Rafe’s brother, Paul, had been a senior at Williams when the planes struck the towers on 9/11. He had a strong sense of patriotism and a gut-level urge for action and revenge that went back to childhood playground games. He had been accepted to a Ph D program in anthropology at Yale, but he bowed out of that to join the Marines. “Going to be doing some applied anthropology instead,” he said. When Rafe grew up and launched his own career, Paul had occasionally suggested that Rafe, too, might want to do something more useful with his life than help rich people pile up more money. Rafe was already beginning to suspect the same thing. But he told his brother that there was unfortunately no Marine battalion dedicated to assaulting fraudulent mortgage lenders or greedy hedge fund operators. In any case, unlike his brother, he was not exactly cut out for military life. His one brush with weaponry had been at the bachelor party of a college friend from Texas. The party had been a weekend-long event on a small ranch outside College Station, where a margarita machine was prominently installed on the house’s front porch. On the Saturday night, the guests drank until they dropped, some in the house, some sprawled in the yard. At 8 a.m. Sunday morning Rafe was awakened by the groom’s brother standing next to the margarita machine and shouting “How do you turn this damn thing on?” Somebody showed him, and by 9 a.m. everybody was drunk again. Which was when someone spotted a bird overhead and said they should be dove hunting. A half dozen shotguns appeared and one was thrust into Rafe’s hands with the instruction to shoot at the now proliferating white birds. (Were they actually doves? Who knew?) Rafe made an intense effort to marshal his logical brain, reminding himself over and over that he was drunk, and that this was stupid, and, most of all, to keep the shotgun pointed up when he pulled the trigger. The blasts were muffled by the alcohol between his ears and his brain but did startle a few red cows grazing nearby. Rafe didn’t hit any birds (no one did) but he didn’t kill anyone either, so that was a success and also the most military thing he had ever done, which he did not think qualified him to serve in Afghanistan.