I spent a good deal of my tour in Long Binh, just outside of Bien Hoa. It was a huge logistical installation where nearly 50,000 men lived and worked. It was a complete American community that only lacked American women.

Every afternoon a hundred Vietnamese pimps would drive back and forth, reminding me of cruising the beach in high school, until they were hailed by some G.I. We were unable to reconcile the existence of those prostitutes with the majority of Vietnamese women who wouldn't even deign to notice an American soldier, much less end up in his bed.

We sat in out enclaves and carried out the business of war. When we went out we went armed and afraid into the midst of a people we did not know or understand. We were the inhabitants of so many American islands in the sea of Vietnam.

The country was chaotic. Frances FitzGerald was in Saigon the same time that I was. The city was all confusion. Americans were every where and stuck together, meeting only other Americans and those Vietnamese who, for one reason or another, were compelled to deal with our self-sufficient and insulated enclaves.

Saigon's population tripled in ten years. Refugees poured into the city, pushing its edges outward every year and straining the capacities of a pre-industrial urban center to the breaking point. The city had a huge, white presidential palace at its center and rows of homes made entirely of flattened Budweiser beer cans on its outskirts.

STREET HIERARCHIES formed and a class of wild, homeless kids called Cao Bois grew up who beat and rolled American soldiers. Thus Do street had the largest collection of bars and bordellos in Vietnam--less than a half mile from Nguyen Van Thieu's home. Monks burned themselves in the streets; soldiers bought bar girls Saigon Tea for two bucks a shot and got blown up by bicycles laden with explosives; NLF agents lived next door to petty government officials. Hundreds of crippled war veterans angrily confronted the state with demands for housing and health care, descending on the presidential palace, in wheelchairs and on crutches, like some surreal army. It was all too much for Americans to think about.

We drove through Cholon and saw block after block of devastated buildings. Cholon and Gia Dinh had been the operations bases for the NLF battalions attacking Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive. U.S. fire had leveled both districts in the counter-attacks. We had burned out villages and shot women and children and them built orphanages for the orphans we had made. Only whorehouses sprang up as fast as orphanages during the war.

All of us kept sheets with days-to-go numbered on them; everybody knew how long he had before returning to "the world." We used to call the silver passenger jets that took off for the States from Bien Hoa "freedom birds."

The jets carried soldiers out of the misery and chaos of the war. They were a route to freedom from the guilt, anxiety, and loneliness of Vietnam and a return ticket to the sanity of the real world. All of us knew something was dreadfully wrong and longed, beyond simple homesickness and fatigue, to leave. We all thought, incorrectly, that departure meant release. We felt no certainty and conviction that the war was just. Most Americans feel defensive and guilty about Vietnam now, but it is a myth that those who fought are in a better position to judge the ear. Our isolation within the country precluded any meaningful judgments.

War is, for soldiers anyway, a process of going temporarily insane, of learning to accept the grotesque and the illogical as commonplace. So we learned to feel about the deaths of ourselves and the Vietnamese like people do about car accidents. It was horrible but it happened. Our main concerns were staying alive, out of jail, and getting home.

We had no compulsion to think about Vietnam to FitzGerald's terms. We were not required to analyze and objectify about Vietnam; we had no reason to justify or condemn the U.S. involvement. On the contrary, we were supposed to be fiercely subjective and we were. Nevertheless, the questions troubled us and if you had asked--as we fought and worked the way we were supposed to--we would have said, "It's rotten: somebody's getting screwed."

Fire in the Lakefailed to dent the barriers in my mind that prohibit objective thinking about the war. The book was too mystical and detached to have anything to do with the country I remember.

Vietnam is still frozen in my mind. Five hundred thousand American soldiers still systematically ravage the countryside. We have come home now and the war only bothers us now and them, in our sleep or when curious people want to know that really happened. And all most of us can say is that somebody got screwed.