Sentence The Fourhundredandthird

What went through his mind while he slept? a fractious kaleidoscope of images from every movie he had ever seen about the Vietnam War, from The Quiet American to Apocalypse Now and interspersed with the classic, horrifying images of people being shot dead in front of reporters, children fleeing, screaming from napalm, their bodies already blistering, desperate figures on the roof of the American Embassy, clinging to the last helicopters out at the bitter end; he heard Robin Williams call-sign:

“Good Mooooooooooooorning, Vietnaaaaaam!” and he remembered friends who'd died here, he remembered an excited Nick Tomalin flying out to write some stories and sending back The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong! who survived Vietnam but died in the Yom Kippur war, his young widow, Claire – his Dulcinea – and his now fatherless children, so soon afterwards, and he knew that millions of people had their own individual, family, generational memories of that time, of all wars and all times; and he wondered how it could possibly be that here he was in a cave in a mountain in Vietnam, with this group of soldiers, and four dying men, and he woke and asked the guard for a cigarette, and when it was alight, used the red tip to look at the four patients, two of whom were completely unrecognisable, savagely beaten, bloody and battered, the third was ashen and sweating, like a heart-attack victim, and the fourth? he dropped his cigarette and gave out a yelp, the guard called over, “y'okay?” and he mumbled a reply, picked the cigarette up and looked more closely at the face of Deputy Chief Constable Duncan Doubleday of Police Scotland whose photograph had appeared on the front page of The Edinburgh Evening News so recently – somewhere inside his head, like a protaspis, he was beginning to ideate