Free I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 by Mike Bogin

warrior and then take it away without putting something strong into that black hole. Demons breed in that hole.”
    She closed like a steel vault. Spencer saw it. Captain Sam felt it and heard in her voice that they were wasting their time.
    “Captain, we were talking about krav maga,” she briskly reminded him. “I am forty percent over capacity. What we can achieve is small steps, and without cooperation we won’t even achieve those. Keep it clear, finite, and fixed in the achievable and I’ll work with you, but knowing how to fill out a job application will help these men. Teaching bar-fighting tricks won’t.”
    “I’m talking about really supporting one another. About organizing,” Captain Sam yelled back. “But you can’t talk about that, about real change. That’s rocking the boat.
    “Your attitude is nothing new, Major. Governments have been afraid of veterans for three thousand years. Two millennia ago, Julius Caesar was taking stolen land back from rich Roman senators and giving it to Roman army veterans. The vets earned it, but the Senate stabbed him to death.”
    “Captain,” Major Davies griped, “you need to stop this appeals nonsense and go home. Go home and organize all you want.
    “What are you doing here? Appealing your PEB. You have full benefits for life? Don’t you realize how ungrateful you are acting? How many men would kill for the benefits you won’t accept!
    We have a program in place here. It doesn’t include martial arts, or bidets, or Julius Caesar either. Go home! That’s your reality. Final. Period.”

    *****

    Captain Sam pressed his back into the tree trunk and pulled his legs up to his chest. Get him talking politics and he wouldn’t stop talking, but mentioning even the idea of him having a home or any future with Alice and his girls and he snapped shut like a bear trap. Spencer caught how he always turned away; even without eyes, he was looking somewhere else.
    “Look at what you’re able to do, Cap. You’re dressing yourself. You’re feeding yourself. You run my ass into the dust. Couldn’t you maybe just give it a chance at home? You can read books on tape. You can still teach or do radio. You can run and dance and tell the girls bedtime stories. Dude. Yeah, it sucks, but get out and do the stuff you keep talking about. Hell, run for Congress!”
    “Congress!” Captain Sam scoffed. “What, so I can do nothing just like the rest of them? So I can play the north pole-south pole charade like corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans? Red states and blue states both made to look a thousand times more different than they really are. Money isn’t red or blue, it’s green. I can see that and I don’t have eyeballs.”
    “Then go and change it,” Spencer urged. “You say corporations are killing more people than wars. Go after them! You say billionaires are buying our democracy. Go after them!”
    “Jonathan, do you ever listen to anything I say?” Captain Sam shot back. “The American Legislative Exchange Council alone writes a thousand times more legislative bills than any elected politician. One lawmaker against that is like a ditch digger up against a bulldozer! Besides, I’m blind and I have no hands, or did you fail to notice?”
    Spencer got nowhere trying to change the subject. Ranting about politics again. Captain Sam even floated a crazy idea that every vet who was going to kill himself anyway ought to put on a suicide vest and take out a bunch of rich people with him.
    “One vet every hour,” Captain Sam said. “That would change things.”
    Spencer laughed it off. “We don’t get 72 virgins, Cap. Our guys don’t off themselves to get to Paradise for jihad. Besides that, how would you ever reach them? Take out an ad in Stars and Stripes?”

    *****

    While the two of them were sitting on the grass, sweating and breathing hard after a two-mile run, eight laps around the track, they talked.
    “We are either warriors, teachers, nurturers, or