He gave me a dirty look and in him I saw the ugly Dr. Siri I’d probably have become after five years in captivity. I’d probably be intolerable after five months. When we left the room, I spoke of my concerns to my team and assigned them some tasks. I had time before my date that evening to pay visits to two old friends.

Bao Ninh was at his desk at the department of statistics at Hanoi University. He’d been collating data since the beginning of the war. The Vietnamese loved collating and recording. He had records on everything from pelicans being shot accidently by antiaircraft fire to tanks sinking without a trace beneath the mud of the monsoons.

From there I still had time to stop by the office of General Xuan of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Being a field surgeon, I often had the good fortune of saving the lives of important people. Xuan was in his office and alive only due to the fact that I’d removed half a ton of shrapnel from his chest. He was a man who greatly appreciated being alive. We shared a jug of coffee and some reminiscences, and I left him with homework I knew would be completed thoroughly.

I returned to my dorm, changed into clothes that looked exactly the same as the ones I’d taken off but were cleaner and took a bicycle samlor back to the Reunification. I was an hour early. The interior bar had come alive since my earlier visit. If I’d taken a photograph I doubt anyone in the world would have guessed the setting was a bar in a city that was about to be bombed to oblivion. Attempting to describe the international crowd there that evening would have been like identifying extras in a Fellini movie. I wanted to ask where all the freaks had come from—how they’d got there—why they’d bothered. But I had to rehearse my speech. I had my notes on a napkin. I didn’t know how long we’d be alone together. She spoke French, I heard, so we could communicate without an interpreter. But I wanted to hit the right tone. It went something like this: