Thanks to asswipe luck Billy will have the aisle seat at Texas Stadium, which means he will bear the brunt of these encounters for most of the afternoon. His neck hurts. He slept but poorly last night. Each of those five Jack and Cokes puts him deeper in the hole, but the sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the hotel aroused a bundle of nervous cravings in him, this boat of a snow-white Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. “What I’m talking a-bout!” cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk.

      “Billy,” says Dime, “you’re flaking on me.”

      “No, Sergeant,” Billy says at once. “I’m just thinking about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.”

      “Good man.” Dime raises his glass, then conversationally remarks to no one in particular, “Major Mac is gay.”

      Holliday yelps. “Damn, Dime, the man sitting right here!”

      And indeed, Major McLaurin is seated on the rear banquette, watching Dime with all the emotion of a flounder on ice.

      “He can’t hear a damn word I say,” Dime laughs. He turns to Major Mac and slows down his rate of speech to moron speed. “MAY-JURH, MACK-LAAAUUURIN, SIR! SAR-JINT, HOLLI-DAY, HERE, SAYS, YOU’RE, GAY.”

      “Aw fuck,” Holliday moans, but the major’s eyes merely take on a needling glint, then he holds out his fist to show his wedding band. Everyone howls.

      There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

      “I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

      His chief fear up to the moment the shooting started being that of fucking up. Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more, but overlying all the small, petty, stupid, basically foreordained fuckups looms the ever-present prospect of the life-fucking fuckup, a fuckup so profound and