Colonel Bleech stomped a polished foot in the South Carolina dust. It was a hot dry summer in these hills of the training camp, where no paved roads led and the only entrance the recruits knew about was by helicopter.

Lordy, did they know helicopters. They knew loading and unloading the way most people knew how to swallow. They knew how to carry people, both willing and reluctant. They had more techniques for dragging someone by lip or ear or even chain than they could count.

Only one person never questioned an order of

6

the peculiarity of the training. And that was the big raw-boned boy from near Pieraffle, South Carolina, twenty-seven miles south of Charleston, the boy who liked Gene Autry movies, chipped beef on toast, who never got tired, and who spoke kindly about Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, even behind his back.

So when Walker Teasdale fell into despondency, his chin resting on the barrel of his rifle, his eyes looking into that great nowhere where people see no tomorrow, the other recruits took special notice.

"How do you know you're going to get killed, Walker?" they asked.

"I know. I know how, too," he said. "They're gonna shoot me for disciplinary reasons. I know it. They're gonna take me out to that piney hill and they're gonna make me dig my grave and then they're gonna put a bullet in my head."

"Who's they, Walker?"

"Colonel Bleech and the drill sergeants."

"You ? They think you're perfect."

"They won't tomorrow."

"Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, Walker."

"I do," said Walker, firm in gaze and voice, a steady sureness in his manner, as when he talked about putting bullets into targets.

He asked for a glass of water and young men who ordinarily wouldn't wait on anyone unless ordered by a superior jumped to find a glass. There were no glasses in the barracks, so someone drank the last bit of smuggled moonshine in a mason jar, washed it out with water, and filled it.