The Dean was truly shocked. “Dropping out? But why? What will your father say? I mean, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go right down to that recruiting office downtown and I’m going to join the army.”

The Dean looked devastated. “Jake, think about this, I beg you.”

“Good-bye, sir,” Jake Cazalet told him and went out.

So here he was eighteen months later, a lieutenant in Special Forces by way of the paratroops – his knowledge of Vietnamese had seen to that – and halfway through his second tour, decorated, twice wounded, a combat veteran who felt about a thousand years old.

The Medevac helicopter drifted across the Delta at a thousand feet. Cazalet had hitched a lift because it was calling at a fortified camp at Katum and they needed him there to interrogate a high-ranking Vietnamese regular officer.

Cazalet was only five feet six or seven, with the kind of hair that had red highlights. His eyes were brown, his broken nose a legacy of boxing days and, in spite of the tan, the bayonet scar that bisected his right cheek was white. It was to become his trademark in the years ahead.

Sitting there now in his camouflaged uniform, sleeves rolled up, the Special Forces beret tilted forward, he looked like what war had made him, a thoroughly dangerous man. The young medic-cum-air gunner, Harvey, and Hedley, the black crew chief, watched him and approved.

“He’s been everywhere, or so they say,” Hedley whispered. “Paratroops, Airborne Rangers, and now Special Forces. His old man’s a Senator.”

“Well, excuse me,” Harvey said. “So what do you get for the man who has everything?” He turned to toss his cigarette out of the door and stiffened. “Hey, what gives down there?”

Hedley glanced out, then reached for the heavy machine gun. “We got trouble, right here in River City, Lieutenant.”

Cazalet joined him. There were paddy fields below and banks of reeds stretching into infinity. A cart was blocking the causeway that crossed the area and a local bus of some sort had stopped, unable to continue.