I wouldn't have—and couldn't have—written these stories without being a Nam vet. Because of that and because I'm sometimes accused of believing things that I certainly don't believe, I've decided to state clearly what I think about Viet Nam and about war in general. I don't insist that I'm right, but this is where I stand.

The speech Shakespeare creates for Henry V to deliver on the morning of Agincourt (the Speech on St. Crispin's Day) is one of his most moving and effective. The degree to which the sentiments therein are true in any absolute sense, though—that's another matter.

My own suspicion is that most soldiers (and maybe the real Henry among them,a soldier to the core) would have agreed with the opinion put in the mouth of the Earl of Warwick earlier in the scene. Warwick, noting the odds were six to one against them, wishes that a few of the men having a holiday in England were here with the army in France. One of the leader's jobs is to encourage his troops, though. If Henry'd had a good enough speechwriter, he might have said exactly what Shakespeare claims he did.

A soldier in a combat unit may see the world, but he or she isn't likely to "meet exotic people" in the sense implied by the recruiting posters. (Mind you, one's fellow soldiers may turn out to be exotic people, and one may turn into a regrettably exotic person oneself.) I travelled through a fair chunk of Viet Nam and a corner of Cambodia. My only contact with the locals as people came on a couple Med CAPs in which a platoon with the company medics and the Civil Affairs Officer entered a village to provide minor medical help and gather intelligence.

My other contacts involved riding an armored vehicle past silent locals; searching a village whose inhabitants had fled (for good reason; the village was a staging post for the North Vietnamese just over the Cambodian border, and we burned it that afternoon); the Coke girls, hooch maids, and boom-boom girls who were really a part of the U.S. involvement, not of Viet Nam itself.