‘We’ll all be going home pretty soon,’ I told him.

‘How can it be too soon when we’ve been going out together since high school?’

‘She just needs you home. Everything will be fine.’

‘Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder. Maybe I need to earn a medal or something, or take one for Uncle Sam. A flesh wound preferably.’

His joke seemed to lift his spirits a bit and as we sat listening to the radio he let himself slip into a Corley riff.

‘So, Michael, fellow man of the world, you think I’m not about to get a Dear John letter?’ And when I told him no, ‘And you’re sure that Sylvia isn’t going to be swept off her feet by some Tom Buchanan she’s working with, some geography-teaching Tom Buchanan wooing her with his globes, or a Charles Atlas gym instructor who thinks human achievement is how many dumb-bell lifts you can do.’

‘That’s not going to happen,’ I told him as convincingly as I could and then thought of Tuyen getting out of Donovan’s car and knew that, despite what I had said, there was nothing that was impossible. In an attempt to distract both of us from our darker thoughts, I asked, ‘How’s the novel going?’

‘Not good.’ There was a pause and I wasn’t sure if he was going to elaborate or not but, as Harry Chapin’s ‘W.O.L.D.’ turned into the Steve Miller Band and ‘The Joker’, he continued, ‘I think it’s my day job. Before, I wrote only good stories and now I have to write only bad ones about what happens when Charlie takes over your village town or city, and I don’t know any more what’s true and what’s made up. Know what I mean?’ I nodded even though I didn’t. ‘And then when I write the novel, I’m writing what isn’t true because that’s what fiction is, but at the same time it has to be true or it has no value. So different parts of my brain are doing different things and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to be listening to.’

At this point most young men would probably have smoked some dope or gone downtown, got drunk and laid, but for different, and not always easily explained, reasons these options didn’t seem open to us and so in their place we decided, when we could borrow a car, we’d travel out to the beach resort of Vung Tau and attempt our own boyish version of R&R, have a swim in the sea. It seemed important for us to get out of the city that, as rumour and fears tightened around it, had started to feel constrained, even claustrophobic at times, so there were moments when to my surprise I sensed a fleeting nostalgia for the world of the prairie. But before that excursion happened there was work to be done and in the following days I was inundated with a seemingly endless flow of documents that originated from various sources, including one inside the French Embassy itself which focused on clandestine French negotiations with the North Vietnamese. What their overall purpose was I couldn’t say, other than perhaps a forlorn attempt to recover face and possibly restore some influence in the region as a whole. But it transpired Donovan had some ongoing interest in them and one day at the end of work he was waiting for me in his car a short distance along from the office building and there was nothing in the way of preamble.