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their stories for the thousandth time, over a beer at the American Legion.
    Bob Hodges smiled then, fingering a picture of his father in an ill-fitting uniform, wearing a defiant solemn bold glare copied from some Rebel ancestor, his cap cocked to the side of his head. You were only a kid, Father. I'm older now than you were when you died. But you were a warrior, all right. So am I. Did you thrill to the drum, loving the march as I do? Did you inhale the smoke from the gunpowder as the weapons fired in training, wondering at the moment when the training would be real? Did you feel a kinship with the woods beneath your feet, and the heft of the rifle as you patrolled?
    Hodges shook his head in wonderment at the picture. I'll just bet you did. It is your blood that yielded me this certainty, these things. And will I, in the end, meet your fate, Father? I'm not afraid. I don't want to, but I'm not afraid. You and all the others taught me that. Man's noblest moment is the one spent on the fields of fire. I believe that.
    My war is not as simple as yours was, Father. People seem to question their obligation to serve on other than their own terms. But enough of that. I fight because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who.
    HE did not look a warrior. He was rawboned and rough-edged and quiet. He emanated a stringy, acquiescent toughness, born out of a need to accept hard living and disappointments. He rarely smiled but he was fond of humor and liked to deal with people with the bedrock irony of the backcountry: What were all those men doing down in Salt Lick with that automatic digger, Bobby? Well, it looked to me like they was digging a hole.
    His eyes were clear and unquestioning and gray, an older man's eyes because they carried pain comfortably. And he had dirt farmer's hands. They shot out almost embarrassingly from his pencil-thin wrists, thick and calloused and indelicate. They were his most noticeable feature and he liked to keep them inside his pockets. He felt they accentuated his thinness.
    He returned from the shed and finished sorting out his clothes and souvenirs. He placed his clothes in two piles, leaving the larger one for his stepbrothers and packing away a few items that were special to him. He similarly sorted his souvenirs, saving old baseballs and magazines, faded classroom notes, one scrapbook. Then he placed the more important items inside a gray foot-locker next to his bed, and locked it.
    The ordeal done, he opened a newly purchased suitcase, extracted his dress-green uniform, and donned it. For a long time he stood before the mirror in the hallway, fixing the knot in his tie just so, checking the alignment of his shooting badges, standing at attention and adjusting his cap. Then he smiled tentatively, saluted himself, and walked out the door.
    She was waiting. He would be just in time for lunch.
    He walked down the dirt road that scarred the ridge-line and turned onto the narrow strip of gray that hugged the draw. On the gray road there were occasional boxes of frame or tar-paper homes that sat too close to the road. Two cars and a truck passed. The drivers waved to him, and he waved back, feeling self-conscious yet mildly important in his uniform.
    A rusted Chevrolet clanged up from behind him and screeched to a halt. Two older men leaned over to him from the car and smiled half-tauntingly. The nearer of the two spat out the window and called to him.
    “Way-ull. Kiss my ass. Didn't know whether to salute ya or burp ya. A real live Looey.”
    Bob Hodges grinned self-consciously, slapping dust off of his uniform. “You can do whatever you damn well like, long as you call me ‘sir.’ ”
    The other man laughed amusedly and leaned across the car seat. “You do real good over there, y'hear? We proud of you, boy.”
    “Thanks, Mister Tidwell. I'll surely try.”
    He reached the railroad tracks and left the road and followed the tracks for a quarter-mile, scanning the low ridges and the rock-strewn