HIS POOR FATHER WAS RIGHT, of course: he should never have gone to war. For a long time after Jackie’s death, Hector’s mother could not speak to him for his leaving his father that night, could hardly even look at him, and though she eventually showed love for him again, for the quiet years between Hiroshima and the surprise attack by Communists on a hitherto unknown city called Seoul, Hector was hoping for another war to break out. He sought a war not for the sake of fighting or killing anyone or defending his country, but for the selfish cause of punishing himself, and so proving his father right.

How easily his wish was granted. It was a brief incident, involving a prisoner, that changed everything, a situation probably not too distinctive or unusual. But it would hold a firm place in his memory. It was in his first tour of duty, early spring, 1951. They were in the foothills of the Taebaek Mountains, 150 kilometers northeast of Seoul. After the chaotic opening to the war, the initial Communist invasion, and the headlong ROK retreat to the very southern tip of the peninsula, and then the breakneck American counteroffensive pushing back all the way north to the Yalu River, which was the border with China, both sides were now engaged in what was in essence trench warfare, if in the hills. The struggle was over any given (and supposedly) strategic section of high ground, the shifting of territory measured in hundreds of meters, each hill identified by only a number (and if bloody enough, eventually a nickname). The fighting was mostly night attacks, with small-scale raids by American and ROK units, and then operations by the Communists, who were now almost all Chinese, regulars in the People’s Army, attacking often in mass, near-suicidal, waves, their aim to intimidate and overwhelm with seemingly inexhaustible numbers.

The prisoner was one of these. He was just a boy, in fact, fourteen or fifteen years old at most, his round moonface sprouted with only a few bristles of hair on his upper lip, his chin. Hector’s platoon had taken him prisoner after repelling an attack the night before, when the whole facing hillside cranked alive before dawn with rattles and whistles and clanging cowbells and the rabid shrieks of several thousand soldiers rushing forward in a mad pell-mell push, their burp guns alive, the sound of their feet on the dry snow like locusts devouring a field of corn. Flares were shot to illuminate the battleground, revealing that perhaps only half of the enemy was actually armed with rifles, the others bearing bayonets and sticks and even toy drums like the kind given away as prizes at fairs, the ten-cent variety with two strings with balls on the ends that one rotated to make a noise.

Their first wave overwhelmed all the forward foxholes but was cut down before it breached the main line; the next ones were successively less effective, and by the fourth wave the Chinese hardly made any noise on attacking and quickly retreated after a barrage of American fire. It was all over after that. By daybreak there were many hundreds of bodies marking the hillside, mostly Chinese, the most unsettling thing being that a number of the American soldiers in the forward foxholes were missing, only the dead ones left to be retrieved. The survivors had been spirited away as prisoners by the retreating swarm to a fate that was known among the men (via report and rumor and fearful imaginings) to feature unspeakable tortures and deprivations and a life sentence of hard labor somewhere deep in the mines of China.

It was under this mind-set that the boy soldier had been taken prisoner by others in Hector’s unit. Hector came upon them soon after he was captured. The boy was short, five foot four or so, and stalk-thin, not even a hundred pounds in his winter uniform, which had been stuffed tight with crumpled newspaper for insulation, ripped canvas tennis shoes on his sockless feet. He’d been found playing dead at the bottom of a foxhole and was beaten up badly by them, given an ugly shiner and a bloody nose and lip. One of his shoulders was dislocated. He had been found with a small brass horn, which a soldier named Zelenko now held in his gloved hand. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Bridger, was off being briefed at the field HQ. Zelenko and his buddies would have likely executed the prisoner right then, but an officer from another unit happened by and on seeing his condition reminded them that all prisoners were to be immediately processed for interrogation. They assented, but after the officer left, Zelenko said they should keep him a bit before transferring him up to field command; he was their first prisoner, after all. There were a handful of grunts from the platoon present, including Hector, who was off sitting on the icy ridge of the next foxhole. He disliked Zelenko, who was also from a small town in upstate New York, a carrot-haired loudmouth who was a dependable soldier but who had begun to subtly bully their tentative college-man lieutenant to send certain squads of men-Hector among them-on the night patrols. Hector didn’t mind the more dangerous missions, for someone had to go and he’d begun to accept that by fate or nature he was strangely, miraculously, impervious, but he didn’t like the idea that Zelenko’s whim should determine anyone else’s destiny.

With another soldier holding a rifle on the prisoner, Zelenko stepped up from behind him and placed the horn’s end right next to his ear and blew as hard as he could on it. The prisoner dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot in the temple, screaming and holding his ear.

“That’s for keeping us up every night with that crazy chink music,” Zelenko said, he himself wincing from the sharp blast. The others were wide-eyed, chuckling. The Chinese often played an eerie, atonal operatic music as well as a suite of popular Western songs and slick propaganda through the night on loudspeakers. The boy was crying silently now with his mouth agape, squeezing on his ear. He was in terrible pain. Zelenko pulled the boy back up on his feet. He was covering his ear, but Zelenko slapped his hand away.

“You’d think all these lousy chinks would be half deaf already,” Zelenko said, and then blew the horn hard into the same ear. “And that’s for Gomez.”

Gomez was his buddy, killed a week before. They’d found his body dumped on the bank of a frozen stream. He’d been tortured and then shot in the back of the head. Zelenko blew again. The boy crumpled to his knees, crying miserably, and Zelenko had his buddy, Morra, wire together his hands behind him so he couldn’t shield himself. Then he blew the horn again. He did it three more times, and with such vehemence that his face grew flushed, as if he’d inflated a roomful of party balloons. But on the last one the boy hardly flinched. The ear was dead. This angered Zelenko, and he struck the boy sharply with his pistol. The boy fell like a tablet of stone. Fresh blood pocked the snow beside his head where he lay. His narrow eyes were open, his lips moving slowly and mechanically but making no sound. Zelenko was leaning over him with the horn to start on the other side, balling his chewing gum to plug his own ears, when Hector suddenly rushed him, knocking him over, sending him sliding on his back a dozen feet down the hill.

“What the fuck!” Zelenko cried.

Morra jumped him and Hector punched him once, hard, in the kidney, and the man fell to the ground. The others stood aside as Hector lifted the prisoner. The platoon knew him to be unhesitating in battle, vigilant and tireless, never cowed under fire, and no one made any move to stop him. He could lead a squad or even the platoon, if he weren’t so laconic. The boy groaned heavily when Hector slung him over his shoulder, and then lost consciousness. Hector carried him up the path that curled around the hill to the reverse slope, where the field HQ and mobile hospital were set up. Zelenko cursed at him, shouting that he was a stupid mick, a dirty queer, a chink lover, but Hector ignored him.