I woke up when they came on board at Providence, all five making noise and grabbing seats in the observation car. It had been quiet and dull until they got there and rather than see every dirty back yard and factory from Boston to New York, I had slept. There were five, as I said, and only Tom was over twenty. He sat in front of me and I saw the manila envelope and mimeographed sheet in his hand.

"You just enlist?"

"No, this is the second time for me. Them guys," indicating the rest with a wave of his hand, "they just joined."

Tom, it turned out, was 24 years old. He was developing a little paunch, stood about 5' 10", wore sideburns and a moustache. He looked Italian, with big dark brown eyes, and one of his bicuspids was gone so that when he grinned you could see the hole. It was becoming somehow: frank, as if he no more would have gotten a false tooth than lied to you for no good reason. He spoke Massachusetts-city-boy and we liked each other right away. We compared notes on dates and places in the Army; we had overlapped in Vietnam but were never in the same places. He had hated it, he said; but he was just a kid, like them, he said, with another wave of his hand.

"Loud and ignorant, man, you know? Seventeen years old, just running away from the judge and cops. I liked it OK for a while, but it got old. I came back from Vietnam and they made me an M.P. because they didn't need any more helicopter crew chiefs. I was pissed off; screwed around the rest of the time; you know, marked time until I got out. I liked flying though; never had to kill anybody, just brought ammunition to people who did and took out our dead ones," he said, breaking into a grin. "Anyway, I been hassling for a few months now, one factory after another, never save any money, too many bills; it got so my old lady and I were skimping on food, man. That's fucking crazy, you know? So I just said fuck it; went out and bought steaks, everything; stocked up on stuff and said fuck the bills. I had a friend who went back in before me, wrote me and said it wasn't as bad as before; they pay you a lot better and I should get back my old rank pretty quick, and then I'll be making more money and have less expenses; you got a wife and kid you got to take care of them, you know?"

I said I did and we said nothing for a little while so I started looking at the others in the car. Chuck caught my attention first: He was 17 years old, a chunky kid, inclined to fat so that his features seemed to melt back into his flesh. But his nose stuck out a little, his thick lower lip was giving him a permanent pout, and his eyes were slits. The rest of his face was flat and square, like his body. He had curly black hair, close to his head, and wore a striped T-shirt. His face was smooth, except for a few blackheads, and entirely hairless. He and another guy, David, had run back to the bar car and bought three six packs of beer. They were complaining about how much it cost to buy beer on the train; they could have got two cases for the same price in a liquor store. Tom got up and went back to buy himself a drink.

"You look familiar," Chuck said, narrowing his eyes further, which I would have thought impossible. "Don't he look familiar?" This to David across the aisle. David turned to regard me. He looked like Joan Baez, a pretty boy, only he had black cavities in his front teeth so the effect was ruined when he smiled.

"Yeah," said David, "You do look like somebody, only I don't know who--maybe it's your hair. Maybe some rock singer."

"Jimi Hendrix" I suggested.

"No, man," David said, and Chuck laughed.

Tom came back just as Chuck began talking about doubts about going into the Army. He was afraid that the people at the Reception Station at Fort Dix would find out he was a user. He turned his arms up to show the black and blue marks around the veins. Tom didn't want to hear it.

"You got to show up, man; look, they'll put you in jail if you don't and I'll have to explain why you didn't make it." Tom turned to me. "Why do I get stuck with shit like this? I'm in the Army before so I have to make sure all these guys show up. So what happens? I get stuck with some little junkie who's not even a junkie. He just watches too much fucking television. My cousin, now there's a junkie, and he's in jail where they all end up."

Chuck heard this and said that he was, indeed, a junkie. He wanted to know if Tom had ever been strung out. No. Then Tom couldn't know what it was like. He told me that he had one brother who was in jail for dealing heroin and another in jail for attempted murder; that one got into a shootout in a bank robbery and nearly got killed but looked like he would live to stand trial. Then he told me that he had fixed ten cc's of heroin one time and David said it was a lie--nobody could do up ten cc's and live. They started arguing. Tom turned to me.

"It's weird, man. His old man got killed this fall in a car accident; he was in the Army fourteen years himself and got thrown out for doing goofers. Fucked up family, you know. Every one of them had something grotesque happen."

Chuck turned around and said to Tom that if you started out bad you didn't have any chance of doing better. "You're full of shit, man," Tom said.