"Well," Grif admitted, "just one? It kind of sucked and we didn't do much. But ideally I was supposed to be shooting at aliens."

Instead, he just shot the bull with Simmons and occasionally scattered lead in a more-or-less-blue-base-ward direction.

"And dude," he added, "this is not even remotely an army. I haven't had even one sergeant threatening to shove a shotgun up my ass. It's nice. A guy could get used to this."

Grif was bitter about being pulled into that war against his will, but he was used to it by then. It was just another thing he'd had no way of stopping, and there was nothing left he could do for it but crack jokes at it.