Let’s sketch the details, if only to get them out of the way. I don’t want a life story to get in the way of this because not much of that seems to hold great importance and yet, as Corley once quoted Hemingway to me, ‘Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.’

After coming home I struggled on for another year with the agency, still working a desk but one whose importance diminished on a daily basis, and then, to use the current terminology, we had a ‘conscious uncoupling’ and I moved into the Foreign Service where I stayed for the duration of my career, slowly climbing rungs, my advancements marked by the rising quality of my suits and a greater understanding of how power administrates itself. I think I had a natural affinity for diplomacy that at the end of the day is always merely the advocacy of civilised relationships, predicated exclusively, of course, on self-interest. I learned how to smooth paths and how to convey insight, even sagacity, saying as little as possible when opinion wasn’t required. In those early years I also kept the fact that I continued to read a private matter, because in the world I moved in there were those who saw contemporary fiction as a honey trap and in their narrow vision was probably the equivalent of sleeping with the enemy.

Coupled with organisation and efficiency, and I suppose my inherent ‘steadiness’, I was able to make my way until, in the fullness of time, I acquired a reputation for sound judgement. For prudence. Perhaps even for patriotism, although I like to think I wore it as lightly as the Stars and Stripes pin in my lapel. And if the younger staff occasionally whispered to newcomers that I was one of the last out of Saigon, I did nothing to diminish that little flush of admiration that in REMF world is offered to those who have seen service. One of the last out. It makes me smile to think of the number of times I have been assured by individuals – mostly in late-night bars or on long-haul flights when the lights are finally dimmed – that they were on that final rooftop chopper and I simply nod and wonder, if everyone’s claim was true, how it would ever have been able to lift itself into the air. The only reality revealed by such stories is that some suffer from the desire to recast themselves as a hero, a desire that thankfully I have felt no need of in my life and hope to avoid now.