Mississippi was a scary guy. On a prior occasion I tried to get neighborly and he took a swing at me for calling him “Nudey.” It was a good punch and I was tired but because of trained reflexes I was just able to give him a head slip. He tried to follow up with a left hook but I had my hands up by then and stepped away from the punch as Mississippi slipped on the soapy duckboard and knocked himself cold when he banged his head against the sharp edge of the steam compressor’s floor brace. I let him lie there as I resumed my activities. When he got up about ten minutes later, he had a goose egg on his forehead and there was no more fight in him. I told him to get his fucking hillbilly ass in gear. “Sleeping on the job, why mercy me,” I said. “Get up. We’re nine mahls behind. Get the cob outcher ass!”

Mississippi liked to talk to himself. He liked to refer to our beloved Corps as a “goddamn, green, sumbitch, cocksuckin’ motherfucker.”

On this matter he got no argument from me. But his negativity was infectious. By the third week I had passed through the anger stage and became a neutral Haitian zombie. While I was used to the marvelous nuance, versatility, and precision of the word “fuck” and lived in a universe where “fuck” was every other word, more or less, all of Mississippi’s “cocksucks” and “motherfucks” delivered in a toothless drawl were making me a very depressed zombie. I could see no light at the end of the tunnel.

One afternoon just into the fourth week Second Lieutenant Baker poked his head into the pot shack and said, “Who did this to you?”

I said, “It ain’t no biggie, sir. Just pulling a little mess duty here.”

Lieutenant Baker said, “Go back to the barracks, take a shower, and get some rest.” He turned to Mississippi and said, “The same goes for you, Marine.”