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and be merciful unto us. Amen.”
    In the morning, in the mess tent, I asked Lieutenant Carroll why he had called Jenkins an angel warrior.
    “My father used to call all soldiers angel warriors,” he said. “Because usually they get boys to fight wars. Most of you aren’t old enough to vote yet.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-three,” he said.
    “How come you’re not retired?”
    Lieutenant Carroll stayed in our hooch for a while and helped check our supplies. He asked if we were short or anything, and Monaco said we could use some more three-day passes.
    “I got a letter from Virginia Union.” A brother we called Brew sat on a footlocker next to Lieutenant Carroll. His real name was Brewster, so I could see where Brew came from. “They said I can probably get into the theology school there but they can’t accept me formally until six months before my admission date.”
    “Did you write to that school in New York I told you about?” Lieutenant Carroll asked.
    “No,” Brew grinned. “From what I’ve heard about New York, the temptations might be too great for me.”
    “If the Temptations don’t get you then you got to look out for Smokey Bobinson and the Miracles,” Peewee called out.
    “You know” — Lieutenant Carroll had spread all the extra first aid packs on the floor in front of him — “my brother went to theology school and I almost followed him.”
    “You can still go,” a guy called Walowick said from his bunk. “It’s good for a priest to be older.”
    “I might have too many doubts, now,” Lieutenant Carroll said.
    “If you turn to God, He’ll take away your doubts,” Brew said.
    “I don’t have doubts about God,” Lieutenant Carroll said. “I’m just not that sure who I am anymore.”
    He gathered the first aid kits together and asked Brew if he would give them out. Then he got his weapon and said he would see us later.
    “He don’t look like a priest,” Peewee said after Lieutenant Carroll had left.
    “He used to act more like a holy guy or something when he first got over here. He never cursed or anything like that.” Walowick was putting powder on a rash he had. “Then one day we were trying to clear a road and some guys got trapped in a ditch off to one side. We were on the other side of the road, and we could see them but we couldn’t get to them. It was getting dark, and we knew they couldn’t last. Charlie was throwing everything at them. Then Lieutenant Carroll just went wild and stormed across the fucking road. We went after him. We were shooting at guys maybe three or four feet from us. We finally wasted all of them and cleared the road. He hasn’t been the same since, but we all found out what kind of a guy he was that day. When the chips were down, he put his ass on the line for the guys.”
    “You get the guys out of the ditch okay?” Peewee asked.
    “Unh-uh.” Walowick shook his head. “That’s why you guys are in the squad.”
    I wrote Mama a letter all about how Jenkins had got killed. Then I tore it up and decided not to tell her about it. It would only get her upset. Instead, I told her more about Peewee. I didn’t want to tell her about Jenkins for another reason, too. I didn’t know how I felt about it. In a way I was really sorry for Jenkins, but there was a small voice inside me that kept saying that I was glad that it wasn’t me that was killed. I didn’t want anybody to see me putting that in a letter.
    They brought a VC into camp to question. They questioned him, and then they took him into a hooch they used for storage while they decided what they were going to do with him. Peewee had been in there to get extra clips earlier and thought he might have lost his comb there. He went into the hooch to look for his pick, and the VC was sitting in there and started a conversation with him.
    “Sucker spoke better English than I did,” Peewee said.
    “What was he talking about?” Brunner asked. Brunner had a thick neck and short