121.
   As we sailed into the majesty of Han Long Bay, Vivian flounced across the deck. “I never get tired of this place. All of this could have been ours. The French never knew what to do with it. And we tried, my dears. For ten years we tried to make it ours. We tried with carpet bombing and napalm, two kinds actually. The first kind didn’t stick to human flesh so we had our girls at Dow Chemical fix things. We tried with agent orange but we’d wipe out whole swathes of virgin jungle and the gook bitches just dug tunnels. We tried with half a million men, with fifty thousand Americans dead at a thousand a month but the commie bitches wouldn’t give up. The anti-war bitches with their endless demonstrations wouldn’t give up. In the end, even our drug addled boys in the field were refusing orders and fragging their superior officers. Finally, there was nothing left to do but bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age. I thought doing it at Christmas time was a nice touch. We can thank Nixon for that, that slimy little grease ball. Just the thought of her gives me the willies, darlings, but I must admit her heart was in the right place. She would just go apoplectic thinking about all the ways to kill gooks. ‘Bomb the dikes!’, she’d screech. ‘That oughta kill a couple hundred thousand.’ And after knocking a couple back it was ‘We gotta nuke ‘em, Henry! We gotta nuke em!’. ”

   “How many million Vietnamese died?” asked Conrad dryly.
   Vivian’s head swiveled on its shoulders like and insect. The coquettish babble was replaced with a dark growl. “And now you, Oliver want to lift the red, white and blue star spangled curtain and show all the nasty things we had to do in order to spread liberty and freedom around the world!”