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he told her in his slow and languorous drawl. ‘US troops were helicoptered in onto the roof and they went through that place room by room and killed every last person inside. I was there, took some snaps of our brave boys doing Lyndon B.’s work. Took six hours … and Christ, I can’t even begin to count how many they killed.’
    Jack smiled as if reminiscing about a family barbecue some warm Savannah Sunday afternoon.
    ‘In February we liberated the Citadel of the Imperial City of Hué. That was one helluva blow for the commies. That was the jewel in the crown for the Tet Offensive. There was a river there, the Perfume River, and alongside it a park that separated Le Loi Avenue from the riverfront. I was there, me and a few others, and we waited in the rain until we could get inside the Citadel compound. The guys we waited with were called the Citadel battalion … tough bastards, fought every hard battle throughout the previous six months between Hai Vanh Pass and Phu Loc. Anyways, the Americans and the South Vietnamese went in there and killed every last man standing,replaced them all with their own people. Place was awash with blood. And in the middle of all that, this flock of white geese came down and settled in the compound. Splashed around in the puddles … been rainin’ all night … and some asshole says we should catch one and eat it.’
    Jack laughed, a dry grating sound that seemed to fill Annie’s new and empty apartment.
    ‘Sergeant said if anyone so much as touched one of those geese they’d be court-martialled. Place went quiet. Everyone knew he was no joker. Geese stayed there the whole time we did … have some pictures somewhere … perfect white geese splashing in puddles of bloody rainwater, and around them the dead bodies of a hundred or more men.’
    Sullivan paused, drank, refilled his glass.
    ‘Then in April Martin Luther King got himself shot, and then in June they killed Bobby Kennedy, and by the time they elected Nixon in November I’d sure as shit had enough of standing in three feet of mud and blood taking pictures for the military. I came back in the middle of December … figured I got myself shot in the leg so’s I’d have a good enough reason to come home, and I remember sitting in a bar, half-drunk out my mind, and the radio comes on. It’s a week before Christmas and the guy on the radio says John Steinbeck died, and then they play ‘What A Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong and I start crying like a high school cheerleader done lost her boyfriend. I’m sat in a bar … a bar no more than a mile from where we are now, and I’m sobbing my heart out like a kid. No-one says a word, not a thing, and they just leave me there weeping like a baby for the best part of an hour. Hell, I must have drunk half a bottle of something, but when I goes to pay the barman says to keep my dollars, that he understands where I’ve been, and though he never agreed with the war he still respected me for going out there to protect the innocent and the American way of life. Didn’t tell him I was crying for John Steinbeck … wouldn’t have seemed right, but sure as shit I was. Sat there crying while Satchelmouth sang about what awonderful world it was, and considered the fantastic irony of it all.’
    Jack paused, drank some more, set his glass to balance on his knee.
    ‘The Earth was not capable of swallowing all that we took to Vietnam. We dropped bombs and food parcels … fucking bombs and food parcels … and then Nixon got us out of there with our tails between our legs and we’re still asking ourselves what the fuck we went out there for in the first place. Helluva thing Annie O’Neill … helluva thing.’
    And then he’d smiled, raised his glass, and Annie had raised hers, and he whispered: ‘To the blessed crazy irony of everything eh?’
    She smiled, drank her glass empty, and closed her eyes.
    She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke he was gone and the