Pete was a Foreign Service officer, educated at Groton and Harvard, very talented, very accomplished. He already spoke French, German, and Italian, and while everyone else was still rendering Vietnamese as if it were some absurd mutation of English he’d begun learning its poetry. He was athletic and rakish. Other men, myself among them, courted his notice as if he were a beautiful girl; he had that charge of glamour. When he laughed at something I said, I felt lucky. Singled out. Pete was seven or eight years my senior and showed an avuncular interest in me that I was not above encouraging with stories of near-death experiences during survival training and parachute jumps. He seemed amused by my impersonation of a cocky young warrior, and I played it up. Pete got to Vietnam before I did and spent some months in the countryside. Then he was posted to Saigon. He sent me his address and offered a bed whenever I needed one, an invitation I put to use several times when I came to town on supply missions.
