There were two good ways to clean Cosmoline from a weapon. The best (and most dangerous) was with five gallons of gasoline in the bottom of a garbage can. If you didn't strike a spark and blow your ass up, the gasoline would dissolve the Cosmoline.

The second way was with boiling water. You took a field mess water heater (A gasoline-fired water-heating device inserted into a fifty-five gallon garbage can. Mess kits are sterilized by dipping them into the boiling water) and filled it with rifle actions and let the sonsofbitches boil like lobsters.

Pleasant was offering neither alternative. He was just being a prick, and McCoy decided there was a limit to the chickenshit he would take. He had promised himself he would keep his nose clean, stay out of sight, and do whatever was demanded of him. But that did not go so far as spending the next three hours in a futile attempt to rub a rifle free of Cosmoline.

He was standing one rank behind and three files to the left of Pick Pickering as Corporal Pleasant delivered his lecture on the disassembly of the U.S. Rifle Caliber.30, Ml. He considered for a moment taking Pickering with him, but decided against it. For one thing, cleaning an uncleanable rifle was probably an essential part of training for a college boy. For another, Platoon Leader Candidate McCoy was about to go AWOL, which (as Corporal Pleasant had with some relish informed them during one of the lectures during the day) was frowned upon. Anyone caught AWOL (defined as not being in the proper place, at the proper place, at the proper time, in the properly appointed uniform) would instantly have his ass shipped to a rifle company and could forget pinning the gold bars of a second lieutenant on his shoulders.

When they were dismissed and double-timed into the barracks, McCoy went directly to the latrine and washed his hands as well as he could with GI soap. Then he grabbed his Garand with a rag, and went out the back door of the barracks.

As he made his way toward the provost marshal's Impound Yard, he considered that after successfully evading every Jap sentry in Shantung Province, it was entirely possible that he'd be nailed cold by some eager college boy guarding a barracks with an unloaded Garand.

But he wasn't challenged. He hid the Garand in a ditch, and then went into the provost marshal's office. Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker's order was on file, and an MP corporal went and unlocked the compound for him.

McCoy drove to where he had hidden the Garand and reclaimed it. Then he opened the trunk, took out a dungaree shirt with corporal's stripes painted on the sleeves, put it on, and then took his campaign hat from the hat press and set it on his head at the approved jaunty angle.

The MP at the gate, spotting the enlisted man's sticker on the windshield and the stiff-brimmed campaign hat on the driver, waved the LaSalle convertible through, but McCoy slowed and stopped anyway.

The MP walked up to the car.

"Where's the nearest gas station, garage, whatever, with a steam cleaner?" McCoy asked.

The MP thought it over.

"There's a Sunoco station's got one," he said. "Turn left when you hit U.S. 1."

"Much obliged," McCoy said, and let the clutch out as he rolled up the window.

The Sunoco station's steam cleaner wasn't working, but they had something even better, a machine McCoy had never seen before. It was designed to clean dirt- and grease-encrusted parts. A nonexplosive solvent poured out of a flexible spout, like water from a faucet, over a sort of sink. Thirty minutes' work with a bristle brush and there was no Cosmoline left on either the action or the stock of the Garand, period.

An hour after he had gone out of the Main Gate, McCoy drove the LaSalle back through it and stopped.

"Found it," he called to the MP. "Thanks."

"Anytime," the MP said.

There was time before Corporal Pleasant reappeared in the barracks to take a shower. The water was cold. The college boys, McCoy decided, had tried hot water. All it had done was leave a layer of Cosmoline on the shower floor. Everyone was still furiously rubbing rifle parts with rags.

McCoy tied rags around his feet, showered, removed the rags, threw them in the pile, and put on clean dungarees.

Then he disassembled the Garand, laid the parts on his bunk, then crawled under the bunk and lay down to await Corporal Pleasant.

Five minutes later, someone called "attention," and McCoy started to roll out from under the bunk. He was halfway to his feet when Pleasant, storming purposefully down the aisle, spotted him getting up.

As he came to attention, Pleasant leaned the brim of his campaign hat into his face.

"Anyone tell you to get in the sack, asshole?" Corporal Pleasant inquired.

"No, sir!" McCoy said.

"Then what were you doing in the sack, asshole!"

"Sir, I wasn't in the sack, sir!"

Corporal Pleasant, seeing the disassembled Garand on the bunk, was forced to face the fact that there was not room for the asshole to have been in the bunk, too.

He leaned over the bunk and picked up the first part he touched, which happened to be the magazine follower.

"You call this clean, asshole?" he demanded, before he had chance to examine it at all.

"Yes, sir," McCoy said. "I believe that's clean, sir!"

Corporal Pleasant shoved the magazine follower under McCoy's nose, and in the very moment he demanded, "You call that clean, asshole?" he thought: I'll be a sonofabitch, it's clean!

"Yes, sir!" McCoy shouted.

"What's the serial number of your piece, asshole?"

"Sir, 156331, sir!"

Corporal Pleasant stood eyeball to eyeball with Platoon Leader Candidate McCoy for a moment.

"Assemble your piece, and then get your ass outside, asshole!" he ordered. "There is a light on a pole outside the orderly room. Guard it until I relieve you!"

"Yes, sir!" McCoy said.

Ten minutes later, Corporal Pleasant marched up to the light pole outside the orderly room.

McCoy came to port arms.

"Halt! Who goes there?" he demanded.

"Who the fuck do you think?" Corporal Pleasant replied, and then ordered: "Follow me."

He walked to the rear of the building, and opened the door of a 1939 Ford coupe.

"Get in," he said.

McCoy got in the seat beside him. Pleasant reached over the back of the seat and came up with two beer cans.

"Church key's in the ashtray," he said.

"Thank you," McCoy said, and opened his beer.

"You're McCoy, right? 'Killer' McCoy?"

"I'm McCoy."

"There's three Marines in there with the assholes," Pleasant said. "I wasn't sure which was who."

McCoy didn't reply.

"You going to give me trouble, McCoy?" Pleasant asked.

Strange question. Why should he think I might give him trouble? And why the beer? This sonofabitch doesn't have the balls to be a universal prick. He's only going to be a prick to those he's sure won't fight back. And for some reason, he's a little bit afraid of me. He called me "Killer." Does this dumb sonofabitch think I'm going to stick a knife in him?

"No," McCoy said. "Why should I?"

"How did you get that rifle clean?" Pleasant asked.

There was a time for truth, McCoy decided, but this wasn't it.

"Lighter fluid," he said.

"You must have used a quart of it," Pleasant said. "What you really need is gasoline."

"Lighter fluid works better than a rag," McCoy said.

"It also made you stand out from the others," Pleasant said. "That's not smart."

"I wasn't trying to be smart," McCoy said.

Corporal Pleasant looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded his head, accepting that.

"That wasn't the first Cosmolined rifle you ever cleaned, was it?" he asked rhetorically. "I guess I would have done the same thing."

McCoy didn't reply.

"There's two stories going around about you, McCoy," Pleasant said. ' "The first is that you killed a bunch of Chinamen in China. The second is that you have friends in high places who got you into this course. Anything to them?"