"WOW!" We both shouted at once. We were hugging each other, jumping round and round in the flow of people towards the Pentagon. We trampled my sign on the pavement. 
    "Where the fuck have you been Les?" I shouted. 
    "Everywhere! Coast to coast!" he shouted back. "The only thing that makes me sad is the cops have made it so hot for me back home since Glen Medard was murdered, so I can’t go back and see Jeanette and my son Nathan. He’ll be a year old next week." 
    "Listen!" I said in a loud whisper, "after the cops ran you and Billy Don out of town there was no one who could say that Rollo killed Glen. So they tried to frame Miriam Medard for killing her own husband! She had to go to Russia until the heat is off." 
    By now Les looked a lot more sober and troubled. 
    "Look Les," I said. "Me and Clu and a bunch of other folks are staying with a guy named Warren Couch here who works for the underground press. Stick with me and come back over to Warren’s after the demonstration and he can at least take your story down and investigate it and we can get the truth about Glen’s murder into print." 
    "Les’s eyebrows gave a little jump of doubt. 
    "Uh-maybe," he said. "Right now I want to see what the demonstration is like. Maybe I can be political again." 
    We walked on across the bridge through the endless crowds of  young men with hair flowing down their backs and young women in bell bottoms. Here and there marijuana smoke puffed into the air. 
    "Look at all these beautiful freaks!" Les said under his breath, "I didn’t know there were this many freaks in the world." 
    If Les could see that, surely these young people would become aware of their own numbers from the march. Who knew what they might do then? 
    We came to the end of the bridge and headed into the turnoff  towards the Pentagon. The sky was completely gray, no trace of the sun. It was now late in the afternoon. We walked past two rows of parked charter buses from New York. Many demonstrators, mostly middle-aged, were sitting on the grass around the buses eating box diners of fried chicken, waiting to be driven home. The Pentagon looked to be about half a mile further on. All of a sudden I saw Evie from the Committee and her blind boy friend Bob. 
    "Come on, let’s get closer," Evie said. "If we’ve come all this way to see the Pentagon, we might as well see it." 
    "Besides," Bob said, fingering around on the top of his cane with his long, pale hands, "back there at Warren’s where we slept last night, I hear that the pacifists are going to do some kind of sit-down thing in front of the Pentagon. It might be interesting to watch." 
    So we started walking to the Pentagon along with hundreds of other people. A steep embankment jutted up ahead of us, covered with grass turned yellow from the autumn. On top of the embankment was a low hedge. Suddenly a man leaned over the hedge and flung down a long rope with big knots on it about every two feet. 
    "Hurry!" he shouted. 
    I was one of the first up. I grabbed the rope and ran perpendicular straight up towards the sky, my cowboy boot heels digging into the embankment. It was like a film of army basic training. I would never have believed I could have done it before. At the top, hands grabbed my hand and pulled me right side up again. I was at the back of a big crowd surging up to the Pentagon doors. From right behind me, Les put his hand on my shoulder. 
    "Where are Evie and Bob?" I asked, turning my head towards Les. 
    "They just couldn’t make it," he said. As I started up I hollered to them to tell people where we were! But look!" 
    I turned away from Les and saw the Pentagon doors fling open. A small group of people in civilian clothes ran out, followed by squads of MP’s holding rifles out level with fixed bayonets. People tried to back away and fell on the paved terrace. Behind the MP’s came Federal Marshals - men in blue suits and white helmets. They raised clubs and beat on the people who fell. 
    From the crowd people threw clods and beer cans at the MP’s and the Federal Marshals. "Crazy!" I whispered. I was sure I was going to be killed in a second. Oh, well, I’ve had a good life I thought. 
    All of a sudden a tall blond haired young man, one of the people who was running in front of the MP’s raised his hands. "Everybody sit down! Be calm!" he shouted. 
    I saw it was Johnny Collins from the West Coast Regional Office of the Organization. Blood was pouring from his forehead. His wife Jean was standing beside him. 
    "Sit down! Stay calm!" they both kept shouting, walking up and down between the line of MP’s and the crows. 
    Les and I sat down along with most of the hundreds of other people on the pentagon terrace. The MP’s formed a perimeter. Behind them the Federal Marshals were hustling the people they had been beating back into the Pentagon under arrest. 
    "Does anyone have anything to say to the soldiers?" Johnny called out. 
    A tall bean pole of a man stood up in the crowd with a thick mop of brown hair spilling over his ears. "My name is Dave Cooper!" he said in a very deep voice. 
    Oh sure, I knew Dave Cooper. He was the Organization’s campus traveler for the Rocky Mountain Region. 
    "I was in Nam, the same as maybe some of you guys were!" Dave boomed out "Now I work with draft resistance. We’ve got to work with our younger brothers to help cut off the supply of troops for Nam. That’s one of the main ways we can end this war." 
