‘Well you can,’ I told him. ‘Help me with what I want and you can see them again. But play games with me and you’ll disappear off the face of the earth, your ashes scattered by the wind.’

These were the words I said to him. They weren’t my words but they were spoken in my voice. And then I had to ask him if he understood. He nodded, but in the next thirty minutes it didn’t seem that Donovan managed to prise out of him anything much more than he had already been given and I could sense his rising frustration in his body language as he pushed his chair back from the table several times or blew little streams of air.

‘Tell the son of a bitch I’ll be back to see him tomorrow and tell him when he tells me the truth he can have his photograph back, can have his family back,’ and before I had finished delivering the translation Donovan was hammering on the locked door, impatient for the guard to open it.

But we didn’t go back the following day – ‘We’ll let him stew a little, think things over,’ Donovan later told me. And when, in the silence of the car, I tried to make conversation by asking about his children’s ages, his gruff answers indicated that these weren’t matters he wanted to talk about. Knowing formally about his family also made it impossible to ask about Tuyen, because I could no longer do so without us both sharing the reality of his infidelity and I was fearful of the repercussions if I was to try. And then, as we drove, I endured a fleeting moment of even greater fear that cast me in a future world where the only words I ever uttered were those dictated by him until our voices merged into one and became the ash blown on the wind he had spoken of. So that night, as I hunkered down in my room, I wrote a long letter home that I knew was not for my family’s benefit but to reassure myself that my own voice still existed and was not eternally bound to another’s will. I know now, of course, that it’s what war does and that being part of a collective committed to a shared predetermined aim obviates the individual, and to think otherwise is foolishness. The logical progression of this is that sometimes the voice speaking for you puts words in your mouth that you don’t believe or want to express. It’s why, too, we always seek to punish the internal dissenter as ruthlessly as the enemy, the man or woman who insists on the primacy of their own voice. And as I wrote that letter I felt an unfamiliar nostalgia for that small-town world where life trundled on in well-established rhythms and the most dramatic changes were the slow turning of the seasons.