I have a what?”

The corporal, who I have never seen before, laughs at my shock.

“You heard me right, private,” he says. “You have a call. Follow me, please.”

I follow him — at a trot, because apparently these things are time sensitive. He leads me to a tent that’s got all kinds of wires running in and out of it, then inside to a squeezed-up desk in the corner among a lot of other squeezed-up desks and guys with headphones on. I grab a phone receiver.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Well, it is about time.”

“Morris?” I say. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. “Morris, man, is that you?”

“It’s me, Rudi, man. So good to hear your voice.”

“Same here, Morris.”

“I was starting to think I’d never get a hold of you. How are you doing?”

“Great, Morris, I’m doing great. What about you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say great, but all right. I’m surviving, getting by, you know. That’s the best we can do over here, isn’t it?”

I’m surprised at how much like a corporal he sounds. “What? No. Actually, no. You can do a lot better than that.”

“Oh. You can? Oh, so I guess when you said you were fitting in with the Marines, you meant you really were —”

“What else could I have meant?”

“All right, all right,” he says. “You’re awful edgy all of a sudden.”

“And you’re awfully sensitive all of a sudden. All I was saying, Morris, was that if more of our guys over here wanted to get something accomplished, instead of just wanting to get by and then get out, maybe we’d have won this thing already. We talk about it here all the time, that Charlie’s like the thing that wouldn’t die. No matter how many days we blast him away we come back the next day and there he is. I don’t see him quitting like I see a lot of our guys doing. The VC, man, those guys ain’t messing around, and they ain’t just waiting to go home, either.”

“That’s ’cause they are home.”

“Hnnn. Maybe. Anyway, have you seen this book thing the Defense Department produces? It’s called Know Your Enemy: The Vietcong.”

“Ah, gee, Rude, not yet…. I think it’s in the stack on my nightstand.”

“Hey, be a wiseguy if you want, but if you read it you would know just how prepared and committed these guys are. They got these lists, their oath, their twelve rules of discipline, their rules of attention — rules of attention, man! If they weren’t the enemy, I might have to start hanging around with them instead of some of the people we got here.”

There is a silence on the other end of the line, which, combined with his silence while I was talking, is a lot of nothing coming from the guy who actually made the call.

“What’s the matter with you?” I say, and I hear more impatience in my voice than I intend, but, oh well.

“I was just going to ask you the same question. You don’t sound like yourself, Rudi, to be honest.”

“Good,” I say loudly. “Thank you. Because you know what? I’m not that guy. The Marines have remade me, Morris. I’ve remade myself. The Rudi you knew was a loser, man, and good riddance to him.”

“No, no, no,” he says, matching my intensity for the first time in the conversation. “The Rudi I knew was an excellent guy. He was kind of a goof, but he was somebody loveable. And I know I speak for the other guys, too, when I say I would rather you came home a good guy and a bad soldier than the other way around.”

The radio coordinator guy comes over to me and starts tapping his watch already. I turn away from him.

“Morris, are you not paying attention? Are you even bothering to read my letters? I’m not going home. Understand? I mean, you guys are still the best guys in the world, and we will always be us no matter what, but … I’m not going back home. I hate home. The Marines is my home, where I fit and where I belong. If they keep fighting in Vietnam then that’s where I’ll be. If they fight on into China, look for me there. If the Russians want a piece, bring it on ’cause I’ll be there. Boston can just take a hike. If I never see that place again that’s just fine with me. In fact, I would really like it if the USMC declared war on Massachusetts. That would thrill me all over.”

He’s gone all silent again. But because he is Morris I know the silence doesn’t stand a chance.

“How ’bout your mom, Rudi? Don’t you want to go home to your mom?”

I should show more respect here but, you know, this just isn’t the time.

“Mom? My mom? Okay, right, I missed her when I left. And I was thinking about her at first, before I started getting experienced, y’know, started turning into a man and into a Marine. Then, I got reality, Morris.”

“You got reality.”

“Reality, right. And reality is this. I needed my mom because I was nobody, with nothing, understand? Then I got to be somebody and I found myself needing less and less of Mom, or anybody, really. And I realized, a big part of why I was Mr. Nobody with Nothing, was ’cause of her.”

“Ah, Rudi, man, she did her best —”

“Know how many letters I’ve gotten from my mother? None. But I’m not surprised. She told me that was how it would be. The day I left, man, my mother — my own mother — said that because I was me it was so sure that I was gonna get killed that she was considering me dead as soon as she shut the door. That way she could protect herself from all the worrying, and if I came back someday it would just be a pleasant surprise. Huh? How’s that for a pat on the back, a confidence booster on the way to war? Well, what she doesn’t know is that that Rudi, Rudy-Judy, is dead already, and this Rudi that has replaced him is invincible. So there.”

There is another silence out there, this one longer. And again, because I know Morris like I do, I can just about see him.

“You’re shaking your head now, right? And holding your hand flat up against your forehead.”

This, at least, brings a chuckle out of him.

“I see you’ve invented the picture phone,” he says.

And now I chuckle, and now that has to be good enough to end on.

“Anyway, you may be a privileged radioman with all the time in the world, Morris, but I have a guy here waiting to unplug me.”

“Remember who and what you are, Rudi. Remember most of all what you are not. And then go and be everything else.”

“Morris, if you start talking to me like Beck then I will pull the plug here myself.”

He sighs loudly. “I know you’ve killed people, Rude. Maybe a lot —”

“A lot.” No sense in tiptoeing.

“But you don’t have to become one of them. That doesn’t have to be who you are. You’re not —”

“I am.”

“You also never used to —”

“Interrupt you?” I laugh, and he does, too.

It feels really, really, really good to be laughing, blending laughs with one of the guys. I’m shocked at the feeling it gives me. Frightened by it, even.

It’s a feeling connected to old stuff, and that feeling has to go.

“I have to go,” I say.

“No, don’t.”

“I have to, Morris, because they’re gonna disconnect me.”

And I also have to because I have to. Before Morris disconnects me. Disconnects me. I start talking very fast, so that I can get my words in, and so that he can’t.

“There is order here, Morris, and I understand it. I am good at this, and I am making a difference. I control stuff like I never could, and like I never will, outside of this thing. There will be no twelve-months-and-out for me. I’m in, all the way in, forever. I hope you understand, and I hope Beck understands, but I know that Ivan understands. And he’s proud of me, and by the time I’m done he’s gonna be even prouder, wait and see.”

“I can promise you that Ivan is in no way —”

I pull the receiver away from my ear when I see the radioman walking briskly toward me and waving his hands in front of his face like he’s disallowing a touchdown.

“Rudi!” I hear little-voice Morris bellowing at me desperately.

“Yeah, Morris,” I say, buying one more moment from the radioman with one finger in the air.

“You don’t have to like what you have to do here. You’re not supposed to like it.”

“Well, there ya go,” I say. “When did I ever do anything the way I was supposed to?”

“Wait, we’re all very —”

Morris is still talking at me when I hand the phone over voluntarily and get back to business.