Fire.

The place is on fire.

I apologize to both countries, but they shouldn’t be called North Vietnam and South Vietnam. They should be called North Fire and South Fire.

Here’s a joke. It was told to me by a guy on the troop ship that brought us here from Oakland, California. He was coming back this way after serving one tour of duty, getting discharged, going home, then signing up again when he got bored with life outside the war because it had very little shooting and stuff like that.

The joke is: What’s the difference between an oven on full blast and summer in Vietnam?

And anyway, I forgot the answer, so the answer is: nothing. There is no difference, okay?

Fire. The feel of fire is everywhere, heat rising up off the ground and pouring down from the sky, and it seems like half of everything is actually on fire half the time, from the bombs and the napalm, and I swear the temperature goes down when you get close to real, flamey-type fire instead of standing in the regular open air of Vietnam.

Fire!

You hear the word all the time, too. They really encourage a lot of shooting. I find myself constantly comparing what I do here with what I might’ve been doing back in Boston, and I can never see anybody letting me shoot at anything over there. I have to say, right off the bat that makes it Marines 1, regular life 0.

’Cause it’s hot in combat terms, too. Has been from the day I arrived in I Corps Tactical Zone — that’s the north part of South Vietnam, just to be extra confusing. Getting to camp was like a tour of every kind of destruction you could imagine. And then I didn’t even make it to lunchtime on day one before I was sent out with a patrol and orders to shoot at everything that moved.

Nothing moved. We shot anyway. At trees and hills and clouds and abandoned burned-out vehicles.

I have to say, I like the shooting.

I like the war.

I shouldn’t say that. Even I know I shouldn’t say that. Nobody should like a war, even if they are great at it, like General Patton or Snoopy or somebody. But this is so different from life the way it was. And those are the only two ways of life I have to compare.

I was all wrong back home, and that’s the truth.

I’m all right here.

I haven’t killed anybody yet — not for sure, but I’ve tried. And almost as good as a confirmed kill is when you fire your M-16 in the direction of the enemy and you actually see them run away, run like rabbits, this way and that because they are afraid. Just a week ago, some fighters from the other side ran away screaming in another language when my company took over this village full of Vietcong and their sympathizers and, man, there’s nothing, like nothing, that compares with that anywhere in my experience. I was heavy breathing for about an hour after that excursion, and I wasn’t even tired. Getting kind of breathy right now just remembering. If they’d shot back instead of retreating, I think my lungs might have broken my ribs.

I’m scared, too, so it’s not like I’m saying I’m not. But that’s a whole other thing. I’m scared, but a little bit less than yesterday and a little bit less than the day before and a good lot less than at the start of my eight weeks of basic training. So the direction I’m going seems to be the right one.

And I was scared a whole bunch of the time in Boston, too. Difference is that when something scares me here, I shoot at it. You know what those fleeing, screaming, scaredy VC looked like to me? A bunch of ol’ Rudi-Judies, is what they looked like. Made me want to shoot ’em all the more.

I haven’t killed any just yet — not confirmed. But it’s only a matter of time.

Shooting solves a lot of stuff, it really does.