Edmund moved to block my passage and said, “I’m supposed to take you.”

“Did the major actually say that?”

This question stymied Lieutenant Lewis.

“No,” I continued, “he did not. You just think that when I enter your space I have to take your orders, and that’s just not true. So why don’t you step aside?”

I don’t know why I was so angry or, for that matter, why I was trying to pick a fight with a combat soldier who had been active in Vietnam as recently as Craig Kilian. Luckily for me our face-off was interrupted.

“You better listen to him, Ed,” an assured voice said. “You might defeat Easy hand to hand, but he’s like the VC; if you don’t kill him he’ll keep coming back at ya.”

Christmas Black was standing at the back doorway. When I didn’t come immediately in, he understood that our conflicting natures were escalating in the outer office.

“Yes, Major,” Edmund said, standing straighter and yet with greater subordination.

“Mr. Black,” I said, mostly to show Edmund that I wasn’t bound to military nomenclature.

“Come on in, Easy,” the major said.

Without direction we went to our preassigned seats.

Christmas’s office was smaller and more Spartan than Edmund’s room. The floor was light pine and the one painting on the wall was of a black soldier pressing forward against nebulous, seemingly insurmountable odds. His desk was a table made from cherrywood. My chair was crafted from the same material.

Over the years the eternal war hero (retired) had learned to respect me, hence the comparison to the VC. I knew that he respected the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese allies as the greatest soldiers in the greatest army thus far in the twentieth century.

Christmas was a big man; six four in bare feet with the shoulders of a giant. His skin was medium brown and his eyes a lighter brown than you would have expected them to be. He had scars here and there and no sense of humor whatsoever. His seven-year-old adopted daughter, Easter Dawn Black, was a Vietnamese refugee. Christmas had killed her parents on a secret government raid. She was an infant and so didn’t remember. But that one act made him quit the profession that almost every male member of his family had been in since before the Revolution.

“What can I do for you, Easy?” asked the man I had recommended for the job of North American coordinator of P9 security.

“Corporal Kirkland Larker.”

The name sparked something in the soldier’s eye. He considered me, weighed where the discussion might lead, and then changed the subject.

“You’re looking in pretty good shape, Master Sergeant,” he said. “You been working out?”

“Used to be working out was what I did from the minute I woke up to late that night with my, or my best friend’s, girl.”