    By now it was growing dark. The only light was from the electricity in the Pentagon. In the shadows of the seated crowd, tiny flames sparked like from birthday cake candles. Men were burning their draft cards all over the place. 
    Jean Collins, Johnny’s wife, walked up to a man sitting in the front row and asked, "Can I have your hat please?" 
    Then she reached the hat out over the crowd. Men dropped the remains of their draft cards into the hat. When it was full, Jean dropped the burned draft cards on the pavement between the MP’s and the crowd. And she gave back the man’s hat. 
    I didn’t burn my draft card. I knew I was going to have to face my draft physical in a couple of weeks - for the second time because my draft board didn’t like me working for the Organization. I knew what I was going to do, and it would be as good as burning a draft card. 
    I stood up and faced the MP’s. "When you all came out here with the bayonets," I said. "I thought I was going to die. I still don’t know what will happen. But it’s really funny," I said, scratching my head. "I just realized the people who sent you all out against us are more afraid than I am." 
    Cheers from the crowd. 
    "The only thing I want to know," I said, "is why you all have to do the work of a bunch of scared people in the Pentagon? Why should Americans have to fight Americans - for those guys? We’re your own people, your own neighbors. I didn’t come here to do anything against you all. I’m here because of them." 
    Just then a Federal Marshall grabbed a young woman sitting in the front row of demonstrators and started dragging her behind the MP lines. She screamed. Her boyfriend, a young man in an army jacket with hair down his back, stood up yelling "Mother fucker!" and tried to take a swing with his fist at the Federal Marshall. 
    "Grab that man! Arrest him!" the Federal Marshall shouted at an MP - one of the youngest MP’s in the whole line. The MP reached out and grabbed the young man by the wrist. I could see that the MP’s hand was trembling. The Marshall took the young man’s other wrist and pulled him inside the MP perimeter and flung him to other Federal Marshals who yanked him back towards the Pentagon steps. 
    Then the Federal Marshall pushed the MP against another young woman and barked, "Arrest her! She’s blocking your way!" 
    The young MP’s eyelids winced like he was about to cry. Then he pulled off his helmet and threw it to the pavement with a clang. He flung his rifle off to one side. Johnny and Jean and the other Movement people who had been chased out of the Pentagon ran over and surrounded him. 
    "Pants!" Johnny gasped. "Mine are too small for him!"  One of the other men who was bout the MP’s size unzipped his pants and started pulling them off. I took off my wind breaker and unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. 
    "Here brother!" I hollered. The MP took off his army jacket and shirt and trousers. The delighted long hair who had given his pants put on the army pants. The MP pulled on the civilian pants and my shirt. By now the crowd was standing up all around the MP. 
    "One thing more! Shoes!" I said. "They’ll recognize army shoes!" I took off my cowboy boots and offered them to the MP. He tried on my boots surrounded by a thick crowd who were chanting at the other MP’s "JOIN US! JOIN US! JOIN US!" Before I could see if the MP’s shoes fit me, someone tapped me on the back. I turned around and it was Les. He flung his arms around me and we hugged for a few seconds. When I looked back the MP had disappeared into the crows. Then I put my wind breaker on over my bare shoulders. We stood or sat there the rest of the night. Pot smoke was going up all over the place. People passed around apples and bananas and sandwiches and sips from canned sodas. Johnny came over and whacked palms with both of us. By now he had a T-shirt tied around the bloody gash on his forehead. He was wearing a faded jeans jacket with strange bulges along the backs of his sleeves. 
    "It was great!" he panted. "Jean and I and the others, we got into the Pentagon before anyone knew it. The only thing the Marshals had time to do was club me on the head before we got away." He pulled off his jeans jacket. The bulges were caused by pieces of rubber hose - doubled up inside the sleeves, which he pulled out and threw away. 
    "Those where to use on them if they tried to do anything to Jean," he said. "Maybe the Marshals would have, but I don’t think the MP’s would. One of the MP’s whispered to me - they had a whole bunch of soldiers over at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, who they were going to bring here to the Pentagon, but instead they confined them to base-hah!" He gasped again. "They were afraid the ordinary soldiers would join us. They only trusted the MP’s! And then one of the MP’s joined us! Whooee!" And he flung his head back and gave a couple more whoops. 
    After that, the rest of the night was an anti-climax. The MP’s gradually expanded their perimeter. The Marshals arrested more people. At one point some MP’s fired tear gas into the crowd. Our eyes and nostrils were stinging, but where were we to go? Off the embankment? 
    After a while the cloud of tear gas cleared. The crowd had been very calm. All of a sudden my damp burning eyes stared as they began to open. There was Hope, picking up an unexploded tear gas canister, giving it to Harry Holtzenheimer’s girlfriend Mariah who put it in her hand bag. 
