Steve showered, dressed in slacks and a sports shirt, and walked three blocks to the Tan Son Nhut Officer's Club. A solid overcast still roofed the world, but had risen to several thousand feet. The last of the day's light trickled to the ground, and already dull colors faded into shades of gray.

Social animals and large flying mammals packed the Tan Son Nhut O-club. Steve ambled into a bar. Voices buzzed. Bottles and glasses plied cheerfully from hand to mouth. There was bragging and swaggering and a modicum of staggering. It was similar to most officer's clubs Steve had frequented, only more so; about an order of magnitude more, he estimated. His mood lifted. This was a familiar world.

He wandered from the first bar through a hallway lined on both sides with slot machines and players, and entered a second bar just as unruly as the first. Vietnamese waitresses traversed well-worn routes between tables, zigging petite bottoms around outstretched grasping hands, zagging around upturned puckered lips. They were efficient but disconnected, Steve thought. Offended? Bored? This was not their world. What thoughts flickered behind the vacuous smiles painted on those faces? Contempt? Indifference? How many worked for the enemy? He briefly considered his chances for scoring, but decided not to try. Casper was right: there weren't any he'd look at twice.

He savored the activity -- the hubbub, the camaraderie, the high-flying tipsy decadence of the club. This is really it, he thought. I'm in a war. If you have to die in the morning, you might as well enjoy the night before. This was the team, the action, where it was at. Soon he, too, would play in that game in the sky, in the sport known as air combat, and after a hard day's war come home to roost and strut in an O-club bar.

A shrill inner voice asked, How the hell do you fit in here? It was not the masterful voice of a fighter pilot. It was unsure, a boy's voice, a journalist's voice, the kind that questions and wheedles and cajoles but never provides means or answers. Even deeper than this nagging, beyond this insecurity, at his roots Steve suffered a deep and abiding personal problem: fear of dying!

Gone was the cocky self-confidence of the naked boy; gone was time to defer the lessons of accident, injury, dismemberment, death. A fall to the sandpaper earth had become a high-probability event. Tomorrow was here, and in this tomorrow it was insufficient to be wild and free.

"Jesus, Don, this place is unbelievable. Is it always like this?" Steve had found his friend meditatively sipping a beer in the third bar.

Don smiled, lifting his mug in a mock toast. "Continual party, Babe, all hours of the day and night, sort'a like Las Vegas. What else is there to do in Vietnam?" The smile came through knowing eyes empowered by two months of combat experience. That small span put an enormous gulf between them.

Don raised the mug to his lips, and when it came down to the table, foam glistened from a darkly luxurious mustache. His face was ruggedly handsome, primal. It spoke Warrior, Virile Man of the World, Slayer of Dragons, Prince and Master of Single-seat Fighters. It spoke of things Steve might become.

If he survived.

Unspoiled innocence shone from Steve's face. Light blue eyes smiled out from an unremarkable visage, a face of crowds, a face whose only mild oddity was that it was designed with a nose slightly larger than he would have measured and cut himself.

It was a minor flaw. He was only aware of it when near a girl he wanted to meet, and in those cases the more desperately he wanted to meet her, the larger the nose loomed in his consciousness, the more it assumed iceberg dimensions, enormous gawky hidden roots of nose spreading massively to the depths of his soul, lurking to shipwreck a potentially meaningful relationship and a toss in bed, only the innocent tip jutting above the flesh, offering a blurred profile to the periphery of pulchritude-filled vision. Actually, it was comic; he had even brought himself to laugh about it once.

"What're you up to, Don? What're you doing in Saigon?"

"Went to Okinawa for a couple days R and R." Don's speech was slow but not slurred as he tossed back the dregs of another beer. "Back to Korat tomorrow." He looked at his watch. "Got a hop on a C-123 at zero four hundred this morning."

"Does that mean you're turning in early?"

