Charles flicks ash onto the floor. (Why doesn’t he use an ashtray? Is this an act of rebellion? Or a statement about how he feels about the church?) His eyes lock on mine.

“I’m not bullshitting you,” I tell him. “I really can’t imagine killing another human being.”

“Think you’re the only one who feels that way?” Charles swings his boots off the desk and leans closer. “Basic training’s not just about getting you in shape and teaching you how to fight. It’s about desensitizing you to violence and the suffering of others. The army doesn’t expect you to be a killer when they draft you. They expect you to be a killer after they’ve trained you.”

I feel myself squirm inwardly. I really thought I’d built a good argument.

“Look, it’s not a bad start,” Charles says. “But you’re going to have to go a lot deeper on your moral responsibility if you’re going to have a chance of convincing them, dig?”

Go deeper? I flash on something I heard my mother say a long time ago, back when my parents still had people over on the weekends for dinner. The grown-ups were sitting at the dining table, chatting. Mom’s hair was coiffed. She was wearing red lipstick. She may even have been smoking a cigarette. “Well, to tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve discovered that deep down I’m really quite shallow.”

The table erupted with laughter, no one laughing more gaily than Mom.

It took me hours and hours of reading and research to come up with, and memorize, the answers I’ve just given Charles. And now he says I have to go deeper? Depth is not my forte. I’m a practitioner of the quip. The short, pithy poem. Or the rambling love letter. Constructing long arguments based on philosophical polemics might be someone else’s bag, but it’s sure not mine.

“What about trying to flunk my physical?” I ask, feeling defeat creep in: Charles has already warned me that the doctors at the army induction center in Brooklyn have seen every faked physical ailment known to man. But there has to be something I could try. (As far as a deferment on psychological grounds, mere letters from psychiatrists may work in other places, but in Brooklyn they’re useless unless accompanied by long, well-documented histories of mental illness. So no sense in asking Dr. Hill. I’m reminded of one of my favorite books, Catch-22, in which soldiers at war discover that anyone who asks for a psychological discharge is automatically turned down. Because not wanting to engage in bloodshed is clear proof of sanity.)