    "Hey Hope!" I called out. 
    She came running up to me and Les with Mariah following behind her. 
    "Have you seen my brother Zack?" Hope asked. "He took off for the demonstration late Thursday. His girlfriend, Marilyn said he just drove off to Washington. He said he had to do something for his brothers in Nam. We just got here a couple of hours ago and I was even more worried when I heard about people getting beat up and arrested." 
    "I don’t know what happened," I said. "Clu and everybody will be back at the house of this guy named Warren who’s with the underground press. They let me off at the March with Warren’s address in my pocket. I don’t think much more is going to happen here, so I guess we can head back there. They’ll have a list of who all got arrested." 
    Hope, Mariah, Les and I walked around to another side of the Pentagon. A lot of people had held a sit down on this side and the Federal Marshals and the MP’s were arresting them one by one. Most of them had already been arrested. We looked. Zack wasn’t there. There was a large flight of steps this way instead of the embankment. We hurried down the steps and across the gigantic parking lot and then we walked back across the bridge out through Washington DC for a couple of miles. Finally we found Warren’s place. Inside it was rather like I imagined the war room in the Pentagon must be - people running back and forth, talking at each other in loud voices, the phone constantly ringing - new people like us constantly coming in. For the first time in the excitement of that night, I really noticed that I was barefoot. My socks were in my wind breaker pocket and I had no shirt under my wind breaker. The warmth of the room made me feel how chilly I had been. My shoulders shivered a little. Then I was warmed up, I realized I was also tired. I dropped onto a sofa. Hope dropped beside me. 
    "Who do we ask about Zack?" she asked. 
    "I don’t know," I said. "It’ll be a while before they have all the names of people who got arrested. As soon as I can think again, I’ll help you." 
    "I had a big fight with Naldo when I said I was hitching here with Mariah," Hope said. "It’s all over between Naldo and me." 
    I had a little electric jolt. "You and me again?" I asked in almost a whisper. 
    "No." Hope said just as softly, "I’m here because of my brother. I don’t want to live my life like this." 
    In the middle of the room we could see a bunch of underground press staffers around Mariah. She had pulled the unexploded tear gas canister out of her hand bag and the staffers were looking it over with great interest. 
    "Hey!" she called to us. "They say this tear gas thingie we found is some kind of extra rough tear gas and the government is already claiming on the radio that they didn’t use it at the Pentagon." 
    "Don’t ask me!" I said. "I was too excited to know if I was tear gassed very bad. But say, do any of them know where Warren is?" 
    Mariah asked around to one after another of the buzzing group of young radical journalists. "Oh that’s easy!" she yelled to me. "He’s in the kitchen!" 
    I staggered to my feet and walked through the crowded living room into the kitchen. Warren, a heavy set fellow of twenty-three, whose hair wasn’t very long, was standing there, wagging a can of beer which he had in his fist as he talked intensely with another man who was also holding a can of beer. Warren was so wrapped up talking that he didn’t notice that foam was bubbling over the edge of his can. 
    "Uh, Warren?" I said. "Excuse me a second." 
    Warren finally turned around to me and said, "Oh, sure Dale." 
    "I’ve got two things to ask," I said. "First, there’s someone who wants to know about whether her brother was arrested. His name’s Zack Vann." 
    "OK, how do you spell it?" Warren said, putting his beer down on the kitchen table and pulling a small note pad out of his shirt pocket. 
    "V-A-N-N." 
    "OK, got it," Warren said. "We won’t know all the names until late the day after tomorrow, but there are people keeping on top of it at the March Office and we have people going over there all the time for the latest news. By the way, I just heard about the tear gas canister you all brought in. Great piece of evidence to expose the government’s bogus..." 
    "I’ve got more than that," I interrupted. "Did you hear about Glen Medard - Organization member, also in the Communist Party? got murdered in July?" 
    "I remember something about it," he said. 
    "Well, we’ve got a friend of Glen’s in the living room," I said. "He knows the identity of the killer and how the cops tried to cover it up and frame Glen’s widow for the murder. He wants to talk to you." 
    "Just point him out to me," Warren said. 
    We walked into the living room. Les was sitting against the wall talking with an extremely pale young man with long blond hair wearing an army coat embroidered with flowers. 
    "It’s the guy in the black vest and shirt and pants, talking to the blond guy in the flowered army field jacket," I said. "His name is Les Olin and..." 
    "I’ll just remember the name Les Olin for right now," Warren said. "I don’t care if he knows who killed Kennedy. Dealing with the March is taking up our whole time now. right now, like you couldn’t believe. Maybe I can get around to him tomorrow night. Just remind me of it then." 
 I went over into a corner and curled up and fell into a very deep sleep.