On the flight, Perry is too nervous to eat. He muses that the only reason he is even going to "Nam" is because of a paperwork mistake. A knee injury has left him unfit for combat duty, but as his former captain has told him, "it takes forever to process a medical profile"
The word "were" isn't a coordinating conjunction because it simply isn't able to connect two independent clauses and put them together to form a compound sentence.
