That didn’t make much of a difference to us on the ground in those days. I don’t know how many young men and women I’d put back together as best I could. I’d cried with each failure. I’d drunk with officers who would be dead the next morning. Ours wasn’t an army of guerilla soldiers. These were shopkeepers and farmers and teachers in uniform, and they were no less terrified of being in the jungle than the young American boys from the Midwest. But whoever it was there in the rain and the muck, they asked the same question. Down through the elephant mahouts of Hannibal, the foot soldiers of Kublai Khan, the Germans and English in the mud of the Somme—they all wanted to know the same thing: “What in God’s name are we doing here?” But no matter what god you asked, you’d not get your answer because no god has ever seen any sense in war.

Which is all a long detour on the way to telling my story. You’ve probably worked out how it started. I was sitting at a table in front of the Metropole Hotel, which had recently rechristened the Reunification. There weren’t many roadside bars in Hanoi back then. North Vietnamese had better things to do than lounge and booze. But there were some. There was a tourist trade of sorts. Curious foreigners came to see what it was like to party in a war zone. There was the Vietnam-American Friendship Association for one, shipping in anyone willing to pay their exorbitant prices. So there were cafés and restaurants and the odd bar, and there was me at the only occupied table at the Metropole that morning.

“Anyone sitting there?” came a voice I’d been expecting to hear.

I turned to see Civilai in full North Vietnamese Army dress uniform. His hair had retreated even further from his brow and he looked, I don’t know, hardened. In his left hand, he held a rattan mango-plucker, which, from a very long distance, might have looked like a tennis racquet. I stood, kissed his cheeks and shook his right hand.

“That’s the best you can do?” I asked.

“Do you know how hard it is to find a tennis racquet in war-torn Hanoi?” he asked.

“Sit down before someone asks you to harvest mangoes,” I said.

He laughed and sat and looked around for a waiter. There was a greater chance of seeing a penguin stroll along Ly Thai To.

“How long are you in town?” he asked.

“Just long enough to pick up supplies. I head back to Vieng Xai on Thursday.”

“Then I’m lucky I got to see you,” he said.

“Always a pleasure. Why are you dressed like a postman?”

“It’s . . .”