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approximately at Billings, Montana’s largest city. I’d awakened in an alley with a sore arm and there it was.
    I had neither a recollection of the tattooing, nor did I know why Montana was on my arm rather than Composition 1921 . I’d never been to Montana and was fairly certain that Mondrian had not in his illustrious career painted a map of Montana . People frequently asked if X was my hometown. I did not shame easily, but I often dressed in long sleeves, even on warm days.
    I always enjoyed the drive into downtown Saigon, a little breeze always welcome at 10.45 degrees   north latitude. The city was flat, and the nicer parts were leafy. Tamarind trees arched out to provide shade. The French had built wide boulevards to remind them of Gay Paree. We were bound for Saigon ’s toniest and fleshiest district, toward the cathedral, the opera house, and expensive hotels, including the historic Continental Palace and the ten-story Hotel Caravelle, toward glitzy Tu Do Street , where goods and services offered by shops, bars and whores sold at a premium.
    I glanced at street names on the signs: Truong Minh Giang, Cach Mang, Cong Ly, Nguyen Hue. To facilitate translation of the Bible, French missionaries had Romanized the Vietnamese language, all the better to flog the love of Jesus into the savages. I was as fond of missionaries as I was of a colostomy, but I had to admit that their work had made it a helluva lot simpler for us to get around when we didn’t need to deal with Chinese-like calligraphy. Chicken scratchings, if you will.
    Zealots have an extremely difficult time adjusting to my new homeland, The Great Beyond. Missionaries where I am twiddle their thumbs, frustrated to the extreme. They had smugly presumed absolutes--paradise for themselves and eternal damnation for us heathen sinners. Since we’ve already checked out of The Land of the Living, they have nothing to promise their sales prospects. The televangelists, the 1-800-SENDMONEY types, are in a constant frenzy. Their cash flow has stopped flowing. We do not have money in The Great Beyond, nor need money, but that is no consolation to those old boys.
    We passed a theater with a poster of Sabu on it. We passed a cathedral that wouldn’t be out of place in any occidental city. We were passed by a massive 1956 Buick crammed with Vietnamese teenagers.
    We came to the American Embassy. It was smack-dab in the heart of town, on narrow, crowded streets. Big building, big target, a nightmare to protect. It was a hollowed-out ghost. There wasn’t an unbroken pane of glass.
    The attack happened on March 30, 1965, so early in the war that to most it didn’t seem like a war at all. It was a different story if you were standing here looking at what we were.  
    We’d heard that the people who’d followed procedure and hit the deck at the first sound of trouble―gunshots by guards in this instance―had survived. Those who’d instinctively gone to the windows to see what was going on had received the brunt of the explosion. They’d been pierced by glass shards, as if clawed by tigers. Charlie had double-parked a Citroën packed with a couple hundred pounds of plastique .
    The area remained sealed off, crawling with trigger-happy ARVN troops and American MPs. We didn’t stick around.
    Our destination, Bombay Tailors, was on Tu Do, Vietnamese for “freedom.” It was Rue Catinat under the French. In the unified communist Vietnam now, it is Dong Khoi, or Street of Simultaneous Uprisings, also known as the Street of Simultaneous Erections. Some things never change.
    Mr. Singh, Bombay ’s proprietor, was in.
    “Gentlemen, it has been too long.”
    Mr. Singh was the hue of milk chocolate. He had jittery eyes and a blinding smile. He was immaculate in blue slacks and a shirt as white as his teeth. He spoke clipped colonial English and could sew you a suit that fell apart in the second cleaning. His expertise was in money-changing and black-marketeering.
    Nobody but