When he was finished and he had said his farewells to the crew of supply clerks who hadn’t managed to slip away early, Stoner made his way back to his truck. There he abandoned his cart and took a brown paper bag and a letter from the passenger seat. Re-entering the building, Stoner made his way though the crowd, out the front door into the bright late afternoon sunlight. Slowly he walked down the wide steps of the Federal building to the street. He weaved a crooked path through people coming and going until he reached the bank of mailboxes that sat along the curb. Dale looked at the letter he had carefully prepared, addressed to the Veteran’s Administration. Revenge, he knew, would have no meaning if the people from whom he was extracting it didn’t know what they were being punished for. So he had put down into words, as best he could, the reasons that had led him to the course of action he had chosen. “As hard as I try,” he explained in his letter, “I can not find a single person in the Army, or the Government it defends, responsible for what it has done to me and others like me. So I must mete out my punishment against the entire Federal government, and those who work for it. I pray, deep down inside, that my actions, regardless of how horrible and despicable they may seem, awakens someone’s consciousness to the wrong that this government has done to ‘We, The People.’”

Without a second thought Stoner dropped his letter into the mailbox, turned, and reentered the Federal building. Making his way through the crowd, he took a seat on a bench in the lobby that he judged would be right over the spot where the force of the blast from all his little devices would meet and then go up as they sought to vent their destructive power. Opening the brown paper bag, Stoner took out a sandwich he had made that morning and began to eat as he waited for his appointed time.

Ironically, the bench he sat on faced an Army recruiting office. For him that office represented the start point for a journey that had proven to be long and tiring. All the lies had started there. The promises of an education, of an exciting career, and the respect of his fellow countrymen had been heaped upon him like so many brightly colored junk mail catalogs. He had believed it, all of it.

But like the leaves of a tree, each of those promises had withered, died, and fallen away. Those exciting and wonderful assignments overseas never came his way. Instead, Dale went to Fort Hood, Texas, a place he found was far closer to purgatory than paradise. Nor had he been able to take advantage of any of the educational benefits he had so desperately wanted. Such things were only dreams for soldiers assigned to field units. Still, he had adapted to the reality he found and made do with a life that, while perhaps not ideal, had at least been comfortable while he had been in the Army.