Belka, Why Don't You Bark

1963–1989

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

Everywhere. You scattered. You increased without limit. Naturally, some of you bore puppies and some didn’t. Bloodlines extended, ended, became intricately intertwined. Thus were you born, one dog at a time, and thus did you die. One dog at a time. Your lives had limits. Your family trees, however, kept growing.

It had begun on the western tip of the Aleutian Islands, and it continued.

All across the globe.

You would never go extinct.

But you were toyed with, exploited. Why? Because this was the twentieth century. A century of war. A century, too, of military dogs.

Two great wars were fought during the twentieth century on the chessboard of the world. In the first half of the century, that is. In the second half, two more wars were fought, both alike in many respects. Both were limited wars. Both were offshoots of the Cold War, and both were played out in Asian nations. In the first, American soldiers shed their blood; in the second, Soviet soldiers shed theirs. The first unfolded in Southeast Asia; the second in Central Asia.

One war on the Indochinese peninsula, one war in Afghanistan.

Each lasted a decade.

America first sent combat forces into Vietnam on March 8, 1965. The Vietnam War lasted until 1975.

The Soviet Union sent its forces across the border into Afghanistan on December 25, 1979. The Soviet-Afghan War lasted until 1989.

The Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. A quagmire for each nation. Each a product of the Cold War, each a decade long from the point of direct intervention to the end. Similar indeed. Dogs, dogs, how you were toyed with, exploited, in the name of these two catastrophes! And it wasn’t only the United States and the USSR that left their mark on your family trees. It wasn’t only these two nations that pruned and spliced, made your destiny grow.

There was also China.

Red China, the third player.

1963. Mao Zedong despised Khrushchev.

At that time, in that year, every dog in the PLA Military Dog Platoon was descended from Jubilee. The platoon was not permanently stationed in any military region; it was assigned instead to the highly mobile field army—the army’s main force, which went wherever strategy demanded.

1963. America was operating under a misapprehension. In its eyes, the globe was still a page in a coloring book that two ideologies were rushing to fill in. It was, so to speak, a geographical contest. Needless to say, communist states were red. This much of the American interpretation was correct. Even America wasn’t always wrong. And yet…and yet…it had it wrong. America had failed to understand that the red patches in the book were by no means all the same tint of red. Or perhaps the Americans understood that fact but decided to ignore it, intentionally chose to be color blind and narrow-minded. America’s political decisions were all based in a sweeping, simplistic judgment that red is red, even when the crayons were, in reality, of quite different hue.

1963. The USSR and China were both red, but those two reds were nothing at all alike in brightness or saturation. America’s decision to overlook that distinction would prove politically fatal.

But America clung to that fatal vision.

What were the roots of this altogether inflexible approach? It began in February 1950, with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. At this point, America decided that Red China was essentially a satellite of the Soviet Union, and it adhered steadfastly to this view. As part of its anticommunist stance, it continued to treat Chiang Kai-shek–led Taiwan—which is to say the Kuomintang and the Republic of China—as China’s true representative. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance had been signed, however, by Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Mao had trusted Stalin. But Mao did not trust Khrushchev, who had taken over after Stalin and criticized Stalin at the Party Congress in 1956.

Here, in a nutshell, were the dynamics of the Sino-Soviet opposition. America didn’t recognize this, though. America failed to see that it all hinged on the personal relationship between Mao and Khrushchev. This was the season of Mao’s hatred of Khrushchev. Khrushchev, for his part, was wary of Mao. History is moved, rolled this way and that, so simply. The twentieth century was a pawn. As were the dogs.

America had succumbed to narrow-mindedness. America was color blind. In 1963, China was anything but a satellite of the Soviet Union, but America didn’t see that.

Perhaps it would have, had it lowered its gaze to the level of the dogs. Yes, the dogs. The PLA Military Dog Platoon. If America had paid attention to that platoon, it would have seen that China and the Soviet Union were gradually drifting apart.

It was unmistakable.

First there was the Korean War. China dispatched the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. This was in October 1950, eight months after the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. Chinese forces had some military backing from the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the poverty of their munitions, and during the Fourth and Fifth Campaigns they were repeatedly overwhelmed by the superior power of the UN forces, which had largely been provided by the American military. The UN forces’ “superior power” came from the fact that they had modern weaponry, modern military strategy. Up to this point, the Chinese had relied on human-wave tactics and had been trained to fight guerrilla wars; now they had to confront the inadequacy of these techniques for an army dedicated to national defense. It took five million soldiers deployed to the Korean Peninsula to learn this lesson. Then, in July 1953, a truce was called. Predictably, the Chinese military took advantage of this opportunity to shift its strategy, to begin preparing its troops to fight a modern war.

And the dogs?

Three had been captured and incorporated into the PLA. Jubilee was the only bitch. The two males were News News (aka E Venture) and Ogre. All three had formerly been American dogs, but now they were Chinese. Purebred German shepherds. When Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the military had no military dogs. Now, in the wake of the Korean War, it had become focused on “modernization.” Twentieth-century war. War in a century of war. The modern military dog was the symbol of it all.

Dogs on the front lines.

So China created its Military Dog Platoon. First the American dogs were taken as prisoner-dogs-of-war on the battlefields of the Korean Peninsula. Then, after the fighting ended, these three elite supporting combatants were given Chinese citizenship, as it were. They were incorporated into the PLA’s first military dog platoon, right from the get-go. All three: Jubilee, News News (E Venture), and Ogre. Making a platoon of thirty-two dogs. At that time, in 1953, China was still on good terms with the USSR, so the platoon was based largely on the Soviet model. Most of the dogs were Russian laikas. Modern military dogs had first entered Soviet military history, incidentally, as early as the 1920s. The military had dogs, that is, even before the USSR itself existed. By the time the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany started on June 22, 1941—a Sunday—ten thousand military dogs had been trained. And so the PLA decided to follow the Soviet model. Military officials contacted the Central Military School of Working Dogs in Moscow and received a gift of twenty-nine Russian laikas. This was one of the many ways in which the Soviet Union provided China with military support.

In this sense, the composition of China’s first military dog platoon, with its heavy slant to the East—twenty-nine Russian laikas and only three German shepherds—symbolized the Sino-Soviet honeymoon. Alternatively, you might say the symbolism lay in the special weight China’s military placed on Russian history. The three German shepherds, Jubilee, News News (E Venture), and Ogre, were valued as extraordinarily capable dogs—the most modern of the modern—but they were excluded from the breeding program.

What happened, as a result, to the dogs?

In the winter of 1953, the males were castrated. The bitch was carefully kept away from any lusty males in the platoon.

The bitch. That means you, Jubilee.

You were kept away from the males, but still you harbored the potential for growth. There were times when you hungered for a male. But you weren’t allowed to mate. When you let your eagerness show too long, they whipped you. No sex for you, Yankee dog!

This situation continued until 1956. Then, in February, first secretary of the Communist Party Khrushchev delivered his speech “The Personality Cult and its Consequences” in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was a “secret speech” in which he presented a thorough critique of Stalin. He had given no indication that anything like this was in the wings. The other communist nations could have been consulted, but they were not. China, above all, had been ignored. The content of the speech became public almost immediately, and when Mao learned the details, he was dumbstruck. What! Stalin…a despot?

What are we Chinese supposed to do when Khrushchev takes a stance like that, when we’ve been working so hard to realize an ideal state modeled on Stalin’s USSR?

Hey, Khrushchev! Hey, Nikita…Nikita Sergeyevich!

We’ve got everyone worshiping Chairman Mao over here! Do you realize the mess you’re causing?

And so, starting in 1956, signs of a mutual antagonism between Mao and Khrushchev began to appear. The effects of this friction were reflected on the Chinese side in two areas of its military strategy: its nuclear policy and its dogs. First, the dogs. That means you, Jubilee. At last you were released from the prohibition on mating. Sex was fine now, you were told that summer. No longer, it was decided, would the PLA Military Dog Platoon be based exclusively on the Eastern model, in terms of its structure or future breeding plans.

It was German shepherd season now.

Twenty-two males were purchased, all purebred German shepherds, all bursting with youth, and you, the only bitch in the platoon, became the object of their affection. On the grounds of the camp. They had decided to make the most of your lineage as an American elite.

And you, Jubilee—you were hungry.

Who were you, after all? Do you remember? Do you recall, for instance, your sister? Sumer was her name. You were separated six months after you were born. Sumer hadn’t made it as a military dog; she was recognized, instead, for the perfect beauty of her form and bought by a breeder. She entered the dog-show world. She remained in America, on the mainland. She gave birth to any number of puppies and was eventually subjected to a peculiar fate. She suckled seven pups that were not her own. And what about you?

ME?

You were across the Pacific. You had not participated in planned breeding. You yearned to mate but weren’t allowed. You wanted to get pregnant, but that was forbidden. You understand what that means? You were starved for a male. You: Jubilee.

ME?

Yes, you.

Woof! you barked.

You didn’t get pregnant in 1956. You didn’t go into heat in spring 1957. You were getting old, so they fed you specially prepared food. Your coat regained its youthful shine. But still you didn’t get pregnant. They prepared traditional Chinese medicines to make you go into heat. They even fed you human milk. Multiply, multiply! But summer came, and still there was no sign that you were pregnant. Then it was autumn. November. Early in the month, something happened. You raised your head to the heavens. You didn’t know why, it was just an impulse that came over you. SOMEONE’S LOOKING AT ME, FROM ABOVE. IT’S A DOG, A DOG’S GAZE. You lifted your head and peered up into the vastness of the sky.

You thought you had seen a star there, shooting by.

Not falling, but shooting.

