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the sleeping head of a black mongrel dog in the back seat.
    "All right, all right. Let's cut the yappin'," Bull said, picking up an imaginary microphone by his dashboard. "Control tower. Run me a check on the weather. Roger. Stand by for a fighter pilot. Over and out."
    "Bye Mamaw," the children yelled.
    The blue station wagon pulled away from the curb like a ship easing into the half black waters a stone's throw from the light of harbors. Soon the rhythm of shifted gears and the suppressed hum of an engine tuned for a long journey brought the car down Briarcliff Road to Ponce de Leon. At the light, Bull Meecham announced that it was time to sing.
    "What should we sing first?" Mary Anne asked.
    "What we always sing first, sportsfans," Bull answered. "Everybody ready?"
    "Yeah," his children cried.
    "Yeah?" the father asked.
    "Yes, sir," they answered correctly.
    "That's better. A-one and a-two and a-three."
    Then together the family sang. The old words of the song burned into their collective memory. Images of other journeys flashed before them as they passed from light to darkness to light following the street lamps of Ponce de Leon into Decatur. It was the holy hymn taken from the bone and sinew of the family's life together, the anthem of both their discontent and strange belabored love for their way of life. With the singing of this song the trip began, tradition was paid its due homage, the rites of odyssey fulfilled. A lone car passed the Meechams' station wagon, and the stranger passing other strangers for the first and last time on earth heard the words coming toward him and leaving him quickly, unable to catch the tune. He caught only the word "battles."
     
    From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,
    We will fight our country's battles on land, on air, on sea.
    First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor
    clean,
    We are proud to claim the title of United States Marines.
    It was the first song on all journeys the family took together. Each of the children had heard it first in the arms of their father; its rhythms had come to them through their mother's milk. The song filled each child with a bewitched, unnamable feeling; the same feeling that drove men into battle. The Marine Corps hymn was the family song, the song of a warrior's family, the song of war, the Meecham song. "Families without songs are unhappy families," Lillian Meecham would say. But the song was theirs. They were traveling now, singing the lead song, driving deep into an American night toward a base where the great silver planes rested, waiting for their pilots.
    All during the summer, all across America, the highways filled up with the migrating families of the American military. They made crisp, mesmerized treks from base to base where the men perfected the martial arts and where families settled into counterfeit security for a year or two. Movement, travel, impermanence, and passing in the night were laws of the tribe. If the birds of the North are born with a migratory instinct fused into the albumen of eggs, then the military families of America develop the same instinct out of necessity. They pack, move, unpack, burrow in, and nervously await their next orders. When summers come a moving fever hits many of them, even when the orders command that they stay where they are.
    Orders usually came during the spring, filtered down from the Pentagon, the long, spacious halls where uneyed, five-sided men fingered the destinies of millions of men and their families, who set in motion the marathon car trip, that took an Army family of eight from the Presidio of San Francisco across the continent, that sent a bachelor from Quantico thirty miles up the road to Arlington, and four naval families living side by side in Newport News to four different directions on the compass, that left an Air Force family of three in the same house on the same base for eleven years. Orders came to some men yearly; to others, rarely. But when they