‘Fireworks waken you?’ he asked as he shuffled the beer and magazine to allow himself to turn his key in the lock. ‘Any excuse and they’re letting off firecrackers like it’s the Fourth of July.’

I nodded and then as nonchalantly as I could rubbed some imaginary sleep out of my eyes, simulated a yawn and returned to my room.

It was the closest I ever came to being under fire. I worked in a white-stuccoed, red-tiled, three-storeyed former French administration office guarded at its entrance by a couple of Nung guards who lounged against the metal gates but never let their M16s leave their hands and who on that first morning, when I ostentatiously showed them my pass, looked at me, not with my hoped-for respect, but the same disdain that every soldier has for REMFs – rear-echelon motherfuckers. And that’s the thing about the war because when we were still in the shadow of the Paris Peace Accords finally being signed, which we know now only served to briefly postpone the inevitable, it felt initially at least like some distant sideshow from which I was physically and even morally disconnected, even though I was there because of it. Having been recruited and trained a short while earlier, my role was essentially to shuffle paper, sort the torrent of intelligence reports that streamed in from various sources, transcribe, collate, summarise, cross-reference, highlight things that required urgent responses and occasionally use my knowledge of French when needed. We had sources inside the French Embassy in Saigon and in Paris filing on a regular basis. I was little more than a clerk with security clearance. My ID card simply said I was an employee of the American Embassy.

We look at what happens to us through the prism of our own inherent stumbling day-to-day lives and not through the printed page and the long lens of history. So my memory of those years isn’t dominated by the bloody images that we’ve all seen on our television screens, or the names on the Wall, even though I’m eternally conscious of them and deeply respectful of the human suffering represented by everyone who died on all sides in that distant land. The past is shaped instead by something intensely and chaotically personal, so sometimes it feels as if it’s part of a puzzle that doesn’t fit into the overall and ordered composition established by that well-documented history. It’s history, of course, whose judgement pronounces us guilty of terrible things and I accept that verdict, share my culpability. But the young man walking to his office on those Saigon mornings, and who had arrived belatedly in the final years leading up to the war’s sudden and dramatic end, believed he wasn’t there to kill people or drop napalm. Wasn’t really there to do anyone any harm, and whatever personal revisionism my subsequent experiences and the passing of the years have brought to that belief, it had not then sown seed much less taken root. Mostly I just sat on the building’s second floor with the louvred windows half-closed in a futile attempt to keep out some of the city’s broiling heat, read about what other people were doing in so-called intelligence reports from our army of agents but which often seemed merely attempts to justify their continued existence on Uncle Sam’s payroll, and occasionally translated documents or tapes. There was no proper air conditioning and the wooden blades of the electric ceiling fans did little to relieve our discomfort, so their main purpose seemed to be to gently levitate the pile of papers with which my desk was usually covered.