You realized how starved you were. Your procreational abilities came one hundred percent back on track. They were turbo-charged. And you gave birth, Jubilee, in 1958—not once, but twice. You bore fifteen puppies in total. You gave birth twice more in 1959. Twelve more puppies. Then, in 1960, you managed to give birth one last time in what could only be considered a super-advanced-age pregnancy. At the same time, in the vast lands up north, on the same continent—in another communist state by the name of the USSR—a wolfdog named Anubis with an erection strong beyond his years kept forcing it into bitches, planting his seed. He was a father beyond his years. You, Jubilee, were a mother beyond your years. This time you gave birth to four puppies. When all was said and done you had brought thirty-one puppies into the world.

In winter 1958, your first litter gave birth to another generation.

In spring 1959, your second litter gave birth to another generation.

By autumn 1959, the children of the dogs in your first litter were themselves getting it on. Their numbers increased. Your bloodline thrived. And over time your descendants proved the superiority of your lineage, its wonderfully modern superiority, and they were urged, males and bitches both, to get raunchy. Finally, in 1963, the day came when the entire platoon was composed of dogs belonging to your family tree. Their number: 801.

And how was Mao’s China doing?

It becomes necessary to touch on the nuclear issue. China’s strategic vision required that it possess nuclear capability. The decision had been made. This was a perfectly natural stance for Red China to take; it was, after all, the third player in the game, along with America and the Soviet Union. In 1958, a telling incident took place: the so-called “Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.” In August, China, under Mao’s direction, initiated a large-scale shelling of the small island Quemoy that belonged to Taiwan. Quemoy was located in Amoy Bay, off the coast of Fujian Province, and the Kuomintang had stationed members of its regular army there. Chiang Kai-shek’s forces intended to use it as the base for their counteroffensive against China. At the time, the only China America recognized as a state was the Republic of China on Taiwan, led by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and the Kuomintang government. Obviously America couldn’t allow this reckless violence. Mao’s China was red. If Red China were to expand, red patches would start bleeding onto the rest of the Asian page in that ideological coloring book. Warning! Beware of Mao Zedong! The situation became critical. From summer to autumn, the United States considered the possibility of using nuclear weapons. The American military had spread nuclear arms across the entire Pacific. Bases on Guam, Okinawa, and Taiwan had been outfitted with secure installations to handle them. All right, then, why don’t we use these things? To contain Maoist China! America had boiled the complex situation down to a simplistic vision of “communism vs. capitalism,” and if nuclear weapons were what it would take, well, gosh darn it America was ready to do it. Mao, on the other hand, had summed up the situation in his own simplistic way: “Chinese socialism vs. American imperialism.”

That, basically, was how Sino-American relations stood.

In the end, actual conflict was avoided. But Mao had learned his lesson: fight nuclear with nuclear. There was simply no other way to push back against the American menace. And there was more. In an earlier age, when China had been on good terms with the USSR, it had been solidly protected by the Soviet Union’s “nuclear umbrella.” Yes—it had been a satellite nation. But now?

Can’t rely on ’em, Mao thought.

In fact, my dear Khrushchev, Mao thought. Nikita…your nuclear bombs are a menace from behind!

Khrushchev, for his part, wondered what Mao was getting all worked up about.

What’ll you do if nuclear war actually breaks out? What then? Man, this guy’s unbelievable. Here I am blahblahblahing about “US-USSR cooperation” to make sure we don’t end up stumbling into a full-scale war, and look at you. Idiot.

Look, Khrushchev thought—though he never voiced his thoughts. Look. Just leave world domination to us and the Americans. You can just chill, okay?

Khrushchev may not have said anything, but his actions showed very clearly what he was thinking. How wary he was of Mao. As a matter of fact, in 1956, China had already made up its mind to develop nuclear weapons. In 1957, the Soviet Union had at least outwardly projected a willingness to support China’s nuclear program by signing the “Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technology for National Defense.” But the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis had made Khrushchev apprehensive about Mao. I mean, look at this guy, he’s actually doing this stuff! It’s dangerous. In 1959, Khrushchev scrapped the Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technology for National Defense. The next year, he recalled the USSR’s nuclear specialists from China.

He completely cut off all nuclear technological support. If that led to a split between China and the Soviet Union, well, so be it. You can’t have everything.

Sorry, Mao.

Then, in 1963, something happened that brought about a definitive change in the situation. Astonishingly, the three nuclear powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. The point of this action was to impress upon the rest of the world that that was it, no one else was going to get these things. And that was the last straw. Mao blew his top. China reacted by releasing a statement explicitly criticizing the Soviet state.

1964.

Two pieces of good news made China giddy. First, on October 14, Khrushchev was ousted. Mao howled with glee. Hah, serves you right, Nikita! Second, just two days later, on October 16, China’s first nuclear test was a success. We did this on our own! Mao cried. Eat our dust, losers!

Now China was a superpower too.

As soon as Mao’s relationship with Khrushchev came to an end—and as fraught as it was, it was still a relationship—he formed another, and this one, too, moved history. Mao developed a personal connection with Ho Chi Minh. This one wasn’t bad. Mao had been Ho’s only supporter during the First Indochina War, when Vietnam, which is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, founded in 1945, battled for its independence from France. “Down with Imperialism!” Red China shouted, and made the Vietnamese army a present of 160,000 small arms. It trained some fifteen thousand Vietnamese to fight, turning them into professional guerrillas. It did Ho some other favors too. Ho remained grateful for this until the end of his life. He continued throughout to show his respect for Mao.

Naturally, the warm personal bond between these men affected Sino-Vietnamese relations, and this in turn had an effect on Sino-American and Sino-Soviet relations.

So what happened?

The chaos of the Vietnam War, aka the Second Indochina War.

Yes, at last we come to the Vietnam War. The infamous Vietnam War. A limited war fought on the Indochina peninsula: America’s quagmire. In 1964, John F. Kennedy was no longer the American president. He had been assassinated in Texas on November 22 of the previous year, almost a year before Khrushchev exited the stage. There was a crack, turbulence in the air, and he was gone from the world. Kennedy had been disinclined to get into a full-scale war, but not Johnson. Not Lyndon B. Johnson, former thirty-seventh vice president of the United States, now thirty-sixth president of the United States. On August 2, the Tonkin Gulf Incident took place. An American destroyer, claiming to have been attacked by the North Vietnamese Navy, which was part of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s military and was thus led by Ho Chi Minh, conducted a retaliatory strike. In fact, the original attack had been fabricated by the Americans.

1965. On February 7, the American military began bombing North Vietnam. As the bombing continued, the targets moved progressively farther and farther north…

So what happened?

Naturally, Mao-led China grew suspicious. What, ultimately, was America’s goal?

Where did it really want to end up?

What’s just above Vietnam to the north?

We are.

That was it. Mao decided that America was taking aim at China. American encirclement all over again. Ho sent out the SOS. On March 22, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Vietcong—short for Vietnamese Communists—announced that it was “prepared to accept aid from its friends around the world.”

Mao was Ho’s friend.

And so the policy of “support Vietnam, resist America” was established. Mao had made up his mind. We’ll push back against America’s war of imperialist aggression, put people on the ground in support of North Vietnam. Some thirty-five hundred US Marines had begun landing near Da Nang on March 8, so the land war was already under way. They had moved ahead into “direct intervention.” Warning! they yelled in Beijing. Beware of the US! This war could easily expand into mainland China!

Send in the PLA!

And so it happened. On June 9, 1965, a substantial support force from China crossed the border. The soldiers marched through Friendship Pass onto the Indochina peninsula and into Ho’s Vietnam. Only the main forces of the People’s Liberation Army, the true elites, had been called to serve. Prior to deployment, they underwent two months of special training.

These efforts to support Vietnam were conducted in total secrecy. Still, by the second half of 1965, more than a hundred thousand troops had been shipped off to the peninsula to “support Vietnam, resist America.”

Humans. And dogs too. Seventy-five dogs from the Military Dog Platoon had been sent over the border as an extremely modern and practical fighting force. All were descended from Jubilee. They moved south, down the peninsula.

Southward…southward…

Had America noticed?

Of course. The US had, by and large, figured out what was happening. It was the leading power in the West, and it had the best, maybe the second best, information-gathering network in the world. But the US kept silent. Johnson’s administration had learned of China’s covert intervention in the conflict, but it kept this knowledge secret. Because it was kind of at a loss. What the hell is China doing? it wondered. Are they trying to turn our limited war into a total war? They seem to see things sort of differently from Moscow, but…is this, like, a trap or something? Washington, in other words, was stymied by its own insistence on viewing two different shades of red, Soviet and Chinese, as though they were the same. And its provisional solution to the problem was to battle secrecy with more secrecy. As long as both sides didn’t make what was happening public, China and the US wouldn’t yet be at war.

The important thing, Washington decided, was to avoid direct confrontation.

The Indochina peninsula was split into North and South. The line was drawn at the seventeenth parallel north, along a buffer zone created by the Geneva Accords, which had ended the First Indochina War in 1954. This region was known as the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. In 1967, Quang Tri Province, which abutted the DMZ on the south, was the scene of a series of ferocious battles between the American military and the joint forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong.

In summer, the direct confrontation with China that the US had been trying to avoid finally broke out in Quang Tri.

The participants in the battle were not human.

You were the soldiers.

Yes, you were the ones battling it out. Dogs vs. dogs.

Among the American dogs who came to Vietnam, shipped over from mainland America, was one named DED. In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy, JFK, exited the scene. In March 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson announced in his State of the Union address that he would not be running for president in the next election, and he, too, left. Goodbye LBJ. And hello DED. The dog was sent to the front in the summer of 1967 and kept fighting there for a year, until he himself left in summer 1968.

JFK, LBJ, DED. That, from a dog-historical perspective, was the progression.

And so there you were.

ME?

Yes, you.

Woof.

DED barked.

June 1967. You had crossed the Pacific, but you weren’t yet in Vietnam. You were on Okinawa, about to be separated from your sister. That’s why you barked. You had both passed a screening test at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, in California, and then they had shipped you off to this distant island. You had undergone six weeks of special training. You were siblings by different mothers, born of the same seed. The difference between your ages was two years and four months. You were descended on your father’s side, some seven generations earlier, from Bad News. Five generations back, your great-great-great-grandfather had had, as his aunts and uncle, Jubilee, Sumer, and Gospel.

