Then you dreamed

That you were back home again in Saigon, attending college while the war was raging all around you. While actual fighting didn't reach Saigon, there were plenty of signs you lived in the time of war. Soldiers and MPs everywhere, both Vietnamese and American. Military trucks in the streets, barbed wire barricades and gates and guards in front of important buildings, jet fighters speeded high in the sky while helicopters including Chinooks languidly crisscrossed in the lower altitudes, artillery booms bounced in the distance. At nights flares would occasionally lit up the sky while bar girls and hookers frolicked with GIs on the ground. Everybody lived on borrowed time. The future was uncertain. Would the Americans eventually leave? Everybody hustled and tried to survive or make money off the war. Saigon was noisy and dusty. Books and exams were surreal amidst death and destruction, raw sex and rampant corruption, war profiteering, and humanoids that knew nothing about truths and honor and knowledge and self-respect.

There was nothing fatidic that you must love the humanoids. You must understand who they were, however, so you would know how to deal with them. Just remember, they were different from and inferior to you, and just a step above chimps.