I called my old friend Ernie and he pretended he had dementia and didn’t know who I was. It went on so long I wondered if maybe he wasn’t pretending. I loved Ernie the way former soldiers are supposed to love each other, even though the worst thing we’d been through, supposedly, was an alien abduction. He claimed we were abducted in back of a Dunkin’ Donuts in ‘92. “Dale who?” he kept saying. “Dale O’Neil,” I said. “Dale O’Neil.” I said it so often it started to sound like some kind of alarm.