“It’s because you were sent the diary that I feel I should tell you what you want to know,” he said. “The account you gave me yesterday about Hiro working in Thakhek with a group of misfits wasn’t true. He wasn’t there.”

“You mean he wasn’t there under that name?” said Siri.

“No, I mean physically he was never a part of any occupational force based in Thakhek. He’d been decommissioned a long time before.”

“Damn,” said Siri. “I think it’s story time.”

“It’s a long story,” said Satsai. “I think you’ll want to sit somewhere more comfortable.”

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Major Depression

“It was late 1940,” Satsai began. “I was a field medic with the French forces up on the Chinese border. They’d recruited me mostly for my languages. Apart from French and Lao I knew Vietnamese and a few hill tribe dialects. The average Lao and Vietnamese foot soldiers were uneducated. They could barely communicate in their own national languages. Imagine a French captain trying to get through to a brigade of farmers. Making me a medic was not based on any skills I’d exhibited in medicine. They had no budget for translators even though they badly needed linguists in the field. They also needed able-bodied men to carry litters and patch up wounds and hand out malaria tablets. In me they had both.

“The Japanese had arrived some two months earlier. They’d taken advantage of France’s distractions in Europe and lied their way into the French-controlled region in order to stop the trains heading through to China loaded with weapons and supplies. The friction along the border was substantial and the French fortresses were on constant alert for an inevitable Japanese offensive. When I arrived, the two armies were truly strange bedfellows. There was no official conflict between the Japanese and those they called the ‘white devils’—most of whom were actually Vietnamese—so the French had no choice but to allow the invaders to use their services and help themselves to supplies.