What kind of training did you undergo on Okinawa? Your handlers took advantage of the extreme similarity of the Okinawan environment to that of the Indochina peninsula to teach you specialized techniques for fighting against the Vietcong. First you had to get used to the jungle, with its oppressive heat and humidity. Then you had to learn to find hidden tunnels. Because the elusive communist guerrillas hid out, generally, in a vast network of underground passageways they had constructed. You had to hone your ability to navigate minefields. You had to be able to detect ambushes before they happened and respond to surprise attacks.

That’s what these six weeks were for. To turn members of the American military dog elite into Vietnam War professionals.

Specialists.

Ten dogs in addition to DED and his sister had been brought in from the mainland, along with another forty-six from a base in the Philippines and twenty-nine specially selected from a platoon at a base in Korea. Unfortunately, seventeen out of the total of eighty-seven dogs were unable to become fully capable specialists. DED’s sister was among these. And so, DED, you barked. Because while you would be sent off to the Indochina peninsula, your sister would be shipped back to Oahu, Hawaii.

You sensed, somehow, that you would never see her again. That you would never again be able to play with her. And so, DED, you barked.

Your sister’s name was Goodnight. Though she had failed the screening test on Okinawa and was shipped off to a military installation on Oahu to serve as a sentry dog, she was still an outstanding dog—they wouldn’t have used her if she wasn’t—and in time, she would have her own rather complicated role to play in your history. For now, we will set her story aside.

To focus on you, DED.

ME?

Yes, you.

Think of your name. DED was an acronym for “dog-eat-dog,” and it had been given to you in the hope that you would become a tough fighter worthy of the phrase. Do you get what that means, DED? Giving you a name like that was in poor taste, yes, but there was more to it than that. And as it happened, in the end, your name suggested your destiny.

You would consume canine flesh.

And soon.

That was the fate that awaited you.

MINE?

Yes, yours.

Woof!

Seven days later you were prepared to ship off to Vietnam. This was still June 1967. You and your sixty-nine fellow specialist anti-Vietcong dogs departed Okinawa and landed on the Indochina peninsula. One by one, the dogs were assigned to their new units. None was assigned to the IV Corps Tactical Zone, which was farthest south. Forty-four were assigned to the III Corps Tactical Zone. Half that number were assigned to Tay Ninh Province in the west, along the border with Cambodia. Four dogs were assigned to the II Corps Tactical Zone, and the rest—twenty-two in all—were assigned to the I Corps Tactical Zone, up north. Of the latter, eight went to Quang Ngai Province, four to Thua Thien-Hue Province, and ten to Quang Tri Province, all the way up north.

July 1967. DED was among the ten dogs sent to Quang Tri.

They went by helicopter.

They swooped down from the sky into a landing zone that had been cleared in the forest, into the thick of war.

The northern border of Quang Tri butted up against the seventeenth parallel. Against the DMZ. That summer, the DMZ was far from demilitarized—it was the site of intense fighting. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff had given permission to start shelling the DMZ a year earlier, though naturally this fact had not been made public. The Americans had one simple slogan in the border area, where the two states and the two sides in the conflict met: “Keep the Commies Out!” Seven months earlier, permission had been granted to return fire across the DMZ. Shooting back could be considered a form of invasion. Five months earlier, permission had been granted to carry out preemptive strikes. This was…well, obviously a form of invasion. They were doing all this and still had no results to show for it. Then, three months earlier, they started constructing a defensive wall. This time they were going to try closing off South Vietnam. This was the beginning of the “McNamara line,” which required an incredible investment of manpower and involved the use of all kinds of equipment: barbed wire, mines, observation towers, searchlights, and so on. They carried all this stuff in using CH-54 heavy-lift helicopters, commonly known as sky cranes, and conducted frequent flyovers to protect the project.

Did the wall work? Was it impermeable?

It was not.

At all.

True, they were still building it, but this was kind of ridiculous. Not infrequently the enemy would actually slip past the McNamara line and turn up behind the US forces. And then they would run around doing whatever the hell they felt like, launching surprise attacks on the Marine Corps advance base, demolishing the McNamara line even as it was being constructed.

Clearly something was going very wrong.

The reason for this lay underground in that highly developed network of tunnels. Vietnam had begun preparing for an all-out war of resistance in March 1965, and in the major cities all the crucial facilities had already been moved underground. Underground passages and shelters had been dug early on, and the digging had continued ever since. Naturally the DMZ was no exception. Over the course of the two years previous, an extremely intricate system of tunnels had come into being below the seventeenth parallel.

To make matters worse, the North Vietnamese Army had the help of a corps of supporting combatants with superhuman powers who could lead them across the DMZ to South Vietnam, and do so even through the pitch-black of night.

Dogs.

Chinese dogs whose presence in Vietnam was a closely guarded secret. Their collars, which bore the emblem of the PLA, had been removed.

The dogs had been doing their thing for quite a while already. When the US Army’s anti-guerrilla special forces, the Green Berets, secretly entered Laos, organized a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, CIDG, and started threatening the DMZ’s western border, it was the dogs who, by summer 1967, forced this strategy to a halt. “Resist America!” the red dogs (that’s just a metaphor) barked as their showdown with the CIDG in the mountains began.

Over the course of the summer, the red dogs’ numbers dwindled to twenty, of which only eleven were assigned to the area around the seventeenth parallel, but they remained North Vietnam’s most powerful ally on the ground.

They remained a symbol of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh’s friendship.

This was the situation in the DMZ and in Quang Tri. This was how matters stood in the northernmost reaches of the I Corps Tactical Zone. Offensive and defensive maneuvers were conducted aboveground; all kinds of other things went on belowground. The US military was determined to build the McNamara line, and the North Vietnamese Army just kept smashing it to pieces. It was almost as if the wall were being built expressly to be destroyed. Naturally the Vietcong were everywhere in the south, west, and east of the province, and they kept plugging along with their war of attrition. In essence, the US military had erected, here in this Buddhist land, to no good purpose, a hell whose flames the military itself was burning in.

And you were sent into those flames. You, DED, were given the command. Your ultimate goal was the complete and utter annihilation of the communists; the first step was to track them down. That was your mission. Yours, and the other nine dogs’. A specialized elite. You were told to keep track of the Vietcong as they slipped quietly into invisibility in the jungle, to search out the North Vietnamese special forces, and to follow them at a distance without attacking. As long as they could figure out where the bastards kept bubbling up from, they could get this chaos under control. And that was the whole purpose of your special training on Okinawa, right?

YES.

Well, then, show us what you can do.

Woof!

You were already accustomed to the environment. To the tropical terrain, the climate. And so, DED, they set you loose—you and your fellows. But…it was different. These thunderous explosions, the horrific smells, the artificial blasts of fire…Was this some kind of show?

You had been set loose. Ten of you. Into the faint miasma of tear gas sprayed somewhere in the distance, eddying through the air. A droning close by that assaulted your ears. Rockets and grenades whizzing overhead, the stuttering of machine guns, bullets sweeping over the ground, shrapnel, flying gunships. Ghastly odors. And there, infiltrators, commies—you’d found them. You pulled back fifty yards. One hundred yards. But you never, not for a moment, let them leave your sight. You pursued them. You kept going. Ten dogs heading, now, in ten different directions, each discovering a camouflaged entrance to the subterranean network of tunnels.

But were they real?

Each of you, one after another, poked your head in to see.

And here everything happened at once. You, DED, and each of three of your fellows, were suddenly approached from behind by another dog. These four new dogs weren’t wearing collars. They didn’t have tags. But they weren’t wild. They simply weren’t revealing their affiliations. They were red dogs with a terrible wealth of experience fighting real battles in the jungles of the Indochina peninsula. Yes, there behind each of you was another dog. Those other dogs attacked.

You were all driven into the holes.

You were anti-Vietcong specialists, yes, but you weren’t fighting dogs. You knew how to deal with people and minefields, but no one had taught you what to do if you were set upon by another animal like this. And these weren’t ordinary animals; these were creatures of the twentieth century, these were weapons. Modern weapons. And they were like you. Members of the Carnivora order and the Canidae family. Dogs.

You were driven down, underground.

As were your three fellows.

An officer in the North Vietnamese Army stood and watched through a pair of binoculars. Two dogs sat at his feet. Waiting, ready to go. Glancing down from the eyepiece, the officer gave the dogs a sign. “Lure them into the fourth layer! Or under the tiger trap!” he commanded. The two dogs, set loose, immediately dove into the well-hidden holes underground.

What of the other six dogs? Three were skewered with bamboo spears by commie sentries waiting inside the entrances to the tunnels and died instantly. Their bodies tumbled belowground, as if they had simply rolled into a deep, straight hole, disappearing as suddenly as the Vietcong themselves. One of the remaining three fell victim to an identical bamboo-spear attack but didn’t die—was, rather, unable to die—and simply lay there yelping. Three minutes later its lungs filled with blood. It lay there wheezing. Each of the American dogs had been accompanied by an American soldier. Two of these soldiers were panicking. A second before, the dogs had been walking along a few dozen meters ahead—the soldiers usually watched their dogs through binoculars—and now all of a sudden they had disappeared, just like that, or in the case of the fourth dog, been transformed into a wheezer who lay writhing on the ground. Shit, they thought, they’re here! Vietcong nests!

They put in a request for an air sweep to neutralize Vietcong forces.

Two dogs to go.

THESE LOOK LIKE VIETCONG HOLES, the dogs decided, and waited nearby. They stretched out on the ground as a sign to the soldiers following them that they had found something. And they listened to the earth. They heard a sound. Their fellows were being pursued. Their friends, down beneath the ground—BELOWGROUND? BUT HOW? HOW?—were being attacked.

