The guns had stopped. The ships in the harbor sat still. Wayne Wilberg, a young Marine far from home, drove his truck through a quiet that felt strange after so many loud and terrible days.
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Then — at the edge of the trees — something moved. A child. Then another. Then so many more that Wayne stopped the truck and could only stare. They came out of the mountains like swarms of ants.
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Wayne learned what had happened. The children's parents had been killed in the fighting. The children had been sent up into the hills to hide from the war. They had been there so long, with nothing to eat, that many of them did not make it back down.
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The army, the Red Cross, and soldiers like Wayne began setting up camps. They brought food and blankets. They called out to the children: "Come down. Come down. You are safe now."
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One afternoon Wayne's group was out when they found a boy of twelve — alone, standing very still, watching them from the shadow of a tree. He did not run. He was too hungry to run.
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Wayne reached into his pocket and held out a candy bar. The boy took it. Then — in about two bites — it was gone. "We gave him a candy bar and he gobbled it up," Wayne would say later, and he never forgot the look on that boy's face.
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The soldiers made the boy a bed and snuck him inside after dark. They knew they were breaking the rules. "If they found out we had him," Wayne said quietly, "we would have been court-martialed." But nobody said go back.
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For several days, Wayne's group took care of the boy. They could not speak his language. He could not speak theirs. But they began to understand each other — in the way you understand someone when you share a meal and a roof and keep each other warm.
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Then the soldiers found him a job. They set him by the telephone and told him — with waving hands and pointing fingers — that when it rang, he should run outside and shout until someone came. He could not speak any English. But he could listen. And he could run.
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BRING! went the telephone. And out flew the boy — bare feet slapping the ground — yelling at the top of his lungs. "Telle! Telle! Telle!" he shouted, until someone came running to answer it.
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Later, the soldiers were able to make arrangements for the boy. He would be cared for. He would be safe. He was no longer lost up in the mountains. He was found.
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The day Wayne's unit shipped home from the war, the boy was standing on the docks, waving goodbye. Not hiding in the mountains. Not hungry. Not silent. Just waving — and waving — until the ship was gone.
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