“We will have that answer soon enough,” said Muir. “Once we make a positive ID on Specialist Fourth Class Deville we will locate his family, his unit history, and his former comrades. And we will also find out not simply how he ended up in that village, but why they apparently did not go back to find him when he disappeared.”

A shabby little bus took Condley from the hangar to the airport terminal, built during the war by the Americans. Inside, he sipped filtered coffee in the same waiting room in which he had stood thirty years before as he prepared to board the giant Freedom Bird that would take him away from the war zone. The cracked pavement underneath his feet was the same. So was the huge mural on the wall depicting a waterfall somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and even the fake little pond just outside one window, cobbled with molded gravel and underneath a now-unworkable water fountain. All the same—the runway, all twelve thousand feet of it, built by the French in one war and expanded by the Americans in another, the sagging hangars, the crumbling revetments that once had housed scores of American combat aircraft. The mountains rose up like looming shadows to the west, and just beyond them had been the war. Literally thousands of battles had been fought within an easy helicopter ride from where Condley stood.

A French Airbus with a British pilot and a crew of gorgeous Vietnamese flight attendants took him back to Sai Gon. There were not a lot of people on the plane. Condley dozed fitfully at his window seat, exhausted from his journey to Ninh Phuoc and back. At one point he awakened as if from a nightmare, imagining that he had put Specialist Deville’s remains in his hanging bag and wondering where the bag had gone. But finally he relaxed, looking out the window and remembering.