During the Vietnam War, a Vietnamese soldier who is hidden among the trees sees an American soldier who is nervous, lost, and alone, and decides to kill him with a grenade made from a Coca-Cola can. The soldier kills the man emotionlessly—he has done this many times throughout the war, and when he approaches the body to search the man’s pockets, he is unaffected by the American soldier’s wounds. All he finds among the American soldier’s pockets is a pack of Salem cigarettes. The Vietnamese soldier thinks about how Ho Chi Minh loves to smoke American Salem cigarettes and reflects on his own selfishness. Although he is supposed to surrender any objects found with dead American soldiers to help the American government identify their bodies, he takes the cigarettes for himself.  In the afternoon, he decides to smoke one of the cigarettes and sees a woman’s photograph in the cigarette package, presumably the girlfriend or wife of the man he killed. He imagines the American soldier gazing at his lover’s face every time he decides to light a cigarette and thinks of his own wife attending to the shrine in their home, and is surprised by the similarities in the rituals. He then decides that the American soldier’s ritual is different because the American soldier’s lover is alive while his own ancestors are not. As he tries to fish a cigarette out of the box, he notices that the first one to fall out is already half smoked, and he realizes that the man he killed was a poor man, just like himself, because he saved even small things like singular cigarettes. He thinks about their similarities again; they were both sent by their governments to fight in this war. The Vietnamese soldier looks at the woman’s photograph in the package and smokes the half-cigarette. He decides to keep the rest of the cigarettes and smoke them when the right time comes.