Henry spoke not one more word that day. He just glared angrily into my eyes as I untangled his lies.

“You’d had enough of this war and the mindless killing,” I said. “And you wanted to get out of it. We can all understand that. And, what better place to escape a war than Thailand? Pretty women. Low prices. Nobody asking questions. I’m not sure where you’d put down the roots to this new life, but it’s unlikely you’d go to Udon Thani with its secret American airbases we all know about. You’d avoid big cities. There was always a chance you’d be recognized in the bars. I’m guessing you buried your parachute near the river, changed into civvies and jumped on a local bus to somewhere like Ubon Ratchathani. You had money saved—probably already set up a Thai bank account. And it seemed back then you could probably live off your savings forever.

“Not a lot of difference between northeastern Thai language and Lao,” I said. “You probably married a local girl who taught you the language in a feminine kind of way, and you got confident because everyone understood you. But you aren’t that good. There are differences between Isan Thai and hill-tribe Lao. In fact, I doubt you’d find a band of hill-tribe rebels fluent enough in Lao to be able to teach you anything. Yours is the Lao of Thai bars and yours is the body of the soft life. Whatever maladies you picked up were treated at the local hospital. Those last bruises and scrapes were probably thanks to you running head first into a wall or punching yourself in the face.”

The early evening mosquitoes were flocking around the onlookers planning a sundown assault, but the audience was rapt and I was the star. Nobody else spoke.

“In the beginning, I imagine you had no intention of returning to the West,” I said. “You were safe and you were happy. You had your secret Nirvana, but you were young and illegal. And there was a world out there you hadn’t seen. You became dissatisfied, and your money ran out. Your banana farm and your lychee plantation and your pig pens or whatever you thought might make your fortune, they all failed and you were left dissatisfied and frustrated. You needed to get back to America. But how do you do that when everyone believes you’re dead? The Central Command listed you as MIA. There was only one way to come back with dignity. You’d read about other US fliers imprisoned for years. The ones that made it back home had options and probably received a pension. But you had a bigger idea. You wrote about your fictional incarceration in a full-length manuscript. You could see movie and TV rights at the end of the tunnel.