One of the things I really enjoyed doing with my soon to be released third novel, The Reach of the Banyan Tree, was to pepper small doses of history into the writing to better frame the time period. Here’s the opening paragraph to a chapter entitled “The Strange Ways of the Universe” which help set the stage of the crazy, confusing mix of political alliances at the end of World War II.

On a cosmic scale, it all seemed kind of absurd. Communist trained guerrillas fighting to overthrow the Japanese, so that they could get a chance to overthrow the French, whom they really hated. Communist trained guerrillas, working with the communist Chinese in cooperation with the nationalist Chinese to fight against the imperialist Japanese with the help of the Americans. Americans, working with the communist Chinese and the communist-leaning Vietnamese, while ignoring the French of Indochina who had kowtowed to the Germans and cooperated with the Japanese, even though their Free-French brothers fought side-by-side with the Allies in Europe. So it was. July of 1945 in Indochina was a political and military mystery—common threads tangled in the strangest of ways—just like a small fourteen-year-old boy who had become infatuated with one Charles Regal Carson.