The tower, where Mark was to meet Darren, was a large water tank that stood in an abandoned industrial complex just inside of the Roseville City limits. It was a round, one million-gallon storage and pressurization tank that sat more than two hundred feet in the air atop four steel legs. A large pipeline ran from the direct center of the bottom of the tank to the ground. The tank, the pipeline, and the legs were painted white although the last coat had been applied so long before that it was now a faded, brownish off-white color. Atop the peak of the tank's body were several cellular towers and radio communication towers. In the direct center of the top was a steel pole atop which a red, flashing light was mounted. This light, in days gone by, had been intended to warn helicopters and other low-flying craft away from the tower. The light was now darkened and had been since the beginning of the war. There were no more helicopters flying about and there was no sense in wasting precious electricity that did nothing but serve as a navigation beacon for attacking Chinese planes.
At the base of the tower were several small wooden buildings that contained pumping equipment and a leveled area of dry dirt that had been constantly treated with herbicide to impede vegetation growth. Despite the herbicide, large foxtails and bramble bushes dotted the area. Two or three times a day, at sporadic intervals, the electric whine of the machinery within the structures could be heard coming to life, pumping water from the underground pipes up into the body of the elevated tank.
Mark parked his bicycle behind one of the pumping structures, out of sight of the main road. He shouldered his backpack and then walked to one of the legs of the tower, a metal cylinder four feet in diameter that stretched into the sky and that was strong enough to support 250,000 gallons of water, or one fourth of the total weight. Attached to the outside of this cylinder was a ladder that extended from the ground to the maintenance catwalk on the tank two hundred and twenty feet up. The first fifteen feet of the ladder were covered by a locked piece of hinged steel that extended upward and prevented access to the rungs. Or at least that is what its designers thought that it did.
He sat down with his back against the support pole and his cammie-covered buttocks on the dirt ground. From around him came the sound of the chilly spring wind and little else. There were not many habitations near the tower and, though what had once been a main road was only thirty yards away, no traffic passed there. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a cigarette. He scooted around the support pole until the wind, which had kicked up considerably now that the sun was approaching the western horizon, was muted by its bulk and then he lit it with a wooden kitchen match.
At ten minutes after eight, just as Mark was starting to think that his friend was going to flake on him, he heard the familiar squeaking of Darren's brakes. A moment later he pedaled into the secluded enclave and brought his bike to a halt next to Mark's. His face was a little flushed from the wind.
"What up?" Darren said coolly, jerking his head a little in greeting. "I got the shit."
"Yeah?" Mark said, standing.
"Fuckin' aye." He reached into his backpack and pulled out two plastic sandwich baggies that were rolled up like a burrito. He handed them across to Mark.
Mark took them and unrolled both. This was part of the ritual of going in with Darren on some marijuana. Darren, in order to "prove" that he wasn't trying to screw his friend out of any of his share, would allow him to pick which bag he would take for his own. The contents in each bag would be pretty much equal. They always were. But Mark had no doubt that Darren had already removed a sizable portion of each bag back at his house and placed it in a third bag which was undoubtedly resting in a little accessed part of his room somewhere. Darren was not even smooth about it. When a week or so went by and they had smoked the contents of both of the official bags and had no money to buy more, Darren would suddenly turn up with the third bag, explaining its existence by saying that Paul had kicked loose a little out of pity. As if a drug dealer made a habit of doing such things.
As always, Mark kept his suspicions to himself. What would be the point of lodging a complaint? He took one of the bags and handed the other back to Darren. He then opened his and took a sniff of the green, sticky buds inside. The odor was pungent and very similar to that produced by an angry skunk. It was enough to make the eyes water. "God damn," he proclaimed happily. "This is some good bud."
"Fuckin' aye," Darren said with a cocky tone, as if nothing else could be expected. "Shall we retire to the smoking area?"
"I think we should," Mark agreed, pocketing his baggie.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a rolled up safety ladder that was designed to help facilitate an emergency escape from a second floor bedroom in the event of a fire. Though the two friends did not actually need the ladder in order to ascend the tower, it certainly made things easier and faster. The first few times they had gone up they had simply shimmied up the sides of the security partition until they reached the rungs. It always took a few tries and a few spills to the ground but it was not a terribly difficult task for an adolescent boy to accomplish when he put his mind to it. It was only after Mark had fallen and nearly broken his arm during one ascension that they had begun to seek out a safer means of going up that first fifteen feet. Mark had been the one to come up with the idea of the safety ladder. Mark was the one that came up with most of the ideas when it came to how to accomplish some task. His mind just seemed to work that way. He had also been the one to shoplift the ladder from the local Home Depot, stuffing it into his pants after carefully removing the anti-theft tag from the packaging.
