"No ache," Ace answered. "I can juice you -- I got lucky last night. Ran into a Navy file who didn't know percentages."

So I got up and shaved and showered and we hit the chow line for half a dozen shell eggs and sundries such as potatoes and ham and hot cakes and so forth and then we hit dirt to get something to eat. The walk up Churchill Road was hot and Ace decided to stop in a cantina. I went along to see if their pineapple squash was real. It wasn't, but it was cold. You can't have everything.

We talked about this and that and Ace ordered another round. I tried their strawberry squash—same deal. Ace stared into his glass, then said, "Ever thought about greasing for officer?"

I said, "Huh? Are you crazy?"

"Nope. Look, Johnnie, this war may run on quite a piece. No matter what propaganda they put out for the folks at home, you and I know that the Bugs aren't ready to quit. So why don't you plan ahead? As the man says, if you've got to play in the band, it's better to wave the stick than to carry the big drum."

I was startled by the turn the talk had taken, especially from Ace.

"How about you? Are you planning to buck for a commission?"

"Me?" he answered. "Check your circuits, son -- you're getting wrong answers. I've got no education and I'm ten years older than you are. But you've got enough education to hit the selection exams for O. C. S. and you've got the I. Q. they like. I guarantee that if you go career, you'll make sergeant before I do... and get picked for O. C. S. the day after."

"Now I know you're crazy!"

"You listen to your pop. I hate to tell you this, but you are just stupid and eager and sincere enough to make the kind of officer that men love to follow into some silly predicament. But me—well, I'm a natural non-com, with the proper pessimistic attitude to offset the enthusiasm of the likes of you. Someday I'll make sergeant... and presently I'll have my twenty years in and retire and get one of the reserved jobs—cop, maybe and marry a nice fat wife with the same low tastes I have, and I'll follow the sports and fish and go pleasantly to pieces."

Ace stopped to wet his whistle. "But you," he went on. "You'll stay in and probably make high rank and die gloriously and I'll read about it and say proudly, ‘I knew him when. Why, I used to lend him money—we were corporals together.' Well?"

"I've never thought about it," I said slowly. "I just meant to serve my term."

He grinned sourly. "Do you see any term enrollees being paid off today? You expect to make it on two years?"

He had a point. As long as the war continued, a "term" didn't end—at least not for cap troopers. It was mostly a difference in attitude, at least for the present. Those of us on "term" could at least feel like short-timers; we could talk about: "When this flea-bitten war is over." A career man didn't say that; he wasn't going anywhere, short of retirement or buying it.

On the other hand, neither were we. But if you went "career" and then didn't finish twenty... well, they could be pretty sticky about your franchise even though they wouldn't keep a man who didn't want to stay.

"Maybe not a two-year term," I admitted. "But the war won't last forever."

"It won't?"

"How can it?"

"Blessed if I know. They don't tell me these things. But I know that's not what is troubling you, Johnnie. You got a girl waiting?"

"No. Well, I had," I answered slowly, "but she ‘Dear-Johned' me." As a lie, this was no more than a mild decoration, which I tucked in because Ace seemed to expect it. Carmen wasn't my girl and she never waited for anybody -- but she did address letters with "Dear Johnnie" on the infrequent occasions when she wrote to me.

Ace nodded wisely. "They'll do it every time. They'd rather marry civilians and have somebody around to chew out when they feel like it. Never you mind, son—you'll find plenty of them more than willing to marry when you're retired... and you'll be better able to handle one at that age. Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort." He looked at my glass. "It nauseates me to see you drinking that slop."

"I feel the same way about the stuff you drink," I told him.

He shrugged. "As I say, it takes all kinds. You think it over."

"I will."

Ace got into a card game shortly after, and lent me some money and I went for a walk; I needed to think.

Go career? Quite aside from that noise about a commission, did I want to go career? Why, I had gone through all this to get my franchise, hadn't I? -- and if I went career, I was just as far away from the privilege of voting as if I had never enrolled... because as long as you were still in uniform you weren't entitled to vote. Which was the way it should be, of course why, if they let the Roughnecks vote, the idiots might vote not to make a drop. Can't have that.

Nevertheless I had signed up in order to win a vote.

Or had I?

Had I ever cared about voting? No, it was the prestige, the pride, the status... of being a citizen.

Or was it?

I couldn't to save my life remember why I had signed up. Anyhow, it wasn't the process of voting that made a citizen—the Lieutenant had been a citizen in the truest sense of the word, even though he had not lived long enough ever to cast a ballot. He had "voted" every time he made a drop.

And so had I!

I could hear Colonel Dubois in my mind: "Citizenship is an attitude, a

state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live."

I still didn't know whether I yearned to place my one-and-only body "between my loved home and the war's desolation"—I still got the shakes every drop and that "desolation" could be pretty desolate. But nevertheless I knew at last what Colonel Dubois had been talking about. The M. I. was mine and I was theirs. If that was what the M. I. did to break the monotony, then that was what I did. Patriotism was a bit esoteric for me, too large-scale to see. But the M. I. was my gang, I belonged. They were all the family I had left; they were the brothers I had never had, closer than Carl had ever been. If I left them, I'd be lost.

So why shouldn't I go career?

All right, all right -- but how about this nonsense of greasing for a commission? That was something else again. I could see myself putting in twenty years and then taking it easy, the way Ace had described, with ribbons on my chest and carpet slippers on my feet... or evenings down at the Veterans Hall, rehashing old times with others who belonged. But O. C. S.? I could hear Al Jenkins, in one of the bull sessions we had about such things: "I'm a private! I'm going to stay a private! When you're a private they don't expect anything of you. Who wants to be an officer? Or even a sergeant? You're breathing the same air, aren't you? Eating the same food. Going the same places, making the same drops. But no worries."

Al had a point. What had chevrons ever gotten me? -- aside from lumps.

Nevertheless I knew I would take sergeant if it was ever offered to me.

You don't refuse, a cap trooper doesn't refuse anything; he steps up and takes a swing at it. Commission, too, I supposed.

Not that it would happen. Who was I to think that I could ever be what Lieutenant Rasczak had been?

My walk had taken me close to the candidates' school, though I don't believe I intended to come that way. A company of cadets were out on their parade ground, drilling at trot, looking for all the world like boots in Basic. The sun was hot and it looked not nearly as comfortable as a bull session in the drop room of the Rodger Young -- why, I hadn't marched farther than bulkhead thirty since I had finished Basic; that breaking-in nonsense was past.

I watched them a bit, sweating through their uniforms; I heard them being chewed out—by sergeants, too. Old Home Week. I shook my head and walked away from there—went back to the accommodation barracks, over to the B. O. Q. wing, found Jelly's room.