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machine? Bunch of 4-F’s in some defense plant out in California interested in just one thing: their pay envelopes—hell with the safety of the poor son of a bitch that’s going to have to pilot the thing. And who serviced your machine? Bunch of goof-off ground-crew ‘mechanics’ that before being drafted were jerking sodas or delivering telegrams. In the Navy there you are out there in a tub slapped together by a bunch of Rosy-the-Riveters waiting like a sitting duck for a submarine to torpedo you or one of your Ivy League college graduate officers to steer you onto an a-toll or whatever you call them. In the infantry you’re dependent for your survival on just yourself. Yourself and your rifle. Your enemy is just another man with his rifle. If you know how to shoot, how to stalk your game, how to read the signs he gives himself away by, how to lay low, you’ll come through. There weren’t many old country boys who didn’t make it back. The ones we lost were those city boys raised on concrete that never held a gun in their hands before they were issued one in training camp.”
    Private Clyde Renshaw won so many citations there would not have been room on his broad chest for all his ribbons if he had kept them instead of throwing them away, but he refused every promotion. This was thought by his superiors and his fellow-soldiers to be modesty; it was not. Clyde wanted no responsibility for anybody’s life but his own. Not for nothing, Clyde reasoned, was a private called a private. A private had only himself to save. Officers, commissioned and noncommissioned, got killed through the cowardice or the inexperience or the bone-headed bravery of the men in their charge, those town boys who did not know how to take care of themselves. As to Clyde’s strategy, it was simple: to kill as many of the enemy as possible. This was misinterpreted also. It was not patriotism. Clyde Renshaw had about as much patriotism as a green pepper. The way Clyde figured, the more of the enemy he killed the fewer of them there would be to kill him.
    The result of Clyde Renshaw’s victorious one-man campaign to survive and get home again was that he was the most decorated buck private in his theater of the war, and the last man there to get back home. He was too good a soldier to be let go, and when the war was over and all those ex-golf caddies and barbers’ college students whose dumb luck had brought them safely through were home getting the good jobs and the girls, Clyde was kept on, as an old billygoat is kept among stallions, to stabilize the herd of beardless high-school kids with permanent hard-ons sent out to be the army of occupation.
    To Ma war was a game of hookey played by grown boys to get away from women and work. “Well!” she greeted the conquering hero on his return. “Where have you been all this while? The others have all been back for ages. What kept you as if I didn’t know?”
    Clyde married. He told his wife his Army adventures—those that could be told to a wife. She listened avidly. Flattered, he expanded. The telling drew them together as they had not been before. Both sensed this and drew closer still. Until both realized that what they were enjoying was the memory of the time when they had not been married.
    Bitter and bored, Clyde Renshaw longed for the lawlessness of wartime, for the license that had been his during the postwar occupation. Clyde craved a conquered country all his own, where he might be a one-man army of occupation, accountable for his conduct to nobody but himself. He found one right in his own back yard. For the beast that paced inside him restlessly, Clyde Renshaw found a jungle, his own private preserve, where by seignorial right he was the king of the beasts. Right in his own back yard where it had been all along, in the camp of the migrant Negroes who came each year to work his crops, Clyde Renshaw found not just another