About me as a particular person there was an undeniable, comprehensive lack of concern.

I recently finished In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff. I liked it more than his This Boy's Life and it is a decent war memoir but not among my favorites.

As soon as he arrives in-country and before he has been dispatched to his station, his camp comes under fire. On the disorientation.

You know that an attack is "just a probe" only after it's over.

He says about this attack something that seems a leitmotif of most Vietnam memoirs.

No one came to tell us what was going on. We hadn't received our issue of combat gear, so we had no weapons or ammunition, no flack jackets, not even a steel helmet. We were helpless. And nobody knew or cared. They had forgotten about us - more to the point, forgotten about me. In this whole place not one person was thinking of me, thinking, Christ, I better take a run over there and see how Lieutenant Wolff is doing! No. I wasn't on anybody's mind. And I understood this was true not only here but in every square inch of this country. Not one person out there cared whether I lived or died. Maybe some tender hearts cared in the abstract, but it was my fate to be a particular person, and about me as a particular person there was an undeniable, comprehensive lack of concern.