, grabs one of the big smooth ivory fangs, gives it a hard tug, says, "A good omen," and then moves out.

Without a word or a sound, each of the Chien Si touches the tiger's tooth in turn, then moves on.