I wasn’t. This had Civilai written all over it: smart kid, beautiful nurse, senior Lao surgeon with a great sense of humor. He was showcasing communism. When the fliers were back home in front of the cameras they’d fondly remember the last people they met in Hanoi and forget the seven years of misery.

“Perhaps they aren’t all bad,” they’d say.

The nurse gave me the results of the pilots’ blood, urine and stool tests. As you’d expect after years in the jungle there was a parasite orgy going on inside them. According to their medical history, two had made it through malaria. Three had survived dengue. One was currently still enjoying its effects. There was diarrhea and skin disease but, as far as I could tell from the records, nothing terminal. Or, at least nothing that would kill them in the next three weeks. And that was evidently our goal, to get them safely into the hands of American doctors who we could later blame if the pilots all keeled over on US soil. I doubted they’d ever be free of nightmares even when the physical symptoms were taken care of.

I gave each of the young men a thorough physical, noted breaks and bruises and sprains and scars the way a car rental shop might note down scratches and dents. The first three pilots were respectful and displayed an unexpected sense of fun. They joked through young Hung Lan who seemed more than capable of finding the right linguistic tones and textures. I bantered in battle-hardened black humor, and they responded with anecdotes from years behind bars. They weren’t yet confident enough to criticize or blame. They’d start a story then stop, shake their heads, smile and think of something nice to say about their captors. They were still in enemy territory.

I tried to imagine what years in a cell might do to me. Would I become some other Siri? One that I didn’t like? And how would I stop my mind from crusting over? What would I have to do to hang on to my memories, my knowledge, my sanity? And I’m sure it was that doubt about my own self-control that led me to leave Henry till last. They’d warned me about him. He’d spent five-and-a-half years in a bamboo cage in a remote, inaccessible area in the north of Laos. He’d been flying air support for a bombing mission over Vietnam, and his aircraft had been hit by random small-arm fire that brought him down. He broke his arm when he parachuted into the jungle and hit his head. He walked for a week, disoriented, ill, fatigued and was finally captured by a rebel militia unit. These were no regular PL troops—more a band of hill tribe bandits who sold themselves to whichever army offered the best deal.