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one English word he knew.
    From behind a rock, the American pilot stood up and cautiously walked toward my father. Dried blood covered the side of his face, but none of his injuries appeared to be life threatening.
    â€œOthers?” one of the men in the platoon asked.
    â€œNo, no others,” the pilot replied. “They are all dead.”
    My father’s men didn’t speak much English, but they understood the word “dead.”
    â€œQuickly, come with us,” my father said in Hmong and motioned for the pilot to follow them. The men in the platoon surrounded the pilot like Secret Service agents around the president as they hiked back through the maze of booby traps and land mines toward their camp.
    As soon as they arrived, a helicopter touched down at camp. They shoved the pilot inside, closed the door, and watched the helicopter fly him away to safety. My father never learned the pilot’s name, and few records were officially kept of such rescue operations, but one thing was certain: the pilot was safe.
    My father was on to his next mission.
    Even with all that my father went through in the war, dlaim ntawv , it was not his destiny to die. After six years of active service, most of which were spent behind enemy lines, my father put in a request for discharge.
    During one of his sporadic leaves, he’d married my mother. It was, like most Hmong marriages, arranged by their two families. My grandmother had selected my mother for my father. The couple had grown up in the same village, yet my father had never thought of marrying her. After all, she was seven years younger. However, the families had other ideas. My grandmother paid the dowry to my mother’s parents, and the marriage was sealed. By the time my father requested a discharge, my oldest brother had been born.
    At first, needing every able-bodied Hmong male to fight, General Vang Pao denied my father’s request. Six months later, my uncle, who’d now been promoted to the rank of captain, convinced his superior officer to grant my father’s request. It didn’t hurt that my mother and the commanding officer were related.
    Not long afterward, I came along.
    My father remained a soldier even though he wasn’t with his platoon any longer. Our village was 40 miles from the front lines, and my father was in charge of its defense.
    For as far back as I can remember, I heard cannons and bombs and gunfire. Some nights, the blasts sounded as if they were directly outside our house, even though they were miles away. I would lie awake, fearing the moment the Communist soldiers would storm our village and kill us all.
    From a very young age, I knew what they’d done to other villages. I’d overheard my father’s stories of what he’d seen whenhis platoon had come upon a Lao village after the Communists had come through. I didn’t know exactly what the word “rape” meant, but I knew it was a very bad thing the Communists did to the women of the villages they overran. And I heard how babies were bludgeoned, children’s abdomens were split open, and men were forced to watch their families suffer before being killed themselves in the most gruesome ways.
    As our uncle and father had, my brother and I made our own pact. If the Communists invaded our village, Xay and I would fight together until the very end. We may have been little boys, but that didn’t stop us from practicing the kung fu moves we were determined to pull on any soldier foolish enough to threaten us. We practiced punching and kicking and screaming. We joked about how, if that didn’t work, we’d shoot them down with our slingshots, like David against Goliath.
    I know my father must have seen his two sons jumping around like Jackie Chan, but he never laughed at us. Instead, he took us into the jungle on hunting trips. There, he taught us which plants were edible and which were poisonous, how to trap small animals, and all of