The pay was good, but tired, frightened young men do not think of money when they want only rest. And they don't think of money when they are thinking only of dying.

Walker Teasdale did his five-mile run with the unit that morning and passed up his favorite chipped beef on toast, even though the other recruits kept passing him heaping portions of it.

They packed for a two-day marching into what was called Watts City, a specially constructed battle site in which the unit maneuvered through alleys and simulated taverns and empty lots. Whoever built Watts City, someone said, must have cheated on the contract because the whole thing looked like a slum.

As they double-timed through piney woods, their bodies now hardened and moving easily without complaint of lung or muscle, dark birds circled and pivoted in the delicate blue sky.

"Buzzards," whispered someone and everyone looked to Walker and then the birds. Only one trooper that day refused to look up. He knew the birds would be there. He had dreamed them. He had seen them in his sleep as he had seen this piney hill. And he knew his time was coming.

They marched as the sun made their uniforms sweat-wet clinging clothes. The pine needles, soft beneath their feet, had at one time made bloody

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blisters, but now these blisters were callouses. The recruits hardly noticed the tax levied on their bodies by the march.

Most thought they were on another mock raid on Watts City, but at the outskirts of the reconstructed slum they turned away and double-timed down into a leafy valley with a small brown mudwater stream, and there Walker Teasdale saw the little hill above him that he had seen in his dream.

And if he had not been staring at that hill, he might not have seen the brown boot stick out from behind a tree. Other recruits rested, but Walker stared at the hill. He knew he would have all the rest he would ever need, soon and forever.