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action?”
    “I’m infantry,” Wapinski answered.
    “So was I,” the man said.
    “Hm?”
    “World War Two. Europe. Marched north from Anzio all the way to Germany. We were in some nasty places.”
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    For the next hour he recounted battles all over Europe in which he had participated twenty-five years earlier.
    “Wow! That sounds like it was hell!” Wapinski said. He was impressed with the details of the man’s stories, the comparisons he drew to Viet Nam. “Our battles were a lot smaller,” Wapinski said. “At Dong Ap Bia we had fifty percent casualties in one battalion but the overall numbers don’t compare with what you’re talking about.”
    “Son,” the man said very respectfully, “every man’s got his own hell. You just finished with yours.”
    “Yeah,” Wapinski answered. They were into their fifth or sixth drink.
    “Never let em get to your mind,” the man said.
    “Um.”
    “You know what that means?”
    “I guess.”
    “It means when everyone else is saying this is the way things were, and you know that is not the way things were, don’t let em convince you that you don’t know your own mind. That happens. Happens all the time. They make you doubt yourself, doubt what you been through, what you know and what you accomplished. They’ll try to make you believe you’re crazy.
    “I know what you guys have gone through,” the salesman continued. “Or I think I know. You guys have been terrific. Don’t ever let em make you believe different. And don’t ever let em paint it up like roses either. Never let em get to your mind cause they just don’t understand. How bout one more?”
    The plane landed twenty minutes early. Wapinski snapped awake. His sunglasses were on the seat beside him. Most of the passengers had deplaned, the line in the aisle at the door was only five or six people.
    “Hey,” Wapinski shouted. He stood up, grabbed his small bag and started for the exit. “Hey, what happened to that guy?” he blurted at a stewardess. She looked at him blankly. “The guy that bought me all those drinks,” he said.
    “I’m sorry, Sir,” the stewardess answered. “I’ve been in the forward cabin.”
    “Damn.” Wapinski gritted his teeth. “I didn’t even get his name.”
    “Sir,” a flight attendant addressed him from behind, “you left your glasses on your seat.”
    During the hour and a half layover before his departure for Williamsport, Robert Wapinski shuffled about restlessly. He called home. His mother had not asked his brother to pick him up in Philadelphia. “Call when you get to Williamsport,” she said. He bought a coffee. He watched people staring at him in his gung-ho, airborne-all-the-way, ribbon-bedecked class-A uniform, and he felt self-conscious.
    He sat in a lime-green fiberglass seat, stared out the terminal windows at the activity, the seeming random motion of planes, trucks, people scurrying. He winced, grabbed a magazine from the table beside him. Casually he flipped pages, then flipped back to the cover: Newsweek , June 9, 1969. In the “Periscope” section he found a short paragraph about the North Viet Namese using Russian-made helicopters to airlift troops and supplies within Cambodia and Laos and “occasionally across the border into Vietnam.” He did not doubt that was true. He looked up. The turmoil irritated him, made him tense. He glanced at the “War in Vietnam” section.
    There was his last battle! Chills ran up his back, neck. “The Battle of Ap Bia Mountain.” He bit his lip. Couldn’t, he thought, they refer to it as Dong Ap Bia like we did? Under the accompanying photo he read, “Hamburger Hill: Was the slaughter really necessary?”
The Nixon Administration, rattled by Congressional criticism over the battle, sought last week to disclaim responsibility for stepping up the pace of the war .... To disclaim responsibility! What the — ? White House aides insisted to reporters that there had been no