through bureaucratic dictates and brute legal force, to quell or repress nearly all of the flawed human compulsions and quirks, from social inequalities, to racial and religious intolerance, to the inbred American inclinations toward indiscipline, laziness, and disobedience. Send us your bigots, your snobs, your slovenly punks; we will unkink their screwed-up heads and return to you a model citizen, an individual of tolerance, good citizenship, and self-discipline--or a fairly convincing fake.
Yet the attraction between the sexes has eluded even the Army's most Orwellian programs and mind games. Here we are, some thirty years after the congressional order imposing the integration of the sexes, and there still is rutting within the ranks, affairs between married officers and their spouses, sexual favoritism, sexual blackmail, voyeurism, rape, and every other imaginative act two or more horny people can conceive of. The modern battle dress uniform, baggy and shapeless as it is, is as aphrodisiacal as a knee in the groin; yet the fevered male imagination fills in the blanks and primitive impulses take over.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I knew I was attracted to her; for some reason, I think she found me attractive as well. Of course, I don't like to make a move on somebody else's lady. Relationships are hard enough without complications. That's not an ironclad thing, though.
I draw the line, however, when her beau is serving our country, in uniform, overseas, battling our enemies in a theater of war. I do this as a patriotic gesture. After all, the least the home front can do is keep our hands out of their ladies' undies. Also, the fiance has a gun, and knows how to use it.
Apparently Bian also recognized we were on thin ice, because she immediately shifted the conversation back to safer ground. She broke eye contact for a moment, then said, "Why did America lose the will to keep fighting in Vietnam? Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead. Hundreds of thousands horribly wounded."
"Because somebody finally asked, why make it fifty-nine thousand dead?"
"Still . . . that's a large down payment. How could you walk away from it?"
"That's a question we're still trying to answer. I think you know that."
"The answer is important."
"For you, maybe. For most of us, the war ended thirty years ago. The dead are mourned and buried, and the survivors have their monument." I added, "For most Americans, it's a brief and confusing chapter in a long history book."
"That's a shallow answer."
"Good. I'm a shallow person."
She put down her fork and stared at me. "You are not. I've known you only one day, but . . . you're deeper and more perceptive than you act."
"Eat your fish."
She smiled. "Hey, I didn't call you sensitive."
"That's why you're still alive."
She finished off my beer. I popped the second can.
She said, "I was on the other end of that decision. It cost my father his life. It nearly killed my mother. Look around you--see what it meant for her future."
"Is she happy?"
Bian repeated my question, and then seemed to contemplate this for a long moment. "She opened a Vietnamese restaurant, and after nearly thirty years she barely speaks English. What does that tell you?"
"She doesn't want to die here."
"She misses her own people. Her sister runs an orphanage outside Ho Chi Minh City. My mother and I send every penny we can spare. The boy . . . the one who's helping her, that's where he's from."
"And are you bitter?"
"I . . . no. I'm the good immigrant story. I've adapted to America, and America adopted me." Apparently enough said about this, because she changed the subject again and asked, "About Iraq, though. Could history repeat itself?"
"Why should it?"
"Well, there are obvious similarities . . . historical analogies."
I reached over and took my beer out of her hand. "Every war is different. The only similarities are that they all suck, and good people get killed."
"That's too simplistic."
"Not if one of those dead people is you, or someone you love."
"You know what I'm talking about. A lot of people believe we went to Iraq on false pretenses, that the government lied, that this war has lasted too long, too many casualties . . . clearly things haven't gone as predicted or anticipated. It was sold as short and simple. It's complicated and bloody. That sounds a lot like Vietnam, doesn't it?"
"That was then, this is now. That was a different time, a different world, a different America. The country was at war with itself--black versus