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the drunks from San Francisco to Cincinnati. Wouldn’t be no wars if people drink more.”
    “Just be sloppier. Huh,” I said as an airman second and his date strolled past our table, “That wouldn’t be a bit sloppy.” The airman turned around, but I smiled at him, and he turned back around.
    “Leech bitch,” Novotny said.
    “Who?”
    “Fucking leech. Dependent child. Sixteen years old and already given the clap to thirty-seven guys.”
    “You know her?”
    “Comes to the pool all the time to make us holler. Ain’t hollerin’ yet. Only airmen mess with leeches. Below our principles.”
    “Might be all right.”
    Novotny straightened up, dropped his grin, and very solemnly said, “Man might as well be a lifer as screw a leech.” He paused, concerned, “You ain’t no lifer, are you?”
    “Lifer?”
    “Taking twenty?”
    “Shit, I don’t know…”
    “What the hell you doing back in the Army anyway?”
    “Shit, I don’t know. After my wife left me, I…”
    “Woman trouble. Knew it,” he interrupted. “Soon as I laid eyes on you, knew it. Woman trouble. You know I’m the only guy been here long as I have hasn’t got a Dear John. Only one left. Seen ‘em all go down. Woman trouble. Spot it a mile away.” He shook his head. “What you need is a seventy-five cent love affair, fellow.”
    “Is it that cheap? I don’t have a pass yet, anyway.” All new personnel had to be on base fifteen days before they were allowed a pass.
    “No, no. This’s different. Over at the Airman’s Club. Six bits. No nookie, just true love and dancing. Be my guest.”
    We settled the check, then walked through a drifting mist toward the barn-like tin building which housed the Airman’s Club. Our voices and laughter rang in the cool, damp night, clear and echoing along the glittering black streets. The soft halos of the street lights wavered in easy breezes and jeeps and trucks hissed politely past. I remembered, remembered those Friday nights in Seattle, Ell and I wandering home from weekly hamburgers and beer at a neighborhood bar; madcap rainy evenings that seemed to dance to our laughter, alone and together, untroubled as never before or again, wet and cold and happy as when we were children. And later tipsy and steaming under the shower, slick and soapy, and we could never wait, never.
    * * *
    Novotny danced and furiously danced with his seventy-five-cent-love-affair until I expected his bad leg to fly off and tumble right up to the bandstand, felling potted palms as it went; but it seemed as able as his other. Able enough to play football, he explained, and added that the season would start soon and anyone who wanted to play could go over to the Agency outfit and sign up. The three Army units — Agency, ACAN and the 721st — had one team among them.
    “We really tear up airmen,” Novotny said, sitting down while his girl caught her breath — my affair had long since left me to my sullen silence. Novotny had that same strained grin again, as if he did not intend to wait for the season. “I hate this fucking place, but we get a good club like last year — won the base championship — and it’s okay. Football season goes real quick, bam bam bam, then six more months and I’m going home. Back to the ZI, the Zone of Interior, the Land of the Big PX, multicolored staff cars and concrete barrios. No more PI for this GI. I’m going civilian-side.”
    All the way back to the barracks he explained why I too would soon adhere to the motto, IHTFP or I Hate This Fucking Place. At the time I wondered what there was to hate, though I later understood that it was the time itself, the slow, inexorable murder of the time, the boredom of escape, the pure nihilism of the peace-time soldier, suffering not only the contradiction of terms “peace” and “soldier” but that of “time” too. But I didn’t hear what Novotny was saying then: I had my own enemy, blacker and vaster than time — memory, or history as it