And then the explosions came. One after the other, four grenades landed nearby. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the mission the ten dogs were engaged in—with their pursuit of the commies. But the shock inspired a split-second reaction. The two dogs instinctively leapt down into the holes they had discovered, into the network of tunnels.

A fighter aircraft appeared on the horizon. It was flying extremely low, dropping bombs with minute precision from under its wings. Air-to-surface missiles, ordinary bombs. This jet’s bombing really was marvelously precise—excellent support. Only the areas in the sights, visible in the plane as the coordinates on a map, erupted into a spectacular display. Showtime! The earth crumbled, erupted, heaved, crashed. Fragments of bombs flew, scattered, mixed with ruthlessly torn-up clods of dirt that somersaulted through the air. And the burial began. The underground passageways caved in. The “Vietcong holes,” targeted in a manner intended to cause minimal damage to the surroundings, were sealed off with almost unerring precision.

You were underground then, in the fourth layer.

You, DED, felt the first layer collapse.

Overhead.

For a moment, you lost consciousness. You and the red dogs—there had only been one in the beginning, but somewhere along the way a second had joined the chase—who had pursued you down from the second layer to the third, then finally to the fourth, slammed your heads against the tunnel’s hard rock floor and earthen walls as the jolt of the explosion rocked it. This wasn’t part of the limited bombing that had been requested. This was a separate battle that had started at the same time, and the offensive and defensive maneuvers associated with it would continue for three hours without rest on the ground, over a range of four thousand feet above and below the McNamara line. Two observation towers still under construction were toppled. More than seven hundred sandbags were catapulted into the air. An electrified fence, torn in places, zipped and zapped. Some thirty-three thousand cartridge cases were scattered. Soldiers’ limbs were airborne, then dotted the ground. It was impossible to judge how many humans had been wounded, because of course there were left and right arms, and right and left legs. The earth itself was a wave transporting an unusual sort of surfer: the McNamara line, with the wooden barriers that had been built to conceal it as its surfboard.

Part of the earth, that is. A tidal wave.

The world crumbled.

And then, eventually, you awoke.

You had lost consciousness for only a moment, but the past was severed from the present. Did you know what had happened, DED? You’d been buried inside the earth. The entrance—which is to say, from your perspective, the exit—had been closed. Not all the entrances/exits to the vast network of underground tunnels, of course, but all the entrances/exits to the fourth layer, where you were. Just a few moments ago, there had been two vertical openings through which you could drop down into, or climb up out of, the fourth layer. Only two. Now there were none.

Part of the first layer had crumbled. This caused the collapse of the second and the third. And then.

The vertical openings were closed. Lost.

So three dogs were buried alive in the ground in the general area of the seventeenth parallel north, the DMZ, in the fourth layer.

Not just in the ground, but under it.

Three dogs, not just you. That fact would soon become clear.

You awoke.

In the beginning, there was darkness. AM I BLIND? You had just suffered a concussion and your judgment was unsound, you became anxious. But no, DED, you weren’t blind. You were in a place that rendered your eyes useless. Pain wracked your body. You had been bashed, you were covered with scrapes. OH, IT HURTS, IT HURTS, you whimpered. And your whimpering echoed off the rock floor and the hard walls of packed earth. OOOHHH, it echoed. IIT HHUURRTTSS, IIT HHUURRTTSS. You had no way of knowing this at the time, but over the next few weeks you would acquire more and more of these bruises. WHERE AM I? you thought. WHAT AM I?

IIIT HHHUUURRRTTTSSS! your echo said.

After that, you kept quiet.

There were enemies.

In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. I’M UNDERGROUND, you recalled. AND I’M AN AMERICAN DOG. AN ELITE. I’M PROUD OF WHAT I AM.

Your enemies, too, kept quiet.

You caught a whiff of something awful. Your eyes might be useless, but you were still a dog. Your nose rendered you omniscient. After all, you weren’t just any dog, you came from a special line of German shepherds that was the pride of the US military, and you had gone through a rigorous screening process in California, and then again on Okinawa. I’M A TOP-CLASS MILITARY DOG! I’M THE PRIDE OF AMERICA! Something stank. Two enemy dogs.

IT’S THEM.

THE SAME KIND. GERMAN SHEPHERDS.

Two of them.

Something stank. You knew what it was. One of them was injured. One of them. And the other…was frightened? But it wasn’t simply frightened of you. The evolving situation itself had stunned that red dog. But such excuses were meaningless. The point was that from that moment on, the two dogs dropped into the weaker position. And you, as a result, ascended to the anti-weak position.

You had power now.

Their fear empowered you. You: DED.

You bristled with a murderous strength. They moaned. Both of them.

Incapable of enduring the silence any longer, they started barking. ARE YOU FRIGHTENED?

YOU…ANTI-AMERICAN DOGS.

Next you attacked them. You did it in a flash, with no warning. In no time at all you had closed the distance between you and them, taken aim at the wounded dog, buried the deadly weapons in your jaw into its flesh. The other dog scampered away, crouched in a posture that made a counterattack unthinkable, its tail literally between its legs. You didn’t pursue. This was a strategic decision. You were unaccustomed to this darkness. This closed network of tunnels was a whole new world. You mustn’t be rash.

EXPLORE, you told yourself. FIGURE THIS PLACE OUT.

Unsteadily, uncertainly, you began. This world had only just been born.

A step forward. Ten steps forward. Three forks in the tunnel. It took an hour to get that far. You returned to where you had started. The dog you had toppled wasn’t yet completely dead. It was teetering at the edge of death, but still breathing.

You lay down beside it to rest.

And then?

Two hours had passed, and you were worn out. You were getting hungry. There was nothing to eat. Where was the food?

There.

You could eat that, right?

You tore into the red dog’s stomach. You made that last breath he had taken his last breath. In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. And then you were hungry. And so you did it.

This was a world with new rules. You became a moral being. Yes, DED. You consumed the body. Flesh of your flesh. You couldn’t have grasped it, but that meat was…a distant relative. A pure German shepherd that traced its ancestry back to Bad News.

And so you lived, and you had one less enemy.

You hadn’t yet noticed that five of your fellows had ended up underground as well. They, too, had no way out. And more enemy dogs as well: six in all, including the two the officer in the North Vietnamese Army had ordered into the tunnels. Except that now one of those red dogs was gone.

Six vs. five.

What’s going on here? What is this?

Sino-American conflict. The direct confrontation that both sides had been avoiding was now taking place, here on the Indochina peninsula. Happening on the ground—indeed, not just on the ground but under it, several layers down. A Vietnam War of the dogs.

The next day—although there was really no basis for speaking of one day or the next as there was nothing to mark the passage of time—you discovered one of your fellows. She was dead. She had stumbled into a tiger trap. This was a brutal sort of contraption consisting of sharp bamboo spears angled up from the bottom of a hole, meant to kill “American imperialists.” There were a few in the fourth layer that targeted the US military’s underground combat specialists, so-called “tunnel rats,” who would be lured in and disposed of.

Five vs. five.

You inspected the tiger trap. Not by sight, since you could hardly see anything. By sniffing and touching. And then you hauled your fellow’s body up out of the trap, one chunk at a time, and ate it.

Over the course of the next year, the remaining dogs dedicated themselves to a slow process of subtraction. Four vs. five. Four vs. three. Two vs. two. On average, one dog died every two months. In the second week, DED, you and your fellows came together to form a pack. Your enemies did the same. Some dogs were able to adapt to this sunless new world, and some dogs were not. The red dogs, the Chinese dogs whose affiliation had been concealed, had already acquired a close familiarity with the network of tunnels—they remembered its structure; carried, as it were, a mental map in their heads—and so they realized that the entrances/exits to the fourth layer had been closed off, and they despaired. Or else they were thrown into confusion by the shock of what had happened. THE MAIN TUNNEL THAT HEADS OFF TO THE RIGHT HAS COLLAPSED! AND SUDDENLY A BRANCH…THERE’S A NEW BRANCH HEADING OFF TO THE LEFT! You and your fellows knew nothing of this loss. You were not tormented by the anguish that consumed your enemies. You knew it: THERE IS THE FIRST STEP. ALWAYS, ALWAYS. Again and again you pounded this instinct into your brain. You took one step at a time, and before you knew it you had taken ten steps, a hundred steps. YOU UNDERSTAND? you asked your fellows. GO ON, BUT GO CAREFULLY, you commanded your fellows.

And fairly early on, you discovered a storeroom. Preserved food the commies had stashed away. The cave held enough to keep you alive for a few weeks down there, underground—besieged, as it were. Enough, perhaps, for a few dogs to survive for a few weeks. But how many? The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, incidentally, had left the fourth layer untouched for almost a year, ever since the attack the previous summer, assuming it was beyond salvage. And intense combat continued along the McNamara line, rendering it impossible to dig down again. As long as the first and second layers remained functional, they decided, thinking strategically, those two layers would have to suffice. And this strategy affected the dogs too, as they fought their own Vietnam War. The supplies hadn’t been gathered in one place in the fourth layer, of course; they were dispersed. There were a few of these caves. And just as you, DED, and your fellows had found a storeroom, so too had the enemy pack. Right around the same time. So you were even. You had equal portions. And so a territorial dispute began.

How did you mark off your realms of influence?

You were dogs, so you claimed space with your scents.

The front lines were the areas covered with your piss and shit. And through the process of marking the ground, you created your own canine military map. Here, in this still new world, in the fourth layer, deep underground, coordinates were organized in terms, not of latitudes and longitudes, but of shititudes and pissitudes. In those terms—carefully, ever so carefully—you grasped the contours of a place that rendered vision useless. Scent spoke eloquently, telling you, for instance, that war had been declared. Or that the enemy was constrained. It was all on the map. An ambush was planned at a certain location. And then there was the canine version of a search-and-destroy mission. The deadly struggle continued. How many bruises did you acquire? Not only from your explorations, but from grappling with the enemy, and from overhead, the repeated cave-ins. You kept adapting, though. Your right front leg was bent, yes—you had broken a bone and there were no splints down here. SO WHAT? You had power. Your enemies’ fear had empowered you, and you had been emboldened ever since. Needless to say, you were the leader of your pack. BEAT THEM BACK! you shouted. KILL THE ANTI-AMERICAN DOGS!

