I began to wash my hands. Pru sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the faucet just enough to cause a trickle. I wondered whether this was supposed to have a sexual connotation. Sometimes it was hard to tell about these things.

"I got a letter from my brother," she said. "He's manning an M-79 grenade launcher. He's in one of the roughest battle zones. He says every square inch of land is fiercely contested. You should read his letters, David. They're really tremendous."

The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies. Soon most of the movies began to look alike and we went into dim rooms and turned on or off, or watched others turn on or off, or burned joss sticks and listened to tapes of near silence. I brought my 16mm camera along. It was a witty toy and everyone was delighted.

"He says you can't tell the friendlies from the hostiles."

"Who?" I said.

"I hate your filthy rotten guts," Pru said.

"Quincy tells me you've got a new boyfriend, Pru. Texas A. and M. Some kind of junior cadet. Quincy tells me you met him through a computer dating system."

"That lying bastard."

"Your own cousin, Pru."

"You've got dandruff," she said. "I can see it on your jacket. Dandruff!"

Quincy was in rare form, telling a series of jokes about Polish janitors, Negro ministers, Jews in concentration camps and Italian women with hairy legs. He battered his audience with shock and insult, challenging people to object. Of course we were choking with laughter, trying to outdo each other in showing how enlightened we were. It was meant to be a liberating ethnic experience. If you were offended by such jokes in general, or sensitive to particular ones which slurred your own race or ancestry, you were not ready to be accepted into the mainstream. B.G. Haines, who was a professional model and one of the most beautiful women I have ever known, seemed to be enjoying Quincy's routine. She was one of four black people in the room-and the only American among them-and she apparently felt it was her diplomatic duty to laugh louder than anyone at Quincy's most vicious color jokes.