An arcade called Dave & Buster’s. My friend handed me a plastic card and pointed me at a wooden ramp. You roll a ball up it. The ball lands in a ring. A machine prints you a ribbon of tickets. At the end, you trade the tickets for a prize. This is the exact system by which my entire civilization rewarded its warriors. I did not expect to find it in New Jersey, beside a machine where a steel claw fails, again and again, to lift a stuffed bear. I rolled the ball with the seriousness it deserved. Each roll, a battle. Each ticket, a deed recorded in the ledger of the house. After one hour I had earned forty-seven tickets. I carried them to the counter the way a general carries a campaign to the throne. “Forty-seven gets you a sticker or a bouncy ball,” the woman said. A sticker. Or a bouncy ball. For forty-seven battles. I chose the bouncy ball. It is green. It is the size of a plum. I hold it in my palm and I think: this is what my service is worth, at the exchange rate of this nation. One plum of rubber. I am not insulted. I am educated. My friend cashed in nothing and saved his tickets. “You save up for the big stuff, dude. The PlayStation is like a million tickets.” A million. So there is a higher rank. There is always a higher rank. I have returned every week for two months. I never save my tickets. I take the bouncy ball every time. I now have nine bouncy balls. My friend says I am playing wrong. But each ball is a war I have won, and a man does not leave his victories in a paper cup, waiting on a PlayStation. A man takes his victories home and puts them in a bowl, where he can see them. The bowl is almost full. I have never, in eight hundred years, been more decorated.