Lett tensed up. He felt others at his shoulders. The whole crew sat here with him, now, finally, every dead GI he’d known in their bloody rags with their grimy grim mugs, an auditorium full and a line out the door. Then Lieutenant Tom Godfrey pulled up a seat next to him. Tom was Lett’s favorite old ghost. Tom’s face was scorched, and he was covered in steaming blood and entrails from the bullets in his back that exploded his chest. Tom Godfrey was the best looie Lett ever had. Tom was killed in action on December 18, 1945, at the height of the Battle of the Bulge. Lett had tried to save Tom but couldn’t.

Be careful out there, Wendell, Tom said now. It’s all I’ve ever asked of you.

Lett nodded along, and to all his other dead buddies going way back, all the way to his first, Sheridan, right after D-Day, Sheridan with a hole where his nose had been and the pink and gray insides of his head still decorating his collar like the truest insignia ever known to an army.

Every time Lansdale turned around, Lett showed a happy open face. It shut down as soon as Lansdale’s back turned, Lansdale drawing crude maps of Asia and Eastern Europe with arrows depicting armies swooping onto cities, nations, peoples. He broke chalk, picked up another, kept scribbling, screeching. Hammer and Sickle. Red Stars. Red White and Blues. The Cross!

Lett was like a wrathful boy sticking his tongue out at a violent father behind his back. He rapped at the table to make the monologue of a lesson stop, but he disguised it as a happy drumbeat to Lansdale’s paean to the American Way when the man whipped around again. But the folds in Lansdale’s brow were stacking up. Lett pressed his hands to his ears. If he didn’t do something soon he wasn’t going to be able to follow Lansdale’s epic razzle-dazzle at all.

Lett started rambling and couldn’t stop. “I’m just an ant and I’m done for, see. We are all ants and done for. All out of change. Back against the wall! Under the heel of the iron boot!”

He’d interrupted Lansdale midsentence. Lansdale pivoted as if on a revolving pedestal, his face looking as if someone had squirted water on it or something worse.

“You cannot let down your guard,” Lett went on, “even when you think you are dreaming. Because you’re dreaming. Then you’re dead. Dead!”

He shot up and paced around the table, rambling on, all his dead buddies following like in some ghastly conga, Lett slapping at the table and then he was pounding on it.

“Stop! Sit the hell down,” Lansdale shouted.

Listen to the man, Wendell. Just sit and can it for a second. This is not what we meant.