I doubted Hilger could have put anyone in position quickly enough to intercept me here. Even if he’d wanted to, the way I’d traveled, he couldn’t have known quite when I was arriving. And even if he’d guessed right, the airport, with all its cameras and other security, would be a poor place for a hit. Still, I haven’t survived this long by taking anything for granted, and the first thing I wanted to do was make sure I was clean.

I shouldered my overnight bag and asked a taxi driver who seemed to speak decent English to take me downtown. I stayed with a Japanese persona and used a Japanese accent. With Hilger I’d be American. At all other times I wanted to be Japanese. The two personas have always been subtly distinct for me, and slipping from one to another would make me harder to describe, and therefore to track.

I watched behind us as we left the airport. Several cabs followed us into the thick traffic. I waited three minutes, then said, “Wait, go back, go back! Forgot sunglasses!”

The driver looked at me, unsure. “Sunglasses!” I said again, gesturing to my eyes. “Airport, please.”

He nodded, then turned into the oncoming traffic with a U-turn that for an older passenger might have meant a coronary. I watched behind us as we returned to the airport. No one, not even one of the motorcyclists in their hundreds, replicated the U-turn.

I paid the driver five dollars-still the street’s preferred currency, and about what the trip downtown would have cost had we completed it-went back into the terminal, and waited inside, watching. No one tried to follow me in, and I saw no one setting up outside. I found another cab and had it take me to the Rex Hotel.

In the thick traffic, the five-mile trip took almost an hour. I sat in the backseat, jostled by the occasional pothole, surrounded by the buzzing and honking of armadas of motorcycles, with nothing to do but watch and think.

I hadn’t ever intended to come back here. It’s not that I hated these people, although there are plenty of soldiers who still do-hell, there are American World War II vets who still hate the Japanese. I hated them at the time, yes. I wanted to hate them, to prove that despite my Asian face I was different, I was American, more American even than the soldiers who suffered and fought alongside me.

And there were plenty of opportunities to hate, plenty of reasons. The Vietnamese were masters of psychological torture. They could turn anything, any harmless, neutral thing in your environment, into something deadly, until the world itself started to seem like your enemy. They booby-trapped pens, C-ration cans, the bodies of dead soldiers. They hid trip wires behind branches and mines under the dirt. They would lay spikes alongside a road and then ambush you so when you dove for cover you’d be impaled.

Imagine losing a buddy that way, one of the men whose smile could always cheer you up, who’d saved your life, who had your back no matter what. Imagine how you would hate. But then imagine this. Before you’ve even had a chance to process what’s happened, while your uniform is still soaked with your friend’s hot blood, two guys you’ve never seen before and never will again have zipped him into a bag and tossed him rudely onto a medevac chopper, and an instant later he’s gone, so gone you wonder where all that blood could have come from. There’s no funeral, no burial, just a grief so confusing and bitter you start to choke on it, and the only thing that saves you from being paralyzed by that grief, being killed by it, is a rage so white-hot the sane can barely begin to imagine it.

The rage has a purpose, you see: it offers an outlet. But it carries a heavy price. You do things you couldn’t have imagined doing, couldn’t have imagined anyone doing, things you can’t talk about afterward, not even with the men who acted with you. In that state, the things that make you human, your empathy, even your fear, they’re gone. You feel like you’ve died already, and you’re right in a way, part of you has died and will never come back. At that point, being killed is almost a mercy. Because if you survive it, if you survive your own death, the path back to life is almost impossible. After the war, there were men, hollowed-out men whose means of negotiating the world had been reduced to alternating silence and rage, who would try with earnest futility to explain themselves that way. “I died there,” they would say.

I thought that, too, for a long time after. But now, watching from the back of a cab images of that stark country that had swallowed up my innocence, I thought, No, I didn’t die here. Vietnam is where I was born.

And I’d never left. Not really. I’d been back to the States, then all around the world, then finally settled, at least for a time, in Japan. But the person who was born here had never grown up, never fundamentally changed. His body had wandered, but his mind had remained in the place that had formed it.

Once, when I told Midori I wanted out of the business, she had asked me how hard I was trying. I felt my jaw clench at the memory. What horror had she ever endured? How could she, how could anyone who wasn’t there, imagine the way war changes you?

Losing people, and not being able to properly grieve them, shrinks your world. You try to avoid attachments, anything that could hurt if you lose it. You start to say don’t mean nothing about everything, the important things especially. You learn that only a few people can be trusted, fewer and fewer, in fact. You feel used by your own government. The equipment sucks, the orders suck, you know the politicians don’t give a shit if you live or die as long as they’re reelected. And then, if you’re special, the way I apparently was, you get sent on a certain mission, where you can kill your own out-of-control best friend: my blood brother Crazy Jake, still the most dangerous man I’ve ever known. That brings it all together: the horror, the stifled grief, the silence, the distrust, the raging, all-consuming hatred.

I got out of the cab in front of the Rex and declined a bellboy’s offer to help me with my bag. I wasn’t going to stay here, but I remembered the hotel from leave in Saigon and thought it would be a good starting point from which to refamiliarize myself with the city. I was glad it was still here, the silly crown over the marquee and all. Not just because it was inherently comforting to know that my memories weren’t only of relics, but also because familiar terrain would save me time and help keep me safe.

I looked across Le Loi Street and smiled. The oddly named Saigon Tax shopping center was still there, looking much as it did in my memory, the main difference being the replacement of a Sony neon sign by one advertising Motorola instead. The French-designed City Hall to the Rex’s right also remained, its cream-colored balustraded façade illuminated grandly in the day’s fading light.

I went into the hotel. The lobby had gotten a face-lift, but in its déclassé essentials it remained unchanged. I smiled in quiet amazement that a place could survive war, and communism, and the passing of decades so unperturbed. I moved in from the entryway, feeling like I was stepping back in time. The young man I was had come here with a prostitute, more than once. I was astonished at the clarity with which I could remember faces, and moments, even the names they had called themselves ten thousand nights ago.

I took an interior staircase to the fifth floor, and then, ignoring the signs warning that only registered guests were permitted beyond, I explored the mazelike interior of the hotel. Beyond the public areas, it was all as it had been: hallways with open balconies at their ends; faded wood paneling and stalwart tiled floors; empty couches facing upholstered chairs in hidden antechambers, coffee tables and ashtrays absurdly at the ready, set out in melancholy hopes of a party that had moved on decades before. Even the fat geckos, feasting on insects attracted to the corridors’ stark fluorescent lighting, it was as though it had all been waiting for me.