Good Work

In his forced retirement, the model warrant officer broods over the episodes of what turned out to be his decline, unbearable and unstoppable. He, the elite soldier, the legionnaire in the Djibouti desert training the hard heads washed up in that back of beyond, where an army steeped in manly fantasies and the smell of death reigns amid a populace which suffers it, reigns, too, over the scorched nothingness of dunes and stones.