“Spoiler’s in good voice tonight.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. The parade-ground mud sucked at his feet, trying to pull his boots off. He could barely muster the strength to lift them. An hour of flying cover for a rescue mission as J. J. Flash left him feeling completely blasted. They hadn’t found any enemies, and no one had been hurt, but the tension had wrung more out of him than even J. J.’s overamped metabolism.

Spoiler tore off his Brooklyn Dodgers hat and threw it down. Then he tore off his T-shirt and threw that too. “It was those Vietnamese Army assholes, you know it was! They think all us jokers are dog-shit, do you hear me? Dog shit. We ought to go down to that camp and just mop the place with the cocksuckers!”

Croyd stopped to watch. “Oh, yeah,” he said, though Spoiler was out of earshot even if he could hear anything over his tantrum. “You don’t even know how to fire your M-16s yet. The People’s Army has machine guns. This should be interesting.”

Mark noticed a deputation marching across from the headquarters buildings. Brew and Luce and a couple of their cronies he recognized from Rick’s, Osprey and Purple and his squad-mate Slick.

Spoiler was still rampaging around offering to personally kick the ass of the entire People’s Army of Vietnam, collectively or one at a time, when Brewer called out, “Hey, why burn up all this energy? Is this display really accomplishing anything?”

Spoiler stopped in the process of trying to fight his way through a knot of his pals to get inside the rec hall, presumably to bust up the pool table, which was way the hell off true anyway. He turned to face the older jokers, skinny chest working like a donkey engine.

“It’s those fucking nat bastards,” he panted. “They were the ones who bushwhacked our boys today”

Luce’s cheeks puffed out. “Is that the Vietnamese Army you’re talking about?” he demanded. “Is that our comrades-in-arms…” Brew put a calming hand on his friend’s upper biceps. “What happened today was an accident. Things happen. Life’s like that.”

“Bull-fucking-shit it was an accident. Your butthole buddies from down the road were out to bag them some joker meat. What the fuck are we doing here? I thought we were supposed to be training to defend the right of jokers everywhere. How the fuck can we do that if we can’t even defend ourselves?”

Luce was starting to turn colors and ball all his hands into fists. “If the attack today was deliberate,” Brew said smoothly, interposing himself a little more firmly, “bourgeois elements had to be responsible. The reactionaries have been kicking over the traces all over the South the last couple of days. And if that’s the case

He shrugged. “Then you may get a chance to fight for joker rights a lot sooner than you think. And for our hosts.”

“Why should we fight for them, man?” another young joker asked. “They hate us.”

“Well, so what? How important is it for you to have the nats love you? It isn’t going to happen.

“The Vietnamese are giving us a shot at being the nucleation point for a whole new phase of joker activism. But more than that, they’re giving us a chance to atone for the sins of America. This is Vietnam, man. It’s crucial, absolutely crucial. What went down here is the focal point of our national consciousness.”

The joker boy looked at him blankly. “Why? Did something happen here?”

Croyd tugged on Mark’s olive-drab sleeve. “We better draw a curtain discreetly over this scene. Spoiler’s lost his head of steam, and the only thing liable to happen here now is our friend Brewer having apoplexy. Or don’t people have apoplexy anymore?”

“They call it having a stroke, now, man.”

“Is that so? Damn. It’s hard to keep up with slang when you spend two thirds of your life asleep. Of course, I guess you normal people spend a third of your lives asleep, but it’s not, like, all at once, if you know what I mean.”

Mark looked at him with bleary intensity. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right, man? You’re starting to sound like you need sleep worse than I do.”

“Bite your tongue. I never felt better in my life. In my whole damned life. Besides, I told you: lizards don’t sleep.”

“Huh,” Mark said, and allowed himself to be led off to the bunker.

Night, and a kata in the rain. This time Moonchild – and the semi-submerged Mark persona – were feeling guilty about being so well rested. The rain had returned in mid-afternoon. Moonchild carried on her martial dance uncaring, serene and lovely, her heavy black hair hanging around her shoulders like seaweed.

The sun had been high up in the sky and the bunker filling with heat like a Cadillac with cement when Mark opened his eyes. He had slept through reveille, which was a much-abused record played over the camp P.A. system. It was a weird note, after even Mark “The Last Hippie” Meadows, Cap’n Trips, had broken down and bought a CD player for his long-lost head shop, the Cosmic Pumpkin, to wake up every morning to the firefight sounds of old-fashioned vinyl getting scratched by a needle. Maybe they figured the cracks in the record would roust out the somnolent better than the recorded bugle solo.

It hadn’t awakened Mark. The miracle was, nobody had come along to kick him awake when he didn’t fall in for P. T. Nor was he in the deep shit he assumed he was, when he turned up at H.Q. at ten o’clock in the morning with his shirt buttoned one hole off to report, heart-in-throat, that he’d overslept. He had been told not to sweat it and was given minor make-work jobs to while the day away inside the perimeter. They hadn’t even made him fill sandbags.

Mark was feeling almost human by evening chow. Afterward the nightly political meetings were held in several big tents, lit by kerosene lamps and smelling of wet canvas, like a militaristic camp revival. Brew taught the one Mark and Croyd wound up at, explaining the history of the Vietnamese war of liberation from a socialist point of view. The young bloods kept getting bored and making noise or dozing off. They were pounced on by Revolutionary Vigilance monitors – other young recruits whose interest in the proceedings had been engaged by giving them red armbands and Authority – written up and told to attend the dreaded daily self-criticism sessions that followed the regular political meetings.

Every once in a while an original joker Brigader would lose his cool at some quietly dry remark Brew made concerning the American involvement in Vietnam and start yelling. Brew never flinched. He just got this sardonic half smile on his heavy, handsome face, listened to what the retread had to say, and then demolished him without ever raising his voice. His refutations didn’t always seem logically watertight to the ever-scientific Mark, but the recipients seldom found an answer to them. Brew fought with words the way his buddy Luce did, toward the same end – total Clausewitzian devastation of the enemy – but his skills were subtler. “Jack the Ripper compared to the Skid Row Slasher,” Croyd said, sotto voce, when Mark mentioned it to him.

When Brew finished with him, the objecting veteran got handed a yellow slip requiring his presence at the ensuing kiem thao session. The veterans accepted them meekly, seeming almost to welcome additional contrition. The young bloods generally had to be threatened with worse, like a good beating by the monitors, or some downtime in the Box. The Box was a recent innovation right out of every direct-to-video prison flick ever made: a tiny tin-roof shed at the foot of the parade ground. Malefactors were locked into it and allowed twenty-four hours or so to enjoy the stunning heat of day and the surprising nighttime chill.

When the indoctrination session ended, the sun was long gone. It was safe for Moonchild to come out and play.