There Will Be Killing by John Hart Page B

black, humid, hot combat zone. Inside it was home. You forgot everyone was wearing dog tags, that everyone looked haggard and messed up in some way. As they started to play and got into the game they transformed so you saw their real faces and sometimes when the game was done and the soul shake was there someone would look you in the eye and you could really see him.
There were nights when men who had been pushing and shoving and banging, really banging just to that edge where any further meant a fight, would stop when that last shot went through and slap some skin, say “good game, man, good game, thank you man.” Then you forgot where you were going to be tomorrow, where you were going tonight. There was just the sound of the ball, the rim, the boards, the net, the grunts, curses, the sounds from the ones waiting their turn mixed with the boombox music of Marvin Gaye. . . .
And life for a moment was what you had always known. Life was not about counting the days or praying to whatever god you prayed to that a Boogeyman wouldn’t come and take you apart or follow you home and hide under your bed just so you could shriek yourself awake.
The Game. The Court. The Boogeyman wanted to Play.

10

    Izzy could not believe he had made it to “three fifty-seven and a wake up” in one piece and was sitting through yet another of Colonel Kohn’s morning reports. Margie hit him with a knock-out smile that should be illegal for making him want something he could but absolutely could not have. He had already lost too much to sacrifice the better part of his character, the best part of his life.
    Two letters from Rachel, his first in Vietnam, had arrived yesterday. Just touching them had been like fingering precious jewels. He was beyond excited but had made himself wait to open them, savoring the anticipation. Then he decided to forego dinner at the officer’s mess, make a date out of it. He showered, shaved, put on some Coppertone Suntan Lotion because it smelled of Coney Island. Then all he had to do was go to the beach and the picnic came to him. A succession of vendors were always plying the area, so he brought a couple of icy cold Cokes, fresh pineapple from the mama-san selling fruit, a beautiful baguette sandwich. He settled in for his little beach picnic in a special spot he found under some ironwood pines. The setting was so perfect—except for Rachel not actually being there—that he decided this would become his ritual whenever a new letter arrived.
    The two from yesterday were folded up now, stashed inside the pocket of his jungle fatigues, along with the new picture Rachel had sent. With her dark curly hair straightened and a kind of leather Indian headband across her forehead, he wasn’t wild about the new look. Probably because he wasn’t there to see how her new straight hair felt between his fingers. That and her mention of “hanging out with some new friends in the Village.”
    New. The reference had never bothered him before. And, he certainly liked new letters, so he told himself again to let it go and discreetly touched them, parked safely in his back pants pocket—yet another reminder of where his true affections belonged despite the residual effects of Margie’s smile, her proximity.
    How much was owed to Rachel’s reassurances, how much to Margie’s attention, and how much to just getting his bearings after a really rough start with a lot of help from his own new friends, Izzy wasn’t sure. But amazingly, he had begun to feel like he actually knew what he was doing. Maybe the military brass knew what they were doing, too, because most of his patients were all young, and in their anguish and trauma, like big kids anyway. He loathed admitting it, but drafting a child psychiatrist had perhaps not been a bad call on the US Draft Board’s end. They were bastards anyway, the whole filthy lot of them.
    Not the patients though. They were as innocent