"Naw." Don smiled broadly, laughed. "What gives you that notion, man? Life is too short to waste on sleep, I'll catch up on the plane. How 'bout you? When you going up to Danang?"

"I'm due Saturday. How hard is it to get a hop out of here?"

"Piece 'a cake. Go down to Base Ops, and you'll get something in a couple hours." Don smirked. "Hell, they don't discriminate; they even give rides to FNGs."

"FNG. Yeah, that's one I know." Steve smiled. Fucking New Guy.

They had dinner -- two T-bones, Don's rare and Steve's medium -- and returned to drinking.

They bantered and reminisced. The Air Force Academy was their last common experience, and they returned to it. Colorado sun punched holes through the dreary overcast of Vietnam as they relived pranks and mischief, Basic Cadet summer, Saturday morning inspections and parades, the misery of Hell Week, Thunderbirds thundering in tight formations of Super Sabre jets over the enormous grassy parade field during the halcyon late days of spring, fresh-mowed smells of graduation wafting through nostrils and memories.

They flew to separate pilot training bases, one in T-33 "T-birds," the other in T-38 "Talons," and a year later, after the winning of wings and the kissing of girl friends good-by, split to their post-graduate training bases to fly their Phantoms and their Thuds after learning to survive in the mountains of Nevada and gamble in the casinos of Reno.

Steve went to England, and Don went to North Carolina. Then Don came to Vietnam.

"How many missions you flown?" Steve pumped for information.

Don spoke of flak puffballs by day and hose-streams of red hot tracers by night, of blossoming bombs and sizzling napalm and firecracker-popping CBUs spattering over darkly verdant countryside. Don talked and enjoyed talking because he was a player in the heat of the game, a veteran of hunters, a steely-eyed Prince of Predators.

Don talked and Steve listened. War stories had always bored him, but now he listened intently -- it concentrated his attention wonderfully to know that tomorrow he would face those same bullets, drop those same bombs, consort and achieve first-name basis and drinking privileges with General Death. A hawk soared, and a boy wondered what he had gotten himself into.

Don's mustache glistened with foam, and Steve put his finger surreptitiously to the skin between his own upper lip and ship-wrecking nose. The skin was smooth -- not even slightly fuzzy.

He made a decision. He vowed he had shaved above his upper lip for the last time until his war was done. He would join the ranks of Hairy Young Dragon Slayers. A white scarf fluttered in a mental wind. A Sopwith Camel barrel-rolled around a Fokker, and a personal battle to the death was joined between two mustachioed grinning Captains of the Air.

Finally, Steve had enough. At one o'clock in the morning, he faded, ready to return to his room. "You really goin' to stick it out the rest'a the night?" he asked, fog banks colliding in his brain.

"You bet'cha." Don's speech was only mildly slurred despite the ocean of beer he'd put away. "Life's short. I'm gonna hang around, maybe chase one'a those waitresses. They're not half bad lookin', you know, come right down to it."

" 'Member what the training films said. Don't catch somethin' that'll rot your dong off."

They said good-by. It was the last they would ever see each other. Steve was almost not tipsy as he left. An inner copilot navigated as if through an obstacle course: OK, up from the chair smoothly, around the table, don't bump it. There. You're doing well; you almost didn't stumble when you made that turn.

He stopped in his tracks as he left the club; he gazed upward in wonder.

The sky! In the middle of the night, a strange illumination stretched shadows across the ground.

Flares! Three of them floated high above, flickering, trailing bright smoke as they drifted slowly downward, lighting the landscape almost as well as stadium lights illuminate a night football game. Steve watched hypnotized, then heard a distant "whump-whump." He guessed the sound came from mortar rounds fired from the base into the jungle, not the other way around. Incoming rounds would probably generate pandemonium.

The overcast and a haze in the air caught light from the flares and returned it, making it seem as if he were beneath a giant inverted bowl, as if his whole world were under that bowl and nothing else existed. He was closed off, hermetically sealed from the outside.