You only live twice

摘要

A TWO-MINUTE pause on a mountain road is long enough for an American unit to be blown up. As Vollie, short for Volunteer, realises, a convoy's orders could be distilled to one simple instruction: keep going, even if you get a flat tyre. This mantra shapes his life: "if it obstructs the road you push it off the cliff, don't matter if your mother's inside." Vollie (a nickname from his childhood on a farm in Iowa) is one of three marines captured in the Cambodian jungle in Salva-tore Scibona's second novel. Their presence beyond the Vietnamese border is illegal, so they do not qualify as prisoners-of-war. In "the tunnel", as the men call their subterranean prison, Vollie survives by eating his wounded comrades' food. After his release and recovery in Saigon, he requests a "hard clearing", meaning his records and identity are erased.