Fallen Angels

You are not in Disneyland,” he said. “The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn’t bite Asians.

Maybe the time had passed when anybody could be a good guy

We were supposed to smile a lot and treat the people with dignity. They were supposed to think we were the good guys. That bothered me a little. I didn't like having to convince anybody that I was the good guy. That was where we were supposed to start from. We, the Americans, were the good guys Otherwise it didn't make the kind of sense I wanted it to make

We spent another day lying around. It seemed to be what the war was about. Hours of boredom seconds of terror