Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.

"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me."

He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the mist.

"I'm a UN man," he mumbled. "You people up there know what a UN man is? You know what happens when you meet one?"

When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm. But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.

He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel. That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.

He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had decided something in the world was more important than himself, but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything else.

With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of the bottle.

Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank. His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the bottle down the dark throat.

As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt the bottle leave his hand.

The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station, surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.

His mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.

"He must have been brave," she said. "We had a fine son."

"He was our only son," her husband said. "What did he volunteer for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?"

His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home.

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