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    By all accounts, this was just the place for real-life experience. Everyone knew that war made a man out of a boy. Always had.
    The jetliner thudded down hard on the Saigon runway and the planeload of fresh-faced teenagers jostled and joked toward the exit. They took care, however, not to press too near the handful of men in the front seats who were returning to this place from medical or home leave, returning warriors in well-worn uniforms with medal ribbons on them, who ignored the boys’ presence as completely as they had during the flight.
    The warriors moved off, leaving the stewardess at the door to wish each new boy well, saying that she’d see them in a year. So eager were they all to see what lay on the other side of the exit door, not one of them looked past the short skirt and sexy makeup to notice that she did not meet their eyes when she said her cheery good-byes.
    At the door, the heat slammed into them as if they had stepped into the world’s largest steam bath, followed closely by the ungodly stench, an oily burning shit-smell that instantly made the eyes stream with disbelief. Allen gagged, swore, and the boy behind him nudged his arm to continue down the flight of steps. At the bottom, the heat beating off the softened tarmac was overwhelming, and as Allen shouldered his duffel and joined the olive-green ant-stream flowing in the direction of the nearest shade, he wondered, for the first time, what the hell he was doing here.
    The shadow of the metal-roofed shed made not the slightest difference to the heat; if anything, enclosing the beast made it seem all the more stifling. When Allen’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he saw that the shed was already occupied by a crowd of dirty, motionless figures—soldiers, clearly, and all of them headed out, but they had none of the high spirits he would have expected from a load of men about to board a plane bound for soft beds and American hamburgers. Even those without bandages or crutches looked severely wounded, and all the eyes watched the scrubbed newcomers with a wariness beyond cynicism. One man seemed to meet and hold Allen’s gaze, but Allen didn’t think the man knew he was there.
    The hot day gave an abrupt shiver, reminding Allen of stepping into the meat locker at the supermarket he’d worked in last summer; he looked away, and made an uneasy joke with the guy next to him.
    A reassuringly abusive sergeant finally appeared to scream them onto a series of ancient Army buses with heavy wire screens instead of glass in the windows. Allen dropped to a worn bench beside his seatmate of the flight out, a short, sturdy PFC named Ricardo Flores. They’d been in basic together, where Allen had taken one look at those green eyes in the brown face and remembered him from high school wrestling matches—although they had never gone up against each other, Flores being a bantam and Allen at the time hovering on the edge of heavyweight. As a kid and in basic, Ricardo had been known as Flowers. On the plane, he’d been dubbed Lucy—or rather, “Loo-Si!”—and it looked like it was going to stick.
    â€œYou should’ve told them your name was Rick, not Ricardo,” Allen said now, as if they’d been discussing the topic, which they hadn’t.
    â€œDon’t matter none, just so I don’t have to wear the lipstick.”
    â€œWhy do you suppose they put wire on the windows?” Allen wondered aloud, when the bus had rumbled into life and driven away from the resultant diesel cloud. “They think we came all this way just to jump out and go AWOL on the way in from the airstrip?”
    â€œJeez, look at them girls—jumping out’s not such a bad idea.” Flores stood to peer through the mesh at the two slim, swaying figures in long pale dresses and wide-brimmed hats, walking the garbage-strewn roadside in front of a row of shacks made of cardboard and