Mississippi was sweating so bad he had his shirt and apron off. He was a redhead with plenty of freckles. There was no gut on him. He was rangy and muscular from humping the boonies. He had the standard USMC tattoo on his left deltoid and above that, emblazoned on his arm, was the name “Nudey.” I took note, grabbed a fresh Brillo pad, and got busy. Just at the very moment the last of the jerricans were done, the cook’s assistants bore down on us with sadistic grins and huge pots and kettles from morning chow. Some of these kettles, had they not been scrubbed so fastidiously, day after day, year after year—had they been blackened with soot, they would have put you in mind of kettles out in the dark jungles of Africa or the Amazon in which cannibals could cook two or three missionaries, a dog, and a mess of root vegetables all at once. And there were so many of them. And they kept coming! I tried to emulate Lieutenant Baker and get into the Tao of the pot shack. I tried to become a part of its essence, lose my identity, become a molecule or an atom—detach and just flow with it all, but that second day, all twenty-two hours of it, was just a complete motherfucker, pure and simple. Seventy-nine thousand, two hundred seconds of motherfucker.

I was back to the rack at midnight. After a suitable dose of self-pity, about 4.0 seconds, I fell asleep to the lullaby, earth-shaking sound of 220 artillery fired by grunts running night maneuvers. Dreamed I slid from Southern California all the way down to Patagonia and fell off the bottom of the globe into an abyss of dragons, toothy lizards, Gabon vipers, and black Norway rats crawling with typhus fleas. There were scorpions, Tasmanian jumping spiders with sharp ivory teeth, and various other eight-legged, predaceous arachnids with bad attitudes. Horrible as it was, this dream was preferable to the flashlight in the face at two A.M. I got up, took a quick piss, and then ran through the chill night air to Mess Hall Number Three watching red tracers arc across the skyline. An illumination round lit up the night like a full moon and I spotted the private fresh from San Diego standing guard again. I caught him smoking and told him to fuck off before he even challenged me. He just gave me a sly grin. We were both just a couple of shitbirds and we knew it, so why jack around? There was enough hassle for everybody as it was.