He unrolled the rope and plastic device, stretching its entire twelve-foot length out. At the top of it were two sturdy plastic hooks that were supposed to be hooked into the frame of the hypothetical second story window. The hooks had been modified by the addition of twenty-ounce deep sea fishing sinkers ingeniously attached with a drill and two bolts. The sinkers gave enough weight to the top of the ladder for it to be thrown into the air.
"Whoever hooks it, the other supplies the first missile?" Darren asked, tightening his backpack straps on his shoulder.
"Sounds good," Mark agreed, already knowing who was going to be the one to hook it and who was going to have to roll the first "missile" up on top. Though he was sharp as a tack when it came to thinking up things like the escape ladder or the counter-weights used to attach it, he was not terribly coordinated when it came to physical activities and competition. But he gave it his best effort nonetheless. He stepped back a few paces and eyed his target: the second rung above the security partition. Holding the ladder by the sinkers, he tossed it upward, throwing it the same way a basketball player shoots a free throw. It struck to the right and low, the sinkers making a hollow bonging noise against the steel before falling to the ground at their feet.
Darren smiled. "Not bad," he said. "You're getting better." He bent over and picked up the ladder by the sinkers. "But watch this." He took two steps back, gave a careless glance upward, and then took his shot almost absently. The sinkers sailed smoothly upward and dropped neatly around the second rung, allowing the rest of the ladder to trail down. "Thank you, thank you," Darren said, raising his clenched hands over his head and pumping them a few times, as if he had just made the game-winning point.
"Lucky shot," Mark muttered companionably, unable to keep himself from admiring it. Sometimes he felt he would gladly trade his intellect just for the ability to be good at things like sports and skateboarding instead of a clumsy fumbler. "Bet you couldn't do it again."
"I do it every fuckin' time," Darren reminded him.
"They're all lucky shots."
"Shee-it," he said, laughing and clapping him on the back. "Shall we head up? It's time to get high."
"Fuckin' aye," Mark agreed, reaching for the flimsy escape ladder.
It went without saying that neither young man's parent or parents knew that their children were spending a great many of their evenings climbing unsecured more than two hundred feet in the air to a flimsy, shaky catwalk that encircled a water tower. They would have been understandably horrified at the very thought. And though Darren was traditionally the instigator for most of the non-parentally approved activities that they engaged in, it had been Mark that had been the author of this most dangerous pursuit.
Mark's father, had he been told about this, would have been terrified at the thought, would have demanded it cease immediately, and may even have reinstated corporal punishment, but he would not have been surprised by his son's behavior. Since he was a child Mark had been fascinated with structures of all shapes, sizes, and purposes; the larger, the higher, the better. He had been building skyscrapers and drawbridges with his erector set by the age of four. He had been drawing and graphing crude blueprints for buildings, bridges, and dams on his computer since the age of six. He had twice won prizes in school engineering fairs for his complex and meticulous projects. One such prize had been for a working model of the very water tower that he was climbing. The project had been complete with a miniature pump and a miniature faucet to symbolize the city water supply. He had shown how the tower increased water pressure in the system and how it could be utilized as an emergency back up to the pump in the event of a power failure. The point about the tower that he had most stressed in his demonstration was the height and how important that height was to the tower's purpose. Mark liked tall structures, masterpieces of steel that stretched into the sky, towering above everything else. He liked the principals of architecture and engineering that led to such structures. He liked the processes of construction that built them. In his room he had actual textbooks of engineering and architecture that he had acquired and memorized over the years. He would rather peruse a blueprint of a new building, would rather read a synopsis of a construction technique than watch an episode of Idaho Platoon or read a war novel. For a teenage boy in that day and age, that was saying quite a lot.
The water tower had always held a particular fascination for him. It stood less than two miles from his suburban house and was, except for a few cellular towers, the tallest structure in Roseville. By the age of twelve he had tracked down on the Internet its exact specifications, purpose, and date of construction. From the time he had longed for anything he had longed to explore its surfaces, to ascend its body.