Attack. Defend. Strengthen defenses. Turn danger to victory. Attack and win.

A canine Vietnam War.

Pure subtraction.

You acquired a sixth sense, suited to the new world in which you lived. It can’t be named. The point is that you adapted. Not all your fellows could. Not all your enemies could. One dog turned to skin and bones. Another went mad at seven o’clock on the seventh day of the seventh week. He barked ferociously, endlessly, and was mauled by the other dogs, had both his eyes gouged out and one ear and his tail torn off, yet he managed to survive seventeen more weeks. You lapped water from a pool, listening to him howl hoarsely in a very distant sector of the map. There were springs. In the floor, in the walls. In the deepest regions of certain paths. You had been aware of the underground stream’s rumbling for a long time. Your nose caught the faintest whiff, almost an illusion, of the South China Sea. No, it wasn’t your nose, it was that unnameable sixth sense. You sensed the motion of the tide. There was water and disease. One dog came down with scabies. There was diarrhea. Colds. Avitaminosis. There were all kinds of worms and insects and parasites, and though some could cause illness—one of the parasites had caused the scabies—some of those creatures that came wriggling out of the earth were rare delicacies. They were fresher than the preserved foods. Naturally, DED, you took the initiative in trying them. TO LIVE, you told yourself. LIVE, you told your fellows. DIE, you told your enemies.

Sometimes you waited motionless for moles and mice to emerge from their holes.

A few times, your new world was visited by catastrophe brought on by the human Vietnam War raging aboveground. One day a storehouse in the second layer, crammed full of munitions the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong shared, caught fire and exploded. This changed the terrain of your world. Made it even more complex, into a labyrinth of new branches. This happened once, then again, a third time.

But you, DED, you were alive.

The subtraction continued until, a year later, it was one vs. one.

You had no way of knowing the time or the season, living underground, but it was summer. Summer 1968.

And suddenly, subtraction became addition.

There came a point when you realized that all your fellows were gone, and simultaneously that only one of your enemies was left. A moment later, you were prepared to shift gears, to make the switch to addition. Yes, you grasped what had happened, didn’t you? You did indeed. Here in this new world, which was no longer new—here in the fourth layer, underground, in the general area of the seventeenth parallel north, on the border between North and South Vietnam, only two dogs remained. One was you, and the other…? That smell…that odor?

A bitch.

In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. Then came hunger. You killed your enemies, ate them, became the embodiment of your name. And then…you were seized by desire.

You lusted. The new world was populated by one male and one bitch. And you knew what was happening. I HAVE TO LIVE, you thought. To live. What did that mean? It was a matter of lineage, its continuation. Your…family tree. So your instinct for self-preservation kicked in, issued a command. DED, get hard.

The underground war was over. It was time to take the bitch.

Don’t kill her.

There was food. Enough for two dogs, now that there were only two, to survive at least a few months. You began sending signals. Signs in shit and piss, barks, whispers. COME TO ME, you said. COME, THE WAR IS OVER.

This is the reconciliation, you announced.

And she felt the difference. You, in turn, understood, by means of your unnameable sixth sense, that she had understood.

You came together. In your storeroom. On your—American—territory. I’M THE ONLY MALE LEFT, you barked. THERE’S ENOUGH FOOD, WE HAVE WHAT WE NEED, you barked. THE TIME HAS COME TO MATE.

WE WILL BE THE ORIGIN OF THIS WORLD.

Did she understand your words?

Three days later, the red dog was wet, in heat. For the first time, this “anti-American dog” as you had thought of her, last among her fellows, grew wet between her legs. She had eaten her fill in the storeroom on your—American—territory, running in, rooting around, sleeping, waking, and running in again, spreading food around with her nose as she gobbled it down, sleeping, waking, making a mess, and then, finally, she was ready, she assumed the position. You were ready, you were hard. You straddled her. You were on top of her, panting, shaking your butt.

Not once.

Twice.

A third time.

The bitch was obedient.

Your sperm dribbled from between her legs. Your seed.

You were calm again.

And then, five days after you and the bitch met up, late at night—late at night aboveground, that is, and in Vietnam—you were murdered in your sleep. You had your testicles bitten off and your throat ripped open.

You died.

Just like that.

Yes, DED, you were dead.

From here on out, it was the bitch’s story. She wouldn’t let the body of a fellow dog go to waste. She tore into it with her fangs. It was warm. She gobbled down the liver, the spleen. She took mouthfuls of the meat. She lapped the still uncoagulated blood. Because she required it. She needed the nutrition. Lots of it—vitamins, minerals, proteins, everything. Because she had a litter of puppies growing inside her.

The bitch knew by some unnameable sixth sense. That she was pregnant.

She had to prepare. She readied herself to give birth.

Nine weeks passed. Thumps came from overhead, from the layer above, even though it was supposedly closed off. She ignored them. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong had begun redeveloping the network of tunnels. The bitch kept silent, however, so that her former masters wouldn’t find her. She wasn’t a red dog anymore, she was a mother. A mother dog preparing to give birth for the first time. Her instincts told her everything to do. Find a quiet place and hide. Ignore the humans, all you need is food. Forget the humans. Turn your back on humanity.

The mother dog obeyed these commands.

She kept a low profile, there underground.

Labor pains began. Then, at last, the delivery. A slimy, half-transparent bag slithered out as she pushed. Then a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. One after another, slowly. Three of the pups were dead. The bitch ate the afterbirth, as all mother dogs do, and she ate her dead children too.

Three puppies had been born alive.

She began raising them. But she had problems suckling them. She didn’t have much milk. Two of the puppies grew weak. Again the mother’s instincts kicked in. She didn’t hesitate at all. She bit into the weaker puppies, killing them.

And ate their bodies.

One puppy.

He sucked powerfully at her teats.

He lived. He was healthy, strong. He, DED, was your child. A male with no name. He did not inherit your name, and he would not eat the flesh of his flesh. Even when his mother died. This was in February 1969. The puppy was no longer suckling. He didn’t eat the body. Instead he imitated his mother’s actions when she had been alive. He ate the food she had brought to the cave where he had been born, their nest.

His mother’s body rotted, stank.

AWFUL, the nameless puppy thought. The stench grew worse with every passing day until at last it drove him away. He would go. You see, DED, how clever your son is? He wandered quietly, secretly, through the fourth layer. There was a need for secrecy—he knew this from his mother’s actions, he had figured it out. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to you, DED, even on the other side, to learn that the labyrinth of tunnels and branches had been completely transformed. There were new passageways, and others that had been closed off. All the paths too narrow for humans to pass through had been abandoned. But if you were a puppy? Could they be used? Yes, they could. And so the fourth layer was now connected to the third, and so to the second, and to the first.

You would have been impressed by your son’s intimate knowledge of the map’s coordinates. He had grasped it all. He appeared and vanished without warning in this “new new world,” faster even than the humans.

Yes, he was fine.

Relax, no need to worry.

You need not linger.

Spring came and the nameless puppy was growing healthily. He was an orphan, but he had never suffered from hunger. He knew well where in the network of tunnels he could find food, and what it was safe to take. He knew everything. Everything relating to this world, that is. But he wasn’t satisfied with this…this routine, with no aim beyond survival. At this early stage in life, he placed no stock in omniscience. He wanted the unknown. It was this, the things he had never experienced, that called to him. And so, even as he surpassed the humans, he spied on their doings. Explored the new munitions storeroom they had dug. The cave next to the underground kitchen, where they kept live chickens that began laying eggs day after day. When an operating room was added to the underground hospital after a medical unit was sent down from Hanoi, he tried to get as close as possible to the astonishing thing they had in there: a light bulb powered by a bicycle-powered generator that the surgeons used when they operated. He was doing all kinds of things, seeing all kinds of things.

Early summer.

The nameless puppy began encountering difficulties. He was growing healthily…in fact, he was now fully grown. He was no longer a puppy, and he was no longer the size of a puppy. His body had filled out remarkably. But this bewildered him: how could the world have shrunk so? The narrow paths that led in and out of the fourth layer were now impassable.

WHAT’S HAPPENED? the nameless dog asked himself in his frustration.

He shouted, IT’S TOO TIGHT! EVERYTHING IS TOO CLOSE!

This circumscribed world didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t feel fulfilled. And he started losing track of his coordinates, which made it difficult to keep hidden. Everything had changed, his measurements were all wrong! He was no longer omniscient, he realized that. So what was he to do? What?

He was approaching an answer.

First there was the fourth layer. Then there was the third. Then he found the second and finally the first. He kept probing the network of tunnels for things he didn’t know. And at last…at last…

Summer. He was crawling through the first tunnel. It stank. It stank. He crawled. He kept crawling and crawling. He forgot all the coordinates he had carried in his head. WHO CARES, he thought. WHO CARES ANYWAY! His body tingled with a heightened sensitivity. An unnameable sense growled within him. He was biting through to something new. Which way had he come, which branches had he chosen? Which forks in which paths had he entered? It didn’t matter, he was being led on. By a voice. You, nameless dog. A nameless sense dispensed its commands to you, a nameless dog. The voice spoke to you. And you heard it, didn’t you?

To live. Live. Live at the edge of starvation. Hunger to live.

YES, you replied. YES, YES, YES.

Woof!

At last, nameless dog, you, too, barked.

Unsatisfied, you set out, beyond the confines of the world you knew by smell. You sniffed, inhaled the odors, searching for the unfamiliar. Finally, you crawled out aboveground. Your fixation on the unknown had made it happen. The smell of grass, undergrowth, moss on a stone, a dangling vine. It was hot. That’s what it was like up there. On the Indochina peninsula, in the tropics, just above the seventeenth parallel north. You had emerged into North Vietnamese territory, outside the DMZ. The exit from the network of tunnels, incidentally, was a camouflaged wooden trap door of the same sort used at crucial junctures underground, so you knew how it worked. You scratched at it, broke through. There was no sentry on guard. You pressed forward over a terrain devoid of humans, devoid of any trace of humanity, and you were out. You stood there, dazed.

