LUDIC LOG

It's his first night back on his leave so I want to show him a good time. The last thing you want is for someone to come away from here with a bad impression of the place but there's only so much we can do, really. I decide to take him back to Schmitzky's, which was one of my favorite places before the war. At least they've still got a pool hall.

As soon as we get there he starts in on me. Loud. People are going to hear, and they don't take kindly to people talking smack about how things are. "Christ, Rob," he asks, with that cocky tone in his voice that comes from guys who have it easy, "what the fuck happened to this place? It's a dump."

I tell him to keep his voice down. People live here and drink here and maybe it's not perfect but we can't all have a clean mess hall and a enlisted lounge to go to. Really, though, he's right. It's a dump. There's an old Schlitz Malt Liquor hanging lamp over the pool hall and it's tilting to one side, and it has cracks on it. There's two kinds of tap beer, the juke doesn't work, and it's a good think you can't see the ceiling because it's nothing but patches of damp held together by cobwebs.

"It didn't used to be like this, did it? I mean, I remember coming here when we graduated and it didn't look like this." He looks around like he smells something. Thank God he changed out of his uniform, and even so he looks too good. Brand new windbreaker, creases in his jeans. I swear he irons his t-shirts.

"Schmitzky died back a couple of years ago. He had cancer."

"Well, what the fuck, Rob? How come he didn't just, you know, I mean don't they have hospitals in this town? He seemed fine the last time I saw him." I buy him a beer just to give him something to do with his mouth besides talk. Ginny behind the bar gives him a dirty look as he turns to get us a booth. I smile at her and she smiles back because we know each other. He's lucky he's my friend, otherwise he'd be leaving here with a warped pool cue up his ass.

"Look, Kev," I tell him, "he didn't have health insurance. Or a pension. And what little money he had got blitzed when the market tanked the first year of the war. You get health care and a pension. We don't get shit. And the export trade is all shot to hell, so it's not like he could have just gone back to the docks."

He backs off. "Sorry, sorry," he says, lighting up a cigarette. It's one of the good Turkish kind. You can get them everywhere at the front. A couple of the guys trying to play pool catch a whiff of it and shoot him a look. He might as well have come in with a big neon sign over his head saying 'serviceman'. "I didn't mean anything by it. It's just..."

He never hesitates. There's nothing in between his mouth and his brain but empty space. He must be about to say something fucked up if he's taking the time to think about it first. "You got something to say, Kev?" I ask, a warning in my voice.

"Hey, Rob, we're cool, man. I mean, I always say, no matter how bad it seems, you have to support the civilians back home. You're the ones we're fighting to protect and all that, no matter how we might disagree with your..."

"Our what?"

"Your choices, man. I'm not judging. I'm just saying, we do something with our share of the taxpayer money. We're making things happen. You guys, I don't know. Sometimes this town just reeks of defeat." He takes a nervous slug of his beer. He knows he's said to much and he thinks I'm gonna let him have it.

So I do. "Pretty fucking easy for you to say, man. Sitting on your goddamn aircraft carrier, punching buttons, playing PlayStation, passing judgments on us from ten thousand miles away while you're safe in your command center. Meanwhile we're the ones putting our asses on the line at the plant to make electronics components to run your Watchman, barely getting by, with the DHS breathing down our neck, and all we get for our trouble is $300 a year. You don't have to live with the terror alerts or the news releases or the speeches every single day. I think it's pretty fucking easy for you to judge, when you don't have to do it yourself."

He doesn't say anything for a long time. They never do. When they see it, they always talk like that at first. You just have to make them understand. You just have to show them how lucky they are. He lights up another Turkish cigarette and squeezes out a weak apology.

"It's cool, Kev," I tell him, like I've told a hundred guys before him. "They also serve, who only go and fight."