It was only since the war had started that he had been able to realize his dream of climbing it. Before the war, he would not have been able to get more than thirty feet up the ladder before some motorist passing by on Base Line Road would have called the police on a cellular telephone. But since the Chinese had effected a drastic reduction in gas consumption, there was no more traffic on Base Line and there was no one within seeing distance to report him. The first time he had gone up the tower it had been almost a sexual experience. When he stood on the shaky catwalk for the first time, able to see for miles in all directions, able to touch the thick steel of the elevated tank, able to examine the rivets and bolts and pressure points, he had been exalted. The water tower soon became his favorite place of seclusion; a place he had shared only with Darren, who had been quite horrified himself when Mark suggested for the first time that they go up.
Ironically it was a reversal of peer pressure that had led Darren up that first time. Though Mark loved heights—he would have gladly climbed a shaky ladder to an altitude six times higher than the Roseville water tower—Darren liked his feet to be firmly upon the ground. He squeamed, as the modern slang went, at the thought of being high enough that a fall would be lethal. But when Mark had enticed him out there that first time and had wormed his way up the secured ladder and began to climb, Darren had been unable to take the thought that his weaker, younger, more timid friend could do something that he himself would not. He had forced himself onto the ladder and, sweating with fear the entire way, had followed him up step by fearful step until he too had stood upon the grated steel walkway.
"There," he had said, with an unsteady voice, his pupils dilated with the adrenaline pumping through his body, his eyes refusing to take in the dizzying scenery around them. "I did it. Now let's get the fuck back down."
"C'mon, sarge," Mark had replied, leaning casually upon the waist-high railing. "Let's hang for a few. Have a smoke. Check out the scenery."
And so they had. By the time they had been up there fifteen minutes or so, Darren had calmed down and had actually began to enjoy himself a little. The next few times they had gone up he had been similarly reluctant but had always given in to the pressure. Gradually, perhaps in defense of the power his friend seemed to hold over him, he had adapted to the point that it was he who usually suggested they go for a climb.
Mark went up first this time. Using the flimsy escape ladder, he pulled himself up to the first actual rung. He then climbed up a few more feet and waited until Darren mounted the ladder below him. Keeping about six rungs between them, the two friends began to climb, their calf and thigh muscles bearing their weight as they pushed into the sky. There were one hundred and eighteen rungs on the ladder from the top of the security partition to the opening on the catwalk. Mark had counted them many times. The rungs were located exactly two feet apart and they flashed by his eyes one by one as the ground dropped away beneath them. They did not talk as they ascended, partially because the physical exertion of climbing required too much breath and partially because the wind, which was ripping by them at twenty miles an hour or so, would have made it nearly impossible to hear anyway.
The legs of the tower, including the one upon which the ladder was attached, were not perfectly perpendicular to the ground. They leaned inward at three-degree angles, with the feet of them at a wide stance. Mark knew that this made for better weight distribution, making it possible to use less steel to support the same amount of weight. It also meant that it was impossible to get to the catwalk, which encircled the tank's perimeter at its widest point, from the support leg by using a single ladder flush against the leg.
The leg mounted ladder ended at rung 96. A thirty-five foot section of heavier, unsupported ladder took over from that point. Its bottom edge was bolted to the support leg and its top edge was bolted both to the catwalk and to the side of the tank just below it. This section's angle was straight up and down, as compared to the three degree tilt of the support leg section and it had no comforting bulk of steel behind it to help cut the wind and lend a slight psychological easement of mind. When Mark reached this section he continued on without pausing, seeing space open between him and the support leg, feeling the icy wind increase by a factor of two at least. The entire section could be felt swaying back and forth in that wind, making harsh, metallic creaking noises at the attachment points.
"God damn!" Mark yelled downward at Darren, "this fuckin' wind is tryin' to blow me right off of here!"
"Don't be a pussy!" Darren yelled back up, not mentioning the fact that the open-air section of the climb still terrified him nearly to tears; especially when it was windy. "Just get your ass up there!"
"I ain't stopping!" Mark yelled back down, and indeed he was not. He actually found the wind pushing at him to be enjoyable. In truth, he had only said that to Darren because a cruel part of his mind knew that Darren hated the climb and had a desire to prod at that fear when the opportunity presented itself. It was not often that Darren was the one terrified of something and Mark was the fearless one. "Just be careful when you get to the open part!" he yelled. "It's a bitch today!"
