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oddballs were sent paperwork as thick as phone books. It came from DoD and DA, and CINCPAC and USARV and USOM and HEDSUPPACT and USIS and COMUSMACV and USMACV and MACV. The papers were sealed inside envelopes marked TOP SECRET CRYPTO.
    Whoever came to the Annex door and signed for the stuff was careful not to give us a peek within. The oddballs were off-limits to us, too. Even to say hello to. But I knew that someday my curiosity would get the better of me.
    “Private Joe, get your eyes off the Annex personnel and listen to me. As I was saying, a full colonel has to submit―”
    “Yes sir, outrageous.”
    “Requisition of a Jeep outside channels, is that feasible?” Captain Papersmith asked.
    We were apparently finished on the subject of typing, clerk-typist status having been dangled as bait.
    “Sir, does the colonel require a Jeep now?”
    “By the ingenuity you men displayed today, it strikes me that you have alternative matériel sources.”
    The captain was correct about Jeeps being in short supply. The buildup was accelerating beyond the ability to support it. From econ classes, I recalled the supply and demand curve. In 1965 Saigon , the curve was bent sharply toward demand.
    If the captain wanted us to steal a Jeep for the colonel, though, I wish he’d spit it out. But Captain Papersmith wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.
    “Alternative matériel sources, sir?” I asked.
    Digging at his chewed fingernails, the captain said, “Outside of official channels. Unofficially speaking.”
    “Is this what you mean by ‘more responsibility,’ sir?”
    “Are you being smart with me, soldier?”
    “Sir, no sir. Just want to confirm the facts.”
    “There are no facts. We aren’t having this conversation.”
    “What conversation, sir?”
    Ziggy laughed and Captain Papersmith flinched. Ziggy’s laugh sounded like a truck backfiring.
    Red as a beet, Captain Papersmith said, “That’ll be all. Dismissed.”
    We whipped salutes on him and headed out to follow orders we hadn’t been given.
     

 
     
    4.
     
    “THE CAPTAIN, he acts like boosting a Jeep is im -fucking-possible,” Ziggy said contemptuously as we climbed into a taxi. “Joey, they’re the easiest rigs anywheres to hot-wire. A monkey with a screwdriver’d be taillights down the road in sixty seconds flat.”
    I had no basis to disagree. Although I lacked Ziggy’s criminal background, I felt at home as a member of the Alternative Matériel Source Team. I was in the Zigster’s good hands.
    Ziggy, incidentally, was the only person to call me Joey, a diminutive I didn’t recollect hearing from family or friends even as a small child. I was not one to whom warm and fuzzy nicknames came naturally. Inevitably, four of my five wives came to refer to me with other four-letter names.
    Ziggy and I were an odd couple before The Odd Couple. We’d bonded before “male bonding” came into usage. Our bond was our mutual alienation from most people and institutions. Call it unhealthy if you like, but it worked for us.
    Me? Who am I?
    While we’re in the taxicab, slaloming in the maniacal traffic, it’s high time we get an autobiographical brief out of the way.
    I am the late Joseph Josiah Joe IV, last of the Joe line.
    My family tree is rather peculiar, an asymmetrical arrangement of dead limbs.
    We can trace the Joes back as far as the Civil War, to Gettysburg , where Josiah Joseph Joe Senior was felled by dysentery or some other shit-borne disease. In the Spanish-American War, charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy, Josiah Joseph Joe Junior was sliced in two by a cannonball. During World War I, the first Joseph Josiah Joe was cut down by machine-gun fire when he lifted himself out of a trench to fetch coffee. Joseph Josiah Joe II bought it at Guadalcanal, courtesy of a Jap sharpshooter hidden in a palm tree. When I was nine years old, my father, Joseph Josiah Joe III stepped on a mine at Inchon.
    Are we seeing a pattern?
    My family and I sure as