But an NCOs’ Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line of sight, begins to chain-smoke. Before long they’ve come over and started to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.