"La mort est une grande dame," said the old Khmer as he fingered the amulet about his neck. Death is a lady. He was looking at me, but I didn't say much, just grunted something or other, and so he went back to working the action of his old M-1 carbine. Why did he still carry that thing? It was getting harder and harder to get ammo for it. All the other Khmers were enamored of their mattel M-16-s but he "clung to the old ways". Anyway, the weapon had jammed on him during the last assault, and he'd been royally pissed about that; he didn't want any repeat performances when we got up to go again, so now he was spending his time tearing it apart and reassembling it, tearing it apart and reassembling it, over and over.

We were, for the moment, all strung out along the edge of a thin, scraggly tree line. Several hundred yards in front of us, across the dry rice paddies, was another such tree line. It would be our next objective. We'd been playing "touch and go" with the KR for several days like this, from one tree line to the next, unable to really "close with and engage". I didn't like it: I felt they were trying to draw us into something .....

We rested. We waited for the order from "higher" to move out again. Until then, everyone sought out whatever relief was possible in the sparse shade, and occupied themselves as they best saw fit. I looked at my companion -- he and I ran the platoon; the FANK lieutenant was worthless, wasn't even along on this op -- old and wizened, in contrast to the other men/boys (and who was I to talk? how old was *I* ? 22? 23?), he looked like he'd run road-guard for the 3 Wise Men. Been around a l o n g , l-o-n-g time. Satisfied at last with his weapon, he rested it across his knees and leaned wearily back against one of the trees. I turned my head and looked out over the scorched fields; the massive glaring white layered cotton-puff-ball clouds were barely moving against the burning blue sky. Cambodian skies .....

Five minutes passed in silence, each of us in his own world. I was meditatively sipping some tepid brown water when he began to speak:

"Je meurs aujourd'hui, mon lieutenant."	("I die today.")
"Non, je ne pense pas."	("I don't think so.")
"Si, si."	("Oh yes.")

At that moment two others came by, dragging a dead Khmer Rouge. One had the legs, the other was gripping an arm.

Time dragged on and on, measured in endless rivulets of sweat. I watched them drip off the end of my chin, onto my fatigue shirt, wet onto more wet.

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Later that day, the shit did hit the fan. Somehow, though, we ended up with three prisoners. *Very* unusual. But they wouldn't last long --- they didn't want to talk, and there were old scores to settle, slowly, methodically, with sharp knives. "Death ain't gonna be no 'Grande Dame' for them," I thought. This made me suddenly wonder where the Old Sergeant had gotten to. I couldn't remember seeing him since about halfway through the last assault. Eventually I found his body, near a small clump of trees. I dragged it to where we'd collected the others. I sat down next to him and lit a cigarette. I drew heavily on it, looked at him, and said, "So death is a lady, huh? What the hell is that supposed to mean?" But of course, by then, it was way too late for those kinds of questions.