When it dawned on the lieutenant that he passed, when he realized he would be promoted to first lieutenant and could re-enlist and go to Vietnam where the life expectancy of a platoon commander was about eighty-nine seconds, he became the happiest man on earth. Everybody was whooping it up and slapping him on the back, even me. You go a year without smiling or experiencing a single endorphin passing through your brain, a smile can be a very exhausting exercise. I had a sore face for three days but in my heart I was glad because I did what every Marine would do, I helped a buddy. All the guys in our platoon threw a little party for Baker when he got his silver bars. We chipped in and bought him a new rifle-cleaning kit. Never saw Baker after that party. Much later, when I got to Da Nang, somebody told me he got greased the second week he went out on the line. You might think selling appliances in Topeka, doing anything in Topeka, Kansas, would have been preferable, but Baker, who was assigned to the rear echelon, volunteered for the line. I believe he died happy. I do not suffer from guilt for helping him get there without proper marksmanship skills. Topeka would have been his pot shack. Would have turned him into a Haitian zombie.

Captain McQueen continued to carry a hard-on for me. Most of your run-of-the-mill assholes have better things to do than sustain a grudge but McQueen was the king of assholes. Not only was I off the boxing team, I lost my gig as a typist in S-2. Got sent to the grunts along with Mississippi where I began to go through the Brasso and Kiwi dark brown at an accelerated rate. Mississippi got his three teeth pulled and was fitted with his first set of government-issue dentures. With teeth in his mouth he was altogether impossible to understand but one night when his gums were bleeding and he pulled his dentures out, he told me the story about his tattoo. He said he had no recollection of getting it and had no idea who or what “Nudey” was, but whatever, he didn’t like it. Mississippi’s real name was Homer Haines. “Homer” of course was a fighting word right up there with “Nudey.” The grunts who knew Mississippi called him “Bud.”