The hospital was old colonial; stucco tiles, strong construction, local stone painted white, so as to reflect the sunlight's warmth away in the tropical Vietnamese summer. Dr. Molineaux and Gerard, his nurse, were both smoking cigarettes, greasy and pungent Gauloises, and savored them, because tobacco, and coffee, brought by an orderly, Vietnamese, were rare during the war, and everyone still remembered doing without the little things that made life worth living. The surgeries had been successful; the extraction of bullets and stabilization of the patient. Molineaux was a doctor before the War, and during. Indochina was often a matter of treating trench foot, malaria, and other tropical maladies. The two men, wrung out from the intensity of their work, no less than saving a man, enjoyed the lassitude of successful post-op. “Strange,” the doctor told surgical nurse, “so many of them are German, but this man...I've seen that tattoo before.” “I saw it, but did not place it. Did you?” “I was in Normandy during the war. Legionnaire Fabian is English, or at least an English paratrooper. He's been shot before,” but he didn't elaborate; an English lad with war wounds meant that he'd probably sustained that with the Allies in the War. But swarthier than the English the doctor noted, and a lean, hungry look. Brutally short cut dark hair. “Strange, non? Most of the Legion are Bosche killers,” Gerard spat, recalling the occupation of France. He'd been Resistance. “It must be quite the story that brings him here,” the doctor mused, shrugging, “Give him to a good nurse, he's one of ours.” “I know just the one, Doctor...” – Dull pain woke him; the morphine left him foggy, still coursing through his veins but less and less. The fog started to clear. Bed. Bright sunlight. Wooden blinds. He groaned.