“The first I heard of Major Hiro was from the Vietnamese medics in my unit. They said a Japanese officer had gone berserk. He’d spent the day with his battalion as usual, filing reports, recording the movement of equipment. At exactly five p.m. he took off all his clothes, climbed to the top of an old unoccupied French machine gun tower, and started yelling at the top of his voice. They’d dragged him down and taken him to a medical ward in a small French hospital. It was there that I met him: a crazy man. He was sedated but still shouting in a language nobody could follow. I’m not an adherent of the spirit world but to me it sounded as if he was possessed. He spat and snarled and drooled and had to be tied to the bunk to protect the other patients. He was unnerving everyone so eventually they had to put a gag on him. His commander wanted to send him back to Japan but he was in no condition to travel.

“They assigned me to him. I was supposed to feed him. For two days he just spat everything out. He needed calming down so I started to talk to him. I didn’t have much Japanese at the time so I spoke in Lao. I knew he didn’t understand but it didn’t seem to matter. After a few days he’d let me feed him. He seemed to relax with me. I felt good about it. It was like . . . like I was taming a wild beast. Three weeks passed and still they were haggling about when to ship him home. And then this general arrived. His name was Shosen Umiji and he’d been Hiro’s commanding officer in China. He had a very simplistic approach to mental health. He came to see Hiro just that one time, looked down his nose at him and spat on the pillow. He turned to his aide and said something I vaguely understood. I was sitting at the back of the room and I memorized the comment. The French had a Japanese translator and I asked him later what had been said. The translator told me, ‘Major Hiro will have to die on the battlefield.’

“The general had decided to avoid embarrassment for the family and the nation by having Hiro put down. I was astounded at how lightly he’d made the decision. I wasn’t a friend of Hiro. He was a disaster; a cocktail of hateful sounds and looks. There was a devil in his eyes even when he was relaxed. But with me by his side he remained calm. In a way he had selected me. Something told me I should help him.”

“So you sprang him from the hospital,” said Daeng.