Vietnam taught me a lot of things, but coming home taught me more. The beginning of my education was finding my wife in bed with a guy named Williams. The only reason I didn’t shoot Williams on the spot was I didn’t have a gun on me, and he was too big to slug it out with, so I ended up backing out of there, feeling embarrassed, somehow, for having interrupted.

The next morning, after I’d cooled down and thought the situation over in the rational light of day, I went out to Williams’s bungalow in La Mirada, where I found him on his back in his driveway, working on the rear end of his little sportscar, which was jacked up with the back wheels off. He looked up at me and said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole,” and I said fine and kicked out the jack.

I didn’t kill my wife. Had she been under the car at the time, I would have dropped it on her just as fast as Williams. But she wasn’t, and any feeling I had for her died with her boyfriend. She divorced me, of course. I couldn’t have cared less.

They gave it a lot of play in the papers, but there was no trial. No district attorney in his right mind would bother trying a case like that. Even in an unpopular war, the returning warrior has the right to get upset when he finds his wife fucking somebody. In fact, those two situations seem to be the socially sanctioned situations for killing people: war, and when you find your wife fucking somebody.