into the Treasury Building, adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids had camped on the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above, the weather was crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks, holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing their metal scabbards.
As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had organized a silent candlelight vigil.
So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping candles, the light of which weirdly illuminated and flickered on their tender faces. Donny's epiphany came at that moment: no matter what the fiery lifers said or the screaming-head peaceniks, both groups of Americans were pretty much the same.
'Yes, sir,' said Donny.
'I remember.'
'Were you aware, Corporal, that radical elements anticipated the movements of only one military unit, Company B of Marine Barracks, and that just by the hairiest of coincidences did a Washington policeman discover a bomb that was set to take out the phone junction into the Treasury, thereby effectively cutting off B Company and leaving the White House and the president defenseless?
Think of it, Corporal. Defenseless!'
He seemed to get a weird charge out of saying Defenseless!, his nostrils flaring, his eyes lit up.
Donny had no idea what to say. He hadn't heard a thing about a bomb in a phone junction.
'How did they know you were there? How did they know that's where you'd be?' demanded the lieutenant commander.
It occurred to Donny: There are two buildings next to the White House. One is the Executive Office Building, one is the Treasury. If you were going to move troops in, wouldn't you move them into one of the two buildings?
Where else could they be?
'I don't--' he stammered and almost ended his career right there by blowing up in a big laugh.
'That's when my team began to investigate. That's when NIS got on the case!' proclaimed the lieutenant commander.
'Yes, sir.'
'We've run exhaustive background checks on everyone in the three line companies at the Marine Barracks. And we think we've found our man.'
Donny was dumbfounded. Then he began to get pissed.
'Sir, I thought we were already investigated for clearances before we came into the unit.'
'Yes, but it's a sloppy process. One investigator handles a hundred clearances a week. Things get through.
Now, let me ask you something. What would you say if I told you one member of your company had an illegal off-base apartment and was known to room with members of a well-known peace initiative?'
'I don't know, sir.'
'This PFC Edgar M. Crowe.'
Crowe! Of course it would be Crowe.
Ensign Weber spoke up, reading from documents.
'Crowe maintains an apartment at 2311 C Street, Southwest. There he cohabits a room with one Jeffrey Goldenberg, a graduate student at the Northwestern University Medin Newsroom in Washington. Crowe is no ordinary grunt, you know, Fenn. He's a Yale dropout who only came into the Corps because his uncle had connections to a congressman who could make certain he'd never go to Vietnam.'
'Think of that, Fenn,' said Commander Bonson.
'You're over there getting your butt shot off, and he's back here marching in parades and giving up intelligence to the peace freaks.'
Crowe: of course. Perpetual fuck-up, smart guy, goof-off, his furious intelligence hidden behind a burning ambition to be just good enough not to get rotated out, but not really good in the larger sense.
Still, Crowe: he was a punk, an unformed boy, he seemed no different than any of them. He was a kid just out of his teens, mixed up by the temptations and confusions of a tempting, confusing age.
'We know you, Fenn,' said the lieutenant commander.
'You're the only man in the company who enjoys the universal respect of both the career-track Marines who've done Vietnam and the boys who are just here to avoid Vietnam. They all like you. So we have an assignment for you. If you bring it off, and I know in my military mind that there's no possibility you won't, you will finish your hitch in twelve days a full E-5 buck sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. That I guarantee you.'
Donny nodded. He didn't like this a bit.
'I want you to become Crowe's new best friend.
You're his buddy, his pal, his father confessor. Flatter him with the totality of your attentions. Hang out with him.
Go to his peace creep parties, get to know his longhaired friends. Get drunk with him. He'll tell you things, a
