So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Société Algérienne d’Éclairage et de Force behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The climb’s steep—a first-gear project all the way. Vendors with push carts loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking fritters along the way. Three-legged dogs run and fight underneath the actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee-can-wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue-eyed burnoose wearers holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones, these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.