I wrote "Cold Sweat" more than a decade ago. I had just completed a realistic, autobiographical and never published novel when I wrote it. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I think it popped into my head whole; comparing the first existing drafts to the piece I submitted, the chief difference is that I deleted a couple confusing paragraph/dreams.

"Cold Sweat" is a string of soldier's night-mares--the kind you have before you go to war, the kind you have trying to survive a war, and most importantly, the kind an aging veteran like me has years later-- that is supposed to lead to the ending and support it. The names, and sometimes the facts, have been changed to protect the innocent.

Some happened to me. Some happened to others. When inducted, a draftee friend had to count off and his number made him a Marine (terrible news), a stateside Marine (good news). Manuel Ulloa thought he was joining the army to be a carpenter, but his orders got botched and he died an infantry man. Some are nightmares the army teaches you, like the grenade pin that got pulled out by a twig.

Some are reported fact. The February 18, 1968, New York Times reported that a rocket hit Ton Son Nhut air base and killed a GI who was about to board his freedom bird back to the world. I read that when I was weeks away from Vietnam. The Tet offensive was going on. I carried that nightmare with me the whole year, knowing that as I counted down from 364 days and a wakeup to go, that even zero wasn't safe. You had to get on the plane. The plane had to take off, and it had to clear land, or some rare, heatseeking rocket might get you. And you better watch out, the President might be waiting to talk to you (as LBJ is reported to have addressed a surlly bunch of returnees, thinking they were replacements about to go to Vietnam in need of a pep talk) and maybe make you go back.

The common theme of the dreams that make up the first part of "Cold Sweat" is the inability of "I' to fix the predicament I'm in. This fits the army, and it fits the way dreams work. I had just written 375 pages of realism over two years. "Cold Sweat," although based in reality, is not realistic. The light tone and dream format allowed me to cram a couple dozen disasters into a few pages.

The original title was "Vietnam Dreams." I changed the title to "Cold Sweat" to let the last words resonate back to the title. If some readers feel a little of the yin/yang attraction/repulsion that I feel, a little chill at the words ". . . I want to go," then "Cold Sweat" works.