“Dammit,” he replied, coughing, “you _can’t_ leave them alone! They don’t want to make this lousy hike. They’d just as soon crap out on the side and let the trucks haul them in. They’d just as soon take police duty. Man, they’re reserves. They don’t care who sees them crap out--me, anybody.” He fell back with a sigh into the weeds, arms over his eyes. “Fuck it,” he said. Culver looked down at him. From the jeep’s headlamps an oblong of yellow slanted across the lower part of his face. One corner of his mouth jerked nervously--a distasteful grimace, as if he had been chewing something sour. Exhausted, completely bushed, there was something in his manner--even in repose--which refused to admit his own exhaustion. He clenched his teeth convulsively together. It was as if his own fury, his own obsession now, held up, Atlas-like, the burden of his great weariness. “Jesus,” he murmured, almost irrelevantly, “I can’t help thinking about those kids today, lying out there in the weeds.” Culver rested easily for a moment, thinking too. He looked at his watch, with a sinking sensation: six of their ten minutes had already passed--so swiftly that they seemed not to have existed at all. Then he said, “Well, for Christ’s sake, Al, why don’t you let them crap out? If you were getting screwed like these enlisted men are you’d crap out too, you wouldn’t care. You don’t have to chew them out like you’ve been doing. Let’s face it, you don’t really care if they make it. You. Me, maybe. But these guys ... anybody else. What the hell.” He paused, fumbling for words, went on feebly, “_Do_ you?” Mannix rose up on his elbows then. “You’re damn right I do,” he said evenly. They turned toward the Colonel standing not far away; he and the Major, pointing a flashlight, were bent together over a map. Mannix hawked something up and spat. His voice became more controlled. “You see that little jerk standing there?” he said. “He thinks he’s pulling something on us. Thirty-six miles. _No_body walks that far, stateside. _No_body. We never walked that far even with Edson, last war. See, that little jerk wants to make a name for himself--Old Rocky Templeton. Led the longest forced march in the history of the Corps--” “But--” Culver started. “He’d just love to see H & S Company crap out,” he went on tensely, “he’d _love_ it. It’d do something to his ego. Man, I can see him now”--and his voice lifted itself in a tone of sour mockery--“‘Well, Cap’n Mannix, see where you had a little trouble last night getting your men in. Need a little bit more _esprit_, huh?’” His voice lowered, filled with venom. “Well, screw _him_, Jack. I’ll get my company in if I have to carry them on my back--” It was useless to reason with him. Culver let him go on until he had exhausted his bitter spurt of hatred, of poison, and until finally he lay back again with a groan in the weeds--only a moment before the cry came again: “Saddle up! Saddle up!”