13 APRIL:
You advertise for prospective college students, and you get people who are just in to punch a ticket and move on to college. They’re not necessarily prepared for the things they end up doing. Patterson is a basically decent guy who is bothered by having to kill someone, even an obvious enemy. This makes him a decent guy at heart, and now he has this burden that could bedevil him for the rest of his life. This is why, once the decision is made to send people to do these sorts of jobs, we should also commit to help them patch things back together when their job is done.

I said I’d get back to more “traditional” humor and I will, but I don’t want to treat Patterson’s situation lightly and then move on like there’s no more to it. This chapter is all “The Face of the Enemy” because, as we see, the enemy isn’t just the bad guys we met, it can be the invisible doubts that march on behind us even after things appear to be settled.