Death was no longer an abstraction. Vietnam took care of that. To Scott Delaney this knowledge made all hope and effort seem futile. He would die and everyone he cared about would die and one day even the earth would die. There was no point in anything.

He knew thinking this way would make him crazy. He did not mind being crazy, but thought the best thing to do was to go through the motions of getting educated.

In those days all of the class rooms at the Boyce Campus of the Community College of Allegheny County were in a single building. The college was new and so were most of the students. Parking lots surrounded the class rooms. Scott Delaney was twenty one years old and decided it would be nice to be a writer of fiction.

It was wonderful being around so many young women. There were tall ones, short ones, slim and voluptuous ones. There were white and black ones. In the warm weather unfettered young breasts moved mysteriously under thin cloth. Some wore ragged blue jeans while others preferred very short skirts or dresses. Some were shy while others looked you in the eyes as long as you liked. They made it seem absurd that two years earlier he had been trying to kill short oriental men who wore sandals made from car and truck tires and carried AK-47 assault rifles, and these men had been trying to kill him. Scott Delaney was a college student in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania one year after being discharged from the army.