Darren mumbled something in reply but it was lost as a particularly fierce gust blasted into Mark, making him clutch strongly against the rungs for a moment until it passed. He then continued up the ladder, now seeing the bulk of the tank curving towards him from the other side of it. At the precise center of the tank, its widest spot, his head pushed through the small opening that led to the three-foot wide catwalk. He pulled himself onto the rusty, grated surface by grabbing the safety railing, careful to keep his knees from bashing on the rough nubs. Panting a little, his eyes watering from the wind, he stood up and walked a few feet around the perimeter, clearing the opening so that Darren could come up.
Holding onto the rail and looking outward, he took in the sights off to the east, the direction this portion of the tank faced. No matter how many times he saw it, the view was still impressive, almost majestic. He could see Base Line Road, a black ribbon with a yellow line down the middle, stretching off into the housing developments, which were visible only as thousands of tiny tiled roofs arranged in geometric groupings. A little to the north he could see Dry Creek winding its way through greenbelts and under road bridges. Interstate 80, which had once carried hundreds of thousands of cars to and from Sacramento, could be seen cutting through the center of the suburb before continuing along on its path to the towering Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. A few cars could be seen here and there, some moving on the freeway, some on the surface streets near central Roseville. Those were either police cars, government vehicles of some sort, or wealthy elite types. In the residential areas he could make out the tiny figures of children playing on some of the front lawns or riding their bikes and skateboards here and there. He could see a few adults engaging in jogging for exercise. Though he could not make out exactly what sex they were, he intellectually knew that they would be mostly women since men that were young enough to jog were generally missing from the Roseville landscape these days.
He heard a grunt, followed by a curse of displeasure and he looked over to see that Darren had emerged from the opening. His face was somewhat flushed and he was panting perhaps a little more than the exertion alone could account for. He stood carefully, slowly, as if moving too suddenly would cause the bolts and welds that held the catwalk together to suddenly give out. As always he carefully kept his body as close to the tank side as possible. "Let's get out of this fucking wind," he said.
"Right," Mark agreed, adjusting his backpack a little and then moving forward, toward the southeast side of the tank, his feet clattering on the see-through grating, making it shake.
That shaking used to terrify Darren when they first started coming up here. Mark remembered, a little ashamedly, how he had taken advantage of that fear once when his friend had blurted it out. It had been the third or fourth trip up and he had not meant to scare him as badly as he had. They had been doing as they were doing now, walking around the perimeter to find the most wind-free spot.
"Sarge," Darren had barked, licking his lips nervously, "do you have to stomp so hard on this thing while you walk? They built this catwalk like thirty years ago. What if your stomping rips one of the sections loose?"
"That would be one on me, wouldn't it?" Mark had responded lightly.
"I'm serious," Darren had returned, putting on a tough, I'm-in-command-here expression. "Retreat with the stomping."
"C'mon, sarge," Mark had told him, concealing a smile. "You don't have to worry. You see these bolts that hold this thing in place?" He had pointed to the half-inch square heads at his feet that were located every fourteen inches along the tank side of the catwalk. "They may be old but there's a damn battalion of them holding each section up. What do you think the odds are that all of them in a particular section would break?"
"Yeah," Darren had said, nodding, a little comforted by this lecture. Though he was unquestionably the dominant member of the friendship, he knew instinctively that Mark's knowledge of how things were built was beyond reproach. "I guess so. It just squeams me a little to feel this thing move when we're two hundred feet up, you know?"
"Two hundred and twenty feet up," Mark had corrected. "And this old catwalk can really take a pounding. Check it out." With that he began to jump up and down, slamming his feet into the grating hard enough to make the entire section bang against the tank and send sharp, echoing clangs out into the air. It had sounded like somebody using a sledgehammer to drive a metal stake into the ground.
"Quit that shit!" Darren had yelled, grasping at the railing in a panic, terrified as he felt the surface beneath him pitching up and down like a ship in high seas.
"Just wanted to show you," Mark had said, stopping his actions and feeling immediately sorry for what he had done. He really hadn't expected that the catwalk would shake that much or scare Darren that badly.
That incident had never been mentioned again, and Mark had never repeated the action. It was doubtful that it would scare Darren anymore anyway. Since then, they had made the discovery that there were other man-made forces that could cause much more pitching of the catwalk than a one hundred and twenty pound boy bouncing on it. They had even learned to seek out, to enjoy the forces that caused this violent pitching.
