It paused for effect.

I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long . . .

“Excuse me?—”

I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and had a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.

“You’re Next, aren’t you?”

“Next for what?”

“Corporal Next, Light Armored Brigade.”

I rubbed my brow.

“I’m not here with the colonel. It was a coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

The student looked at me oddly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was.

“You were the one who went back,” she marveled, as though I were a rare stuffed parakeet. “It was against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.”

“Well, they didn’t, did they?”

“Not when The Owl on Sunday got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony at the inquiry. You’re antiwar.”

The two students looked at one another as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.

“We need someone to talk at Colonel Phelps’s rally,” said the young man with the big nose. “Someone from the other side. Someone who has been there. Someone with clout. Would you do that for us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I looked around to see if, by a miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.

. . . Whom I, continued the mannequin, some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?

“Listen, guys, I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us.”

“Not like you, Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get your fallen comrades out. One of the fifty-one. It’s your duty to speak on behalf of those that didn’t make it.”

“Bullshit. My duty is to myself. I survived the charge and have lived with it every single day since. Every night I ask myself: Why me? Why did I live and the others, my brother even, die? There is no answer to that question and that’s only just where the pain starts. I can’t help you.”

“You don’t have to speak,” said the girl persistently, “but better for one old wound to open than a thousand new ones, eh?”

“Don’t teach me morality, you little shit,” I said, my voice rising.

It had the desired effect. She handed me a leaflet, took her boyfriend by the arm, and departed.

I closed my eyes. My heart was beating like the crump-crump-crump of the Russian field artillery. I didn’t hear the squad car pull up beside me.

“Officer Next?—” asked a cheery voice.

I turned and nodded gratefully, picked up my case and walked over. The officer in the car smiled at me. He had long dreadlocked hair and a pair of overly large dark glasses. His uniform was open at the collar in an uncharacteristically casual way for a SpecOps officer, and he wore a goodly amount of jewelry, also strictly against SpecOps guidelines.