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any question of sexual imagery as one shoved it into the German cunt as one might have pressed it against the rough impassive surfaces of the tent. The whores were not pretty, but under the circumstances this hardly mattered; they had hard, useful bodies and the absence of prettiness meant that the question of emotion would not enter into and complicate the matter. I was never able to get their identities straight; they all had thick, Teutonic names, closed their eyes while in the act of copulation and squeezed with small, grunting yanks of the pelvis to urge the semen forward.
    The whores had one interesting effect upon the company; they converted all of us — married, unmarried, young, middle-aged, talented, untalented — into whores ourselves because like prostitutes we began to think and live solely in terms of the sexual act, and there was very little else that interested us at that time. Gambling fell off, so did insults and jockeying for favored positions among the men, goldbricking fell off, the only thing that was important and which involved people were the whores and the question of arranging for their time, making sure, days in advance, that a guaranteed fuck was there. Fucking has never been as important to me as it was during this time, which may have something to do with the metaphysics of proximity or then again only with the dull, numbing effect of the German landscape upon us in that cold, diminishing winter.
    Of the two hundred in the company, only seventy or so were actually cohabiting with the whores; the others talked wisely of disease or loyal wives or the cheapening effects of paid, predictable sex or the danger of consorting with ugly women who, for all we knew, might have been spies… but this majority was as affected by the whores as those who were actually using them; they were forced to reexamine, no less than the customers, the question of their lives as controlled by the whores, and it was not a cheap period in anyone’s life. If one of the benefits of the Army is its ability to provide a heightening of experience, a continuing reappraisal of action under the influences of pain and boredom, then surely the whores were as effective as any platoon sergeant or insane colonel in making metaphysicians of the least of us. They were also wholly unconcerned with question of rank; officers and enlisted men alike paid the $5 fee, and officers received no preference in making appointments. It was like the open latrine privileges during combat.
    Hunched over my whore, working toward the slow throes of orgasm, certain vicious German insects buzzing wintrily around us in the night, I opened my eyes to the burlap and had an apprehension, a vision so dark and full that it explained all consequence, fixated me in time and space, made clear the question of my destiny, and I reached toward it groaning, but as I was on the verge of touching it, something broke within me and spasmed out along with helpless seeds of climax, and the lights behind the vision faded; I found it yanked from me before I could touch it and was left with only the small clutching whimpers of the whore against me as she touched my face and wished me good; staggered then from the bed in the lamplight to find my clothes but, stumbling on the dirt, fell to Earth and lay there for a time too weary to get up, post-coital
tristesse
locking my limbs, and when the whore said to me in the darkness, “hurry, hurry,” I did not know for a moment from where her voice came or whom she was talking to, and the vision of the Captain’s wife came upon me; the Captain’s wife as she must have looked under him as she spread and took his agony within, but before I could get a glimpse of Her face it all winked out again and I was struggling with my boots and thinking helplessly of the Captain’s wife who in no way could be equated with the whore … but the captain’s wife is a different story altogether and does not fall within the context of this