As they worked their way around to the south side of the tank the high-rises of downtown Sacramento some thirty miles away and the wide, murky Sacramento River twisting its way past them came into view. One advantage of the war and the severe gasoline shortage it had produced was that urban smog had almost vanished. The Sacramento region, which was located in a huge valley, had once been one of the smoggiest places in the nation. An ugly, brownish haze used to hang over the area year-round, even during windstorms such as this one, making visibility of more than twenty miles or so next to impossible. But now the air was clear and sweet smelling and from the railing of the tank they could see all the way to Mount Diablo in the San Francisco Bay area more than ninety miles away.
Closer in, about four miles distant, the huge Roseville rail yard could be seen. The largest rail-switching yard west of the Mississippi River, it stretched literally for miles along the southern reaches of the city. There were miles and miles of track and sidings in the yard and thousands of tanker cars, boxcars, and equipment carriers stacked up in a seemingly random pattern. Unlike when they were looking at Roseville itself, when they looked at the rail yard there could be no doubt that they lived in a country at war. On most of the flatcars were M2 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, half-tracks, self-propelled artillery guns, self-propelled surface to air missile (SAM) launchers, Humvees, and Apache III attack helicopters. In most of the tanker cars would be diesel and jet fuel. In most of the boxcars would be artillery rounds, aircraft bombs, anti-tank missile reloads for the AT-9 launchers, and ammunition of all calibers.
Each train that entered or left the yard had a SAM launcher installed on a flat car somewhere near the middle and a 23mm gunner stationed at each end. Chinese pilots had been known to attack freight trains in transit when they blundered across them on their way to other targets. The yard itself had three fixed surface to air missile sites and nearly fifty fixed large and small caliber anti-aircraft guns. The guns and the SAM launchers were each entrenched three feet below the ground level and protected by a five-foot wall of sandbags. From above, Mark and Darren could see the stout barrels of the guns and the swiveling missile launchers of the SAMs protruding from their emplacements.
The train yard was a busy place. It was the primary switching yard for supplies heading either to the inactive western front along the Columbia River near Portland, or to the active front in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho. Workers could be seen moving here and there, coupling this section of cars to that locomotive, moving other cars from place to place. Trains moved in and out constantly, at all hours of the day and night. Trains heading north and east would have the new military equipment from the factories on their flatcars. Trains returning from the north and the east would be carrying the remains of the earlier generation of machines that had been destroyed in battle and were being shipped back to be recycled. One of their favorite activities after climbing the tower was to stare at these machines, both new and battle-smashed, through binoculars. Seeing the smashed and burned tanks or APCs did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm for going off to war. If anything, it seemed to strengthen their resolve.
The yard was naturally a frequent target of Chinese bombers trying to impede the flow of supplies to the front. Impact craters from bombs dotted the surface of the yard. Many of the administrative and storage buildings on the property had been destroyed in one air raid or another and those that had not were now surrounded with double rings of sandbags. Off to the east side of the yard, in what had once been a huge empty field, were piles of twisted steel that were the remains of train cars that had been blown apart during an attack and then hauled there until a recycling run could be made.
Because of these frequent air attacks much of the residential area immediately surrounding the yard had been cleared of inhabitants. The reason why could be plainly seen. Entire sections of those subdivisions were nothing but smashed rubble and blackened frames, the results of off-target Chinese bombs that had landed amid the houses and exploded. More than two hundred people had been killed in that area before the authorities had made the decision to condemn any dwelling located within three miles of the yard. This had led to a vicious battle between the residents of those houses, who were not eligible for any sort of compensation for their displacement, and the Roseville Police Department, who had been ordered to enforce the evacuation order. Three days of violent clashes between the two groups occurred. Sign-carrying middle-class homeowners, mostly women since the men were off at war, had been beaten, gassed, and shot by riot-gear clad cops, most of whom were also women or older men beyond service age. Before enforcement of the order was finally established, six protesters would be killed, scores more injured, and nearly a hundred would be arrested and tried under a wartime criminal code and sentenced to prison terms. The criminal justice system had little tolerance for organized civil disobedience these days.
"Look at that," Darren said, as they finally found a wind-free spot in which to settle. He pointed towards the yard and the mass of steel cars that sat in it. "You see them?" His voice was excited, as if he had just spotted a naked woman for the first time.
