Jane is one of the friends who finds tales for me. She is a ‘Plain-Jane’, wholesome hyper-fox who lets my hungry eyes linger, flirts with me occasionally, and generally plays along as a foil to my foolishness, in exchange for my willingness to ‘interview’ friends of hers who have sagas to relate that no other journalist is willing to countenance as a story. What she gets from this deal, at her end, is some weird “spectacular-theory” sort of boost, a combination of vicarious mediation and wh...

A friend of mine has five sons and two daughters. One of the daughters returned from Iraq in October; she still won't talk about what went on there. Now one of the sons, a real "Joe Soldier" boy, "Soldier of the Month" and runner-up for "Soldier of the Course" at basic training at Fort Benning, who is an E-6 I think, something like the position of Staff Sergeant that my father held in the newly created Air Force in Korea, has a brutal, frightening, bizarre, and hilarious story to tell, of o...