They poured out behind us, two hundred fifty strong. I picked up the beat to the usual 120, and the dirge became a roar, anger, mirth, carnival, death. My men sang, their grief gone:

We are Krummel's raiders.

We're rapers of the night.

We're dirty sons a bitches.

An' we'd rather fuck than fight.

And the ASA was singing, to the tune of the old Western, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon":

Behind the door her father kept a shotgun,

He kept it in the summer and the merry month of May.

And when I asked her father why the shotgun,

He said, "It's for her lover, who's in the ASA.

ASA! – Suck! suck!

ASA! – Suck! suck!

He said, "It's for her lover,

Who's in the ASA!"

Suck! Suck!

As you might remember, about fifty thousand Filipinos also called Town their home, though we often forgot. On Saturday night they would have expected it; on an ordinary night they would have been unhappy, but not too angry; on Good Friday, man, they went insane. The police switchboard, the Town switchboard, and the Base switchboard all jammed at once with irate calls and threats of international incidents and war. With the telephones down, the Air Police, using radios and intelligence, formed up with the Town fuzz, and came to do harm to us, racing toward the market with about forty jeeps, and six hundred sirens. It came to me that I was slightly out of place at the head of this mob, but it also came to me that I belonged here more than with the law, I was more my Trick's man than the Army's. So I gave the only order, they tell one in basic, which will stop a marching company in less than two steps: GAS!

The troops dispersed, rats down holes of darkness, and when the law arrived, they found only innocent Joe Morning asleep in his coffin. The jeeps circled once like a band of raiding Comanch', then sped after the shadows, but they were only shadows fleeing from their headlights. I, as an eyewitness, can categorically state that any damage, except to religious sensibilities or to shinbones fleeing through the night, was done by this marauding band of jeeps. There were four accidents within my hearing. A lone late arrival flying around a corner in the edge of the market clipped the side of the sari-sari store under which Novotny and I were hiding. The whole corner came off, the small building tilted, and Cagle rolled off the roof. He hit the ground running, and by the time the jeep turned around Cagle was singing, "Ho, ho, ho. You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!" and in a flash, he vaulted a fence and disappeared, leaving a bewildered AP behind him, shouting to an empty street, "Stop or I'll shoot – I guess he got away."

Morning fared as well as any of us. The APs woke him in the coffin, asked him what the hell he was doing in a coffin, to which Morning answered, "I'm dead, you dumb fuck." They wrote him up for conduct unbecoming a member of the armed forces. "For being dead and kidnapped by vandals, they give me an IR?" Morning said to a harried Dottlinger the next day. (Capt. Saunders had gone back to the States again.) Dottlinger took his pass for seven days, saying, "Lord, I don't know what's happening in this world. I just don't know." For the seven days without pass, Morning became a national hero. All over Base: "Hey, that guy there. He was the one in the coffin!"

No one else was caught or connected with the march. Hardcore Townies just were not caught by Air Policemen, and we were all professional Townies. There was a period, shortly before the Huk raid, which I haven't spoken about partly because it wasn't really important and partly because I'm somewhat ashamed of my conduct during these few weeks. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Quinn, Franklin, and I would sit in the market after curfew, drinking beer, daring the APs to come in and get us. They never touched us. In fact, I'm the original Gingerbread Man. I had to relax sometimes. Dottlinger gave me foul looks, and Tetrick commented, "You guys are all going to get killed someday, and I'm gonna laugh like hell," but I'd learned from Morning how to play innocent too, so I did. The United States Government picked up the damage tab, as it should have: foreign affairs are strange and expensive adventures.

Okay, so we desecrated a holy day, insulted the people's religion, tore up the American image abroad, but what the hell; everyone already hated us when we got there. We ran with pimps and whores because nice Filipino families and their daughters spat at us on the street. Since we were not officers, we were scum, so we said to the world in general: suck. Suck to the good folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kileen, Texas, Ayer, Massachusetts, Columbus, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, etc. You name it, baby, I've been there, and it ain't good. Maybe soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, deserve the treatment they get. Maybe they've earned it. But soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, aren't any worse than the people they have to deal with, and most of the time they have to deal with bastards. Morning, Novotny, Cagle, none of my guys, not even Quinn, were Ugly Americans. When they were told that they had to pay the price of all the bastards before them, they said, Shove it up your ass, jack; we didn't make the world, baby, and we ain't paying for no mistakes but our own. I know I'm sounding like Morning (what an admission), but there are a lot of people in the world who should be dead. Morning said Hitler had the right idea, but the wrong criteria. My hate isn't as deep as his was, probably for good reason, but I almost agree with him.

And, too, what we had done that night – and I say this without apology – affirmed, said, shouted that men, even the most ordinary of men, will sometimes, in whatever way they can, refuse to be part of the system. In the defiance of that night, we bought back a bit of our individuality; shouted, as Quinn had shouted that night, "They can kill you, mother, but they can't eat you!" Goddamn, Morning never learned that. He knew they were always going to eat him alive. I know they'll never take me alive. Goddamn, goddamn, sometimes I miss him. Sometimes I do.

But relief is never a moment away.

It was all downhill after Easter, we said, not knowing quite how we meant it. I grew fat, fatter, slimy and oily in the heat, sucking beer after beer, crying, it didn't matter. And the money, too, down, down. In desperation I gathered a week's leave to spend with Teresita in Dagupan on the beach, but we both caught colds the second day and squandered most of my leave in fever sweats, sneezes, halfhearted love, and stale, gamy sheets. To recover, we fled back to Manila on an air-conditioned train to spend two days and nights in a luxury hotel. That helped, but on the second afternoon I refused to give any of my quickly vanishing money to a ragged beggarboy. Terri and I stupidly fought, and the whole leave was lost in anger.

Back to work. Air conditioning goes blink; major goes mad; repairman short circuits the whole Det, leaving the Head Moles to rage in sticky darkness, rage at me until I actually beat my head against a wall. At 1645 I left it in the hands of the next unfortunate, Sgt. Reid. He'd shucked his wife but hadn't found happiness, and his face killed me each time he relieved me. Then evening chow was ham. We had ham, frozen ham just this side of rotten, eighteen times a week. That could be endured. But the nineteenth time busted it. "You must have miscounted," the mess sergeant says. "Don't make mistakes," say I, handing him my plate. I sat in my quarters, the buttons on my khaki shirt straining to hold back the flood of beer gut jammed behind them. Sweat covered me, not running, but drifting like an oil slick. A Coke, I thought, I would have a Coke. Change in my pocket? No, only keys to doors behind me. Surely I had ten centavos somewhere. Less than a nickel. After fifteen minutes I came up with an old one, green with mis- and dis-use, lodged in the watch pocket of a pair of Town pants which stank like sin. Down to the Day Room like a kid after the ice-cream wagon in August. The damned machine (oh, foul machine, I ran astray of you before) took my last ten centavos silently, made no acknowledgment, gave me no cold Coke, made no apology, refused categorically to return my money. I hit the son of a bitch in the mouth. Bull-assed bastard of a machine. I shook the damned thing until Tetrick raced in from the Orderly Room to pull me off.