“A predictable answer, given your history,” said Manh, fighting to hold back his anger. “That is your problem. So much intelligence, and so little common sense.”

“I had common sense or I would not have survived in combat,” answered Dzung. “Then for almost four years your interrogators kept repeating that I had been stupid to oppose the revolution, and they reeducated me. So maybe all the lectures by the stupid propagandists took away my common sense.”

“Be careful,” warned Manh, tapping the phone.

Dzung was still smiling, but he spoke without a trace of sarcasm as he watched the Interior Ministry official’s face. “Oh, it was a wonderful education, Manh! Nothing like the boring classrooms of Da Lat! Clearing minefields by hand and planting thousands of trees out in the wilderness. Eating bugs because there was no meat. Living in the mountains like we were some lost and hopeless tribe, never hearing a radio or reading a newspaper or seeing the people we loved, until most of the people we loved were either dead or had disappeared. Four years, listening to the gong man, the pit-bull man, the gun man, the propaganda man, the loudspeaker man, until my brain was so overloaded with nonsense that it emptied all the garbage out into the jungle, just the way you vomit when you have eaten too much food. All of it, left behind me in the camps. That is what happened to my second education, the education that was supposed to erase my education. But it helped me become more intelligent. It cleansed my mind and focused it, don’t you see?”

“You must speak more carefully,” warned Manh. “I am trying to help you when I say this. You should be showing me respect. If you knew how quickly I could lock you up you would be very afraid of the things you are saying.”

“Afraid of what? You are a powerful man, so maybe you know fear, but do you know what courage is?” Memories washed over Dzung until the calm in his face resonated, penetrating even the depths of Manh’s dark threat. “Courage and honor, respect and even pity, justice and, yes, you may not like for me to say it, but let me use the word—love? Do you know these words, Manh? A love for your children, so deep that you would die for them? Or maybe a love of justice, so pure that it demands that you speak out? These are the feelings that push the world forward. And what are they to you but words? What have you learned in the government schools that taught you how to hate and to interrogate? The honor of defending a failed revolution? Justice measured by a bribe? The love of retribution? Sometimes I pity you, and then I wish I could show you what could have been. Or what might have been. Or even what could be.”