“Yeah. I guess.” Fletch’s head bobbed up and down. He didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like crying. He’d done that only once, the night he moved out of the apartment and into BOQ. He’d been a lot drunker then than he was now. Of course, he could still take care of that. The whiskey sour vanished. He signaled for a refill.

“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow morning,” Douglas said, also putting his drink out of its misery. “If they have live-fire practice, you’ll wish your head would fall off.” That bit of good advice didn’t keep him from reloading, too.

Armitage shrugged. “That’s tomorrow morning. This is now. If I’m drunk, I don’t have to worry about… anything.”

“Look on the bright side,” his friend suggested. “If we were back home, there might be snow on the ground already.”

“If you were back home, there might be snow on the ground,” Fletch said. “That’s your worry. I’m from San Diego. I don’t know any more about it than the Hawaiians do.”

“You grew up in a Navy town,” Douglas said. “You’re here where they’ve got more goddamn sailors than anywhere else in the world. So what the hell are you doing in the Army?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Armitage said. If he had one more whiskey sour, he was going to start wondering about his own name, too. The only thing getting drunk didn’t make him wonder about was Jane. She was gone, and he wouldn’t get her back. That was why he was drinking in the first place. It didn’t seem fair. He turned his blurry focus back to the question. “What the hell am I doing in the Army? Best I can right now. How about you?”

Gordon Douglas didn’t answer. He’d put his head down on the bar and started to snore. Fletch shook him awake, which wasn’t easy because he kept wanting to yawn, too. They lurched back to BOQ together. Patrolling sentries just kept patrolling; it wasn’t as if they’d never seen a drunken officer before, or even two.