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
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