8 December 1966: Saigon RVN
I have not been here long but I don’t know how much longer I can last. It is not that there is danger – although there is that; there are a wide variety of ways that one can get killed living in this dunghill – but that danger is the only thing that seems to constitute an off-setting tonic to the overwhelming malaise that is settling upon me. I feel as if I am suspended between somewhere and nowhere and that the suspension is being settled, because the middle can never prevail, in favor of nowhere. I almost feel as if I am inside something withdrawing into a darkening realm and am looking out from that something. I feel that even when I am in the presence of my fellows. I sometimes wonder why they don’t ask me why I am so vague and distant and only semi-tangible. But they don’t. And I guess that must be because at some level – a level not obvious to me – I am functioning as a normal human ought.
And the entries to this journal that appear as if by magic only intensify and enhance the feeling I am attempting to describe.
It is a feeling of slippage.
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