"He cannot bear the callous civilian world which he contrasts unfavorably with how it was for us back there in the Pacific with the frigging sound of mortars overhead and our buddies dying—for what? How could any black-marketing civilian spiv know what war was really like? Actually, none of us knew what it was like either since, as far as my investigations have taken me, no novelist of the Second World War ever took part in any action. Most were clerks in headquarter companies... one cooked."
—Gore Vidal, "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt"
