Innocent; for the noncombatants stationed in Saigon or one of the giant bases, the war wasn’t much more real than if they’d been getting it on TV back at Leonard Wood or Andrews. There was the common failure of feeling and imagination compounded by punishing boredom, an alienation beyond tolerance and a terrible, ongoing anxiety that it might one day, any day, come closer than it had so far. And operating inside of that fear was the half-hidden, half-vaunted jealousy of every grunt who ever went out there and killed himself a gook, furtive vicarious bloodthirsting behind 10,000 desks, a
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