Later we walked on the beach. The rain had stopped and the sky was blue once again, as if the previous rain and wind had been just a passing fit of temper, and with some sense of equilibrium restored we took off our shoes and walked along the water’s edge. Corley talked of his childhood holidays on the Connecticut coast, the cottage they hired every year and the fishing trips he went on with his father. I had no such childhood memories to offer in return and so I assumed my customary role of listener. We had brought swimming trunks but the sight of raw sewage in the water put an end to that idea and we slipped our shoes on again. As we walked we met two Americans. One of them knew Corley and they stopped to talk for a while. Afterwards he told me that they worked for DAO and were part of a team sent to reconnoitre the area and assess if it would prove a suitable place to ensure a safe evacuation if it was needed. In the event it would never be used but instead in the years after Saigon’s fall become the starting point for many of those who sought to escape the new republic. They would set off in small craft and fishing boats under the gaze of the giant Christ who stood high on the hill with his arms outstretched. And I wonder if any of those looking at it thought those outstretched arms were a farewell blessing or a calling back from all the dangers that awaited them.

The trip had been a failure, although neither of us admitted it to the other, and so we told ourselves it made sense to head back before it got dark. Corley drove this time and I mistakenly thought that the concentration this required might stem some of his conversation. But it was only after about an hour of small talk that he fell silent and probably then because I pretended to be asleep. The silence was short-lived.

‘Mikey, Mikey,’ he said, poking me, and then when I sat up and had given him my attention, ‘have you ever done something really stupid?’

I could have given him a long list beginning with our trip to Vung Tau but there was something uncharacteristically tentative about his voice that stopped me falling into facetiousness.

‘Yeah, I guess. Lots of things,’ I said, but I somehow knew that he didn’t mean what Donovan would have described as little chickenshit things and, when he didn’t answer right away but firmed his hands on the wheel and stared intently at the road ahead, I knew something out of the usual was coming. And as it wasn’t my stupidity he was interested in, I didn’t offer to elaborate.

‘I trust you, Mikey. There’s no one else I can tell and I need to tell someone.’

And just for one crazy and mistaken moment I thought he was going to say, ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,’ but instead he glanced at me either to visually confirm his evaluation or check that I was really listening.