Dzung’s eyes were faraway, lost for a moment in the memory of a village outside Bien Hoa where he had brought gifts of a dog and a scarf and helped Tu’s father rethatch a roof before asking for his blessing on their marriage. The concrete well on the packed dirt pathway outside their home brought the whole village as much water as it could use. Her family had grown rice and manioc and mangoes in the lush, flat fields. It was a good life. He had taken that from her, to the squalor of District Four. And now even this was going to disappear.

“Maybe sometime you still need me,” he said hopefully. “I still take you, maybe at night?”

“I want you to drive,” said Condley.

“Drive, sir?” asked Dzung, looking quickly at the road in front of them. “I am driving, sir. Drive where?”

“I want you to drive my car!”

A car? Dzung’s face went flush with the thought of it. “Oh, thank you, sir, but they will not give me a license.”

“You drove before ’75, right?”

“Yes, sir. I drove jeep, truck, no problem. But I am old Cong Hoa.”

Condley looked up to him, smiling with delight. “I will take care of it.”

Dzung could not believe it. “The government will not allow it, sir. I know that.”

“I’ll call in a chit with Colonel Pham.”

“Call in a chit?”

“I will get the car, maybe soon. After that I will take you on driving lessons. Then you’ll be my driver.”

“You are sure of this?”

“Yes!”

A surge of pride and anticipation lifted Dzung in his chair, empowering his tired legs. A car. “Thank you, Cong Ly. I will do good work for you.”

Dzung turned onto a smaller street. Nearby, the sun cooked the juices of a pile of garbage, filling Condley’s senses with the odor of decaying bananas, making him think in an odd way of Manila. Then suddenly in the laughing scream of a young boy he remembered the naked children of Guadalcanal, brown as raisins, their frizzed hair bleached with streaks of blond, calling to him in a village that had no electricity and no road. Such cycles were his karma, just as in Manila and Guadalcanal he had never stopped thinking of Viet Nam.

They made false turns, hit dead ends, maneuvered around randomly parked cars, piles of sand and gravel in front of old walled homes. Crowds of young kids were playing soccer or throwing their plastic flip-flop shoes at cola cans as they laughed and chattered in the street. Old Sai Gon, District Three, block after block of small villas and upscale homes left over from the French and then the Americans, confiscated from the wealthier Vietnamese who fled more than two decades before, taken over as the spoils of war by those who had served the other side.

Home to Colonel Pham. But enemy territory to a man like Dzung.