I’m also feeling discomfort because growing up in my well-to-do, lily-white, middle-class suburb, I never thought of my family as rich. It wasn’t until I began working at the paterfamilias’s bulk-mail company in Hempstead a few years ago that I realized how privileged my life really was, and how much I took for granted.

And then there’s the angst of knowing that Charles is so right. Here I am, a middle-class white kid asking a black guy to help me stay out of a war that a lot of black kids have no way to avoid.

But here’s what feels the most shameful of all: everything I’ve just thought won’t stop me from accepting Charles’s help.

Chris’s most recent letter arrived the day before Robin and I left for Maine:

6/7/69

Dear Loogie,

It’s a total shit show over here. No one believes we can win this war. Half the time we don’t even know who to fight unless it’s every gook we see. During the day the VC pretend to be farmers and village folk. The guy plowing behind a water buffalo. At night he puts on black pajamas and puts a bullet in your skull or a knife in your back.

Command says we’ll win this war because we have a kill ratio of ten to one. That means 10 VC die for every American. But like everything else command tells us that’s bullshit. Why? Because the VC don’t care if they die. THE KILL RATIO COULD BE 30 TO 1 AND THEY WOULDN’T CARE. This is their country and we’re the invaders.

Loogs, what kills me ain’t just what we’re doing to the people. Burning their villages. ACCIDENTALLY killing babies. It’s also what we’re doing to their country. You never saw a more beautiful place. Beaches that make Jones Beach look like a crappy playground sandbox. Miles of green rice paddies. Mountains. Except we’re bombing, burning, and defoliating it so fast, it looks the surface of the moon. Only with dead tree trunks.

In your last letter you wrote you couldn’t believe the army censors didn’t censor what I wrote. I got news for you, Loogs. Like everyone else, the censors don’t give a shit. No one does. The other night our squad flat out refused to go on patrol. Everyone’s sick of getting killed or booby-trapped in the dark. And if that ain’t bad enough, it fucking rains leeches. I swear to God, Loogie, they fall out of the trees when they sense you under them. They get down your shirt collar, on your neck and back. You return from patrol and there are these big fat blood-filled worms all over your body.