In many ways, Juris’s experience in Viet Nam was atypical, including the “unwritten understandings” between Americans and VC in the neighboring town: “The war seemed far away. We were miles from the border where major American units tried to interdict the arms and infiltrators dripping into the nation’s lower half. Unlike the major theaters of the Indochina conflict, in the little province capital, unwritten understandings with the enemy existed. The town and surroundings were, to the unarmed, a safe and neutral zone. A truce prevailed that allowed wary GIs to stroll without rifles into the village for a strong Vietnamese beer or a haircut at the town’s leading barbershop run by a Francophile sentimentalist whose key ring was anchored by a hard coin of the French era. Even while the war roiled all around, only rarely were shots fired out of anger in the city limits, and even then the odds were that a jealous South Vietnamese had popped off a round at a mongrel American ally, not that a member of the opposition, home on leave, had been interfered with in his peaceful pleasures in the bosom of his family. Indeed, we sometimes sat in the dizzying heat of the afternoon drinking an American bottle of pop from Bangkok watching a pajama-clad stranger enjoying a mentholated cigarette and iced beverage, each patron eyeing the other, and the telltale bulge of a sidearm under the other’s shirt, across the empty café.”