I've heard accounts of fraggings, torture, and other horrors. THere were a lot of Viet Nam vets where I went to school, and you would hear stories. I learned many years later that a girl friend of mine was brutally raped by one of my racing buddies, a vet, when she was a freshman, just out of high school. He threatened to kill her if she said anything, and she believed him. We suspect he eventually killed himself. He was a fanatic about using his seatbelt, but he wasn't wearing it the day he drove his Healy into the bridge abutment at Cowhouse Slough.

Of course, there is no way of knowing whether these stories are true or not, and even if true, you can't conclude they are necessarily representative. But we do know that those things happen in war, and its safe to conclude they're not just the "other guys."

War dehumanizes people, they do terrible things, and they probably witness many others. And I don't doubt that the survivors of combat aren't always proud of what they did, or didn't do, in action.

I had an uncle who served at Anzio and at Monte Cassino, and he had terrible PTSD. He would go beserk at night and beat up my aunt in his sleep. He was a kind and gentle man, but something terrible must have happened to him in Italy. One night, while on a long car trip with my mother (his sister), he woke up in the back seat and attacked her while she was driving, almost killing them both in an accident.

He told us one night he had one of his blackouts while sleeping in his foxhole and started making so much racket his own comrades almost bayonetted him because they were afraid he would give away their position to the enemy.

Maybe that's why I was so outraged when I heard about those sexual assault reports coming out of our military. The ones in a combat zone are unnaceptable. The ones in the service academies are much, much worse.

I did my service on an air-conditioned ship, with three hot meals a day, and a warm clean fartsack to crawl into at night after a hot shower. I wasn't aware of any of these things happening to my shipmates, but then, compared to the infantry, we had it easy. I was never scared, hungry or in pain even once the whole time I was aboard, and I slept like a rock, 20 miles off the coast of the DMZ. Vietnam was the central fact of my generation, and it did not affect me at all. I still have issues with that. I came so close to the war, but somehow I managed to miss it.