Chapter 1 My Leg and the Wilderness You only live twice: Once when you are born And once when you look death in the face. Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, 1964 I'm descended from a long line of Quaves, running all the way back to Juan de Cuevas, born in Alg++mitas, Spain, in 1762, who settled in what is now known as Harrison County, Mississippi. He married into the French Canadian Ladner family that had settled in the region, and they made their home on Cat Island, raising twelve children. To this day, their descendants carry a number of similar surnames-Cuevas, Coueves, Quave, and Queve. The name on my line of the family is pronounced kwave (rhymes with wave). We've always been people of the land. My father, Raymond, grew up on Quave Street in Biloxi, which, at one time, was entirely inhabited by close relatives. Daddy's father, J. L., was a stumper. Back in the 1920s, colossal longleaf pines (Pinus palustris, Pinaceae) throughout the south were clear-cut and used to build the homes and businesses of small towns that popped up along the coastline and interior of Florida. These evergreen trees sport the longest needlelike leaves of any pine in the world and proudly stand between eighty and one hundred feet tall. After trees were felled, the stumps stayed behind. J. L. and his sons used bulldozers to push the stumps out of the ground and then blew them up with dynamite, blasting them into small enough pieces for grinding at the stump mill. The Hercules Powder Company had such a mill located on the Peace River in DeSoto County, Florida. After being washed, the stumps were ground into chips and steamed to extract turpentine and other by-products like nitroglycerin and black powder. Stumping was an essential part of clearing the land following the timber harvest and creation of arable land for agricultural use. It was not easy work. My uncle Tommy lost several fingers playing with a hammer and a dynamite blasting cap as a kid, and another close member of J. L.'s work crew, Bo, died when a chain carrying heavy equipment broke and crushed him in the semitruck cab. Daddy grew up working outdoors, welding together pieces of scrap metal both as an artistic outlet and as a means to repair pieces of the business's bulldozers, tractors, and excavators. After the family moved from Mississippi to Florida, Daddy and his brothers became well known for their wild days of drag racing cars and trying to outrun the police. One of my uncles even served on a chain gang after being caught by a policeman. At the age of twenty in 1969, Daddy made his first trip overseas, trading the swamplands of Florida for those of Vietnam. He served in the First Infantry, Eleventh Brigade, Company B, Third Battalion, Americal Division, Central Highlands. He trekked through miles of jungle recently defoliated by dioxin, or Agent Orange-a powerful herbicide sprayed by US military forces to eliminate forest cover and crops of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops. In late July 1970, his machine gun locked and loaded, he was on top of an armored personnel carrier (APC) with four other friends in his squad, their eyes on alert as they surveyed the horizon, sweat dripping down their backs. Six other members of his platoon rode inside the APC. They were positioned in North Vietnam, north of the Quaúng Ng