But back to that obscene, immoral, illegal and criminally protracted war in Vietnam that I so cleverly got myself out of--

I was, of course, damned lucky.  But I was also smart enough to realize--when almost nobody else in the world, apparently, had a clue--what an intrinsically evil, profitless and vile business it is ever to participate in a military adventure whose real, true purpose is simply, and no more than, the exercise of the illicit powers (of the abomination) of a standing, peacetime army.  That's all it was.  I hate to tell the millions of Vietnamese whose lives were destroyed in the so-called Vietnam War, but's that's really all it was.  There was no Cold War that anybody who knew anything about it actually believed in--no Communist Threat.  It was all a sham, a farce--play-acting--with real weapons, and, alas, real victims.