I rejoin the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan, who have been watching me with interest.

As we walk away we can hear Supergrunt, the Seabee, giving an introductory lecture on the lore of whorehouses in Viet Nam: "These gook women are so small you have to screw them two at a time to get any satisfaction. And, yes, the rumors you have heard are true, gook pussies do, in fact, slant sideways. Half of these gook whores are serving officers in the Viet Cong. The other half have got TB. Just be sure you only fuck the ones that cough."

We walk into the village and everyone is excessively polite to me, the American officer. Everyone smiles. But it's a fuck-you-I-hope-you-die smile. If these people are whipped dogs, it's only on the outside. They're all Chien Si, every man, woman, and child. It's there in their faces, as plain as day. It's funny I never saw it before.

Our guide reappears. We follow her. She pauses at a hooch, then hurries away with her stage-prop laundry on her head, not looking back.

The Woodcutter, my bound prisoner, orders us into the hooch. Inside, I untwist the black comm wire from around the Woodcutter's wrists while silent women come in and serve us tea and rice cakes.

I am introduced to the confused women as Bao Chi, the American Front fighter.

Commander Be Dan changes out of his Arvin Ranger outfit and back into his black pajamas and hurries off on some urgent errand.

The Woodcutter and I squat on the dirt floor, silently sipping our tea.

Shadows come with the night. The shadows move in and out of the small hooch. There are so many of them; they must be waiting for their turns outside. They come to talk to the Woodcutter. Their voices are like the soft rippling of creek water. The Woodcutter speaks to each applicant softly, politely, with endless patience, sometimes rubbing his wrists, sometimes pausing to eat a rice cake.

A slender teenaged girl brings us red rice and fish.

We eat. The girl squats in front of me and stares. As the famous Chien Si My, I am becoming just another jaded celebrity. Everywhere I go, I have my fans. But there's something very unusual about this girl. She has a powerful presence.

It's dark in the hooch, so I can only scan the girl with my night vision. She is very beautiful. Her hair is cut as short as a man's. She is wearing a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and red rubber sandals. In a shoulder holster the girl is packing a nickel-plated snub-nosed .38-caliber pistol. Around her neck hangs a braided string necklace with a white jade Buddha and a gold chain strung with maybe fifty dogtags.

The girl stares at me, silent, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. She holds her head first this way, then that way, checking me out from every angle. She must be some kind of groupie. Boy, I hope so!

An electric chill grips my stomach as I sense that the girl is blind. She can't see me, but she knows a white foreigner when she smells one, like the blind barge man. This beautiful woman is sitting here, calm and serene, thinking up extrapainful ways in which to torture me to death.

The shadows move. Someone lights a kerosene lantern.

The new light scares a gecko. The brown lizard doubletimes upside down along the thatched roof.

The Woodcutter says, "Bao Chi, I wish to introduce you to Miss Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region. We are here in obedience to her orders."

Tiger Eye says, "I have heard of you, Bao Chi. You are becoming a legend to my people." Then Tiger Eye says to me in English: "Welcome to my country."

I say, "Thank you, Comrade General."

Tiger Eye leans forward. In the lantern light I can see her face. She is not a teenager. She's probably in her early thirties; with Asians it's always hard to say for sure.

The Comrade General pulls a black eyepatch over her face and onto her right eye. She says, "You. You. Boom-boom picture you? You buy. You. You buy."

Her performance makes her laugh merrily. She is the dream girl who sells dirty books out of her bra. She says, "I am a very good actress, Bao Chi. Oui? Don't you think so?" And she laughs again.

I laugh too.

I pull my dogtags up over my head and offer them to Tiger Eye in the polite way, with both hands.

Tiger Eye pulls off her eyepatch and leans forward again into the light so that I can slip the beaded chain over her head. I see something that makes me hesitate.

Tiger Eye is not blind, but she has lost her right eye. The eye socket now holds a marble as big as one of the Woodcutter's Ping-Pong balls. When I was a kid we called these oversized marbles "jug rollers." And we called this type of marble, crystal clear except for a single slash of yellow in the center, a "cat's eye."

Tiger Eye accepts my dogtags bashfully, smiling and blushing until I think she's going to cry. She lifts a braided black string necklace from around her neck. On the string hangs a small white jade figure of the Buddha. She places the loop of string over my head.

Then the Commander of the Western Region takes my right hand between her two hands and lifts the three hands between us. We sit like that, saying nothing, facing each other across the kerosene lamp and a blackened brass teapot.

The Woodcutter smokes his pipe. He looks at us without expression and nods his approval.

Midnight. Now all of the horny soldiers and Marines have retreated behind their barbed wire and are hunkered down in their firebases and landing zones, safe behind sandbagged walls and Claymore mines and interlocking fields of fire.