I understand, too, why Donovan set up the poles and, despite everything I know about him in the past we shared, it seems to possess its own beauty, to make something human in the wilderness, the wilderness that has always stood at the edge of our history. The wilderness where, as he said, all of us must come at some moment in our lives to face our own tests. But beauty remains in the eye of the beholder and in time we will have a president who thinks barbed wire can also be a beautiful sight. I know which I prefer. So I drive on across the invisible ley lines of history where countless journeys have been made, and not just in one direction. As a nation we have always been a people making new frontiers, pushing ever further into what lies beyond – it’s the spirit that exists at the heart of who we are – even though when George W. Bush, in his attempt to launch a global war on terrorism, talked of ‘extending the frontiers of freedom’, he ended up working off the wrong map, drawing a line in the wrong sand. And there’s still a price to be paid for that in what we did to others and what we did to our own.

In a different story, one that’s fictional, at this point the narrative would probably head in a new direction, play itself out to a predetermined ending, planned out right from the first word written. I’d tell you about escapes, about small boats setting out at night and subject to storms and attacks from pirates. I’d describe the dark, all their hopes and churning fears. Selfishness and altruism. Tell you about dramatic rescues from sinking craft and despairing stasis in refugee camps. Describe endless searches on my part, frustrating dead-ends, the piecing together of clues from dusty official ledgers and eyewitnesses and then, like one of those long-lost-family-reunited television programmes, and to the literary equivalent of appropriate heart-tugging music, end with an encounter. A nervous encounter between a man and woman grown old, and her adult child, that slowly blossoms into love. Something that gives our hearts the comfort, the needy reassurance we desire more and more in the face of this fragmenting world. But if that’s what you want, you need to look elsewhere because it’s not something I’m able to give you.

So far I have told you only what I believe to be true, and that compulsion endures more than ever now, and so it behoves me to tell you that, as I drove north to that rendezvous in the parking lot of a dying shopping mall, I finally let Tuyen and her unborn child go, let them also slip into the dark and hidden waters of history. If I had retained the religious faith of my childhood, I would have said a prayer for them and their crossing over, but as that was long gone all I could do was look out at the landscape we were journeying through and in the ochre-coloured stretch of scrubland, or in the sky, try to find something to which I might lift my eyes. I told myself that after all these years maybe I too had crossed over, from that young man in his first day in Saigon when, despite the heat and dressed in my well-worn jacket, I headed off to start a lifelong career as a REMF. It is late in the day to become a soldier and perhaps even a little duplicitous to try and assume a bravery never really felt. But sometimes you just step through an open doorway, step through it for better or worse.