“Was it a natural fire?” Daeng asked.

“No, Comrade. We were attacked.”

“In ’75?” said Siri.

“It was a few months before the Pathet Lao took over the country,” said Satsai. “We’d been safe here all through the wars. If anyone comes by river, we hear them and we have time to know how to react. The only other way is to get here by air. And for that we had no defense.”

“Who attacked you?”

“Americans,” said Satsai.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Siri. “No offense.”

“It is ridiculous, Doctor. Yet it happened. Three US helicopters circled once. The only thing that saved us was that there was only one place they could land and that was on the village square. Most of us were at a meeting here at the school. They started shooting even before they hit the ground. We lost four villagers immediately. The rest of us climbed the hills and took refuge in the caves. There are hundreds up there towards the ridge. We all know the tunnels really well. It was an escape plan we’d formulated with the royalists against the communists but there we were fleeing our old allies. We still don’t know what bad intelligence directed them to our little hamlet but they had a hornet in their helmets about something. We weren’t even politically active here.

“The Americans were on the ground for an hour. We didn’t know what they were doing. When we heard the choppers take off, we sighed with relief, but we could already smell the smoke. We returned to an inferno. It was still the dry season, so the bamboo burned fast and the vegetation caught immediately. We did our best to put out the fires, but they’d used gasoline. It hung in the air. Every photo, every keepsake, every stitch of clothing was gone. And there was nobody to report it to. The royalists had fled with their tails between their legs and the Pathet Lao hadn’t yet arrived. By the time there was a new administration in place, we were old news. All we could do was start again. But even today we ask, why? What had we done? There were no American servicemen based in Laos. So this team had to have flown over the mountains from Vietnam—a last-gasp effort before they were called back home. But we had no idea what they wanted.”