When I got him into his room and on to his bed, he asked me not to go. I didn’t want to stick around, thinking it best if he got to sleep it off, but when he sat up there was an urgency in his voice as he pleaded with me to stay. He was shaking his head and once he jerked his hand as if there were flies buzzing round him. I got him a drink and he held the glass with two hands like a child frightened he might spill its contents.

‘We have to get out of here,’ was what he said. ‘We have to get out, Mikey.’

‘It’s OK, Corley,’ I told him, thinking that it was still the drink talking. ‘It’s OK.’

‘No, Mikey, it’s fucked. It’s all fucked.’

‘You’ll be OK in the morning. You need to sleep now.’

But as I made to go he grasped my sleeve and held it tightly.

‘You don’t understand, Mikey. You, me, we don’t understand anything. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.’

And then he reached to the side of his bed and handed me his notebook.

‘Read it, Mikey. No, not later. Read it now. You have to read it – it’s the only thing I’ve ever written that’s true.’

He was so agitated that there was no way to avoid his request and so I sat at the end of the bed and opened the notebook.

They’re sending me into the field. Can’t understand why I’m getting sent as part of a small team but it’s all arranged and I’m supposed to visit some villages recently ‘liberated’ from the Vietcong. I think the order’s a mistake because I don’t actually need to see anything anymore to write the stories they want. But they tell me it’s part of some program being introduced to create first-hand accounts of the good work we’re doing, and the terrible consequences if such places fall into Vietcong hands. I’m supposed to link up with some ARVN infantry platoon in the Delta. We were hitching a lift and given seats in a convoy of three Hueys and two Cobra gunship helicopters heading further north. I was issued with a helmet and a flak jacket. There was some confusion about where the rendezvous was supposed to happen but eventually they set us down close to a village sprawling haphazardly along tiered paddy fields.

A spiral of smoke snakes upwards from it and the first thing I experience when I get out of the Huey is the smell of burning and then there’s rapid fire for a few seconds and I think this isn’t where I’m supposed to be but already the chopper’s lifting off, streaming water and vegetation as its blades churn the air. Crazy shouting, screaming, more gunfire, and I start to think that we have stumbled unwittingly into a firestorm, that the Vietcong are still in the village. That it’s a trap, that this is where it’s going to end. But then I see a small group of ARVN soldiers hunkered down in a circle but they’re not sheltering from incoming fire, instead passing a smoke between them and some have their helmets off. And the firing has stopped so there’s a strange silence stretching over everything. They look at us with glazed eyes and one of them says something about us that makes the rest laugh. Just beyond them on a dry-earthed rutted pathway I see the first bodies. An old woman and two children. Two kids not much older than five or six. And I think we’ve all got there too late to save them and that’s when I see more bodies in the ditch – maybe as many as twenty – and it looks as if they’ve been herded there and slaughtered. Women, old people, children – not once did I see an adult male. Out in the paddy fields there are partially submerged bodies face down in the water with their conical hats floating beside them who look as if they’ve been killed where they worked, or trying to run away. Further out, close to a trembling bamboo thicket, is a splayed line of bodies cut down as they tried to reach the hiding place it seemed to offer.

At the entrance to the village are dead water buffaloes, their grey flanks pocked with red holes, their open eyes frozen in a blue terror. Soldiers walk past us seemingly indifferent to our presence and what lies all around them. Contorted bodies sprawl in the doorways of the ramshackle houses where fires have been started after they’ve been plundered of whatever little they held of value. Some of them have their faces shot away. Discarded worthless possessions are strewn everywhere. Little more than rags. We’ve got there too late to save them – that’s what I think, and then suddenly I realize that it isn’t the Vietcong who did this but the soldiers who walk slowly past me, dead-eyed, sullen of expression, never meeting my gaze. I see an officer and grab his arm, ask him what happened, and he throws my hand off as he says, ‘Bad people, hide Vietcong. Feed them.’ Then he walks on as he shouts, ‘Bad people,’ and spits as if they are a foul taste in his mouth.

These are the people we’ve come to save and tell about all the good things Uncle Sam is going to do for them. And what we’ve done is try to bomb them into the Stone Age, taken their daughters …