ALTHOUGH BLACKIE TRIED to promote his new place as the “Celestial Harem of Earthly Delights,” it was hard for anyone to accept Virgil Brandon’s goat shed as being anything close to an exotic playground; and, to his dismay, it quickly became known simply as the “Whore Barn.” Too, it wasn’t quite as successful as he had initially hoped. He had planned on the girls having more johns than they could handle, but it turned out that the soldiers at Camp Pritchard were kept on a fairly tight leash, at least through the week. Mandatory classes on the horrors of venereal disease also put a damper on business. The physician who conducted the classes, a Dr. Eugene Eisner, scoured the county looking for the most ravaged victims of gonorrhea and syphilis he could find to parade and sometimes even treat in front of the recruits. He often had to pay them out of his own pocket, but he didn’t care; the look on the soldiers’ faces as they watched him knock the clap snot out of some hilljack’s pizzle with a rubber hammer was priceless. Since Eisner, who was also an ordained Methodist minister, believed that such diseases were a useful, even God-sanctioned deterrent against sex outside the marriage bed, he didn’t condone the use of condoms. As he had told various colleagues over the years, he would rather die than help promote anything that allowed the promiscuous to continue their licentious lifestyles with impunity. No, with the rubber hammer act, he was trying to achieve a more permanent psychological effect, something a man would automatically recall every time he thought about sticking his prick in some casual acquaintance. As he boasted at the little gatherings the general occasionally held for privileged members of his staff, half the men who sat in on his lectures took vows of chastity at some point or other, even those who were already betrothed. As one captain quipped to his buddies, the crazy bastard’s enthusiasm was “infectious.”