"See what?" Mark asked, having no idea what he was referring to. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small pillow, which he put on the grating and then sat upon. They had learned quickly that you did not want to sit directly upon the grating for any length of time.
"Over by the west side of the tracking," he said, pointing again. "That train is carrying the new Bradley 3A's. You see 'em? I heard that they were going to start sending them up to the front pretty soon. That must be the first load!"
"Static," Mark said, peering out to take a look. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his baggie of marijuana and a pack of Zigzags. "What's the difference between those and the old Bradleys?" he asked, more to make conversation than out of any real desire to know.
"What's the difference?" Darren asked, shaking his head sadly at his friend's lack of knowledge about what was important. He reached into his pack and withdrew his own pillow and his beloved binoculars. "The 3A has thicker armor on the front and the new turbine engine. It can also carry four more troops than the 2C. I bet we won't see too many of the 3A's coming back on the flatcars." He sat down and let his legs hang over the edge of the railing. Once he was settled in, he put the binoculars to his eyes and began peering at the new infantry carriers, his fear of heights forgotten. "Damn," he said admiringly as he took in a close-up view of the shape. "I dig those 30mm cannons. I read they increased the rate of fire and the range on this model too."
Mark listened to the dissertation on the new infantry carrier with half an ear, nodding and giving a "really?" whenever it seemed appropriate. Most of his attention was spent trying to successfully crunch up and roll a missile without spilling any of the precious bud.
Darren dropped the binoculars, letting them hang from the cord around his neck. "I can't fuckin' wait, sarge," he said wistfully. "Just another couple of months and we'll be out there, killing those fuckin' chinks wholesale. You and me, buddy, we'll be a fuckin' chink elimination squad."
"Goddamn right," Mark said, grinning at the thought. In truth, if he was going to go to the line, he wanted it to be with Darren, his high school protector at his side.
"I wonder where they'll send us?" Darren said, slowly panning back and forth. "I hope it's to the real front and not fuckin Montana or Oregon. Can you imagine how boring it is being part of the holding force?"
"Brett Faxton went to Montana," Mark felt compelled to remind him. "Apparently he didn't find it all that boring. It was interesting enough to put him in the obits." Faxton, a former classmate of theirs, had dropped out of school to enlist on his eighteenth birthday back in February. He had been killed in the Rocky Mountain passes less than a week after being assigned there as an infantry soldier.
Darren dismissed this side issue of the Brett Faxton story as being beside the point. "Faxton was a moron," he said derisively. "I'm surprised he even made it through basic without getting his ass killed. I'm surprised he was even able to get on the right train to make it to basic. Imagine, getting killed in the fuckin mountain brigade. They're almost as pussy as the rear-echelon motherfuckers. All they have to do is keep the chinks out of the passes. They have a single fucking road to guard. How do you get killed doing that?"
"He found a way," Mark said, sealing the missile closed with saliva. As tradition dictated, he handed it across to Darren along with a box of kitchen matches.
"The stupid ones die easy," Darren said wisely, putting it in his mouth. "It ain't gonna be like that for us. If the chinks wanna take me or my bud out, they're gonna have to fuckin' work at it." He struck a light and applied the flame to the tip, inhaling deeply.
"What if they put us in tanks?" Mark asked him, articulating a fear that was in nearly every prospective armed services member. In this war it was the tank crews that were having the toughest go at it. They were the ones with the highest casualty rate and they were the ones who died the most horrible deaths. Even if they were merely injured, the injury would most likely be a severe burn.
Darren finished his hit and handed the missile over. He held in the smoke for a moment and then finally exhaled before answering. "They wouldn't do that to us," he assured him. "We're volunteers. They put the draftees in the tanks, those fuckin pussies that they have to go chase down to get them to serve."
"I heard that's just a myth," said Mark, who read obsessively and who had found an official armed services web site on his computer that proclaimed the draftees-to-the-tank-corps story to be nothing but an urban legend.
"Naww," Darren scoffed, with all the assuredness of someone who did not want to face an unpleasant truth. "That's really the way it works, sarge. The volunteers get the infantry and the holding positions. They get the armored cav and the airborne. The draftees go in the tanks. That's their fuckin punishment for not signing up on their own, I'm tellin' you."
"I guess that makes sense," Mark answered, still holding the smoldering joint between his fingers. He could have said a lot more, but he didn't, knowing that his friend would not be receptive to any observations or thoughts that might scare him. Instead he put the missile in his mouth and made it burn.