On the other hand, I couldn’t find work. Everybody sympathized with me, didn’t blame me a bit for what I’d done, and told me so in no uncertain terms. I got more sympathy than a terminal cancer patient. And about as many job offers.

Before I went in the service, I worked in a garage, but everywhere I went I was told there were no openings for a mechanic, which I knew wasn’t entirely accurate, as Williams had been a mechanic, too, so the job market was short at least one. The publicity about my homecoming was obviously working against me, but there was also a general negative attitude toward hiring Vietnam veterans, since a lot of employers assumed we were all dope addicts.

I spent a lonely month in L.A., feeling sorry for myself, drinking, and trying to catch V.D. California itself was enough to bring me down. The place was full of bad memories, or rather good memories that had gone bad, as this was where I’d been stationed before going over, where I’d met my California girl, my bride with the sun-bleached brown hair and golden tan and lush figure just made for a bikini, an image in my memory that had turned dark and brittle, like newspaper left out in the sun.

The first week my old man came out to see me and tell me not to come home. Home was Ohio, and a stepmother who thought me strange even before I started dropping cars on people. My old man hadn’t needed bother to come tell me not to go home, but his doing so didn’t particularly help my mental state.

Neither did his insistence that my “murder” of Williams didn’t bother him, because it was offset by all the good things I’d done in the service of my country. By good things he meant all those yellow people I killed.

After a while I began getting tired of counting the cockroaches on the walls of my “apartment,” two rooms, one of which was the toilet. Besides, I was broke. I knew I’d have to get off my butt and find something to keep myself going. And while I had learned in Vietnam about the meaninglessness of life and death-a view that had only been reinforced since my return to the states-I’d also had instilled in me the importance of survival. Those two views should be incompatible, I suppose, but they aren’t. Anyone who’s been in a war can tell you it’s quite possible to believe in survival while placing no value in life and death.