WHAT IS ALL THIS? EVEN THE SOIL SMELLS DIFFERENT?

IT’S ALL SO DIFFERENT!

You were moved. The scent in your nostrils was the earth baked by the sun. But it wasn’t daytime now. When you emerged from that cramped world, it was the dead of night.

July 1969.

The moon was out. You turned to look at it. It was dazzling. This was nothing else, only moonlight, but for you, born and raised underground, it might as well have been as bright as the sun. You had seen the Vietnamese doctor’s light in the tunnels, so your eyes were familiar with illumination. They had been educated by the bulb in the operating room, and they had felt awed by its vivid round glow. But the moon hovering up there in the sky…this was different. The shock of it was altogether different. You were moonstruck. Any number of stars twinkled in the sky along with the moon, but it was the moon that got you. An American reconnaissance plane carrying an infrared camera flew by, but you were enchanted by the moon.

That summer, humans, too, found their gazes drawn to the same celestial body. The whole world was focused on the moon that season, because the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration had launched Apollo 11 and, for the first time in human history, landed a man on the moon. That was the human world, though, not the dog world. Dogs had been the ones to open the door to space travel, but now the man-made satellite Sputnik 2 was all but forgotten. Twelve years had passed since then.

The human twentieth century continued, that summer, as though Anno Canis didn’t exist.

You cried.

Nameless, gazing straight up at the moon, you were pained. Your eyes hurt. You had been born underground, where vision was useless, and the moonlight was too strong for you. Tears welled in your eyes. Tears fell. But you didn’t look away.

You kept staring up at the moon, overwhelmed.

You sensed something behind you.

You turned around. Your eyesight still blurred by tears.

It was a human. He held a night vision device in one hand and a military map in the other. He was different from all the other humans you had seen…spied on…so far. There was a difference in race—in build, in odor—but of course that meant nothing to a dog like you. You were on the edge of a firebase to the north of the DMZ, an area that was on the front lines but which had been cleared of North Vietnamese soldiers.

You were unsure how to react.

Because instinct told you there was no need to run.

WHAT IS…WHAT…?

You, nameless dog, were at a loss. How could a human do what he was doing, stand there opposite you as he was, in the darkness?

The human spoke: “Are you crying?”

His voice sounded like a dog’s whine. It radiated through your body with the same warmth as the commands the unnameable sense issued. You had no way of knowing, of course, but the language the man spoke was not Vietnamese. Neither was it Chinese. Or English.

WHAT IS IT, HUMAN?

“I saw you,” the human said. Then, holding up the night vision device, “I saw you with this. Crawling up out of the ground. Like the earth was giving birth to you. You were looking up at the moon.”

ARE YOU A GUIDE? you thought, your vision clouded with tears. A GUIDE TO THIS OTHER WORLD?

“You’re the opposite of those dogs who returned from outer space. But not unrelated. And look at that physique of yours…you’re purebred, huh? Purebred German shepherd? You don’t look that old either. Young, in fact. You’ve just graduated from puppyhood.”

HEY, HUMAN, you say. THIS IS A GREAT, MYSTERIOUS WORLD.

“Strange…are you an American dog?”

I CAME ABOVEGROUND.

“They set you loose in the tunnels to explore them in secret, and you got lost—is that it? No, it can’t be. You don’t have that kind of attitude at all. Are you Chinese, then? One of the dogs in that platoon they talk about, the one they say the PLA sent in four years ago? No…that’s not right either.”

YOU WERE HERE.

“Anyway, I was here, and then you turned up,” the human said. He spoke the same words, dog, nameless dog, that you yourself had just said. Not in Vietnamese, or in Chinese, or even in English. In Russian.

“Come. I’ll take you with me. Can your children be the next Belka, the next Strelka?”

The KGB officer held out his hands, and you barked. Woof!

In March 1969, the Sino-Soviet split finally escalated into armed conflict. The two armies exchanged serious gunfire in the area around Zhenbao, aka Damansky Island, in the Ussuri River, on the border between the nations. In June a similar border dispute broke out along the edge of Xinjiang Province, and in July the same thing happened around Bacha Island, aka Gol’dinskii, in the Heilong River. The participants in the conflicts were always border guard troops. The tension had been building for some time. In 1967, as China was pressing ahead with the Great Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard attacked the Russian Embassy in Beijing. They set fire to effigies of Soviet leaders. A more offensive demonstration would not have been possible. And did this shift in Sino-Soviet relations have an effect on the Vietnam War? Of course. As if the Vietnam War weren’t already chaotic enough. In June 1965, the USSR and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed two agreements concerning “free Soviet aid in the development of the national economy of the DRV” and “strengthening the DRV’s defensive capabilities.” Just one month after the PLA marched through Friendship Pass to provide secret aid to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Vietnam were building a new relationship. Ho’s health went into a decline that year, and the party secretary took control. The USSR exploited this shift to try, in a variety of ways, to chip away at the Sino-Vietnamese friendship. During the first half of the Vietnam war—America’s quagmire—the world’s two great communist powers were in fact engaged in a tug-of-war, each trying to attract that small communist country, North Vietnam, to their side. In the end, Vietnam chose the USSR.

History revealed itself almost prophetically. On September 3, 1969, Ho Chi Minh died. Just like that, the personal relationship he and Mao Zedong had cherished was over. And by then Vietnam had already made its move. It chose to leave China, move closer to the USSR. Fully fifty percent of the aid that poured into North Vietnam from communist countries in 1968 came from the Soviet Union. This aid didn’t only take the form of weapons; the USSR actually put feet on the ground. It sent military advisors to the Indochina peninsula, to the front. The series of “Sino-Soviet conflicts” in March and June 1969 led the Soviets to include a large number of officers from the Border Guard among these specialists. The men on the ground weren’t only specialists in fighting, they were specialists in fighting and maneuvering against China.

And so a certain Russian KGB officer found his way, that summer, to that spot.

Or could it be…that it was your history, dogs, that called him there?

Could it be?

Dogs, dogs, where will you bark next?

Woof, woof!

1975: one dog was in Hawaii, one was in Mexico. To be precise: one bitch was on the island of Oahu, at the twenty-first parallel north, and one male was in Mexico City, at the twentieth parallel north. Their names were Goodnight and Cabron. Goodnight was a purebred German shepherd; Cabron was a mongrel whose father had been a purebred boxer—who had sprung, that is to say, from boxer seed. Goodnight’s origins have already been discussed. Her brother, DED, died in 1968, underground, on the Indochina peninsula, at the seventeenth parallel north. His neck had been torn open by a dog belonging to the PLA Military Dog Platoon, a dog descended from Jubilee. Jubilee had been the aunt of Goodnight and DED’s great-great-great-grandfather, five generations earlier. Okay. What of Cabron, the mutt in Mexico City? Where did he spring from?

It’s complicated.

Cabron wasn’t descended from Bad News. But if you were to trace his line back through his mother’s side, you would find that, in a way, he was directly descended from Bad News. Four generations earlier, Cabron’s great-great-grandmother had had six maternal aunts and uncles. Cabron’s great-great-grandmother’s mother and her six siblings—a litter of seven in total, each dog entirely different in appearance from the rest—had basked in the love of two mothers. The first was their birth mother. She had suckled them for the first half month of their lives. Their second mother was the one who raised them. She, too, had suckled them for a few weeks, until the time came for them to be weaned off her milk. Their birth mother’s pregnancy with them had been her fourth. Her name was Ice; her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother was a Siberian husky, and one of her grandmothers had been a Samoyed. The Hokkaido dog was Kita, of course. Their adoptive mother had given birth several times before she took charge of the seven puppies, but after that she never gave birth again. She was a lovely purebred German shepherd, and her name was Sumer. She was Bad News’s child.

And she was Jubilee’s sister.

Sumer became the mother of the seven puppies Ice had given birth to in 1957. Year zero Anno Canis. In October of that year, the mother and her children had entered the area around the Mexican-American border. They had been brought in to serve as guard dogs on the property of a certain prominent Mexican-American who ran an orchard there. That wasn’t all this man ran, though: the Don, as they called him, was the head of a family with another, secret face. He was the boss of a criminal organization that specialized in smuggling. His partners in business all lived on the other side the border, to the south…in Mexico. Or at least they did in the 1950s. Time passed. By now the Don was the old Don, and Sumer had lived out her allotted years. What happened to the prominent family’s secret trade? And what happened to the dogs?

First, their trade. In the 1970s, the old-style mafia, with its ideal of “rustic chivalry,” was in the process of collapse. A new generation of underworld organizations was coming to the fore, attempting to supplant their predecessors, and among these the most prominent were those that dealt in “dirty” businesses such as the drug trade. The prominent Mexican-American family, having itself experienced a changing of the guard, rode that wave. The new Don was a man of the new generation. He had thoroughly revised the family’s business operations, identifying drugs as the principal source of their future income. By 1975, he had grown the organization’s total business dealings to a figure eight times what it had been two decades before. They controlled about half the inflow of drugs from south of the border. Indeed, it was the enormous investment of capital this family had made during the 1960s that had allowed the Mexican drug cartels to expand in the first place.

They were known in the underworld as Texas’s “La Familia.”

