"We're going to play a game. I'm going to ask you questions, and if I don't like the answers, we're going to beat the hostages, OK?"

"What letter of the alphabet am I thinking of?" he asks a skeptical construction worker.

"Zero," the man replies. He is wrong, and they beat the hostages. And the game continues until everybody gets bored and leaves.

But two of the spectators weren't bored. They were arguing over the hostages.

"I think it's stupid," she said.

"I think it's stupid too," he said, "but you're adding to all the stupidity. Retaliation...What does 5000 added to 50 equal?"

"Doesn't it bother you that this country--that and you and I--are being absolutely ridiculed? What kind of knee-jerk liberal junk is it to lay down and let the world disrespect you publicly?"

The bums weren't listening to either of them. They were draining the last of some old port, students were looking at debaters on the way to movies and rock 'n' roll shows.

"A dead man who died for honor is still dead. And when he died so did the honor."

"But at least he died for something," she prattled on. She was young and talked too much. She knew the world. She read all the books, knew all the names. "Just give ME a gun...I'll go and blow them all away. He's crazy. He's a lunatic and he's gonna take 50 innocent lives..."

"No lives are innocent," he thundered back, angry now beyond his words. "Being alive means being responsible for everything you do, everything you let happen... by everything you choose to ignore or laugh at..."

"I don't agree."

The arguments hissed after each other like a confused dog biting after its tail. Broke down and full of nonsense and waiting for the sunrise so he could sleep, he tried a different tactic: "Do you know about punji sticks?"