ACROSS THE RIVER STYX.

Padded ear protectors had transformed the thunking of the helicopter's blades to a bland white noise, enhancing the sense of dreamlike remoteness with which we drifted over fields of shining paddy. Standing starkly in one green field, a woman wearing a pale, conical hat shaded her eyes to watch us. Hills appeared and the ground became less lush, patched with raw brown and covered with the green scrub of secondary growth. Shortly afterward, we landed on the southern slope of the Dong Ma Mountain, in Quang Tri Province in central Vietnam. Thirty-six years ago, in April of 1968, a patrol of ten American soldiers was ambushed from this hill, and a young G.I. lost his life. The men and women I had come to meet were here to retrieve what they could find of his body.

A short trail led through scrub vibrating with cicadas to a rough shelter made of bamboo and blue plastic awning. It was a hundred and three degrees, and the humidity registered at sixty-three per cent. Beyond the shelter's blue shade, on a precarious slant, a small band of diggers subjected the hillside to a tidy but determined excavation.

The eleven members of Recovery Team 4 at work on Hill 328, as Dong Ma Mountain was prosaically called during what was known here as the American War, had been deployed in Vietnam by the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command (jpac). Operating under the Department of Defense, jpac is the largest of five units--with a collective annual budget of a hundred and four million dollars--that are dedicated to retrieving and identifying the remains of American military personnel across the globe.

Work on Hill 328 was monitored by Captain Charles Gatling. Tall, dark, and energetic, the thirty-three-year-old team leader could often be found in the pit, churning out shovelfuls of dirt with large, capable hands. He espoused a theory of leadership based on communication and "caring about your people." The latter point, he said, "is just part of your upbringing."

Every member of Team 4 was a veteran of previous recovery missions. "Most here have been in the military for seven or so years--they stay because they like it," Captain Gatling told me. "They are the kind of people who like getting on with people." Civilians, he allowed, could be more problematic, although the "doctors are very focussed"; the "doctors" were the civilian anthropologists, assigned to each recovery team, who direct the actual excavations. The "anthro" of Team 4 was Dr. Elizabeth Martinson Goodman, or Zib, an athletic, golden-haired woman in her early thirties. Zib grew up on an apple orchard in Washington State. She characterized the recovery excavations as "honest, healthy work."

"Archeologists usually excavate habitation sites, or burial grounds," she said, gesturing toward the pit. "There is a moral clarity to this kind of work--you are not plundering graves."

Mapped out into a grid of three-by-three-metre squares, the pit was cleared by a bucket line that extended up the hill to a screening station. The soil was dumped into one of twelve hanging screens, then passed through quarter-inch mesh and examined for artifacts and biological matter; most excavations turn up only fragmentary remains. Each hour on site was broken into forty minutes of hard work, followed by twenty minutes of rest, during which both American and Vietnamese workers retreated to the shade of their respective shelters. Under a kind of leafy bower on a ridge of the hill, Vietnamese government officials, who accompany every mission, had their own small camp, from which smoke or the steam of a pot on the boil occasionally escaped.