Next, the dogs. The dogs were used as tokens to strengthen the bonds between members of La Familia. The first eight—Sumer and her seven puppies—had understood this from the moment they were presented to the old Don. They had to shine as guard dogs and to pledge their unfailing loyalty to the Don. Their old owner, the man with the boxcar in the switchyard where Sumer had made their nest, the man who sent them off to work in La Familia’s orchard, had commanded them to do their best, and they had. The Don was pleased to see how seriously they took their work, how loyal they were. This was the kind of dog La Familia needed. And so he treasured them. He didn’t let them mate with just any dog. He only “wed” them to purebred Dobermans, collies, Airedale terriers—proven animals, with personalities, looks, and the skill set a good guard dog needed. The seven siblings had looked completely different from one another to begin with, and as they continued to mate they produced a monstrous elite. Dogs have, on occasion, been referred to as “shape-shifters” because the various breeds look so different, and the dogs in this lineage pushed that potential to the limit. Not all of them were involved in this, however. Even as a few of the dogs were carefully mated with the cream of the crop—with Dobermans, collies, and Airedale terriers who could accurately be described as “totally the best, Don”—a few others remained under strict guard, a sort of birth control.

Why?

Because, as has already been said, the dogs had a role to play in strengthening the bonds among members of La Familia. For the most part, they remained within the boundaries of the orchard. But whenever a new member “joined the family,” so to speak—joined the Texas-based criminal organization La Familia—he would be presented with a dog. This living gift had become the custom in the 1950s with the old Don, and the current Don inherited it. Only the men who had been granted one of the dogs from this special line belonged to La Familia’s inner circle. Only they had been recognized by the Don as “family.”

The dogs were the evidence of this.

The dogs showed that La Familia was as tight as family.

And here we come to Cabron. A male dog, great-great-great-grandson of one of the seven dogs Sumer had adopted. He was living, now, far from La Familia’s orchard on the Mexican-American border, far to the south of La Familia’s territory, in Mexico City.

One dog on the twentieth parallel north.

One dog in Mexico.

And the other, on the twenty-first parallel north.

Goodnight. What were you up to?

You never went to the Indochina peninsula, to the seventeenth parallel north. Having done a fine job during his six weeks of special training on Okinawa, your brother DED was sent into the midst of the Southeast Asian conflict as a specialist anti-Vietcong fighter. You, however, had failed to make the cut. You had been judged unfit for service on the front lines of the Vietnam War, and in June 1967, you left Okinawa for Hawaii. At the time, incidentally, Okinawa was under the administration of the US government. The Hawaiian Islands, for their part, had been annexed in 1898 and were elevated to the status of a full-fledged state in 1959. These historical developments meant nothing at all to you, Goodnight, but the point is this: you were born on the American mainland, in California, and you were raised and had lived your life until then as an American military dog, moving from place to place within the vast expanse of “America.” You had never passed beyond its borders. Not yet. You had been sent to Oahu, where you worked at Wheeler Air Force Base as a sentry dog for approximately eight years. In all that time, you had been exposed to real stress on only one occasion: the day you had come face to face with a spy of unknown provenance, and you were shot. The bullet passed right through you, and you completely healed in three weeks. You had, however, saved a human life, and so you came away from the trauma with the canine version of two medals: a purple heart and a silver star. This meant you were assured a lifetime pension (money for food) even after your retirement. The man whose life you saved was a lieutenant on security patrol; you had taken the bullet trying to protect him.

After that, you were respected by everyone on the base, not only the humans but the other dogs as well—you did have two medals, after all—and your life as a sentry dog became even more relaxed than it had been.

That was how you passed the eight years since June 1967.

And then it was the year. 1975. It began in February. At long last, you were released from your position as a military dog. You were retired. A family had volunteered to take you in. They lived in the suburbs of Honolulu. The father was a retired officer—the very man whose life you had saved. That same lieutenant. Or rather, that same former lieutenant. He himself had retired from military duties when he turned forty—just six months earlier—and now worked in tourism. He was originally a mainland haole, but during his time on Wheeler Base he had fallen in love with Hawaii and decided to settle permanently on Oahu. He would start out fresh here—it would be a whole new life. He moved his elderly parents from Ohio to live with him. They had kept a young dog as a pet, a bitch. Naturally, she made the move from Ohio as well. Then, finally, he had brought you in. You completed the picture.

“Here we are,” the former lieutenant said. “This is your family.”

MY FAMILY? you thought. Looking up, you saw four faces: a human, a human, a human, and a dog.

The other dog was a beagle. She had a compact build and an extremely mild disposition. She sensed immediately that your master felt indebted to you and didn’t try to challenge you.

Yes, you were the dog that had saved your master’s life. And for that reason, your old age, your retirement, should have been as placid and peaceful as it gets. One hundred percent stress-free. You had no title, you were just an old German shepherd. But although you were nine years old, you were still vigorous. Your family played with you a lot. You did a lot of sightseeing. The former lieutenant, thinking to repay you for what you had done, took you all over Oahu. You walked through Waikiki with your aloha-shirted master. From the beach into town. From the backstreets to the canal. The scents of Chinatown bewildered you. All those Asian spices, the mounds of Chinese medicines in the market. You climbed to the tip of Diamond Head crater, 232 meters above sea level. You visited Pearl Harbor. And you saw something. You gazed at the chalk-white memorial. It was out in the harbor, just over the remains of the USS Arizona, submerged twelve meters in the muck. The battleship had been sunk by a Japanese plane on December 7, 1941. That had inaugurated the Pacific War. A surprise attack by the Japanese military. To this day, the bodies of 948 men lie sleeping within the body of that battleship on the sea floor. The boat is a grave. You gazed at the grave, Goodnight, at the sea that was a grave, and you felt nothing. You were staring out at the place from which your history, the history of your tribe, had begun. But you felt nothing.

It never occurred to you that it was all on account of the battleships that sank there that three Japanese military dogs and one American military dog had been thrown together on the Aleutian Islands, in the Arctic regions of the Pacific.

You were near the middle of the Pacific now.

And all you thought, there on an island located at the twenty-first parallel north, was HOW BEAUTIFUL THE OCEAN IS.

You liked the sea.

You liked the beach.

You were always frolicking at the water’s edge.

In April, something changed in your family. It emerged that the young beagle was pregnant. She had been knocked up somewhere, probably in that holy land of doggie free sex: the leash-less park. In May, the beagle gave birth to four healthy pups. And you, Goodnight, found the sight incredibly moving. You had never had puppies of your own, but still you found the little ones irresistible. You helped the beagle raise them, as if you and she were sisters, maybe cousins. Naturally, you were careful not to go too far, to do anything that would be too much for their mother. But they were adorable! Your maternal instincts cried out within you: HOW CUTE! HOW ADORABLE!

Beagle puppies milling about their beagle mother’s teats.

You couldn’t nurse them yourself since you had no milk, but you were enthralled.

When you weren’t helping to look after the puppies, you played on the beach. In July, you discovered something unusual on the one you frequented most often. A boat. A double canoe. It had two masts, two sails, and it was a little less than twenty meters long. It was totally different from an ordinary canoe.

Humans, both haole and pure Hawaiians, had clustered around the double vessel and were learning how to operate it. They came back the next day and the day after that, and since the beach had essentially become part of your territory, you watched them as they worked. You mingled with the people, wandering among them. When a man patted you on the head, you licked his hand. Good dog, he said. Good dog, they said, again and again. They remembered you, just as you had remembered them.

“You know what I heard,” one haole announced to the party in English. “Seems this guy was a military dog! Heard it from his owner. Could have knocked me over with a feather! He’s got two medals. Real medals! He had a showdown with a spy, and the spy shot him, and he didn’t even flinch. Incredible, huh?”

Wow! Cool! the humans cried. In recognition of your distinguished career, they let you onto the boat. The view from there was amazing. You stood at the prow.

The people could see you liked it.

Then one day in September, one of the crew members, excited, called out, “C’mon, girl!” He was inviting you to accompany them on a short practice sail, just forty or fifty minutes. The time had come. Woof! you barked. And you jumped up with them.

You weren’t at all afraid.

Indeed, you were excited to see another face of the sea.

You didn’t get seasick.

The peculiar double canoe was the embodiment of a dream. An embodiment of the thrill of the Hawaiian renaissance and its effort to revive ancient Hawaiian culture. The West had its first encounter with the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 when the explorer James Cook landed there in the course of one of his voyages, and from that point people puzzled over the question of how humans could possibly have reached the islands, which were completely isolated—set down plop in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, near no continent. And when Cook arrived, the Hawaiians didn’t have the technology necessary to set out on long trips across the sea. What they had was a legend, an old chant that said, “Our ancestors came from Tahiti.”

Tahiti was south of the equator.

Far, far away, in the South Pacific.

Could this be true?

A group of people decided to try and find out. Decided to demonstrate that before it was polluted and degraded by the influx of Western civilization, in its very earliest years, Hawaii had possessed a sophisticated culture of its own. The Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded in Hawaii in 1973. Its goal was to build a replica of a prehistoric Hawaiian voyaging canoe, and to sail it all the way to Tahiti. The project was intended as a sort of experimental archaeology. It was also an adventure. They would set out for the South Pacific relying only on ancient navigation techniques, reading the position of the constellations, the wind, the tides.

In Hawaii, the Polynesian Voyaging Society project was made part of the US’s bicentennial celebrations.

The boat you rode on its trial run, Goodnight, was not, however, the replica the Polynesian Voyaging Society had created.

It was a replica of the replica.

Secretly built in California, it had been transported to Oahu in July. The humans had gotten into a dispute. Since the techniques for navigating long sea voyages had not survived in Hawaii, a Micronesian—a man from Satawal, an atoll of the Central Caroline Islands—had been brought in to steer the vessel. There was a faction who disapproved. The first project was being led by a California-born surfer and professor of anthropology, but he had a competitor: a researcher who was jealous of him. Who was, in addition, a wealthy brat. At the same time, another navigator turned up asking to be chosen. He was a Polynesian from Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, and all he wanted was the fame.

Thus, a group of people angry with the Polynesian Voyaging Society made up their minds to break away, to try and beat the original adventurers at their own game.

