There he was standing on a makeshift stage in front of the old French colonial house. Thousands of men had come to greet him. He wore no hat but the rain didn’t seem to stick to him as it did to the rest of us. Six months ago Japan declared that the occupation of Indochina was now officially a coup de force. We could stop pretending to be polite to our insufferable French hosts. We had taken the whole of the region in a day and had resorted to the same barbarism we’d enjoyed in Manchuria. Thakhek was now the center of operations, a chance to regroup, refresh, retrain. We had to find some answer to the unimaginable threat that we were losing our grip over the countries we’d occupied. The troops who stood there in front of the general were a defeated lot. Their uniforms were tattered and they all sported souvenir wounds of the campaign. And as I stood in front of the stage with the other regional commanders and our own Major General Dorari, I could see the faces of every one of the men and it appeared to me they were deformed in some way. It was as if they’d been made of clay and were melting: eyes into cheeks, noses into chins. My colleagues stood in the front row at attention, perfectly still, perfectly silent, looking up at the general with something close to love in their eyes. There had been no meeting of officers to announce this assembly. Every man had arrived there spontaneously. The general had insisted that I stand in front with my back to him alongside our major general and some four lieutenant colonels I’d never seen before.

The general was giving a speech that used the words “victory” and “massacre” and “pride” a great deal. But it was then I noticed something else. All the men in my unit were looking at me and smiling. And behind them, every eye on every man, wherever that eye had settled in those shifting faces, was also looking at me. To my left, Major General Dorari was looking at me. And when I turned, the general, his mouth now as big as his entire head, was looking at me. The speech came to an end and Colonel Konko took me by the hand and invited me to enter the house with him. He showed me to a spare room and suggested I sleep. I was fatigued and greasy from the heavy rain and tired, so I lay down.