“I couldn’t help thinking about Vicki. We’d had some great times in Palm Springs – making love under the clear desert sky, romantic dinners at the Biltmore, cocktails on a yacht on the Salton Sea and “Two Sleepy People” playing endlessly on the hi-fi. All those memories started getting to me. That’s the trouble with the Springs — something in the atmosphere of the place does weird things to your emotional state, and that desert voodoo was hitting me big time…”

“My platoon was catching some much-needed R & R. We were on a secluded white sand beach on a small nameless island in a chain of nameless South Sea islands. We drank beer, sprawled on the sand. splashed about in the clear, salt water and talked about women. We were six days and five hundred miles from the war.”