Indeed, the wealthy researcher decided that he would go a step further and outdo the professor who made him insanely jealous. To crush him once and for all. Long ago, when the first sea voyagers immigrated en masse to Hawaii, they had taken twenty or thirty plant species along with them for cultivation. They had also taken pigs, intentionally, and rats, unintentionally. And chickens. And dogs.

At the time, the oldest dog fossils that had been unearthed on the Hawaiian Islands dated from sixteen hundred years earlier.

That was exactly when the ancient Polynesians were thought to have immigrated.

Well then, why not include that element in the experiment—in this essay in experimental archaeology? That would really prove that it could be done!

Yes, the wealthy researcher thought, stunned by the brilliance of his idea. A dog.

Hey, dog!

This time you didn’t bark in response to the call, you just cocked your head.

The wealthy researcher was moved, now, by the engine of his ambition. He knew a dog that wouldn’t be afraid to cross the sea in a canoe. And the dog was a strong, healthy, purebred German shepherd. And it had gotten friendly with everyone on the project, the entire crew. And…and…

Your owner immediately agreed to let him have you. The negotiations occurred in October. “Are you serious? That’s quite a promotion,” the former lieutenant said. “He’s really going to be an important player in this project, part of the great Hawaiian Renaissance?” The researcher assured him you would with a terse, “He will have that honor.” And that was all it took to sell the former lieutenant. “Oh my god! Oh my god oh my god I can’t believe it!” he yelled. “The honor! The glory! I was a military man, you know, and so was she! Well, she was a military dog. Honor above everything! Right? Isn’t that right, girl?” he asked you. “Besides, she really likes to go out and enjoy the ocean. I’m sure she’ll love it, I’m happy to let her go. What an adventure! Go out and bring us something back to show for it!” he told you. “A third medal! You know what I’m saying? You understand?”

Though your master didn’t mention this, his family had grown too large. There were too many of you. The beagle’s pregnancy had been entirely unexpected, and in the past six months the four puppies had grown almost into adult dogs. The family had been unable to find anyone to take them. That, ultimately, was what mattered. You were a burden, so he got rid of you. He didn’t have to feel guilty, and he got a $500 reward to boot.

“I hear in Tahiti,” your master told you at the end, “they’re going to welcome you as a hero, back after 1,600 years, and you’ll live out the rest of your life as a canine king.”

October 11. You set out from Oahu. A crew of sixteen men and a dog sitting in the double canoe. You were riding the great, wide sea. You, Goodnight, were no longer a dog of the twenty-first parallel north. You were headed south of the equator. But the Polynesian navigator you were all counting on was, it turned out, a fraud who had only joined the crew to get his name in the newspapers. “If worst comes to worst,” he thought, “someone will rescue us with whatever modern equipment they’ve got.” He hadn’t totally mastered the traditional navigation techniques, which were by then being passed down in Polynesia only in secret, to a select few. He was all bluster, just like the researcher. Still, when night fell the sixteen human members of the crew gazed up at the sky. They read the stars. During the day, they watched which way the birds flew. You, Goodnight, didn’t look up at the blue sky; you kept your gaze trained rigidly on the flat horizon. By October 12, you were already growing homesick. You missed the little beagles. Those four puppies you had mothered, and whom you had kept caring for even after they were grown. Your teats tingled. Five pairs of teats that had never lactated.

1975. And the other dog—the male on the twentieth parallel north? Cabron, in Mexico City. He had acquired an alter ego. An alter ego that was simultaneously human and canine. But only when his face was covered; then, and only then, was this man transformed into a dogman. He was thirty years old, a mestizo, and they called him the Hellhound. That, at any rate, was the name he used in the ring. The Hellhound was a luchador.

The Hellhound was active in entertainment wrestling, known as lucha libre, “free fighting,” a sport that had been practiced in Mexico since 1933.

Of course, he donned a dog mask in the ring and fought as a dogman. His special maneuvers were the Dog-Hold and the Dog-Bite, the latter delivered to the top of his opponent’s head. He also did a torpedo kick called the St. Bernard.

The numeral two had a special meaning for the Hellhound. He had two faces, for instance: his outer and his inner face. In the 1970s, there were approximately two thousand luchadores in Mexico, seventy percent of whom wore masks. A certain number of these wrestlers maintained a policy of total secrecy and lived without revealing their true names or places of birth. The Hellhound was one of these. From the time of his debut, he had paid the company that created his mask a huge sum to keep all information regarding his countenance, his unmasked face, under wraps. Two faces: one outer, one inner. The vast majority of luchadores, eighty percent of whom also had other jobs, treated their everyday, unmasked faces as their public faces; the masks were the hidden identities they assumed only in the ring. The Hellhound was different. For him, the masked self, the dogman, was the public self.

The reason for this was obvious: he appeared without his mask, his ordinary face exposed, whenever he had underworld dealings. He had a position in one of the two cartels competing for domination in Mexico. And not just any position—the Hellhound was the boss. He had a special token to prove it. A dog. The dog on the twentieth parallel north. Yes, that’s right, the mongrel Cabron was his. The Hellhound, in other words, was Cabron’s alter ego. The Hellhound looked after Cabron—he owned Cabron, he was owned by Cabron—and so, for precisely that reason, he was acknowledged throughout the underworld, from North America all the way down into Central America, as an official member of La Familia. Texas’s La Familia. The family.

Once again, two. Having an alter ego, being an alter ego.

What’s more, the Hellhound was the second generation in his family to work in this business. He had taken over from his father, who had changed the course of his life. His father had been the first to initiate a relationship with La Familia, and he’d had his own dog. A mongrel the Don had given him. The dog’s father—his seed, that is to say—had been a giant St. Bernard, incredibly brave, fabled throughout the region for having saved no fewer than seven lives. The Hellhound had been born in 1945; his father’s dog joined the household in 1949. Almost as far back as the Hellhound could remember, the dog had been there. The Hellhound had loved to pet the dog, and he would ride him—he had gone in for dog-riding, you might say, not horse-riding—and he would sleep with his head pillowed on the dog’s fluffy, roly-poly stomach, tug on his ears, and pet him some more. The Hellhound had hardly any childhood memories in which this dog did not figure. When he grew older, he used to grapple with the dog, pretending to fight. It was a sort of pseudo- wrestling and also a sort of pseudo-dogfighting. Dogfighting, incidentally, was big in Mexico too. As a boy, the Hellhound had never once managed to get the upper hand on his mongrel opponent. Of course not. The mongrel was a master. On the night of his seventh birthday, frisking around with the dog on the patio, he realized that he would never win. He shed tears of humiliation at his weakness, but at the same time he felt a new respect for the dog welling up within him. From now on, he decided, the dog really would be his master. Master!

Ever since he was a boy, the Hellhound had tended to run with his passions. If he wasn’t as good as the dog, he would learn from the dog. And so his relationship with the mongrel La Familia had given his father deepened; the dog became his family, his teacher, his closest friend. It was during those days that he perfected his killer St. Bernard Kick. The Hellhound had always been an outstandingly physical child, ever since he was born, and he was always landing flying kicks in his classmates’ stomachs at school whenever he flew into a rage. He’d been doing this since almost the first day, even attacking the older tough-guy types.

At the same time, going to school introduced a new worry into his life. Until then, he always assumed his family’s business was perfectly above board, but now it began to dawn on him that the activities they were involved in were criminal. His classmates’ parents weren’t involved in organized crime. What? You mean we’re doing illegal things? Drug dealing and stuff? Killing people? But…isn’t that…isn’t that bad? The boy began to be tormented by moral qualms. Then it was 1957. The year the dog died. The boy’s family, teacher, and closest friend—gone. The boy was twelve, and it hit him hard. He felt as if a hole had opened up in his heart. He visited the local Catholic church every day to pray for the repose of the dog’s soul. Then one Sunday three months after the dog’s death, something happened. During the sermon. The pastor, as it happened, had spent the previous night with a cousin who had come up to the city from their hometown, and since the two men hadn’t seen each other for four-and-a-half years, the pastor imbibed a bit too much tequila. So he wasn’t doing too well. His voice, as he stood declaiming from the pulpit, was so toneless that most of the congregation started nodding off. The boy, too, felt himself falling under a sort of spell, as if he were succumbing to hypnosis. Only in his case, it wasn’t hypnotism of the You’re getting very, very sleepy type. He was having an actual hallucination. Hearing a mysterious message. First, he heard a voice. A male voice: “Hello? Hello? Hel-low!” It was an adult voice. What? Who is that? The boy glanced around the church, then froze. Up there behind the priest, a little to his right, at the rear of the pulpit, the statue of the crucified Christ was moving its lips. Their gazes met. And BAM, a bolt of spiritual lightning slammed through his body.

“Hey!” Jesus Christ’s voice bellowed in his brain. “Don’t you think you’ve got some things to take care of before you come here to pray for a dog? What about all this immorality you’re part of? You gotta make amends for that stuff first!”

All at once, just like that, the boy felt the hole the dog’s death had left in his heart close up, plugged by the wisdom he had been granted.

Whoosh. In it went, just like that.

Bear in mind that the Hellhound had always been unusually passionate. He was particularly susceptible to hallucinations. Physically prepared, you might say, to receive the word of God.

Age fourteen. The young man made his first appearance in the ring. He was a luchador now. He had spent the last two years training four hours daily, and expectations were high for this newcomer able to pull off impeccable high-flying moves. In Mexico, fourteen was not considered a young age to debut as a wrestler. And of course lucha libre was the preeminent form of popular entertainment. People watched, captivated, as the struggle between good and evil played itself out in the ring. Cheering for (or jeering at) the luchador who stood for goodness and jeering at (or cheering) the luchador who stood for evil offered a means of letting out the stress that accumulated in day-to-day life. Wrestling was a world of fantasy. And so the boy entered the ring. Watch me. Be happy!

This was his solution to the moral dilemma that plagued him.

His family’s business was evil. Well then, he would serve the public by becoming a luchador, showing his audiences a good time!

Thus he assuaged the prickings of his conscience.